Everything is futile, resist the machines

In early industrialization, workers' sabotage of machines was treated as a serious crime.

"On March 5, [1812,] two days after Childe Harold was published, the Frame Work Bill passed both hosues of Parliament.
Anyone convicted of dismantling a machine could now be put to death."
— Brian Merchant. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Little Brown and Company, 2023.

It maks me think that, if you were to ask a political scientist today: Terrorism is ideologically motivated violence against what or whom? they'd likely answer: Civilians. But 200 years ago, there was a different prevailing view: Terrorism was workers' intentional destruction of a rich man's property.

The Luddites weren’t necessarily protesting machines, Merchant explains, but “the social costs of technological ‘progress’” forced upon them, according to Ruha Benjamin in Race after Technology. Imani Perry says that they were resisting “the conversion of oneself into a machine,” especially for the purpose of making someone else rich.

“It is deemed only rational to surrender and rejoice in new conveniences and harmonies, to wrap ourselves in the first text and embrace a violent ignorance of its shadow.”<
— Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2020.

"The thin line between flourishing and failure is also a theme of the [Sukkot] holiday’s scripture. In synagogue, Jews traditionally read the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, a ponderous and often pessimistic tract that opens with the famous words: 'Futility of futilities, everything is futile.' But the original Hebrew holds a secret that is not readily apparent in translation. The Hebrew word for 'futility' is havel or הבל. The word for 'everything' is hakol or הכל. As you can see from the lettering, the difference between the two words is a single stroke of the scribe’s pen. That’s all it takes to turn 'everything' into nothing, utility into futility. Observing this point, the Oxford scholar John Jarick wrote, 'we might say that [Ecclesiastes] has crafted the most compact form of parallelism to be found in the Hebrew Bible.' It is as though the biblical author wanted to illustrate how the slightest shift in a life story can completely change its contents."
— Yair Rosenberg. When You’re Not in Control of Your Life This week’s Jewish holiday reminds us that the line between our success and failure is thinner and more fragile than we like to think. The Atlantic, Oct 4, 2023.

The cotton gin: 'The most disastrous case of unintended consequences'

"The African slave trade is the most dramatic chapter in the story of human existence."
— Deborah G. Plant, introduction to Zora Neale Hurston. Barracoon. Amistad, 2018.

"[In 1793, Eli] Whitney's machine separated those [sticky green] seeds from the white cotton balls with a hand crank or a horse pull. ... Whitney even suggested that his device could help end slavery, since laborers would no longer have to do the unpleasant work of picking the seeds out by hand.
That is not what happened. Instead, the cotton gin is one of the original sins of automated technology, and the most disastrous case of unintended consequences unleashed upon the world this side of the nuclear bomb. Whitney's machine was widely pirated, modded, and adopted by plantation owners, who saw little need to compensate the inventor. The cotton gin worked so well that it wildly increased the demand for workers to do every other part of the cotton production process, especially the hoeing and the picking. ...it helped sustain the institution of slavery for another seventy years."
— Brian Merchant. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Little Brown and Company, 2023.

(Later in the book, Merchant says that so-called "automation," when used as a pretext to "hide and degrade" human labor, is — as Astra Taylor calls it — "fauxtomation.")

"...the United States does not have a legitimate history of integrity and fairness. It’s been run by villains that make Disney’s look like saints. Racism is not a byproduct as much as it’s the foundational stock in the American soup. This is why Black people are still fighting to be recognized in our full humanity."
— Luvvie Ajayi. I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual. New York: Henry Holt, 2016. p. 72.

“..a majority of white voters backed a candidate who assured them that they will never have to share this country with people of color as equals. That is the reality that all Americans will have to deal with and one that most of the country has yet to confront.”
— Adam Serwer. The Cruelty is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America. New York: One World, 2021. Chapter: “The Nationalist’s Delusion.”

Image by Josch13 from Pixabay

If you'd like to learn more about this period in history (the early 1800s) elsewhere, I wrote about the Jena collective in Germany during the end of Immanuel Kant's life. It's paywalled. Readers with a paid membership to Medium can read it.

