Sundry Notes, October

Living Ruins, The Use of Moral Panics, the Peace deal, and some cool things you might like

I. Living Ruins

For most of this week, I’ve been in Uzès with my husband. Originally a Roman village named Ucetia, Uzès is a small and gorgeous little town with a generally well-preserved medieval center.

Being here has gotten me to thinking a lot about living in ruins and living ruins. Uzés is particularly well known because it’s where one of the best preserved Roman aqueducts starts. Walking down a valley from the medieval center, you reach a stream and the fontaine d’Eure, originally venerated by the Celts as a sacred spring. The water from it was then channeled over 50 kilometers to the Roman city that later became Nîmes.

The spring was completely dry when I saw it yesterday, save for a muddy patch. This is partially due to the current time of year (most springs dry up by early autumn), but also because its underground source has been tapped to provide water to the town and surrounding areas through modern means.

There’s a funny thing I need to admit. I was quite confused when I’d arrived at the place, since there’s a river just next to the source, and the signage in the area was quite unclear. Thus, my husband and I walked along the aqueduct for several minutes whilst in search of the aqueduct, not noticing until a bit later that it was right under our feet.

Missing the obvious ruins like that, though, was only possible because the ruins themselves still live as other things. Being flat and paved, that section of the aqueduct is the primary path along the river in many places. It was an aqueduct, now it’s a walking trail, a ruin alive in another purpose.

Towns like Uzès show this even better. Many of the buildings here were built in the medieval period and haven’t changed much — externally — since then. Inside them, of course, you can find remnants of their earlier incarnations and imaginings, apartments re-created from older apartments that were themselves re-creations. Successive generations build from the ruins, shore them up, make them less like ruins, give them life, pass them along down to us.

The direct connection to the past in such places feels more tangible because it’s literally that: tangible. You can touch the past, and so it doesn’t actually feel like “past” at all. It’s the past still living on, rather than razed to the ground, imprisoned behind museum glass, or reduced to words in dry textbooks.

II: The political uses of moral panics

A new EU law that would have allowed governments to have access to all messages, photos, files, and videos sent through internet communication looks likely — for now — not to pass.

The law’s official name was the “Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse,” a rather brilliant title. I mean, what kind of monster would want to oppose such a thing? “Obviously, must be a pedophile.”

Fortunately, millions of people in Europe quickly responded to an online campaign by a Danish coder opposing the bill, who called it instead the “Chat Control” law.

In fact, that was a much more accurate name for the regulation. The law would have required every communication sent within and from countries in the EU to first be scanned for illegal content before being sent. In order for this to happen, chat providers (Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal), email providers, and every social media platform would have needed to provide what’s called a “backdoor” into their encryption so the communications could be read. In other words, encryption wouldn’t actually be encryption any longer.

Worse was that the scanning of those communications needed to occur on the devices initiating the communication. This “client-side scanning” would have required an invisible and irremovable third-party program — approved by the EU — to be installed on each person’s smartphone, PC, or other device. This program, using “AI” technology, would then scan everything you type or attach to messages to identify anything that the program deems potentially harmful to children. Anything thus identified would be blocked from being sent and also sent along to the appropriate “authorities” for further investigation.

The EU has tried to pass something like this since 2022. But before any of my British readers imagine this to be just another example of European technocrats gone wild, you should know this was also the original plan for the Online Safety Act. From a report about the original version of the Act:

The legislation contains what critics have called “a spy clause.” It requires companies to remove child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) material or terrorist content from online platforms “whether communicated publicly or privately.” As applied to encrypted messaging, that means either encryption must be removed to allow content scanning or scanning must occur prior to encryption

In fact, the UK and the US have been trying to force through laws that will circumvent encryption and private communication since the middle of the last decade. But for now in the EU, the regulation has been stymied by Germany. Originally fully in support of the law, it changed its mind because of a massive public outcry after the implications of the bill were finally made public by a Danish computer programmer.

Unfortunately, regulations like this will eventually be put into place. And not just in the EU, but also in the United Kingdom and the United States. That’s because the trajectory of governments is always towards more control, more authority, and more surveillance.

We already saw many new powers seized by governments during the Covid-19 years, not least of which was the authority to control human movement (something I’ll take up in an upcoming essay). And there’s an important connection between those regulations and these new regulations, which is that both employed a moral panic to manufacture consent from the public. During the pandemic, people willingly gave governments more authority over their lives and the lives of others because they believed it would save the elderly and the disabled. Now, the masses are asked to give governments the right to access all their private communications in order to save children from sexual predation.

Just as defending the rights of humans to go to church, to work, or just to leave their house during the Covid-19 years opened you up to accusations that you hated disabled people, defending the right of humans to communicate privately with each other opens you up to accusations of supporting (and even participating in) child molestation. It’s a neat trick, one that worked quite well during the witch and heretic trials just a few hundred years ago and the anti-communist hysteria just half a century ago.

III. Probably Peace

I, like many others, sighed in relief upon hearing about the current agreement between Palestine and Israel. Though I generally tend towards cynicism about such things, I cannot find it within myself to be pessimistic this time.

A thing of curiosity for me, however, has been how much virtual ink has been spilled trying to re-narrate the agreement in a way that minimizes or even erases Trump from his role in its creation and acceptance. This is a normal, albeit adolescent, reaction. I think for most who indulge in this kind of thinking, it’s impossible to imagine someone they hate so much might also be able to do things they don’t hate and even like.

I don’t think anyone else could have affected such an agreement, and it’s precisely because of those abhorrent things Trump does that it was even possible. It’s gross, but only someone so unpredictably volatile and inscrutably motivated could make both Hamas and Netanyahu feel like they are getting exactly what they wanted while maneuvering both sides into a position where they had absolutely no choice. It wasn’t the protests or the boycotts that did this, and that probably doesn’t feel very good for those who’ve built their entire political identity around being the “good guys” opposing Trump.

To be fair to them, though, there’s little imaginative political thought to draw from any longer, and there’s nothing even approximating a “left” to iterate a better vision.

IV. Assorted Discounts and Book Recommendations

There are a few cool things happening at Sul Books that I thought you might like to know about.

First of all, enrollment for each of my course Being Pagan is 50% off until the end of October. Use code RHYD for that.

Secondly, Sul Books is offering free worldwide shipping on all orders over $40. Shipping costs continue to increase everywhere, so if you want to pick up more than one book, and especially if you want to get a jump on holiday shopping, this is a really great deal. The discount code for that is OCTOBER.

If you’re looking for recommendations on books (besides mine), I’ve got a few I can suggest.

If you like light-hearted and fast-moving fantasy, I’d suggest picking up Fimbulwinter by Nathan Alexander Ross and Ernie and the Mage-Killer, by Jools Warner (available as a pre-order).

If you’re looking for something more literary, both A Demonology of Desires by Joe Grim Feinberg and Aunt Birdie and Other Stories by Thomas Ogden are great picks. Both also have hardcover editions printed on higher-quality paper and they look really great.

For non-fiction, I’d really recommend Asa West’s The Witch’s Kin, Kadmus’s True to the Earth, and The White Deer, by Melinda Reidinger. These are also available in great-looking hardcover editions (The White Deer is also illustrated).

And if you’re a fan of John Michael Greer, Sul Books publishes all of his fiction now, along with some of his non-fiction. His Ariel Moravec Occult Detective series is really fun, and you can also get all five of his books on thriving in a post-industrial world together as part of a package (particularly a good deal with the free shipping discount).

Again, the code for free shipping is OCTOBER and the code for 50% off my course is RHYD.