Why I Study Transnational Media

Fame? Fortune? Actually, it's because my day job is finding gems like this.

Imperial Undertow

Surefire sign that I'm getting older: science-fiction posthistory is increasingly difficult to distinguish from fantasy-fiction prehistory. Because the tide is going out on this Empire, and the undertow is pulling millions of Americans under.

It's a familiar undertow. I know all too well what they're going through. The rage, the frustration, the steadily increasing desperation, the spiral into near-suicidal depression -- been there, done that. Long ago, the first ripples of that undertow almost carried me out to sea. This was almost a decade ago, when my chosen profession (the teaching of literature in the US) went and shot itself in the head. I shudder to think of what would've happened if I hadn't discovered the world of media studies.

The ripples became waves, the waves became a flood. The horrible tragedy is that most Americans still don't realize it isn't their fault. It is the fault of this dreadfully corrupt and unjust system we live in, this dying Empire collapsing under the weight of trillion dollar military boondoggles and trillion-dollar bailouts for corrupt banksters. Trillions for war and theft, while schoolteachers are fired to save pennies and children are test-milled into oblivion.

We must disassemble the monster, before it disassembles us all.

In happier news, I've posted some new theory-rants posted here (the first of six, they're all up now). Also, I finally scored a cheap webcam, which means more webcasts will be unleashed in the near future on an unsuspecting planet. Next up: thoughts on the postneoliberal era.

Six Levels of Twilight

Grey shapes, formless. The bead of droplets on unknown surfaces. Gibsonian complexity which cuts the eye. Capillaries stream with light. World-systems strobe past, granular and immiscible. Ready or not, the 21st century has finally begun.

Darkness

Bad cold. Nightmares all night. Energy-drain. Crush depth. We're all Joseph Capelli and Susan Shepherd in the war of the Wall Street Chimera on humanity.

I refuse to quit.
I refuse to quit.
I refuse to quit.

There is only resistance.

Twilight Souls

Deep in the dissertation zone, which is much like living permanently in one of the deeper levels of Russian sci-fi writer Sergei Lukyanenko's Twilight in his hugely entertaining Nightwatch novels (now available to English speakers thanks to excellent translations by Andrew Blomfield).

The shaping of each word. Measurements of texture, the scanning of density and mass. The extreme energy expenditure of standing still. Endless dunes of grey sand, beading into opalescent skies, streaked with light. Kneel down and grab a handful of sand: what seemed platinum gray at a distance turns out to harbor shimmering colors, each grain a fractal multitude.

Where have I come from.

Where am I going.

It's hard to think transnationally.

Hold the Line!

The dictator's forces have counter-attacked, taking back several towns in the west. After a week of heroic resistance, the small city of Az-Zawiya was blasted into smithereens and occupied by regime forces, though it seems many of the rebels escaped to fight another day. Misurata, Libya's third-largest city, is still holding fast, as are the far western towns, though for how long, noone can know.

What is clear is that while support for the dictator is minimal – the population of Tripoli is sullen and morose, the state propaganda victory parades shown on state TV are pathetically small, and it took the regime a full week for its crack troops to defeat the largely unarmed protestors of Az-Zawiya, a small city – the revolutionaries don't yet have the organization to topple the state's military machine. The revolutionaries made a brave but futile attempt to take the town of Sirte with nothing more than AK-47s and pickup trucks, and were driven all the way back to Ajdabiya by tanks, air-strikes and rocket barrages.

Still, the regime's greatest threat remains the eastern cities. They are not just the heartland of the rebellion, they are located in hilly terrain unfavorable to open tank warfare (in fact, the road to Tobruk was the site of some memorable battles in WWII). The regime is hastily throwing its most capable brigades at the east, knowing full well that they need to strike before the UN sanctions and the loss of oil revenues bites. Unlike Saddam-era Iraq, which had a sizeable middle class and trained engineers capable of keeping the refineries running, the Libyan regime is utterly dependent on skilled foreign labor.

The revolutionaries must play for time, dig solid anti-tank defenses, and mobilize its civilian population. Properly organized, the 1 million citizens of the east can put 50,000 soldiers into the field and eventually defeat the regime's mercenaries and elite brigades, which do not number more than 30,000. The revolutionaries control the border with Egypt, and have access to fresh weapons and supplies. The regime's obsolete, poorly-maintained tanks will become increasingly less effective and eventually useless, once the revolutionaries acquire sufficient anti-tank weaponry. Tunisia's nascent democracy will enforce UN sanctions on its border; and it will not be possible to export significant amounts of oil through Algeria or Chad. The only card the regime has left to play is air-power, and a UN-sponsored no-fly zone can take care of that.

I know what you're thinking: Slorgzilla has jumped the shark and joined the neocons, who are barking for another disastrous colonial war. 

Nope, no sharks here. Any direct foreign intervention in Libya would be a catastrophe. But the problem is how best to deal with the legacy of *past* forms of foreign intervention. In a 2009 report for the US Congressional Research Office, analyst Richard F. Grimmett estimated the countries of Europe sold the regime $1.3 billion of military equipment during 2000-2009, Russia sold $600 million, and other countries an estimated $300 million worth. Now that $2.2 billion is being used by a murderous tyrant to kill his own people. Consider further that the European Union has been the main customer of Libya's oil, effectively financing the dictatorship.

Noone can fight the Libyan people's battle for them. But we can at least neutralize the regime's air-force, and save as many Libyan lives as possible.

No Libyan blood for oil, and no Libyan blood for arms sales, either.

Zawiya and Benghazi, Hero Cities

The people of Libya are so brave, so incredibly brave. They are facing not just point-blank fire by tanks, APCs, artillery and air strikes, but also the more subtle but no less dangerous enemies of fatigue, despair, reactionary identity-politics, and regime propaganda.

Alex Crawford filed this stunning report from Zawiya, a small city just twenty minutes away from the outskirts of Tripoli. It shows how the regime's thugs murdered unarmed, peaceful demonstrators -- and only then did the people pick up weapons to defend themselves. And defend themselves they have. They fought off literally weeks of attacks by the crack brigades of the dictator. They fought against the best the regime had -- and they are winning. Time and again they have driven out incursions by the dictator's forces, and continue to control their city.

On Libya Alhurra, the Revolution's web-streamed TV channel, another band of heroes had gathered: a meeting of the women of the revolution in Benghazi, organizing themselves and their city to consolidate and support the revolution. They are no less brave, casting off centuries of patriarchal oppression as well as decades of regime propaganda, and their struggles are no less important to the foundation of Libya's democracy.

Two bands of heroes, covering themselves and their nation in glory.