In the last few years, come the end of December, I have posted about my favourite media of the preceding year, even though writing such retrospectives has increasingly felt more like a chore. I’ll append a list of some of my favourite online readings of the year at the end of this post, but 2018 leaves me in no mood to write a lot about movies (with one exception), or books, or music, or television.

Anyway, if you are a human reading this and are indeed interested, I have a running list of my favourite movies of 2018 over at Letterboxd. But even though Call Me By Your Name felt like summer holidays, or Cuarón’s Roma is a Cinematic Achievement, or The Florida Project tightropes between the colourful and the garish in photography as in life, or You Were Never Really Here has the Best Hammer-yielding Avenger, or First Man gave me the goose bumps because I’m all into vintage space exploration, none of those movies is really about the malaise of 2018, and the one movie I keep thinking back and reflecting upon is Paul Schrader’s First Reformed.

In a dark conversation with a friend late in a November night, we discussed how maybe we belong to one of the Last Generations of a civilized humanity. Even if Miracle Fusion Energy is discovered and humanity manages to cope with climate change and soil depletion without having turned the poor first and the less rich afterwards into Soylent Green for the one percent, the fact remains that optimism and positivism at this stage feels callous. In this context, First Reformed dared to address the taboo of feeling that it is wrong for someone informed to willingly bring a new witness into this world, in which our economic and media elites consciously or unconsciously plot to shepherd the expendables (that is, me, you, and most of everyone we know) into the Door Number Four of the Four Possible Futures, as it was shockingly well articulated — in my own Portuguese tongue, no less —, by the victory of the Exterminist candidate in the Brazil presidential election.

It’s not that I’ve stopped whatever I am doing in life and retreated to a monastery, an idea that sounds even worse after I typed it. The paradox is that I remain engaged in my research on education and technological literacy. Even though I’m not willing to bet the existence of new human beings on that outcome, I keep daydreaming about the old techno-hippie promises of freedom, equality, and fraternity, as if everyone just learns to code and we all break free from late capitalism — swallowing, so to speak, the red pill that undoes the spell of manipulation and envy. Sadly, a brief look at forums reveals that people that work in the algorithmic sausage factory are fully invested in their shit wursts, and that the red pill metaphor, much like the word ‘freedom’, is most often used in horrifying ways. So maybe the meaning of our lives is in nursing each other through the end of civilization, or at least through the barbarian invasions, and that requires thoughtfulness, civility, and approaching whatever the hell the internet is nowadays with the reverence one does for weapons of mass destruction.

So anyway, that BoJack Horseman funeral eulogy episode was terrific!

Here are some news articles and reports I found pertinent in 2018:

On our technological dystopia:

• The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel: Artificial Intelligence and Neoreaction, Viewpoint Magazine;
• The Cambridge Analytica Con, The Baffler;
• The Algorithmic Trap, Perell — on how tourists became bots controlled via Instagram;
• Dystopias Now, Commune — Kim Stanley Robinson, always the optimist;
• Ambient Cruelty, Real Life Mag;
• How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually, New York Magazine.

On how hell is other people:

• ContraPoints’ wonderful takedown of Jordan Peterson, YouTube (it’s a video but should be required reading);
• No Hugging, The Guardian;
• The Daddy Dialectic, LA Review of Books;
• The Internet of Garbage, The Verge — on online harassment;
• The Dark Core of Personality, Scientific American;
• Psychpaths and the Rest of Us, Hazlitt (TLDR: run as far away as possible);
• Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?, The Atlantic.

On turbo-capitalism and other scams:

• Edutopia, Jacobin;
• A Letter to My Daughter About the Black Magic of Banking, Yanis Varoufakis;
• Why we should bulldoze the business school, The Guardian;
• It’s Basically Just Immoral To Be Rich, Current Affairs;
• The CIA Reads French Theory, LA Review of Books — an account of how secret services nudge(d) academia;
• If the Point of Capitalism is to Escape Capitalism, Then What’s the Point of Capitalism?, Umair Haque;
• It’s time to abandon the cruelty of meritocracy, The Guardian;
• The language of capitalism isn’t just annoying, it’s dangerous, The Outline;
• A Business With No End, NYT.

On science and (good) technology:

• Why Paper Jams Persist, The New Yorker;
• The Scientific Paper is Obsolete, The Atlantic;
• A Modern Prometheus, The History of Processing, Casey Reas and Ben Fry;
• Trying not to Try, Nautilus — modern cognitive science agrees with ancient Chinese philosophy;
• The Empty Brain, Aeon — your brain is not a computer.