Quotes: Reflections on machines

1920s and 1930s

"Now we cannot abolish machinery, because machinery lies in the very essence of life and we ourselves are machines. But, as the largest part of history shows, there is no need whatever for man to become the slave of machinery, or even for machinery to injure the quality of his own work; rightly used it may improve it. The greatest task before civilisation at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men; and if civilisation fails at the task, then without doubt it and its makers will go down to a common destruction."
— Havelock Ellis. On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue. Two Volumes in One. New York: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc. 1937. (Formerly Little Essays of Love and Virtue, 1921, and More Essays of Love and Virtue, 1931.) Vol 1., p. 177.

1960s and 1970s

"...we should tailor our intelligent opportunist advances to our basic behavioural requirements. We must somehow improve in quality rather than in sheer quantity. If we can do this, we can continue to progress technologically in a dramatic and exciting way without denying our evolutionary inheritance. If we do not, then our suppressed biological urges will build up and up until the dam bursts and the whole of our elaborate existence is swept away in the flood."
— Desmond Morris. The Naked Ape. New York: Dell, 1967. p 197.

"It isn't the machine that dehumanizes, it is the system that tends to enslave man."
— William A. Spurner. Natural Law and the Ethics of Love: A New Synthesis. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974. p 141.

1990s

"[Samuel] Butler conceded that machines were still governed by their makers, but, surveying the marvels of nineteenth-century technology, he wondered if that would always be true: 'We are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race.' ... 'There is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more," he quipped, "than to see a fertile union between two steam engines.'"
— Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan. Microcosmos. California: University of California Press, 1986, 1997. p. 257.

"[In an automated world,] human artists will become the most valued and irreplaceable of professionals."
— "The Creators," Bran Ferren, The New York Times Magazine, September 19, 1999, p 54.

2000s

"Between 1840 and 1879 alone, these [innovations] included the electric telegraph, the telephone, the lightbulb, the transcontinental railroad, and the passenger elevator. Tasks that had been taken for granted since the dawn of civilization were suddenly no longer required, or were performed in utterly new ways. Tasks that had always been performed by human flesh were taken over by machines. Motion and light and time and space and talk, and thus reality itself, morphed radically within a single generation..."
— Anneli Rufus. Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto. Da Capo Press, 2003. p. 98.

2010s

"John Henry was a steel-driving railroad worker in the South in the 1800s whose story has become legend. … When the steel-driving machine arrived to replace Henry and the other steel-drivers he battled the machine, carrying with him his pride and the honor of humankind. … Henry surely pushed his heart and lungs well past their potential because he won the battle against the steel-driving machine and then he collapsed, dead of a stroke or a heart attack.
In modern psychology John Henryism is the idea that exposure to social discrimination can lead some Blacks to put in extraordinary effort in pursuit of success and a repudiation of racism, resulting in a steep physiological cost. Blacks who have extra human reasons why they need to win — to prove that they have been wrongly judged and the stereotype against Blacks is wrong and that the expectation of failure is undeserved — may find themselves working incredibly hard and straining the edge of their physical, mental, and human capabilities as John Henry did."
— Touré, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What it Means to Be Black Now. New York: Free Press, 2011.

2020s

"The notion that textile workers like Ben Bamforth and George Mellor would discuss the prospect of losing their agency to machines in the early 1800s, when the machinery in question was a wooden, water-powered loom, may strike us as implausible. Our twenty-first-century visions of displacement by machines, after all, concern omniscient artificial intelligences and sleek autonomous robotics. But George and Ben's argument was colored by deeper anxieties, too — what is the value of human labor, they wondered, or even human life, in a world where technologies seem constantly poised to replace us? In fact, it's remarkably similar to debates we're still having two hundred years later, in books like Rise of the Robots, film franchises like Terminator, and cable news segments about the looming AI takeover."
— Brian Merchant. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Little Brown and Company, 2023.

Scammers have gobbled up U.S. telephone numbers and call them frequently, such that most people won't answer an unknown number.

