The below was written very shortly after the review, but I have since moved on to other stuff, and do not plan on finishing whatever I was thinking at the time. I’m gonna just hit publish because the book club is meeting to discuss it this weekend: https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/upqqep/unofficial_bar_book_club_picks_for_may_and_june/
The only notable thought that I’ve had in the time since is this: In the Introduction, she talks about “digital mob”s of white supremacists on Twitter as a negative thing, and shortly after talks about “dragging” of racist people as a positive thing. Citing sociologist Jesse Daniels’ documentation of white nationalists on Twitter, she says that the white nationalists “grow their network, disguise themselves online, and generate harassment campaigns… [which] actually benefits the company’s bottom line.” A few pages later, she describes “dragging” like this: “Dragging can be entertaining, and it is profitable for corporations by driving up clicks; but it is also cathartic for those who previously had their experiences of racism questioned or dismissed. It offers a collective ritual, which acknowledges and exposes the everyday insults and dangers that are an ongoing part of Black life.” All I see here is “it’s ok when we do it” and a sort of vague pointing at the fact that the corporation wins either way. There is no real discussion of how a bad “digital mob” differs from a good “dragging”, except that she thinks one target deserves their reputational lynching because of the color of their skin or the behavior depicted in the 30 second video clip attached to the precipitating tweet, and that the good guys have cathartic fun in one and the bad guys have devilish grins during the other. To me, the people who have dedicated their incredible talents and their years of education are unable to even offer a decent rationalization of why and how “dragging is good, actually, and is definitely not done by a digital mob” are squandering their lives.
If you take a materialist view of the world, the words you use to describe it almost not at all, and the physical stuff that occurs matters entirely. Having the right words is good for forming predictions about what will physically happen, but a theory that can’t get to those accurate predictions is completely useless. And what has constantly driven me nuts about this stuff in general is that the academic theory seems much more interested in finding a lot of words to impress others about how you can post-hoc rationalize stuff, rather than how you can predict things, or change outcomes towards the world you desire to create. Calling it “cancel culture” or “call out culture” or “digital hate mobs” or “the culture war” and arguing about whether it exists or not doesn’t matter as much as something material like: hours spent on Twitter, that could have been spent on literally anything else.
…Now that I’m here I do have one additional thought: I was skimming through https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0018726720914723 and had the same thought that I always do: how do you KNOW that something is purely a stereotype with no underlying basis? Is there *really* zero stereotype accuracy? And, more importantly, why is it OK to be skeptical of women who say something you don’t like (and blame the ingestion of patriarchal ideas for her saying it) instead of simply believing that what she is saying is just true, as you might if they were saying you like:
>A closer focus on Tracy suggests something more complex. In describing herself as having ‘focus, definitely being able to block everything out and just concentrate on the job in hand’ but also ‘able to communicate really well’, she appears to identify as the archetypal Ideal developer. It is curious, therefore, that she also said, ‘I think that code has to be written by a guy really because . . . guys are very much more logical than women in general’, and that she found coding ‘monotonous’ and her abilities limited.
I think, as I do so often, of Girlhood Interrupted: https://itsnotmyfault01.medium.com/statistical-machines-and-girlhood-interrupted-98edd889e7d3. All I see is post-hoc rationalizations, but… what’s the difference between a post-hoc rationalization and just “a good discussion section after the study’s results come in"? I don’t know, I don’t have a good theory.
After posting the review to reddit, I got a pretty interesting comment on a line I wasn’t totally sure about and I’m curious on what might be good ways to deal with it. DivingRightIntoWork says
"Thank you Dr. Benjamin. You've got a very high verbal IQ and it really shows, "
That's a really articulate way of saying she's very articulate.
My definitely-too-offended-and-defensive response was:
On the WAIS, one of the verbal tests is that they give you two words and you have to explain how they're similar. One of the things psychologists have discovered is that for a lot of political things there is no connection between intelligence/expertise and position. A sufficiently smart person can explain how their position is correct, almost no matter the position, and they can explain a plausible through line between any thing and anything else.
The point I’m trying to make, I am clearly not making very well, so I will tell it in a totally different way about a totally different topic.
There’s a subreddit that I really enjoy called /r/WordAvalanches. It’s tagline is “Word Avalanches: incredibly contrived setups for homophonic punchlines.” You might best think of it as a place to put jokes like “Badger badgers badger Badger badgers”. How do you explain innocence? “In essence, innocence is no sins… in a sense”.
