Homework Assignment #3

Rats Pressing Levers

This is cross-posted at the Farmers & Builders website.

In 1954, two biologists named Olds and Milner identified regions in the brain where, if stimulated in response to an action, animals would repeat that action as if they had been rewarded. It was an enormous breakthrough in understanding animal behavior, as Olds and Milner inferred that these are the brain areas that activate when an animal engaged in evolutionarily sound behavior – eating when hungry, for example, or drinking when thirsty, or reproducing. Olds and Milner studied rats.

Like our smaller mammalian brethren, humans also have centers in our brains that activate when engage in the behaviors naturally selected for over the millions of years of human evolution and billions of years of life on earth. It makes sense, too; if there was a trait by which the brain rewarded behaviors such as not eating or not reproducing, all the animals with that trait would die without passing it down to other generations. Olds and Milner found a shortcut around having to perform the behavior that is hardwired to the reward center, just activating the center itself with an electrical impulse.

Humans, in our seemingly endless ingenuity, have found similar shortcuts. Instead of hooking electrodes up to our brains (though in a way we do do this – it’s one way that cocaine and methamphetamine work), we have created incredibly ready access to all the food we could possibly eat. Granted, this is through no small amount of environmental, human, and other animal exploitation, but every time we bite into that El Nino Burrito, we are rewarded by our brain thanks to the circuitry deep within us that evolved because it kept us alive. Because we are rewarded in this fashion, however, all of the things that go into making that burrito are also rewarded: factory farmed beef, human slave labor picking tomatoes (are there tomatoes on an El Nino?), fossil fuel based pesticides that poison our water and put environmental pressures in place to create super-pests, the petroleum needed to ship all of these things all over the world and attendant pollution and global warning, and so on, and so forth. Because our brains reward us, we ignore big picture “externalities” in pursuit of the things that create the reward. We think of them as things that make life better or more comfortable, but we are killing ourselves in their pursuit. In countries with the readiest access to high-calorie food, there the highest rates of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, osteoporosis, and a host of other ailments. Americans and Chinese contribute the most greenhouse gases contributing to global climate change. We are pulling natural gas out of the ground through means that contaminate groundwater and create earthquakes. We have eaten almost all of the big fish in the ocean.

The rats in Olds and Milner’s study would activate their reward centers by pushing on a lever attached to the electrode in their brain. Later scientists found that rats would push the lever, self-stimulating to the point of exhaustion. Rats would run over shock grids and ignore warning signals of impending shock in order to self-stimulate and would even starve themselves to death, self-stimulating by pressing the lever instead of eating. Perhaps humans, in our seemingly endless ingenuity, can find a way to feed ourselves, reproduce, and live without taking such disastrous shortcuts.

Occupy Yourself

This is cross-posted at the Farmers & Builders website.

In a little more than a week, the Occupy Wall Street protests will be 3 months old and, especially since their evictions, no more immune to the criticism that they haven’t done anything more than make a big stink in a public place. Irrespective of the “victories” of inserting “income inequality” back into the public discourse and Cuomo’s reconsideration of the millionaire’s tax, there is still a lot wrong in the State of America. People are still making a stink, however (there have been two days of action of note even this week: the Occupy Food protest of U.S. agricultural policy and today’s Occupy Homes seizure of bank-owned foreclosed houses), and the opposition is still calling the “movement” a bunch of smelly crybabies who should just get jobs. This accusation can be stressful to people sympathetic to the occupations as they strive with general assemblies and resolutions to validate their existence and speak directly to policies. While I have no problem with the protesters engaging in such noble pursuits, I submit that change in the system was unlikely to ever come from the protest camps themselves, but rather spring up from the larger ideological movement that the camps are a symptom or projection of.

With all due respect to the occupations, at heart they are an art project, that is, a culture jam conceived by Kalle Lasn and delivered by Anonymous. Lasn, a long-time critic of American capitalism, and Anonymous, techno-Lokis extraordinaire, wanted to see what would happen if you plopped a bunch of weird, pissed-off, arty, educated, and drum-playing people on the doorstep of conservative, white-collar America. Just as they hoped, people freaked out. Cops beat people up. Other occupations in every major U.S. city cropped up. Homeland Security started advising. Ports got shut down. A big stink got made. It was awesome. But the protests are, at their core, protests. Protests don’t solve the problems, but they’re provocative. They get people going.

