Book Review & Analysis: Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

by Lester Bangs

      Punk is an attitude. That is the old refrain. Despite what outsiders might think, punk isn’t a clothing style or any definite way of playing music. It isn’t an ideology or a set of beliefs. Punk is loud, aggressive, raucous, in your face, and, most importantly, sincere. The attitude isn’t limited to music, appearance, or the counter cultural underground music scene. It can extend into any aspect of life. Even writing. And possibly no other writer embodied the punk attitude in the written word the way Lester Bangs did during the short 33 years of his life. Live fast, die young. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung is an anthology of his writings assembled to preserve his energetic raging-bull prose for future generations who probably need a wake up kick in the shins these days since it appears counter culture, and American culture along with it, is sleepwalking into oblivion.

Lester Bangs is most famous for his rock journalism, criticism, and record and concert reviews most notably written for Rolling Stone, Creem, and the Village Voice back in the 1970s. He may have been the man who coined the term “punk” since he presciently saw a connecting thread between the garage bands of the 1960s, the Velvet Underground, glam rock, the proto-punk scene in Detroit, and the expanding punk scene in New York City from the mid-1970s and beyond. He championed The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, and The Dictators when most people were unwilling to tolerate them. He was one of the first critics to point out that rock and roll is all about feeling and raw emotion more than technical perfection. He was also one of the first critics to call out rock stars for being what they mostly are: spoiled, petulant little children whose monster sized egos are nothing but a smokescreen to hide their human shortcomings from public view. “All rock stars are assholes,” said rock promoter Danny Fields. Lester Bangs took that simple idea and ran with it.

The opening articles start in the late 1960s, covering garage bands like The Count Five and Question Mark and The Mysterians, the meaning and significance of the first two Stooges albums, and why Ray Dennis Stekler’s trashy cult classic psychedelic zombie musical film, The Incredibly Strange Creatures that Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies, is a great work of art. But early on, it is easy to see that Bangs’ writing is about so much more than the stated subject matters. He rarely ever stays on topic, going off on long tangents about sex and drugs while violating standard rules of punctuation and sentence length. He often writes like Arthur Rimbaud after popping a handful of uppers. If psychosis and French Symbolist poetry ever found an appropriate place to liaise with rock journalism it is in the prose of Lester Bangs. Reading this stuff is like being hit in the face with a firehose while riding a bull in a rodeo, not that I would actually know what that feels like. (I did ride a mechanical bull once in a place where there was an Asian woman wearing a fringed leather bikini and shiny knee-high boots wielding a horse whip in her hand. Needless to say, I didn’t last long on the mechanical bull. And now I think I understand what the song “Rawhide” is really about.) But somehow the fast paced insanity of the writing works even if it can be a little exhausting to keep up with at times.

This collection moves on into various articles written for Rolling Stone and Creem in the early 70s. The acts covered range widely from the likes of James Taylor and Barry White to Jethro Tull, Slade, The J. Geils Band, David Bowie, and Kraftwerk. Some of these are favorable and some aren’t. Lester Bangs takes interest in whoever he writes about even when he has no interest in them. His reviews of James Taylor are obviously sarcastic, character assassination pieces while he expresses fascination for Jethro Tull even though he hates their music. The chapter on David Bowie is a little more complex as he considers himself a Bowie fan but can’t stand the man as a performer. The Slade and J. Geils articles are interesting since Slade starts a food fight in Trader Vic’s (yes, that’s the original tiki bar that eventually turned into the Trader Joe’s grocery store chain) and then harasses a dinner party for Freemasons. The J. Geils Band invite Bangs onstage to type an article during a concert for reasons you will have to read on your own. Lester Bangs really captures the atmosphere of free for all fun that was a part of rock concerts back in those days, something that sadly no longer exists in our dismal music industry now.

