Four Quotations and a Fifth Thing
1.
money, enhancing the fluency of negotiation,
has no substance of its own: it
is just medium, action, the flow by
which substances are exchanged,
— A. R. Ammons, Glare, 15.
2.
3.
Hear us then: we know
You are our enemy. This is why we shall
Now put you in front of a wall. But in consideration
of your merits and good qualities
We shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you
With a good bullet from a good gun and bury you
With a good shovel in the good earth.Bertolt Brecht, “The Interrogation of the Good,” quoted in Slavoj Žižek, On Belief, 150
4.
[T]he pulse of recognition is still unmistakable, and I know that I have felt it again and again: the great buildings of civilisation; the meeting-places; the libraries and theatres; the towers and domes; and often more than these, the houses, the streets, the press and excitement of so many people, with so many purposes. I have stood in many cities and felt this pulse: in the physical differences of Stockholm and Florence, Paris and Milan: this identifiable and moving quality: the centre, the activity, the light. Like everyone else I have felt also the chaos of the metro and the traffic jam; the monotony of the ranks of houses; the aching press of strange crowds. But this is not an experience at all, not an adult experience, until it has come to include also the dynamic movement, in these centres of settled and often magnificent achievement. H. G. Wells once said, coming out of a political meeting where they had been discussing social change, that this great towering city was a measure of the obstacle, of how much must be moved if there was to be any change. I have known this feeling, looking up at great buildings that are the centres of power, but I find I do not say “There is your city, your great bourgeois monument, your towering structure of this still precarious civilization” or I do not only say that; I say also “This is what men have built, so often magnificently, and is not everything then possible?”
— Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, 5f
And Now For Something Completely Different
Surely everyone knows NFTs are stupid. For those blissfully unaware, an NFT is an entry in a virtual ledger (a “blockchain”) marking that the owner of a certain account “owns” some piece of data. Technologically, this ownership means virtually nothing: it prevents another person from claiming that exact piece of data on the ledger, but of course they can always claim a virtually identical file (e.g. an image with one pixel different). Legally, it means even less. To any sensible observer, an NFT is worth precisely nothing. Yet the NFT market is having a moment right now; virtual quasi-ownership of ugly drawings of monkeys is going for five, six figures.
In the Cratylus, Plato has Socrates mediating a debate between two views on the nature of meaning. In the one corner, Hermogenes asserts that words are arbitrary sounds that are given meaning by social convention. In the opposing, Cratylus claims that our words (well, the Greeks’) were given to us by the gods and have their meanings. To the modern reader, Hermogenes’ position is obvious and that of Cratylus, absurd, and yet Socrates spends the dialogue forging a middle path between the two views. Perhaps with some justice, for there is something absurd about Hermogenes’ theory of meaning. For how exactly is this convention to be effected? Each party comes together saying, “Yes, henceforth shall ‘computer’ mean computer.” They all nod, but what ensures that they should all have meant the same thing by this joint proclamation? A prior convention?
For most of us, poker is a game of predictions of two sorts. There is the pure mathematics of probability. Given these cards in my hand and on the table, what are the odds that I will make that straight? Then there is the psychological element. Is Mina bluffing? But, since others are playing the same game, this latter part of the game iterates. Is Mina bluffing, or is she only trying to trick me into thinking she’s bluffing? A good poker player, then, is always one step ahead of her opponents. One might think that the ranks of good poker players could go on forever, each rank one step ahead of the last, but there is in fact an ideal, a perfect poker player: one who calculates and bluffs so judiciously that, even if one knew precisely their strategy, the best one could do against them is to break even. Computer scientists have recently programmed such a player, thereby “solving” poker.
In 1967, Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies marched into the New York Stock Exchange (the only possible source of order in the world) and tossed dollar bills into the air. This display was meant to herald, inaugurate (?), initiate (?) the death of money. Four years later, likely in response to this display, Nixon attempted to kill money once and for all by bringing the United States off the gold standard. It is yet to be decided whether money ought to be buried or cremated.
A central issue in ethics — though perhaps one little appreciated outside of the academy — concerns procrastination. Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter ask us to consider a professor facing a request to write a book review. This professor is uniquely competent to write this review and, so should he write it, it would be a boon for his career and for the venue in which it is published. So it would be best if he accepted and wrote the review. However, this professor is also a horrible procrastinator. He fully expects, perhaps even is certain, that were he to accept the invitation to write this review, he would never get around to it: not for want of time or any external impediment, but simply because he would keep putting it off. Given that, Jackson and Pargetter think, even though it would be best for the professor to accept the invitation and write the review, he ought to decline the request.