I would be ecstatic if the solutions to America’s ills came from the protests, but I’m skeptical. That’s where projects like Farmers & Builders come in. We are building the alternative to the system the occupiers are protesting against. We and the protests are two different projections of the abstract, deep-down sense that the status quo is unjust, unsatisfying, and unsustainable. As the protest camps are one-by-one swept away, Farmers & Builders and other alternative economies and societies stand in solidarity and ready for those who want to occupy themselves, providing as a composite for our necessities while enabling the autonomy to pursue our own ventures.

What’s your occupation?

Homework — Assignment #2

Karl Marx once said, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  Assume that the rules of economics and the laws of physics were suspended, allowing a friendly Communist utopia to actually exist in perpetuity.  What would your abilities be in such a place?  What could you contribute to an egalitarian, peaceful society?  Ponder this.  Write some of it down.  Refer to those notes during your further studies.

Homework: Assignment #1

Reading:

“Hollow States and a Crisis of Capitalism” by John Robb

“The Studen Loan Debt Abolition Movement in the United States” by George Caffentzis

“The Glass Bead Game” by John Michael Greer

Extra Credit:

Listen to “The Fall of the American Empire” by Dmitry Orlov

Demands – Rob

In talking about the spreading Occupy protests yesterday, we at 26W wondered aloud about what our top five demands would be, were we the ones with the Occupy Wall Street bullhorn. I think it would be interesting if all of us here would articulate five demands that we have of the current system (the socio-politico-econo-cultural system that the protests are aimed at). To kick things off, here are mine in no particular order:

• Forgive all student debt
• End subsidies for unsustainable agriculture
• Cease all military actions overseas
• Institute a tax on all carbon emissions for every industry
• Close tax loopholes for corporations and their officers

20 Years of Tuition Hikes

In the 1991-92 school year, in-state undergrad tuition at UB was $1,350, now it’s $5,270. That’s an average 7.95% hike a year for twenty years.

Grad school in-state tuition was $2,150, now it’s $8,870, for an average 8.2% hike every year for twenty years.

The med school at UB cost $5,550 in 1991. Now it costs $27,090.

UB Law in 1991-92 cost $3,150 a year. This year it costs $19,020, more than 6 times as much, with an average 9.75% tuition increase every year for twenty years.

How’s that for a “rational tuition plan”?

If you’re a UB student, chances are that you are the 99% as well. Walk out today at noon to let them know that you’re sick of being ripped off for the elite’s benefit.

Update (10/6/11):

People in my generation have had it hammered into our heads from as far back as we can remember that we MUST go to college in order to succeed. Every institution from the our parents and churches to Sesame Street to the White House to giant corporations have convinced people that, to have a fulfilling life, one must go to college by any means necessary. Take out loans, run up credit card debt, beg, borrow, or steal.

The result has been a watering down of the value of a college degree, skyrocketing tuition, and crushing debt, all while college administrators and the banksters lending the money get filthy rich.

Since I was accepted to UB Law School in 2009, tuition there has gone up 44%. There is no way that the class of 2012 has gotten a 44% better education than the class of 2009 (though in actuality, the number should be higher because the class of 2009 was subjected to tuition hikes during their time at the school as well). I wouldn’t mind paying more money for school if I realized some benefit from it. Instead the tuition hikes have amounted to nothing more or less than a tax on my generation for graft on the part of SUNY and UB administrators and for the malfeasance of the New York State government.

On Counter-Revolutionaries

There has been a lot of criticism levied at the young people participating in the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protest. This is all well and good; there is definitely a use for discourse when it comes to any group or movement, however loosely defined, that is making a big fuss somewhere. Much of the criticism, however, is directed at the fact that there is no centralized leadership to this group of indignados or that their demands are somehow not serious or, because they’re spoken in broad terms and have not come up with concrete demands and the means to achieve them within our current system, are unfocused. When viewed through the lens of the type of political movement and type of protest to which America and Americans are accustomed, this seems like a valid criticism. The images coming from the mainstream media portray Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of pissed-about-no-one-particular-issue trustafarians who are protesting for the sake of protesting. It’s possible, if not probable, that some of the folks there are exactly this. To write off this movement as such, though, is dangerous. It writes off the value of what these people in New York are doing as being counter to “real” issues that need to be addressed as well as perpetuating this system whose fundamentals are more broken than most people want to admit. It is exactly what the powers that be want everyone to do. It’s a mistake and it’s the same kind of thinking that leads to popular support for all kinds of bad things, such as bank bailouts, UB2020, and voting Republican.