There are a couple important things to notice in these writings. One is that Bangs frequently refers to a certain class of rock stars as punks. This was a few years before “punk” became an officially designated genre of music. But Bangs wasn’t describing the music. He was describing the obnoxious behavior of people like the MC5 and Iggy Pop. It looks almost obvious that he was instrumental in that words being used to describe the genre. There is some debate over whether it was Bruce Springsteen or Legs McNeil who started using “punk” as a name for the musical style and scene that grew with it.

The other important thing to notice is that these articles are thoroughly unpredictable. You can never tell where they will end up. In example, a review of a John Coltrane album turns into a story about Lester Bangs using screeching, atonal blasts from a saxophone to terrorize his landlady after she complains about him making too much noise. Other than the presence of the saxophone, what does this have to do with the Coltrane album? Who Knows? Who cares? It’s great writing.

The genius of Lester Bangs really shines through in the section on Lou Reed. The two men had a curious relationship. Bangs became famous in New York City for the interviews he did with Reed for the Village Voice. As we see here, they weren’t actual interviews, but more like drunken arguments over nothing important other than one-upmanship in a gladiatorial battle of nastiness. Both Bangs and Reed would later say that these argument/interviews were the best punk journalism ever written. Both of them were in firm agreement on one other thing too: they both thought that Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is one of the greatest rock albums ever recorded. In one interview, Reed goes on about how it is a multi-layered symphonic work of avant-garde classical composition. Lester Bangs retorts by saying that Reed only thinks so because he was on amphetamines when he recorded it. In any case, Bangs also waxes poetic about how beautiful its four sides of vinyl containing nothing but droning guitar feedback played through high-end studio equipment are. It is a masterpiece because most people find it impossible to listen to. One thing about Lester Bangs is that he appreciated the noisier, abrasive side of rock and roll more than the finer examples of musicianship that the mainstream goes for. He liked his music a lot more if he knew it would irritate people to the point of anger. I bet he would have loved the Butthole Surfers. I bet he would have hated grunge too.

After the Lou Reed section, we get a variety of articles with an even wider range of topics than came previously. They mostly start as album or concert reviews, but there is also one long-form work of journalism about The Clash. We get insights into all kinds of things like the direction the music industry is heading in the late 1970s, the crass and offensive attitudes of rock’s biggest stars, social observations, critiques of the American lifestyle, and Lester Bangs’ inner torments in dealing with disillusionment, anxiety, depression, insecurity, inadequacy, and drug addiction. This fits harmoniously with an article about Iggy Pop and the underlying negativity of the punk scene in general. In a previous article written about Iggy Pop, he examines how The Stooges embody authenticity in rock music, more so than most other bands. Here he poses the question as to why Iggy Pop is so self-abusive when performing on stage. He drunkenly rolls around in broken glass, cuts his body with razors, and starts a fight with a bar-full of bikers, taunting them with insults and throwing beer bottles at them until he gets beaten close to death. Bangs observes that in the beginning The Stooges reckless abandonment and Iggy Pop’s indulgence in nihilistic self-destruction was ecstatic and liberating, but over time it became more obvious that this freedom from restraint is motivated by a deep sense of self-hatred on Iggy Pop’s part. Bangs also sees this self-hatred as being an underlying attitude of the New York and British punk scenes. If this were so, you might wonder why Iggy Pop never just outright committed suicide (he’s still alive and well today). But there must be something to what Bangs has said considering Pop’s antics. It may not be entirely about self-hatred, but it certainly isn’t self-love either. A singer who brings himself to the edge of death in every performance is not a role model of healthy self-respect. The guy obviously has problems, but the mind of Iggy Pop remains a mystery.

In the latter articles of this collection, you can see Lester Bangs maturing both in writing style and psychologically. He becomes more socially responsible. In what is possible his most famous work of journalism, “The White Noise Supremacists”, he admits to feeling guilty for having used racist language in the past and examines racism in the punk scene despite the presence of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and everything else. When interviewing people at CBGB’s about the subject, one punk dismisses the problem because racism is just as much a part of their scene as anywhere else. Bangs’ comeback is that punks are supposed to be different from everybody else. He ends the article with a plea for punks to stop being racist. He is met with a lukewarm response and his disillusionment with America continues to grow.

