Search Results for optimization

... of pilgrims from eight million to thirty million. Under this plan, the holy city is to become a laboratory for new sciences and technologies of crowd management, logistics, and optimization. This article demonstrates how Mecca comes to be constitutive of these new crowd sciences. The author shows how a range...

... framed as a project of technological optimization and management by a technocratic elite. By contrast, this essay argues for an emancipatory understanding of democracy, which emphasizes that popular sovereignty is not an object to be facilitated by unaccountable tech monopolies from above...

... into the nonindexical third-person narration becoming the basis for the historical time of the historical novel ; apostrophe takes free indirect style and translates it into the historical present of affects and emotions. Cruel optimism takes the treadmill structure of relative surplus value and transforms...

... such strategies that engineers can reach the scale demanded by current architectures. 5 Massive benchmarks and the (foundation) models trained on them also impose a particular semantics on the world (discussed further below); the optimal label or action for situation X is the one that follows from...

... contentment: the impersonal pulses of capitalist exchange have had devastating personal, including physical, effects, and now, momentarily secure, she has optimism about the prospect of becoming what she pridefully calls “a good worker...

... discursive and narrative form to a self-defeating compulsion to keep on keeping on with dreams of “the good life” and that treadmill structure of feeling, or cruel optimism . We observe that failure and hope are not opposites, nor are pessimism and optimism for that matter. Indeed, optimism sometimes...

... rich in the same way that we acquire material wealth. The differ- ence between the two kinds of growth is an essential feature of the liberal condi- tion insofar as the latter predicates the reproduction of subjects who will make good use of their natural propensity to optimize their interests...

... to place bets online; nor did it take full effect until 2010, by which point anti-UIGEA legislators were making headway with their agenda. 6 To view a video of multitabling, see Thurman 2011 . Poker sites offer tips on how to arrange the tables on one’s screen for optimal play: “If you play only...

... and an unfailing belief in a better tomorrow. Optimism, as Terry Eagleton (2015 : 4) has more recently argued, is a “typical component of ruling-class ideologies,” because it belies reason and instead insists that everything will be okay. Neoliberal niceness plays a vital role within inverted totalitarianism...

... are mobilized together as a form of progressive humanism that works to disseminate a distinctly American vision of what I am calling “world fitness.” World fitness is a logic of practice geared toward both optimization and cohesion of various lifeworlds: civil and military, self and other, social order...

... on revitalized memories of the colonial past. We close the issue with Omer Shah's article on the logistics of the Islamic Hajj, the annual convergence of millions of pilgrims from across the globe in the holy city of Mecca. The essay, titled “Optimizing Mecca: Expertise, Infrastructure, and Logistics...

... been named Asha, after a Swahili word for “life.” 3 Seeking forward momentum in contexts of suspended temporality is, according to Ilana Feldman (2015) , itself a political act. Enduring in contexts of existence that offer no possibility for futurity implies optimism in conditions designed...

.... Niebuhr resisted what he considered the naive optimism of liberals and the demonization of the other that was characteristic of conservatives. His religiously rooted politics, given the name Christian realism and locatable within the broad legacy of Saint Augustine’s fifth-century classic, City of God...

... and action, and—crucially—of hope. To refuse to recognize these limits is to risk falling into a naive empiricism or, what is perhaps worse, a cruel optimism ( Berlant 2011) . 1 Let me begin to explain what I mean by relating a story that I came upon in the course of my research with some early twentieth...

... (1997) and The Female Complaint (forthcoming), she has developed an analysis of public spheres as affect worlds. Her essay in this issue will appear in her forthcoming volume Cruel Optimism. Joshua Comaroff is a doctoral candidate in geography at the University of Cali- fornia, Los Angeles. He...

... . . . does not seem to be fully realizable as long as opportunities for observation, reflection and reporting remain very unevenly distributed, and unevenly controlled” ( Hannerz 2010 : 112). Perhaps this gets us back to the less than optimal institutional conditions under which academic and nonacademic...

.... In the hospital I eventually decided not to kill myself. This was more an expression of demoralization than optimism. I put on some weight, went to Group, met with my counselor and my psychiatrist. Now here I am. Me: 39, DWM, 6' 5...

...-called war on terror. The origin of this book was in the 2003 global demonstra- tions against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which remains a moment of spectacu- lar optimism and defeat at one and the same time. A pamphlet the authors issued at that time, Neither Their War Nor Their Peace, was crucial...

... ). In the World War II era, actor and activist Paul Robeson performed songs in Chinese in Harlem, in a show of Black American support for communism. In a different vein of Afro-Asian possibility, Ethiopian intellectuals in the 1920s looked to Japan as a model for their modernization (Marzagora 2023 ). Optimism...