On art and culture:

• As a Lute out of Tune: Robert Burton’s Melancholy, Public Domain Review;
• The Problem with Muzak, The Baffler;
• The Good Room, Frank Chimero;
• Against Popular Culture, Aeon — about Theodor Adorno;
• The Book No One Read, Nautilus — about Stanislaw Lem;
• Brutalism and Antidesign, Nielsen Norman Group;
• Corrupted Texts: Silent Cinema and the Intertitle, Silent San Francisco;
• The Deal of the Art, The Baffler;
• How to Be an Artist, Vulture (refreshingly realistic while not cynical).

On other things:

• The Lost Art of Staying Put, The Baffler;
• Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Engage in Class Warfare, Topic Magazine — about board games;
• The Secret Language of Ships, Hakai;
• The 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People, AlterNet;
• Is everything you think you know about depression wrong?, The Guardian;
• What Is It Like to Be a Man?, The Hedgehog Review — a candid and realistic account of masculinity;
• We Will Curse You, Lapham’s — a history of curses in sports.

Here’s some 2018 visual candy to wash away the bleakness. This one is my favourite.

It’s been twenty-one years since I followed a Microsoft Frontpage Express tutorial in some British computer magazine and built a personal website. I practiced my high school English writing about my city, about the music and the films I liked, and, as I was turning eighteen, some bad poetry. I also followed instructions on using a FTP client and uploaded the site to the meagre megabyte of space my ISP offered, marvelling at the fact that the site — my stuff — continued accessible even when my computer was turned off. I would check my website at my friends’ computers, at libraries, at cyber-cafés, just to confirm it was indeed an independent entity, and no further action was needed from me for my site to be available to everyone, always.

Over the next few years I would iterate my site obsessively, experimenting with form, structure, content, while building spin-off sites at the same time — photo manipulation exercises hosted over at Geocities, Sensible Soccer at Tripod, tracker music playlists at some other short-lived free webhosting company. Later I would start to blog, in both solo and group form. Early enough that I became one of those “blogging before it was cool” curmodgeons while enduring the Blogger age. Later still, I enthusiastically took up Tumblr, and eleven years later I keep using its still open API as a jury-rigged blogging backend. In this age of Medium, I can’t but feel that having your own personal blog became an eccentric hobby like model railroads or birdwatching.

During these years I migrated everything over domains and platforms. If you’re at the right place, this particular blog you’re reading was started April 21st, 2001. Even though I took stuff offline as I went along, deleting what I found embarrassing or no longer interesting from my online sites (always keeping offline copies, though), between the Wayback Machine and Google’s caches, I never trully know what is still accessible and what isn’t.

You can see where I’m getting at. I’ve consciously and willingly put a lot of stuff online on the web, as my professional path took me from amateur to pro and back to amateur, and then possibly to eccentric hobbyist. I formed an habit of not considering my preferences and opinions as private, so I possibly drew the privacy line further back than most people my age. Although I am careful not to give my exact whereabouts to prying eyes via Instagram or other networks, always posting stuff well after the fact, nearly all of my posts on Facebook are public and automated — from Instagram, from Twitter, itself a public repository of my public Pocket favourites. In fact, most things I ever posted on Facebook exists in some way in this website, and vice-versa. My threat model has been parochial: I might have felt a small amount of concern about a prospective client, employer, or date ending up reading something they find disagreeable, but… open book and all that. I’ve always took ‘online’ to mean 'public’.

So, Facebook. I won’t say that Cambridge Analytica business is okay. But an unexpected breach of trust? No: fully expected. Or further still: what trust? Did you expect that when you give information to a private entity they wouldn’t use that information as they privately see fit? Do you imagine your ISP, which you actually pay for, to behave any differently from the postal service of a totalitatian state, peering inside every envelope and package? Or for that matter, your paid VPN provider, which you use for 'security’? 

Let’s not forget the net is war technology, and computers were invented because spies — indeed, codebreakers — needed them. Digital technology is spyware at its core, and for all of Facebook’s abuses, I don’t think the problem lies with a few companies, or even with a Silicon Valley ‘culture’. The problem is a deeper, way deeper, capital-P Political problem, of how we as a society look at information technology. Facebook harvesting an admittedly alarming amount of information about our preferences and opinions, and then selling it to the highest bidder, is not that different from YouTube being the house the unpaid labor of a large mass of video producers built, or AirBnB being a machine for subsidizing tourists, landlords, and housing developers with money stolen from the monthly paychecks of tenants and lenders.