And then it goes onwards to the U.K. where he tours with The Clash. He finds them to be likable and unpretentious, thinking he finally found a bunch of rock stars who weren’t assholes, but as events on the tour unfold, he becomes disillusioned with them too. There is a progressively creeping sense of despair as Lester Bangs wrote into the early 1980s before he died of a drug overdose while he had the flu.

What is great about these writings is that Lester Bangs transcends his genre. That may be an odd statement considering that the genre is rock journalism, one that doesn’t lend itself easily to the concept of transcendence to begin with. But this is an author who put so much of himself into what he wrote. He wasn’t just writing to make a living or even just for attention. He was writing to make art and in that he succeeded. Of course, this book is only a sample of what is probably his best work. Not everything about it is great though. There is a fair amount of casually racist language that would have been common in his time, but dates the writing significantly. To be fair, he doesn’t express any ideas about other races that are meant to be insulting or hateful; it’s just that he uses words that are now considered racially offensive in place of terms like “African-American” or “Asian”. By the end of the book, his writing becomes a little tiring too. His long sentences and tortured syntax combines with his moodiness and indulgence in pessimism begin to drag his writing down to the point where you get fatigued from reading it. Otherwise, I’d be interested in the articles that weren’t included here. Lester Bangs was one of the first, if not THE first, to recognize the genius of Lemmy Kilmister and the greatest of punk-metal crossover bands Motorhead. I would love to see what he wrote about them.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung is so much more than a collection of articles or a nostalgia trip for aging counter-culturalists. It is a collection of writings marked by energy, passion, authenticity and enough volume (the amp is tuned up to 11) to speak across multiple generations. On the surface, these passages are rough while being true to the punk attitude in their inner core. The old punk clothing style could include leather, spikes, razors, chains, dog collars, combat boots, safety pins through the nose, and self-inflicted wounds while your typical punk, beneath it all, was good natured, humorous, ironic, articulate, intelligent, complex, affectionate, righteously angry, socially aware, and even a bit sensitive. Those later traits are all inherent parts of Lester Bangs’ writing while the former ornamentation is the sharp edges of his language that breaks all rules of good writing and works better than what most teachers would consider to be acceptable by educational standards. Regardless of what you think of Lester Bangs’ ever changing world view, these writing should serve as a boost of rocket fuel for the increasingly dull and shallow society we have in America today. The upcoming generations need writing like this to inspire them with the fires of rebellion. Stop acting like a bunch of old ladies. Smash your mind-rotting cell phones and make some noise. It’s time again for some cage rattling and earth shaking. Let’s make life exciting once again.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:

The Fight For a Human Future In the New Frontier of Power

by Shoshana Zuboff

      The postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault once wrote about the Panopticon, a prison designed for maximum surveillance, control and domination over its prisoners. This prison makes it possible for the officials running it to see everything the inmates do yet also makes it impossible for the inmates to see what the officials do or even who they are. How such a facility can be achieved using the simple structures of architecture is immaterial to this discussion. Such a prison, presumably intended solely for criminals, may be unnecessary in these days because we have technology that does the same job and does it more effectively. This technology is called the internet and instead of being inhabited by individuals incarcerated against their wills, it is inhabited by voluntary participants. Some might argue that comparing the internet to a maximum security prison is a false dichotomy, but Shoshana Zuboff lays out a strong case for this argument in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

The concept behind surveillance capitalism is that digital technology is used to harvest data from its users. This data, which is extracted from the internet and SMART technologies like smart phones and smart cars, is sold in bulk to data processing companies which then sell it to big corporations who re-insert it into advertisements on internet websites or else use it to micromanage things like car or health insurance rates, mortgage interest rates, and access to employment or education. The ultimate goal of big tech companies is behavior modification as internet targeted advertising is used to push and pull people in the direction of spending more money to the benefit of the technocrats holding the whips and reins of digital power over us.

