Bookmarked Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era by .
Reading
Bookmarks and snippets from books and articles I’m reading.
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“The site was the I-11 katchi abadi, one of Islamabad’s largest and oldest informal squatter settlements, which had been earmarked for demolition by the capital’s bureaucratic managers in the CDA, as part of a wider ‘anti-encroachment’ drive targeting other residential settlements and roadside vending stalls.
15,000 residents of I-11 abadi were given one week’s notice to vacate their homes of decades, following which they were besieged militarily for days. Eventually, their homes were forcibly demolished and dozens of residents were arrested under the Anti-Terrorist Act for their attempts to resist.”
They razed our homes — Hassan Turi on the demolition of katchi abadis in I-11 Islamabad in 2015
Accumulation by dispossession is a concept presented by the Marxist geographer David Harvey. It defines neoliberal capitalist policies that result in a centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few by dispossessing the public and private entities of their wealth or land.
Wikipedia
Katchi abadis are home to nearly 50% of Pakistan’s population.
Urban indicators 1996 2006 2013 Percentage of urban population living in slums 24 30 50 Percentage of urban population with access to adequate housing 50 60 60 Percentage of people residing in urban areas with access to improved drinking water 85 – 91 Percentage people residing in urban areas with access to adequate sanitation 60 65 72 Percentage people residing in urban areas with access to regular waste collection 30 50 5
Table from a Ministry of Climate Change report.
“The political economy of war and ‘counterterrorism’ — the vast majority of the abadi’s residents were Pashtuns who out-migrated from war-weary north-west Pak–Afghan border zones into cities like Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi over the past three to four decades.
Military personnel, civil administrators, mainstream politicians and the corporate media regularly invoke threats to the ‘development’ of Pakistan’s cities from this growing underclass.
As the demand for real estate, malls and roads on the part of the city’s upwardly mobile segments grows, the latter buy into tropes of ‘security’ and ‘rule of law’ peddled in statist and dominant media narratives.
In short, a distinctly urbane, middle-class aspiration to partake of more ‘development’ translates into support for military-style operations to cleanse the city of undesirable elements
“The dialectical other of the military’s real estate adventures in the 80s was the massive influx of refugees from both Afghanistan and the Pakistan side of the Pak–Afghan border into cities like Karachi and Quetta, as well as Islamabad. Later characterised by the epithet ‘internally displaced persons’ (IDPs), this perpetually dispossessed mass would settle on city outskirts in what were effectively refugee camps, slowly but surely building shanty homes whilst generating precarious incomes, mostly in the service sector. I-11 katchi abadi was one such settlement.
“In contrast to propertied classes, the toiling classes do not enjoy security of tenure, the threat of coercion against their ‘illegal’ occupation of notionally ‘public’ land hanging like the proverbial sword of Damocles over their heads.
At particular conjunctures, this threat materialises into reality, dispossession and development hence forming dialectical parts of a contradictory social totality, the systemic and systematic processes inherent to capitalist accumulation playing out dramatically for all the world to see.”
“In the aftermath of the I-11 abadi demolition, the Pashtun evictees suffered the ignominy of being denied rental accommodations in the wider Islamabad-Rawalpindi metropolitan area following a widespread propaganda campaign led by the CDA and ICT administration to warn landlords against taking on Pashtuns as tenants.”
“We made these homes through hard toil, working day and night to supply Islamabad’s elite with basic needs. This city cannot function without our labour, rich people’s homes and offices cannot survive. But they don’t care. The only thing they care about is the land. Who cares about working people like us?”
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What Twitter Does to Our Sense of Time
Bookmarked What Twitter Does to Our Sense of Time by .
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Reading Past the Tipping Point: Why Pakistan’s Low …
Reading Past the Tipping Point: Why Pakistan’s Low Emitter Argument Won’t Work.
An increase in global temperatures from 1.5°C to 2°C has been estimated to cost upwards of 150 million lives, mostly in Asian and African countries as a result of air pollution linked to GHG emissions. That’s more than four times the death toll of the First and Second World Wars combined.