Now, as with regarding Volkswagen’s Dieselgate scandal, I’ll happily argue for executive jailtime and some kind of 'death penalty’ for unethical companies (say, forced nationalization or redistribution of institutional shareholders’ stock to the workers, which would be something nasty and also leftist enough to get shareholders’ skin deep in the game). But again, that’s Political. As much as I watch Facebook’s stock plummet with some glee, and as much as I imagine that, as I mass delete old posts and likes, sirens are going off in Zuck’s volcano lair control room, henchmen screaming “our assets! are being deleted!”, and the Falcon Heavy fails its launch to Mars and explodes the whole island… will I delete my account?

No.

Will I keep using it as before? Well, almost. Yes, I did delete a lot of stuff I had on Facebook and other platforms belonging to private corporations. Digital spring cleaning: deleting content, unliking and unsubscribing pages no longer active or interesting, unfollowing and unfriending followees and ‘friends’ no longer known or trusted. I deleted chats from long ago, chats no longer going, chats with ghosters, thus also sparing myself the cognitive grief of illusory availability and trust. And yet, Facebook has become, alongside Google, an essential communication utility. Facebook group chats have became, at least for me — a single, middle-aging person who works from home —, an essential tool for socializing with a loosely-knit group of friends. #deletefacebook is great if your socializing doesn’t require it. But unless I can convert a large group of very different friends and acquaintances into cypherpunks using Mastodon and Signal (and surely I don’t want to be that kind of guy), I just can’t.

Multiply this by the troubles of 2 billion persons: Facebook is an utility, like your electrical company, like your water and sewage company, like your ISP or the postal service — the German Democratic Republic’s, in this case. Furthermore, Facebook is a monopolistic utility (just think that Instagram and Whatsapp are theirs) to be dealt with in the realm of Politics. Dealing with it perhaps requires a whole other model of society, as I don’t think Facebook should be a private company, but I don’t think it should belong to a government either.

I don’t really have any ideas about what to do with Facebook or Google. Political intervention seems a fever dream, and the same for 2 billion people simultaneously changing habits. It may be that something actually better comes along and disrupts the disruptors — who knows if the blockchain is actually good for more than growing tomatos? Or we may find ourselves in a VR Facegoolazon hellhole, reminiscing about the present day as we reminisce of the 1990s.

I watched fourty-seven movies released in Portugal throughout 2017, and this time I even took the time to make a ranked list over at Letterboxd, which you shouldn’t take very seriously — ranking apples alongside oranges is hard! Still, these are the films I would very much like to highlight and recommend, in no particular order:

A Fábrica de Nada (The Nothing Factory) by Pedro Pinho. There is a story in there about a group of workers stopping their factory owners from removing equipment and relocating, and then proceeding to turn the factory into a co-op. But the movie is so much, much more as a powerful case-study on those left behind by the turbo-capitalist zeitgeist; and it is served well by being more interested in raising questions about what can be done in the 21st century (there is an exemplary scene where a few artist-burgeois discuss politics without actually getting anywhere) than providing 20th century answers. Stylistically, The Nothing Factory also blends the documentary with the lyrical (there’s even a musical sequence), making the film akin to a long episode in Miguel Gomes’ opus Arabian Nights. Were that the case, it would have been one of the very best.

The Square by Ruben Östlund. Do you ever wonder what it would be like if someone made a movie in which a character much like Mad Men’s Don Draper was the curator of a large museum, and terribly sucked at his job? Well, look no further! And the sad thing is, The Square does feel like a pretty accurate observation of how the institutional art world is run. The Square is perfect companion piece to Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, should you still believe in contemporary art.

Should you despair too much at what ‘art’ became, I heartly recommend Paterson by the great Jim Jarmusch: a sober movie about how artmaking belongs anywhere and to everyone; and how making trumps showing.

20th Century Women by Mike Mills and Song to Song by Terrence Malick are two movies that couldn’t perhaps be more different, but I consider them both sides to a coin: Mills’ shows growth and the strengthening of human relationships, while Malick’s chronicles their destruction. An yet, both are movies about longing, both are charming and hypnotizing, and both are balsam for a heart’s wounds.