Zuboff effectively uses comparisons to historical turning points, specifically the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age, to contextualize the present time as a later, third stage of capitalist development. The top echelons of Silicon Valley are rightfully likened to the robber barons of old but with one major difference: where industrialists like Edison and Ford sought to make money by manufacturing products for public consumption that would be useful for the consumers, the current tech industry offers little in return for the massive amounts of data they collect. While it is true that we get a lot of free benefits from search engines like Google and social media sites like Facebook, the price is that these firms are used to watch and monitor us to mine as much data as they possible can about all aspects of our lives. This isn’t just a matter of what content we look at online. Cellphones track our locations using GPS, data is collected on the amount of time we spend online and what times we use the internet, data is collected on the length of sentences we write and how effectively we use punctuation, and things like the like buttons and emojis on Facebook are used to track our moods and interests. Internet data miners seek out information about what motivates us unconsciously, what manipulates our emotions, and what could be going on in the deepest recesses of our own consciousness. If you’ve ever wondered why your toaster or your vacuum cleaner needs to have a microchip, the reason is that SMART technologies of all varieties are transmitting information about your behavioral patterns to household items like cell phones and WiFi routers which then get scraped for as much data on you and everyone else as can possibly be collected. Data is extracted from our lives the way oil is extracted from the ground and our individual best interests are not a part of the equation. All this is being done for the profit and power of giant corporations.

Of course there are obvious ethical problems with this whole structure of surveillance capitalism. The most obvious one is the invasion of your privacy. Tech companies are not only monitoring our outward behavior, but also digging deeply into our minds with internet technology to monitor our psyches and use the information to control us. The author falls back on the existentialist philosophy of Sartre and Beauvois to say we have a human right to the inner sanctuary of our private thoughts and also the right to make choices about our individual futures. She doesn’t go into a deep analysis of existentialism, but she does use it as a theoretical basis for resistance to surveillance capitalism.

On the other hand, while tech companies are invading our privacy, it is impossible for us to access information about them. She uses the medieval citadel as a metaphor to describe how big tech has isolated themselves from our scrutiny by building defensive walls, both legal and digital, to ensure that we never know exactly what they are up to. This asymmetrical political and economic structure has returned us to a type of medieval society divided between an inaccessible, all powerful aristocracy and a class of peasants and serfs with diminishing abilities for class mobility.

Another ethical issue mentioned by Zuboff is that of behavior modification. She relies heavily on the radical behaviorist program of psychologist B.F. Skinner to make her case. Skinner was a determinist whose core idea is that people have no free will. Choice is an illusion and human behavior is simply a matter of responding to stimuli in the surrounding environment. Skinner believed that thoughts and emotions, the things that make us human, are unnecessary and that human societies can reach perfection by setting the right environmental parameters, turning humans into little more than machines, albeit machines without negative things like wars or poverty. Whether humans are happy or not was irrelevant to him. Zuboff argues that Skinner’s radical behaviorism is the theoretical starting point for surveillance capitalism as the purpose of targeted advertising is the use of environmental stimuli for the purpose of behavior modification, all for the benefit of the leaders of the tech industry whose goal is to maximize profits by making us spend money without thinking.

Zuboff’s passages on behavior modification are the weakest parts of her argument. Not only does she spend far too much time describing the program of Skinner for the purposes of the narrative, but she also never sufficiently sites specific instances of tech industry leaders referring to Skinner or behaviorist psychology. While she acknowledges that the motivations and activities of big tech are inscrutable, she also has to take a major leap of faith to make the case that behavior modification is the main purpose of data extraction from internet usage. Being opaque and inaccessible, the motivations and theories of big tech leaders is impossible to verify so she inserts Skinner’s radical behaviorism to fill in this gap in her knowledge. Admittedly it does fit all too well. Given this absence of certainty, it might be tempting to use it as grounds for dismissal of this part of her argument, however if you further research this subject, there is reason to take her word seriously. There are a lot of videos of lectures and conferences involving engineers and code writers from major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, video game designers, and others who confirm that websites and cell phones are designed to be addictive because the longer users spend on these sites, the more data they can collect and that translates into higher profits for tech billionaires and advertisers. If Skinner is not speficially the godfather of surveillance capitalism, there is a lot in his theories that justify and support it.