FEMA just put out a press release reminding disaster victims to answer the phone even if the number is unfamiliar. We really allowed a major communications tool to just rot away with scams when this is where we’re at.

[image or embed]

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) October 18, 2024 at 3:51 PM

Colombia: Noticias del reconocimiento de los falsos positivos

Selva por Elias Shariff Falla Mardini from Pixabay

Álvaro Uribe

En su sitio web, el expresidente Álvaro Uribe subió un video. La página web tiene la fecha 22 octubre 2022 aunque el video en YouTube tiene la fecha de 4 octubre 2023.

(Durante su presidencia, Uribe fue miembro del Primero Colombia, luego del Partido de la U (2010–2013) y ahora del Centro Democrático.)

El Espectador

"El acto de reconocimiento de responsabilidad que vimos esta semana, con el presidente de la República, Gustavo Petro, a la cabeza, tiene un enorme poder simbólico y deberá repetirse una vez la Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP) llegue al final del macrocaso que adelanta sobre los mal llamados falsos positivos. * * * Es la primera vez que el Estado colombiano, en voz de sus representantes, ofrece disculpas públicas de esta manera. Es un cambio histórico, pues antes el negacionismo y el silencio eran la norma. ... El expresidente de la República y quien fuera ministro de Defensa bajo la Seguridad Democrática, Juan Manuel Santos, terminó en aquel entonces su intervención diciendo..." — Un Estado que reconoce el horror va camino de sanarlo, El Espectador, 4 octubre 2023

Blu Radio

"En los últimos días, el jurista Rodrigo Uprimmy ha escrito algunas columnas de opinión sobre los falsos positivos, a propósito de las audiencias de reconocimiento de un grupo de militares en Yopal, Casanare, pues estas personas aceptaron su responsabilidad en casi 300 casos de ejecuciones extrajudiciales que se registraron en el departamento entre los años 2005 y 2008.
— Comisión de la Verdad apoya idea de responsabilidad política de Uribe en falsos positivos. El padre Francisco De Roux y los excomisionados respaldaron a Rodrigo Uprimny. Por su parte, el expresidente Uribe que hay un sesgo en este tipo de declaraciones, Mateo Piñeros, BluRadio, 3 de Octubre, 2023

La Comisión de la Verdad apoyó lo que ha dicho Uprimmy. Su publicación afirmó "la responsabilidad política y moral del expresidente Álvaro Uribe en los falsos positivos" y que Uribe posiblemente tenga "la responsabilidad del mando, aunque no haya ordenado directamente esos actos criminales". También dijeron que tenía que haber sido política del estado, por ser obviamente "un sistema de disposiciones legales y extralegales, estímulos y exigencias de resultados, acciones y omisiones, surgidas desde el mismo Gobierno e implementadas durante varios al interior de las Fuerzas Militares."

W Radio

Se llama "contundente" ese párrafo:

Uribe

Uribe les respondió y defendió su política de seguridad democrática. Dijo: "la política de Seguridad Democrática bastante mejoró al país".

Petro

Gustavo Petro (Colombia Humana, anteriormente Movimiento Progresistas)

Harry Emerson Fosdick on immortality

The American minister Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) wrote a number of books, and in my first semester of college in the Fall of 1998, I stumbled across one of them on the library shelf. It may have been The Assurance of Immortality (1913). I took notes on his argument. At the time, it seemed to me that he was saying:

If you can't enjoy life now, and you have no hope for improving it, then you must hope for a better afterlife. If you don't believe in an afterlife, there would be no reason to continue living. People soldier on through situations that are not only difficult but intractably, hopelessly so, and this suggests that they believe, at least implicitly, that there's something worth waiting for on the other side of this life.

But isn't virtue its own reward? Or do we do good in the world only because we're waiting for something on the other side? Fosdick acknowledges this theme but doesn't seem to quite grasp that it truly means not being rewarded, at all, ever and finding satisfaction in a virtuous life. He says no one would sacrifice pleasure for virtue unless there were some other kind of reward.

