Byung-Chul Han on digital self-surveillance and passivity

Byung-Chul Han is very quotable. From Psycho-Politics: Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon isolated inmates from each other for disciplinary purposes and prevented them from interacting. In contrast, the occupants of today’s digital panopticon actively communicate with each other and willingly expose themselves. That is, they collaborate in the digital panopticon’s operations. Digital control society makes intensive use of freedom. This can only occur thanks to voluntary self-illumination and self-exposure (Selbstausleuchtung und Selbstentblößung).

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Good news: the vet confirmed that Ralph has already been spayed. (Yes, her name is Ralph.) Further news: the garage cat has become a basement cat. Every day Rachel opens a ground level window to let Ralph come and go at will, and then shuts her in at night. She isn’t allowed upstairs (yet).

A couple of changes to my work routine this week:

  1. I’ve started walking to work every day. Just short of fifteen minutes one way, so I can get in almost an hour of walking per day.
  2. I start working two days a week from home, beginning Thursday.

I’m very thankful to be in a job that allows for this.

After @ReaderJohn linked this excellent piece by Teddy Macker, I went in search for more. This on Walt Whitman and the problem of American politics is challenging and hopeful. Maybe impossible. As Fox Mulder would say, I want to believe.

Update on my Anabaptist reading

Currently reading: The Amish Way by Kraybill, Nolt, Weaver-Zercher Finished reading: Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof by Markus Baum. Engaging biography. Will be reading more about the Bruderhof. Becoming Anabaptist by J. Denny Weaver. Focused on the Reformation era. Historical books often lose my interest (my fault, not theirs) but this one did not. Future plans: More by Kraybill The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder.

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On my morning commute (i.e., walking a few blocks to work!), I’ve started listening to Remembering Peasants by Patrick Joyce. I think this is going to be a good one.

I’m honestly a bit surprised how much I’m enjoying this biography of Eberhard Arnold, founder of the Bruderhof. To be fair, it’s a friendly biography. Still, he’s an interesting guy.

This is cool: a device for stirring natural nut butters.

Byung-Chul Han, kicking off Psycho-Politics with a banger:

We are living in a particular phase of history: freedom itself is bringing forth compulsion and constraint. The freedom of Can generates even more coercion than the disciplinarian Should, which issues commandments and prohibitions. Should has a limit. In contrast, Can has none. Thus, the compulsion entailed by Can is unlimited. And so we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. Technically, freedom means the opposite of coercion and compulsion. Being free means being free from constraint. But now freedom itself, which is supposed to be the opposite of constraint, is producing coercion. Psychic maladies such as depression and burnout express a profound crisis of freedom. They represent pathological signs that freedom is now switching over into manifold forms of compulsion.

Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him,

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