The author does give some examples of how the internet has been used for coercive purposes. Since information about the Pokemon Go game has been leaked, it is known that the app was designed for the purposes of behavioral control. The game’s players are led to public spaces to collect characters on their phones and yet Pokemon Go players may not be directly aware that these public locations are often near businesses that collude with the game’s creators to expand their customer bases.

Other experiments mentioned were conducted by Facebook. One posted the names of users who voted in an election to motivate more people to vote; comparisons with geographical areas used as control groups shows that rates of voter participation were higher in places where people saw the pro-voting information than in places where they didn’t. Another experiment involved manipulating the Facebook algorithm to boost stories with positive emotional content to the top of newsfeeds in an attempt to make people more happy in what they post. Facebook metrics showed that they had a 2 percent success rate. The former Facebook experiment was obviously more successful than the latter, yet Zuboff insists that the latter still proves Facebook can manipulate people’s moods. I’m no great statistician, but I know that two percent is within the margin of error and otherwise is too small a percentage to be regarded as anything other than random chance so maybe this isn’t the best evidence that could have been used. This leads to two more problems. The ethical issue that Zuboff raises is that since the end of World War II, experimentation on humans is considered, under international law, to be illegal without the informed consent of the participants. Therefore, behavior modification experiments conducted clandestinely by big tech might be a violation of human rights. Second is that Zuboff does not provide an abundance of compelling evidence that big tech behavior modification is in any effective. With such paltry evidence it could be written off as tin foil hat paranoia and yet there is abundant testimony from big tech insiders that behavior modification is the goal of digital technology. Zuboff’s argument has some shortcomings that should not be there.

In conclusion. Shoshana Zuboff has written a compelling argument detailing what surveillance capitalism is and why it needs to be resisted. Some of the support she offers to defend her argument is not strong, but with easily gathered information coming from outside her writing, it remains intact. Then, it is important to remember that her grievance is not with the technology of the internet itself, but how it is being used by the ideological leadership of Silicon Valley. While they are motivated by a philosophy of libertarianism, radical individualism, and anarcho-capitalism, we should note that ultimate freedom for those at the top of society’s hierarchy means totalitarian oppression for the rest of us. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism details an aberration from the original intent of the internet and resistance to big tech is necessary for us to maintain our rights, our freedom, and our dignity. The fact that things like VPNs, ad blocking apps, and the dark web are widely used indicate that massive amounts of people are resistant to internet surveillance and the nightmarish visions of the future promoted by Silicon Valley. Of course, the masses will most likely continue on their path blindly as unthinking cell phone zombies, but others like hackers, luddites, and various strains of progressive thinkers will continues to eat away at the barriers to our freedom. Only time will tell if our future will be one of the internet’s Panopticon prison or one of freedom for all. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul

Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

      “Cocaine’s not addicting. My friends have been snortin’ coke for fifteen years and they’re not addicted.”

Welcome to the world of Richard Pryor. It’s a world where a young African-American boy grew up in an inner city brothel, discovered he had a talent for stage performance, and went on to become one of the greatest stand up comics of all time and a movie star too. If you grew up in the 1980s, your introduction to Richard Pryor was probably in family friendly movies like The Toy or Superman III. But those who explored his works further were probably shocked at first by the X-rated brand of humor on his comedy albums in which “bitch”, “motherfucker”, and the n-word are used over and over again. On stage, on screen, and in his personal life he was a complex man with a multi-faceted personality. In Scott Saul’s biography Becoming Richard Pryor, all these different sides are brought out on display. It’s like exploring the closet of a disguise artist to find an almost incomprehensible range of clothing styles that don’t go together but still make up a picture of the man who owned them. Only Pryor wasn’t just changing outfits to suit each individual character he played the way a normal actor would; these weren’t disguises since they came from inside the man, revealing to public view the crazy world that existed inside his head.

