An essay at the Times Literary Supplement adds context to Frankenstein:

As the editors note, Shelley’s contemporaries would have associated the monster’s terror with the Terror of the French Revolution. Conservatives likened the Revolution to a monster created by Enlightenment rationalism, whereas radicals perceived it as a justified response to a monstrous ancien régime. The novel raised questions about social justice and reciprocal obligations in a modern, secular age, in the process also condemning slavery. In addition, Shelley criticized gender relations, just as her mother had done in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Frankenstein’s creation of life was not simply an act of scientific hubris, but an exposé of patriarchy. By arrogating the creation of life solely to himself, Frankenstein’s deed of giving birth results in the death of everyone he loved, culminating in his own mortal struggle with his creation in the sterile frigidity of the Arctic.

“Fear is an extremely powerful motivating force, especially in public policy debates,” writes Adam Thierer. The emotion is often used to drive public policy to spectacular effect, but it little understood in this context. Thierer’s paper “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle” fills in those gaps. In reading it, however, I was struck by the connections at various points to current linguistic theory, and so this is my attempt to slowly build a comprehensive paper to further elaborate on the topic. The first section is on gesture, simply enough.

Gestures

Chimpanzees do not point. Although they might hear the vocalizations of other apes and assume the presence of a predator without seeing it, the one who vocalizes will always have sight of the the predator. They cannot, unlike humans, point to things that are not there; they cannot express information about an absent thing. To some, this might seem like a minor distinction, but for those concerned with language, it is a gulf, separating the simple communication of higher apes and other social creatures, from the defining feature of humanity, language. To be more concrete, we can express abstract gestures.

The ability to point to something out there that we both do not see, is the key difference. It hints at something larger, at a more basic relationship between abstract gesture and abstract communication. There are however many of these threads running between anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology that paint a complex mosaic of relationships connecting language with important bodily features like gesture, motion, emotion and reason. The total project that has tried to draw together many of the important thought is generally being called cognitive science, and gives us an important theoretical underpinning to the power of technopanics.

It helps to begin where all of the magic happens, the brain. As evident from a wide assortment of studies on language disorders, only a limited number of areas in the cerebrum have linguistic capabilities; the so called Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas being two of the most studied and well known. Nearly all of these areas of language processing are located on the left side of the brain, next to areas that control speech and movement. This is not just a peculiarity, but integral to processing. As evidenced in studies employing neural imaging, mentions of the face or the leg will cause the part of the brain that directs movement in the face or the leg to light up. Conversely, activation will occur in many of the same language areas when an individual conducts simple tasks involving the leg or the face. When repeated for visual and olfactory stimuli, language centers again were activated.

This partially explains why comprehension tests show a marked increased in semantic understanding for the situations that are essentially spatial or related to ‘body-object interaction,’ as there is complex array of processing dedicated to these relations.

To guide the movement of the body through space, there must be constant physiological monitoring of the environment and the relations of nearby objects. Body schema is the name given to this internal system of control. As a version of homeosatis, body schema is a kind of internal regulation that is universal for life. Distinct from the rest of the higher primates and the animal kingdom, humans by far have the most complex of these systems, as we are able to incorporate tools within seconds. Oftentimes, there is no natural inclination to actually interact with tools on the part of other primates, which is universal of humans, and they have taught.

In many ways, this is a new way of looking at language. This new program of research has emerged,

[This] approach focuses attention on the fact that most real-world thinking occurs in very particular (and often very complex) environments, is employed for very practical ends, and exploits the possibility of interaction with and manipulation of external props. It thereby foregrounds the fact that cognition is a highly embodied or situated activity—emphasis intentionally on all three— and suggests that thinking beings ought therefore be considered first and foremost as acting beings.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. the potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. we know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. in the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”

-Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

The best parts of this poem come from the end:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The natural state of humanity is poverty, not abundance. Poor, nasty brutish and short was the way of life for nearly until 250 years ago, especially poor. Here was life in the early 1700s, for example:

• Every item of clothing was made by hand to fit the consumer. Suits made like this today costs around $4,000. Consider affording that on subsistence wages. 
• In France, it was common for poor laborers to not wear shoes.
• With low economies to scale and expensive transportation costs, everything but the priciest of materials was expensive to ship. Spices, whale byproducts and tobacco were among these items.
• Interest rates were 30-60%.

Yes, you read that title correctly. The NYT is reporting:

From 2005 to 2009, Illinois issued $2.2 billion worth of municipal bonds, which the S.E.C. said were marketed under false pretenses. There was a growing hole in the pension system, putting increasing pressure on the state’s finances every year. That raised the risk that at some point retirees and bond buyers would be competing for the same limited money. The risk grew greater every year, the S.E.C. said, but investors could not see it by looking at Illinois’ disclosures.

In effect, that meant investors overpaid for bonds of a lower quality than they were made out to have, although the S.E.C. did not measure any loss. In Monday’s settlement with the S.E.C., Illinois agreed to a cease-and-desist order without admitting or denying the accusations.

“Masters of the Universe” will be the next book in the pile, largely due to a review by Michael Clune:

That neoliberalism won out was due neither to the failures of the welfare state nor to a “master plan” pushed by the agents of capital. The story Stedman Jones tells is considerably more nuanced. He shows neoliberalism’s ascendance to be the result of a series of more or less ad hoc moves on the part of politicians, activists, media figures, and economists in response to a series of political and economic shocks that began in the 1970s. The image of a dramatic face-off between neoliberals and proponents of the postwar center-left consensus is largely an artifact of retrospective right-wing propaganda, which the left seems to have accepted in its essential features.