I think you have to be a goddamn genius with words to come up with some of these. Writing well is a real skill and people are real experts at it, and I am eternally jealous of them and seek to join their ranks.
However, writing well is a totally different thing from being right. And also, writing well and being right are completely different from being persuasive, making money, getting prestige, or forming powerful predictions about the future, or being able to change policies to create a better future. Although I think she has a very clever way with words, getting an undisputed high score on the “how many different ways can I use the word Exposure in a sentence” challenge, in a way that is perfectly engineered to appeal to the liberal academic environment, it seems like there’s absolutely nothing there for me because I have no idea if she’s formed a coherent theory of how the world works, or if that theory is correct.
In other words: “Benjamin’s writings might rightly bring Benjamins and Benjamins, but might not be right.” (I know, I’m not good at this).
My complaint might actually be worse than that. Say we have some function box. As inputs, we can insert two variables. One is the amount of exposure, under any definition of exposure. The other input variable is optional, but it is an amount of visibility. You put both of those into the function box and it outputs an amount of racism that has occurred. Or, I guess to make it simpler, it returns a boolean on if racism has occurred. If I were to write this out in python, I don’t see how it wouldn’t be written like so:
def chapter3(exposure: Union[Light, Disclosure, Unprotected, Risk, Reveal], visibility: Optional[float]) -> bool:
return True
This is a bit hyperbolic, but only a little bit. The main thing is that it’s truly incredible that the function can take so many different kinds of inputs and still work. So incredible, that I don’t find it credible. The main thing I associate with sophistry is equivocation. I actually got the definitions of the two completely mixed up on the review, because I’m a dumbass. To be clear: equivocation, as I think of it, is the use of the same word with different definitions within the same argument, typically resulting in logical fallacies. It works great for political speeches, for sure, with my favorite example being “if by whiskey”, where the speaker boldly gives away the whole game, and is generally regarded as a work of art “renowned for the grand rhetorical terms in which it seems to come down firmly and decisively on both sides of the question.” Similarly, Benjamin is clear in her statement that we will absolutely be using equivocation as a rhetorical device, and that’s a good thing.
Exposure, in this sense, takes on multiple meanings.
I don’t think that’s a good thing. For one, it's really incredibly difficult to try to design a rule that can take any type of Exposure input, and do meaningful work on it to create a different outcome that will be better for black people. My questions from the original review are material in nature: If I were to make a camera or a film, what is the correct amount of exposure to give to black-skinned people? In contrast to a whiteness-as-default for all regions across all time,
Kodak continued research on skin tone preferences in different countries. Roth describes a resultant “geography of emulsions,” in which “film inventory is batched by region and distributed” according to the skin color biases of the various parts of the world. The market and profitability imperative of tailoring technologies to different populations is an ongoing driver of innovation.
But the hegemony of Whiteness is exposed not only in the context of the global competition to capture different regional markets… [goes on to talk about Polaroid’s ID2 camera working well for South African apartheid passbooks]
Just as Polaroid, Kodak and others attempted to design differently so that their cameras could vividly represent a broader spectrum of skin tones, so too companies that manufacture cameras today are working to address bias in the design and marketing of their products…
So we know whiteness as the only option is bad, and we know that whiteness-as-default is bad, and we know that selling a variable-whiteness camera to an apartheid state is bad, but we’re OK with market and profitability imperative tailoring technologies over time… so did we ac
Also, what to make of this claim, also on page 99?
Photography was developed as a tool to capture visually and classify human difference; it also helped to construct and solidify existing technologies, namely the ideas of race and assertions of empire, which required visual evidence of stratified difference. (Gidley 1992. Representing Others: White Views of Indigenous Peoples)
My guess is that Gidley’s work is primarily a documentation of how the technology of photography was used in the presentation of evidence for racist policies or thoughts, not for the first part about photography being developed specifically for that purpose. But, as a material question, are we to think that photographic technology shouldn’t have been developed, because it had racist uses?
And, this is one of my general complaints with academia in general, especially the humanities. Everyone there is pretty smart, and could lay out a fairly convincing rationale for why the reality is the way it is, no matter which way the data actually falls. A lot of the theory is so bad as to provide almost zero predictive power.