There are a lot of ways Scott Saul could have written this biography. He could have simply emphasized the course of Pryor’s professional career. He also could have emphasized the turbulent social and private life of the man. But instead he brought those two threads into a multi-dimensional biographical portrait showing how they contributed to the development of Richard Pryor’s work as an artist. Knowing that Pyror saw himself foremost as an artist rather than a comedian and actor helps clarify what a loftof his life was all about.

Richard Pryor’s childhood was something that no child should ever have to live through. He was raised in Peoria, Illinois by his grandmother, a strict disciplinarian and madame of a brothel who always carried a pistol on her person. His father was also a pimp and a violent man. Pryor spent his childhood seeing women being mistreated in various ways. He also went to integrated schools where he experienced racism first hand while also learning how to navigate in the white world as a Black person. He was smart but not a great student, getting attention by being a class clown. Then a perceptive woman working as a stage director in a youth center saw his potential and inspired him to pursue a career in the performing arts.

Eventually Pryor moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and easily found his way into the bohemian night clubs where he did stand up and got involved with improvisational acting troops. These actors were of the experimental and avant-garde variety and Pryor carried a surreal sense of absurdity into later works as a comedian and film maker.

It didn’t take long for him to get a break so he ended up in Hollywood starring in corny TV variety shows. Although he had made it into show business, he felt lost as though he wasn’t being himself, a situation that led to a nervous breakdown on stage during a performance in Las Vegas. After recovering from that crisis, his stand up comedy took a new, uninhibited turn and Pryor began drawing on his own life experiences to create a unique brand of performance that nobody had ever seen before. He began telling stories, switching his voice and demeanor to represent different characters in absurd situations. A lot of these characters were drawn from people in the African-American community. There were pimps, winos, junkies, con artist preachers, revolutionaries, and do gooders, all ciphers of recognizable character types. What Richard Pryor got right was that he mirrored these personages to the Black community, showing them the faults and shortcomings of people they recognized, but doing so in a way that humanized them. This wasn’t cruel humor. It was self-effacing humor, something rare in American comedy, that allowed Black people a chance to laugh about the things that troubled them. Richard Pryor also found success as a cross over comedian, appealing to progressive white audiences because he gave them a window into a Black community that they never experienced first hand despite their support for integration and the politics of Civil Rights.

The issue of racial politics play a prominent role in this book. Richard Pryor was deeply committed to the African-American cause and a fair bit of his performances were related to issues of racism and social justice. Even when making jokes about winos or tall tale bullshitters like his recurring Mudbone character, there was always a sense that these people were welcome as members of the Black community despite their human imperfections. Even when making jokes about white people he did so in a way that showed white people how they look in Black people’s eyes. This was done in a way that made white people laugh at themselves. Pryor’s relations with the white community were sometimes contentious though. As a child he had white friends at school and often encountered white men in the whorehouses where he lived, something that probably helped him get along with white people later in life, but later in his film career he got into long running disputes with directors and actors who didn’t always see things from his point of view. There were other times when he felt like he couldn’t trust white people even though acceptance in the white community was often a priority of his. And yet making it to the big time meant making it in the white world of entertainment. He had this conflict over being true to his art and his people or selling out, but somehow he came out on top, finding himself in script writing, producing, and acting that he would never have gotten into had he not pushed himself beyond the obstacles that other Black artists saw in their way.