…

Monetarism is a government policy for manipulating the economy. The free market is the vision of an economy liberated from government control. Understanding how a rather technical policy approach came to be identified with the love of free markets opens an entirely new approach to the fundamental economic and political transformation of our time. And understanding how this identification came to be resisted allows us to understand the longevity of the biggest zombie of all: the tendency to blame government for everything that’s wrong with the economy.

I often find myself in discussions of neoliberalism and have implored others to consider a more detailed story of events, which this book seems to aim for. But Clune fails to mention the deregulation that occurred elsewhere in the economy, not just in monetary policy. Telecommunications, airlines and alcohol were all “deregulated,” the effect being lower prices and higher quality goods. Of course there have been problems, but the larger point is that a free market philosophy is more nuanced than even this reviewer is willing to admit.

Animals by Frank O’Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

Over the last five years, the libertarian movement has expanded drastically. What was largely a niche group of individualist and anarchist radicals in the 1970s and 80s has been transformed in the last decade. Approval ratings for both of the parties have dropped as much as their views have grown apart.  Bloated budgets, increased secularization and a distrust in governmental efficacy have furthered libertarian ideas.

But there is a bias in this growth, as Gina Luttrell points out,

I’ll be frank. Most libertarians are white, middle class, men. It was painfully obvious when you walked around the corridors of the Hyatt in Washington, D.C. White, middle class men are the people who, by and large, get to experience true individuality. Our culture sees white men as the “standard” or the “normal.” Thus, they are a “blank slate” upon which they get to write whatever they want.

Exactly.

As she goes on to explain, the experience of the white male is the standard blank slate from which the “Other” is constructed. Regardless of one’s recognition of it, and this is typically the case for white men and women, there is privilege imbued in white skin that confers the person a litany of advantages. This helps to reinforce the differences between white men, the standard bearer for the society, and the Other.

I agree with Gina and am similarly amazed by those who claim themselves to be libertarians but abhor identity politics. The demands of freedom and liberty require that we further understand how individuals are made into groups and stripped of their uniqueness both by society and by government. Libertarians more than any other know that the State makes us into groups and into statistics, but we should take the step further and consider how society does the same. At its core, identity politics and critical theory are aiming to do just that.

Thus, the pillar of individuality that is so often touted by libertarians is rightly seen to be disingenuous to those who are not white or male because they aren’t seen as individuals by society. Instead, they are groups, which individualists, of all people, should be interested in studying. More than any other, this social process is hardly discussed in the canon of libertarian thought.

bell hooks, a black feminist scholar, hinted at the problem when speaking on postmodernism,

We have too long had imposed upon us from both the out­side and the inside a narrow, constricting notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of self and the assertion of agency.

One primary aim in this article is to urge social theorists to consider black identity in the context of modern social theory. Her aim is radically individualist, which makes the explicit omission by modern libertarians of this kind of thinking especially problematic. To be clear, if there is a commitment to individualism then identity politics must be part of the broader conversation.

The political development of the libertarian movement will be one of the most interesting in the coming years, but it needs to consider its position within politics. It needs to be self critical and reflective of where it lies on the political spectrum. Some might claim that I am trying to change the scope of debate with these questions. But it seems to me that we just need to apply the classical liberal mindset to the modern world. This doesn’t mean a retreat to the ideas of the old at the expense of the new, but the inclusion of the new as an addendum to the old.

Armen Alchian passed away earlier this week and in reading some of the remembrances, I came across this review of the Alchian-Allen Theorem, which I have posted the pertinent parts:

The Alchian-Allen Theorem is a lesser known but still very interesting economic theory. It states that when a fixed cost is added to substitute goods, the more expensive one becomes relatively less expensive, and so people are likely to increase consumption of the higher quality good. I think the best way to illustrate the theorem is with examples.

…

When a drug is outlawed, people face a large fixed cost equal to the expected punishment. They not only have to pay higher money prices, but they also pay in the form of a potential prison sentence. Thus, in areas where alcohol is outlawed, people tend to drink either high concentration or high quality alcohol. It’s simply not worth the trouble to smuggle regular beer. Likewise, the THC content of marijuana has increased as more effort is spent trying to eliminate marijuana use. Paradoxically, because of the higher dosages, drug prohibition can actually increase the dangers associated with drug consumption by eliminating the low cost low concentration doses from the market.

The Alchian-Allen Theorem has profound explanatory power when applied to the internet. The harder it is to gain access to cultural elements, the higher the quality of those elements will be consumed. On the flip side, if it is easy to access culture, people will prefer to consume shorter lower quality pieces of culture. In the middle ages, people had to travel long distances to view concerts, which were performed by live musicians. Thus, the fixed costs of consumption were very high. If you bothered to pay a huge amount of money and time, you might as well view a long complex opera or symphony. On the flip side, when fixed costs are as low as a Google search, people prefer short YouTube videos of cats doing cute things. Don’t think that this means that the quality of culture has gone down.

When there are large fixed costs, an opera is only about 50% more expensive than watching a cat video. An opera would only have to bring a little more enjoyment to be worth doing.