Against the Stream

Geek Misogyny: Violentacrez Edition

Gawker recently published a profile of Reddit "redditor" Violentacrez, who has apparently become well-known in certain corners of the internet world for trucking in the most vile, racist and misogynist kinds of internet trolling. Apparently Gawker's Adrien Chen was able to track down Violentacrez true identity and confront him about his behavior. The result was a deeply disturbing interview with a deeply disturbed individual. Read it at your own risk. It's pretty disgusting.

However, Alyssa Rosenberg at ThinkProgress pivots from the Violentacrez story to consider how a certain kind of geek misogyny (which we've seen far too much of in recent months), was pressaged by none other than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, particularly in the person of Warren Meers:

Warren is a decidedly nastier specimen than either Jonathan or Andrew, almost a living incarnation of the more provocative solutions to social insecurity and lack of success with women posited by lonely men online and elsewhere. When we meet Warren, he’s done the magical equivalent of one Reddit user’s suggestion that “one day they’ll bio-engineer a *live* fleshlight. and when it’s not in use, it can be kept in a cage and fed hamster food,” building a robot, April, he uses for sex rather than interacting with a real woman. When he starts dating Katrina, a human woman, he abandons April to run out of batteries, an act tantamount to murder, given that he endowed April with some basic sentience. Later, Warren creates a similar sex robot replica of Buffy that the vampire Spike uses to vent his desire for her—Spike later attempts to assault Buffy, an act of ugly violence that prompts him to reevaluate his life. ...

The Trio’s attacks on Buffy are often manifestations of sexism or sexist desires. They turn her invisible in “Gone,” leaving her voiceless and with limited ability to affect the world around her. They work ugly magical gaslighting on Buffy in “Normal Again,” convincing her that her life and work as a Slayer, the things that make Buffy strong and special, are merely a delusion, a result of severe mental illness that’s left her incarcerated in an institution. And the climactic confrontation between them is sparked when Warren takes steps to address the thing that he hates most about Buffy: that she is more powerful than he is. When Warren fails to equal Buffy magically, he tries to kill her with a handgun, and ends up murdering another woman, Willow’s girlfriend Tara, instead.

Alyssa does a great job tying in the themes that Joss Whedon develops through the character of Warren to the issues of anti-woman geek-ness that have been giving nerddom a bad name these past several months. Her piece is well worth reading.

Video Games and Morality Redux

Some months ago, I appeared on a web show called "Different Drummers" that's filmed here in Chicago. At the time, they also asked me to do a commentary based on my Christian Century article "Virtual Good and Evil." From time to time I had wondered what had happened to that commentary. Turns out, it's online!

So if you're interested, here it is. Be kind. I had never used a teleprompter before.

 

July 4th Religion and Politics Reading List

At Religion Dispatches today they have a list of recent articles detailing the various ways in which religion, politics, patriotism and partisanship have intersected in the United States recently. If you're looking for something to read this July 4th, go check it out.

The Singularity is Where?

At Religion Dispatches, Andrew Aghapour discusses Ray Kurzweil's evangelizing on behalf of the emergence of "the singularity" as evocative of new religious movements:

Over the last 15 years a brilliant and charismatic self-made man has been campaigning across the United States, describing a near-future event that will deliver human salvation, immortality, and unlimited creative potential. After this event, he claims, the trappings of earthly life will no longer plague us: we will no longer age or get sick; we will be able to create our own worlds to our exact preferences; and we will no longer be restricted to our current physical forms. 

This man’s vision has become the center of a growing movement that already has tens of thousands of adherents, dozens of shared texts, and its own non-profit school that aims to “assemble, educate, and inspire a cadre of leaders” to one day “address humanity’s grand challenges.”

This might sound like a run-of-the-mill new religious movement, but what makes Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” movement unique is that it doesn’t consider itself religious at all. Singularity Theory holds that technology will continue to grow exponentially until “human” and “digital” forms combine seamlessly.

There are of course a great many parallels between singularity theory and religion, but is singluarlarity theory best understood in terms of religious categories? That's unclear to me. It's an interesting experiment in futurism, and certainly applies well to our strange technological age. Whatever light the theory of religion may shed on the topic, the underlying question of our reliance on technology deserves to me carefully explored from religious, moral, and sociological points of view.

TED, Taxes, and Income Inequality

 

There has been an interesting back and forth over the past few days about Nick Hanauer's recent TED talk about the idea of "job creation." Apparently TED had decided not to run the segment, and Hanauer cried "censorship," after which TED decided to go ahead and relase it. You can see the piece above.

The key element of his talk is the following passage, from an editorial he wrote on the topic:

I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.”

What he says here shouldn't be controversial. It's black letter economic principle: "job creation" come about ultimately through consumer spending, in other words, it's stimulated by demand, so giving ordinary consumers more money to spend has a greater stimulative effect than giving rich people more money to spend, because the rich are probably already spending near the top of their capacity. Giving Nick Hanauer a 10% tax cut won't stimulate the economy nearly as effectively as giving someone with realtively little money one, since Nick Hanauer has almost everything he might need, whereas an ordinary middle class American will take that money and immediately spend it on goods and services that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to purchase. Again, really not controversial.

It's become controversial because of the ideological capture of the idea of "job creator" to mean "enormously wealthy." The idea is that the wealthy create jobs through their investments, which to be fair, is true to a point. But the stimulative effect on the economy of low taxes for the rich is far less potent than benefits for the poor and middle class would be. In fact, because the low taxes on the rich have necessitated deep cuts in programs to the poor and middle classes, as well as cuts in education and infrastructure around the country, the low taxes on the wealthy have actually had a counter-stimulative effect. They've actually made the economy worse, or at least, haven't helped it get better.

I'm glad to see Hanauer and a few other members of the hyperwealthy in the United States beginning to push back against this ideology, precisely because, as Hanauer notes, as a matter of social policy, it's not only good for the poor and middle classes, but it is also ultimatley better for the wealthy to live in a well-managed, just, relatively equal society with a well-maintained infrastructure and a sound educational system.

Video Games and Morality: My "Different Drummers" Interview

Greater Chicago Broadcast Ministry has a show called "Different Drummers" that they post on their Youtube Channel. A few weeks ago they invited me in for an interview. Here it is:

 

It was a fun and interesting experience, though I admit it was a bit disconcerting to talk about these issues while the young man being interviewed with me was blowing away bad guys on the screen right behind me!

Felicia Day Is Cool

Taking a break from theo-blogging to dip into nerd blogging. Hope you don't mind.

Moral Combat

My cover article is in the current issue of the Christian century. Here is a link to the site for those of you who are interested in checking it out.

iPhone blogging

Just a note to tell the world I've got my new iPhone working.

That is all

Mac Notebooks Through the Ages

The sad truth is that it was my desire for a Macintosh Powerbook that resulted in my long odyssey away from Macintosh through the desert of  PC/Windows. My first computer was a Mac, but as I was beginning graduate work, I decided that I needed a laptop computer, and I really wanted a powerbook like this one.

Unfortunately, at that time, Powerbooks were incredibly expensive, both compared to desktop Macs and compared to PC laptops, so, against my better judgement, I bought an IBM Notebook. It took me a very long time to migrate back to Macs.

I'm reminded of this because there's a really cool article over at Apple Gazette on the evolution of Mac notebooks. Cool as I thought that first generation model was, I have to admit that they've gotten a lot cooler over the years.