There was one area in which his relations with white people was the most controversial: his relationships with white women. Maybe the seeds for his problems were planted in his childhood when he tried to be friends with white girls in school only to have their parents forbid their friendships because he was Black. As he got older, Pryor married seven different white women and all of the marriages were disastrous. He was an habitual wife beater and all of his wives ended up with bruises, broken bones, and knife wounds. Pryor’s rages were fueled by high doses of cocaine and alcohol and didn’t stop with domestic violence; he sometimes destroyed his own houses in the process. You don’t have to be more than an armchair psychologist to see how his upbringing contributed to this with his violent grandmother, his absentee mother, his woman-beating father, and housefuls of prostitutes that put up with abuse on a daily basis, sometimes even humiliating him for being skinny and weak. He probably felt a great deal of confusion over women as well as anger at the dominant white power structure, so by marrying white women and assaulting them, he dominated them through a violent expression of rage, a maladaptive means of working out his frustrations This is the ugliest side of Pryor’s life and something that could ruin him in the eyes of his fans. The author of this biography treads lightly in this territory. The purpose of the book is to examine the development of Richard Pryor’s art, therefore emphasizing his extreme misogyny could easily distract attention away from that purpose. Yet Scott Saul would be doing a great disservice to his audience by downplaying or dismissing the truth of Pryor’s violence altogether. He finds an uneasy balance in his writing. It is a balance that makes you uncomfortable as it should, but it is a balance nonetheless.

This biography also covers Pryor’s career in Hollywood films. Aside from being the primary script writer for the classic comedy Blazing Saddles, he also acted in a number of movies during the 1970s. Pryor had a charismatic appeal and a strong on-screen presence. It could be said that he was a first rate actor and comedian starring in a series of mediocre movies. But what this biography shows is how much Pryor dedicated to working with directors and other actors to ensure that his characters would project a positive image of Black people to Black and white audiences alike. These movies are all overlooked today, but this book shows how instrumental they were in bringing Black film characters to be accepted in the mainstream of American cinema. Fortunately this book winds down in the early 1980s when Richard Pryor set himself on fire after freebasing cocaine and spares us an in depth analysis of what most would call Pryor’s sell out phase when he starred in commercial blockbusters, turning in less than inspiring acting performances yet maintaining his on screen charm all the while.

Becoming Richard Pryor is a brilliant biography. The media likes to feed us stories of multiple personality disorder. The status of that mental illness is a matter of dispute to professional psychiatrists, but the designation does fit Richard Pryor, only in his case he sublimated his multiple personalities into stand up comedy routines and acting. Some might criticize Scott Saul for pulling punches when writing about Pryor’s monstrous dark side, but he needed to do that maintain focus on the intended purpose of this biography. If the intended purpose is to show how the life Richard Pryor led off stage and off screen served as inspiration for his performing art, and also to show how Pryor developed his talents over the most important span of his career, then this book is entirely successful. It also reminds us that art is a flower that grows out of a damaged mind. We have to separate the art from the artist, but we also have to be careful when the art and the artist are so intricately entwined. As horrible as Richard Pryor was in his personal life, his art still managed to be uplifting, inspiring, and socially aware while making sharp observations about the human condition. It was all done by a man with a rare talent for being both entertaining and skilled at communicating while also being delightfully weird. Maybe we can still celebrate him for being a genius artist while condemning the worst things he did.

 

Book Review & Analysis: New Dark Age by James Bridle

New Dark Age:

Technology and the End Of the Future

by James Bridle

      There’s no doubt about it. The internet age has arrived and digital technology has taken over our lives whether we like it or not. Instead of ushering in a new age of enlightenment, James Bridle in New Dark Age examines the ways in which our technology is taking us into a renewed medieval era of ignorance and corruption. If you think it’s too soon to become pessimistic about the effects of the internet, you’d be surprised at how much evidence Bridle has collected to demonstrating its detriment ro our world.

This book does not get off to a great start. The introductory essay introduces several themes that carry through the entire book. The main theme is the metaphor of the Dark Cloud of Unknowing, a phrase introduced by a medieval theologian who claimed there is such a cloud fixed between humanity and God, making it impossible for people to understand the deity and his ways. Bridle introduces this metaphor to explain how the computer screens that are usually in front of our faces are a dark cloud that prevents us from seeing what digital technology is doing. The device that is closest to us is the one that prevents us from seeing beyond our own noses. While the introduction isn’t necessarily a poor piece of writing, Bridle could have emphasized this Dark Cloud metaphor a little more as it is the thread that ties all the chapters together. Or at least it’s supposed to. This doesn’t become clear until about three chapters or so into the book.