While Pakistan is responsible for adapting to climate change – a pledge made by the Federation when it ratified the Paris Agreement – the implementation of adaptation initiatives such as flood protection, irrigation efficiency, the provision of clean drinking water are all areas where Provincial administration plays the dominant role. To date, there is no formal mechanism in place to coordinate the execution of international agreements between federal and provincial mandates.
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Reading Devine & Rekka‘s log of their sail from Shimoda to Victoria, Canada.
Smart devices to take away the pain of thinking deep thoughts, social things against the solitude, forever removing ourselves, in exchange for protectedness, for a complete thoughtless socialized inexistence.
A creeping numbness might be to blame for our own search of this direct experience, in the form of long distance sailing, to let ourselves feel cold so we could sense the subtler changes in the weather, to go hungry to appreciate simpler foods.
Convenience products will protect those living at odds with nature. Novel and fashionable horrors will be popularized to subvert anyone into docility, else new fears will be provided as obedience demands.
In the name of security, a modern citizen will be thoroughly handled. A modern civilisation will deem itself total as it finally does away with all inconveniences, vanquished the totality of the Unknowable, the Indifferent, the Unorganizeable, of Nature, by means of paving over it.
We believe that one can use nature’s indifference as a reminder of the actual fortitude of their being, to learn of one’s own true capacity for resilience when communing with nature — Ideas altogether at odds with modern stories, or an invitation to be part of something.
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Basic HTML Competency Is the New Punk Folk …
Bookmarked Basic HTML Competency Is the New Punk Folk Explosion! by .
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From Permanent Record by Edward Snowden:
How can I explain it, to someone who wasn’t there? My younger readers, with their younger standards, might think of the nascent Internet as way too slow, the nascent Web as too ugly and un-entertaining. But that would be wrong. Back then, being online was another life, considered by most to be separate and distinct from Real Life. The virtual and the actual had not yet merged. And it was up to each individual user to determine for themselves where one ended and the other began.
It was precisely this that was so inspiring: the freedom to imagine something entirely new, the freedom to start over. Whatever Web 1.0 might’ve lacked in user-friendliness and design sensibility, it more than made up for by its fostering of experimentation and originality of expression.
As the millennium approached, the online world would become increasingly centralized and consolidated, with both governments and businesses accelerating their attempts to intervene in what had always been a fundamentally peer-to-peer relationship. But for one brief and beautiful stretch of time—a stretch that, fortunately for me, coincided almost exactly with my adolescence—the Internet was mostly made of, by, and for the people. Its purpose was to enlighten, not to monetize, and it was administered more by a provisional cluster of perpetually shifting collective norms than by exploitative, globally enforceable terms of service agreements. To this day, I consider the 1990s online to have been the most pleasant and successful anarchy I’ve ever experienced.
I think this explains what it is that I love so much about alt-web spaces like the fediverse, Scuttlebutt, and the decentralized web in general.
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Reading The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.
A close friend recommended this book to me 5 years ago, when I had just dropped out of college and suffered my first mental breakdown. I never got around to reading it properly until earlier last week, and the first chapter felt enough like an epiphany that I’ve now decided to read the whole book.
On Diagnosis
Diagnosis is as complex as the illness. Patients ask doctors all the time, “Am I depressed?” as though the result were in a definitive blood test. The only way to find out whether you’re depressed is to listen to and watch yourself, to feel your feelings and then think about them. If you feel bad without reason most of the time, you’re depressed. If you feel bad most of the time with reason, you’re also depressed, though changing the reasons may be a better way forward than leaving circumstance alone and attacking the depression. If the depression is disabling to you, then it’s major. If it’s only mildly distracting, it’s not major. Psychiatry’s bible — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fourth edition (DSM-IV) — ineptly defines depression as the presence of five or more on a list of nine symptoms. The problem with the definition is that it’s entirely arbitrary. There’s no particular reason to qualify five symptoms as constituting depression; four symptoms are more or less depression; and five symptoms are less severe than six. Even one symptom is unpleasant. Having slight versions of all the symptoms may be less of a problem than having severe versions of two symptoms. After enduring diagnosis, most people seek causation, despite the fact that knowing why you are sick has no immediate bearing on treating the sickness.