I would also highlight a few more movies that could just as easily be listed as my favourite should have I left my bed through the other side this morning: Aquarius, a great Brazilian movie about, for the lack of better words, resistance to the gentrification mafia; The Age of Shadows, an amazing Korean spy thriller set in World War II, echoing of J.-P. Melville’s French resistance classic Army of Shadows; Pablo Larrain’s Neruda, half an amazingly charming portrait of the Chilean poet, half a great political thriller about his escape from persecution; character studies in loneliness Moonlight; and also Lucky, played by the late great Harry Dean Stanton; James Gray’s venture into the unknown with The Lost City of Z; and finally, Thor: Ragnarok, which commanded the best laughs I gave at a theatre last year, and I praise Marvel and Taika Waititi for the change of tone and embrancing all the sillyness and psychedelia of superhero comics in a very crisp comedy. I am also firmly on the camp of those who really liked The Last Jedi — to paraphrase a friend, I was expecting Star Wars but got a good movie instead, and commend Rian Johnson for the way the movie made short work of turning expectations around.

A few words for movies I didn’t like at all. I admit I wasn’t expecting much from T2 Trainspotting, but I felt it consisted of little more than reminders of how the original felt cool in 1996, and was in the end as welcome as a tour from a second-rate britpop band. In the same vein, I felt whitewashed Ghost in the Shell was as mediocre as expected, but at least a little redeemed by casting Beat Takeshi with the weirdest haircut. Luc Besson’s promised return to The Fifth Element form was a big failure, but at least I think I won’t change channel should I ever come across Valerian on television, on aesthetic grounds alone (and the movie did have a great title sequence). I won’t have a reason to watch Blade Runner 2049 ever again, however. Jamie Zawinski’s analysis of 2049’s failures is pretty spot-on. As I said before of Arrival, Denis Villeneuve must have the best press agents working in Hollywood. Even Ridley Scott, surely a culprit in that he claims to have pitched ideas for 2049, felt bored watching it. As with movies such as Interstellar, where did this trend of equating movies about Serious Questions About Man’s Place in the Universe with logically unsound plots, stiff acting, lots of slow wide shots of landscapes, and Loud! Hans Zimmer scores come from?

Granting David Lynch’s wish that Twin Peaks: The Return been seen as a long movie, I would surely place it among my favourite of 2017, else it was one of my favourite series, even for all its Dougie-ing (I’m sure that’s a word now). It’s surely the ultimate showcase of David Lynch’s craft — he’s very good at creating characters, he’s very good at creating mood, he’s very good at world building, he’s very good at slapstick comedy, and situation comedy as well, he’s very good at horror (both gore and stupid), he’s very good at action!, and he’s very good at that which he’s best known for, creating painterly nightmares — of which Episode 8 is the ultimate example. David Lynch is very good.

I didn’t watch that much series, but I’d highlight the final season of Halt and Catch Fire, and how a series that started as Difficult Man in the 80s Tech Industry grown over time, as it gave the lead to Donna and Cam (sorry, Joe!) to one of the best portraits of human relationships bound by the creative process. Computers not being the thing, but being “the thing that gets us to the thing” is a line that I’ll carry as the perfect description of why I like the Internet so much, even in a year I often felt the Internet should just close and begone. I will also highlight the great second season of Master of None, and a good return of Mr. Robot, less concerned with serving Fight Club-level twists and more focused at being a very good cypherpunk thriller.

A survey of my favourite reads of 2017 is coming soon!

I haven’t read as many books as I would have liked throughout 2017, and most of the times ended up entertaining myself with some sci-fi escapism (or not, given how I tend to go for the bleak stuff). Still, I would like to highlight a few books that left an impression:

Laurent Binet’s HHhH would be a very thrilling account of Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of high-ranking nazi Reinhard Heydrich by a czechoslovak commando during World War II. Even though it would be wrong to describe reading this book as a joy, given the book’s description of the rise of nazism and of nazi atrocities, it is true that I found HHhH unputdownable, mostly because of the book’s narration from the point of view of its author, researching the book as it is written — eg. finding a crucial detail in a museum in Prague while on holiday there, commenting on how an old film adaptation of the events gets a few things wrong, being constaly unsure of the color of the car Heydrich was in during the assassination, etc.