The opening chapters give a brief history of computing and its relation to technology. Your average person seems to think that a computer is something you use to watch videos of cute animals, look up free pornography, or argue with people who don’t know what they’re talking about over things they don’t understand. The vast majority of those arguments are about politics and if you’re arguing about them on the internet, it’s a strong sign that you haven’t got a clue as to what’s really going on. But I digress. The point is that most people don’t understand that “computation” means to do math. So a computer is a machine that does math, or at least that’s what they were a century ago. Computers were designed by the military to compute probabilities of weather conditions. If the military could predict the weather, then they could more effectively conduct combat operations. Later, technicians realized they could use computers to analyze data about things like traffic, human behavior, and other scientific things. From the beginning, computing technology was developed for the purposes of predicting the future and asserting control over it. Despite what you may believe, those are still the primary purposes of computer technology today. That’s what data mining is all about, the surveillance of you to make predictions and subtly nudge you in the direction the technocrats in Silicon Valley want you to go in.

These historical chapters are somewhat interesting even if they are a bit incomplete. But it isn’t obvious from the start how they fit into the scheme of the book. This starts to become more clear in the chapter on the environment and how the permafrost in Svalbard is melting. As the permafrost melts, we begin to see how different parts of nature work together to form a network of interdependent entities that rely on each other for the stability of the planet. Then Bridle takes a risky narrative leap into comparing this natural network, now under severe threat from global warming, to the vast neural network we call the internet. From there he demonstrates how internet usage is driving an exponential increase in energy consumption, increasing the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, and becoming the leading cause of global warming in our times. Your cell phone and laptop are leaving a bigger carbon footprint than your car. Now the Dark Cloud of Unknowing metaphor emerges into clarity.

Although it takes a while to get going, this book takes on greater meaning as it progresses. The rest of it examines different ways in which the internet causes people to exist in a state of ignorance. One problem he brings up is science. New scientific discoveries are on the decline and there has also been a sharp increase in retracted scientific studies. One reason Bridle cites is that researchers have almost entirely abandoned the use of using models for studies. Instead they use large data sets as a substitute. This method has proven to be faulty, especially because data technicians do not actually understand what computer codes do once they are set to use. Algorithms can be written, but once set into motion, nobody really knows what they do or how they arrive at conclusions. The result has been less effective scientific studies that are riddled with errors, miscalculations, and misinformation. We suffer from this because in the real world this means lower quality medical care and the inability to solve complex problems related to things like global warming.

Other problems addressed by Bridle include the tendency people have to believe anything they see on a computer screen thereby causing them to disbelieve information they encounter offline, stock market flash crashes that result from bots being used to trade on the stock market, internet surveillance and data mining, the massive accumulation of junk data that is useless in large data sets, and the spread of disinformation and fake news coming from troll farms in Eastern Europe and Russia. The book ends with a chapter on ElsaGate, a term coined after the publication of this book. This is a scandal that happened when YouTube Kids became infected with disturbing violent and sexual content disguised as children’s entertainment that resulted in advertisers removing their ads from YouTube in protest after a public outcry. Although the ElsaGate content was inherently disturbing, Bridle makes the case that what is even worse is never knowing who or what is on the other side of the screen. The internet is so anonymous that we can never know who is posting these things or what their true intentions are. This is the menacing Great Cloud of Unknowing that we face every time we look at our screens.

James Bridle lays out his case clearly and precisely. He doesn’t leave much room for interpretation in these straight forward essays. To his credit, the writing is never pedantic or dry. Despite getting off to a weak start, it finishes by being accessible, clear, and thought provoking without sacrificing depth or nuance. Although New Dark Age is a thoroughly grim assessment of how the internet is harming our world, it isn’t entirely without hope. If we are entering into a new medieval period of history, just remember that the Middle Ages were followed by the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. Providing the human race survives long enough to get through these wicked times, there may be cause for celebration in the distant future.