Depression and your body
Illness of the mind is real illness. It can have severe effects on the body. People who show up at the offices of their doctors complaining about stomach cramps are frequently told, “Why, there’s nothing wrong with you except that you’re depressed!” Depression, if it is sufficiently severe to cause stomach cramps, is actually a really bad thing to have wrong with you, and it requires treatment. If you show up complaining that your breathing is troubled, no one says to you, “Why, there’s nothing wrong with you except that you have emphysema!” To the person who is experiencing them, psychosomatic complaints are as real as the stomach cramps of someone with food poisoning. They exist in the unconscious brain, and often enough the brain is sending inappropriate messages to the stomach, so they exist there as well. The diagnosis — whether something is rotten in your stomach or your appendix or your brain — matters in determining treatment and is not trivial. As organs go, the brain is quite an important one, and its malfunctions should be addressed accordingly.
Although depression is described by the popular press and the pharmaceutical industry as though it were a single-effect illness such as diabetes, it is not. Indeed, it is strikingly dissimilar to diabetes. Diabetics produce insufficient insulin, and diabetes is treated by increasing and stabilizing insulin in the bloodstream. Depression is not the consequence of a reduced level of anything we can now measure. Raising levels of serotonin in the brain triggers a process that eventually helps many depressed people to feel better, but that is not because they have abnormally low levels of serotonin. Furthermore, serotonin does not have immediate salutary effects. You could pump a gallon of serotonin into the brain of a depressed person and it would not in the instant make him feel one iota better, though a long-term sustained raise in serotonin level has some effects that ameliorate depressive symptoms.
On reducing depression to a chemical phenomenon
Chemistry is often called on to heal the rift between body and soul. The relief people express when a doctor says their depression is “chemical” is predicated on a belief that there is an integral self that exists across time, and on a fictional divide between the fully occasioned sorrow and the utterly random one. The word chemical seems to assuage the feelings of responsibility people have for the stressed-out discontent of not liking their jobs, worrying about getting old, failing at love, hating their families. There is a pleasant freedom from guilt that has been attached to chemical. If your brain is predisposed to depression, you need not blame yourself for it. Well, blame yourself or evolution, but remember that blame itself can be understood as a chemical process, and that happiness, too, is chemical. Chemistry and biology are not matters that impinge on the “real” self; depression cannot be separated from the person it affects. Treatment does not alleviate a disruption of identity, bringing you back to some kind of normality; it readjusts a multifarious identity, changing in some small degree who you are.
Anyone who has taken high school science classes knows that human beings are made of chemicals and that the study of those chemicals and the structures in which they are configured is called biology. Everything that happens in the brain has chemical manifestations and sources. If you close your eyes and think hard about polar bears, that has a chemical effect on your brain. If you stick to a policy of opposing tax breaks for capital gains, that has a chemical effect on your brain. When you remember some episode from your past, you do so through the complex chemistry of memory. Childhood trauma and subsequent difficulty can alter brain chemistry. Thousands of chemical reactions are involved in deciding to read this book, picking it up with your hands, looking at the shapes of the letters on the page, extracting meaning from those shapes, and having intellectual and emotional responses to what they convey. If time lets you cycle out of a depression and feel better, the chemical changes are no less particular and complex than the ones that are brought about by taking antidepressants. The external determines the internal as much as the internal invents the external. What is so unattractive is the idea that in addition to all other lines being blurred, the boundaries of what makes us ourselves are blurry. There is no essential self that lies pure as a vein of gold under the chaos of experience and chemistry. Anything can be changed, and we must understand the human organism as a sequence of selves that succumb to or choose one another.
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Organized a study circle on surveillance capitalism with comrades in the Student Workers’ Study Group
Reference texts:
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Soshanna Zuboff
- Interview: The Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights, Aral Balkan
- The Telekomunist Manifesto, Dmytri Kleiner