I really liked the worldbuilding on Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota books, of which I’m halfway through The Will to Battle, the third in what is expected to be a tetralogy. I’m still a little bit unsure about the premise (There’s going to be a war! Why? Because there’s going to be a war!), and the structure of the books tends to be a bit boring sometimes, specially in the second volume (a dialogue scene, then another dialogue scene, and another, and another), the utopian future world Palmer describes is very consistent and really stays with me, a marvel I would like to see like no other in earthly sci-fi. I see some hints in The Will to Battle that Ada Palmer may be improving at writing action, and if so I can’t hardly wait for the final chapter. And given the worldbuilding, the number of interesting characters, the operatic style, the blood and the constant menace, I hope HBO comes calling. That I would watch.

I’ve also given much thought to Cixin Liu’s bleak Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. While parts still feel very unsophisticated (such as the very weak writing of female characters), it’s very interesting to read hard sci-fi with a chinese point-of-view. And most of all (a spoiler for the second volume, The Dark Forest, follows), Liu offers one very interesting and extremely unsettling theory about why we haven’t yet found any other signs of life in the universe: every advanced civilization is hiding, as demonstrations of intelligent life are swifly met with extermination before they can grow to be a threat. Add the SETI project to our list of existential threats.

I haven’t watched the series, but did feel inclined to read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Despite being written in the 1980s, I agree that it is a dystopia that captures many anxieties of 2017, and for all the ways it may strike us implausible that something as Gilead may be implemented in the West, we should never forget it has happened multiple times before (eg. just look at how Afeghanistan devolved from an emerging developing country to Taliban rule in less than two decades). Therein lies the power of distopia. We may never agree on the utopia we want — Ada Palmer’s books shows how her multiple choice utopia breaks (and that one is only made possible because of free energy and a highly unplausible transport technology). However, we may agree on what we don’t. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum!

I’ve also read quite a few online articles, of which I recommend the following:

There is no alternative?

• Evict the Rich, Peter Moskowitz, The Outline;
• The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millenial, Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm;
• Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture, Brianna Rennix & Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs;
• The Ins and Outs of Europe’s Deep Establishment, Stan Persky, LA Review of Books;
• The Legion Lonely, Stephen Thomas, Hazlitt;
• This is Not a Simulation, Carmen Petaccio, The New Inquiry;
• The Rise of the Thought Leader, David Sessions, New Republic;
• Against Domesticity, Amber A'lee Frost, Current Affairs;
• Against Willpower, Carl Erik Fisher, Nautilus;
• Why time management is ruining our lives, Oliver Burkeman, Guardian;
• Twenty-first Century Victorians, Jason Tebbe, Jacobin.

Sciences & philosophy

• The Machiavelli series, Ada Palmer;
• The Logic of Risk-taking, Nassim Nicholas Taleb;
• The Sadness of Saturn, Sam Kriss, The Outline;
• How Information Got Re-invented, Jimmy Soni & Rob Goodman, Nautilus;
• Bad Things Happen for a Reason and other Idiocies of Theodicy, Jason Blum, Aeon.

The decline of academia

• Publication, Power, and Patronage, Chad Wellmon & Andrew Piper, Critical Inquiry;
• Laboring Academia, Maximilian Alvarez, The Baffler.

When technology backfires

• What Bitcoin Shows Us About How Money Works, Tim Babb;
• The Death of the Internet, Joshua Topolsky, The Outline;
• The Great Tech Panic: The Internet Is the Uncanniest Valley, Virginia Hefferman, Wired;
• Eliminating the Human, David Byrne;
• Build a Better Monster: Morality, Machine Learning, and Mass Surveillance, Maciej Ceglowski, Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference;
• When Good Intentions Backfire, danah boyd, Data & Society: Points.

Art and media

• What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?, Claire Dederer, The Paris Review;
• Lynch, Time, and Comedy, Elise Moore, Bright Wall, Dark Room;
• Salvation Mode — the forgotten joys of the screen saver, Zack Hatfield, The Paris Review;
• Return of the KLF, Andrew Harrison, Guardian;
• Mike Judge, the bard of suck, Willy Staley, New York Times Magazine;
• Thoughts on Software for the Visual Arts, Casey Reas, Processing Foundation.

Funny stuff

• Everything I Am Afraid Might Happen If I Ask New Acquaintances to Get Coffee, Hallie Cantor, New Yorker;
• A Selection of the 30 Most Disappointing Under 30, Bess Kalb, New Yorker.