Perhaps, he says, virtuous people seek not a selfish reward but rather the opportunity to become better. That opportunity — for some reason, in his view — must go on forever. Therefore, if someone didn't implicitly believe in an afterlife, there would be no reason for them to continue morally improving themselves.

He says, using Socrates' harper analogy, that our souls are like musicians who endure after the music of our lives ends. It could be true, I wrote in my notebook, but merely making the poetic analogy doesn't prove it. Where's the proof that our souls go on?

I always remembered Fosdick because for years afterward I continued to write a bit, privately, now and then, on this topic.

Everything I came up with ended up in this essay: "We don't need to be ‘immortal’: We can ask instead how we'll survive" (January 1, 2023). It's a 6-minute read. What I've given here is an unpaywalled "friends link" on Medium.

Fosdick's name in New York

On Easter Sunday 2022 (April 17), I was surprised to see Fosdick's name on the wall of Riverside Church in Manhattan. He was their first minister.

Does your 'personal brand' allow you room to change?

Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, didn't want to brand herself.

In Doppelganger, she wrote:

"Good brands are immune to fundamental transformation. Conceding to having become one at age thirty would have meant foreclosing on what I saw as my prerogative to change, evolve, and hopefully improve. It would have locked me into performing this particular version of me, indefinitely."

Furthermore, journalism and analysis "rest on a tacit commitment to following one’s research wherever it leads, even if that turns out to be a very different place from what was originally expected. Trusted analysts have to be willing to be changed by what they discover." So, while "good branding is an exercise in discipline and repetition" that requires "knowing exactly where you are headed all the time," unfortunately for those who care about intellectual honesty and personal growth, this motion "is essentially in concentric circles."

— Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Similarly, Klein wrote in this book: "From the start, I made a conscious decision in my work neither to describe raising a neurodivergent kid in any detail nor to discuss the merits of the labels that a doctor, who spent two hours with him, chose for him when he was four. A bit like a personal brand, defining T. in those ways would fix him at a single point in time and through the eyes of others. The decision about when (and if) to share his private world are T.’s to make."

I briefly compared gender to a personal brand: "Tell Us As You Write Your Story: What You Know and Can Act On". It's a 4-minute read on Medium. Consider a paid membership on the platform.

Elsewhere, I've written that I didn't feel I had space to grow in one gender, and I picked a different category that I felt had room for me. If one's gender is a brand, for me I wanted a room to expand in, not a room to constrain me.

---

"Seeking some way to acknowledge the past embedded in my name without continuing to honor it, I recalled the philosophical strategy of putting a word 'under erasure.' It was a technique popularized by the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, who argued that certain words contain their own negation, which he signified by crossing them out. Such words, he suggested, are unavoidable tools for speaking and thinking, but they are also inadequate. As such, they had to be eliminated while also remaining legible."
"My name is a Confederate monument, so I cross it out when I write it."
I needed a way to reject my family’s role in the history of slavery without denying it.
Perspective by Baynard Woods. Washington Post. July 8, 2022.

Why does someone always have to be at the center?

Today I learned from sahibzada mayed's post on LinkedIn:

"Merely replacing who or what is at the center refuses to uproot the underlying colonial logics of centralization.

As Frederick van Amstel writes in his brilliant article on decolonizing whatever-centered-design:"

"Those who lived their entire lives at the margin, never being seriously considered by the center, are suddenly invited to participate in a central project, to make decisions, and, in some rare cases, benefit from its results. Nothing substantial changes in the spatial practice. When the project ends, the participant returns to the periphery with fewer advantages than those earned by the center. The periphery does not develop, as it still depends on the center."

The idea, as I understand it, having also read some of the comments on LinkedIn: the people at "the center" have power. Power always wants to reproduce and reinforce itself in the hands of the people who currently hold it; it does not genuinely intend to share itself. Sometimes people at the center say let's "center" these other people for a moment in this discussion, but if the people who are briefly centered (i.e., allowed to raise their hands and speak and give useful information) and then sent back to the margins, all that's happened is that knowledge, resources, and work-product have been extracted from them. The power balance hasn't actually changed, even if you call the process "[X]-centered."

What needs to be challenged, mayed argues, are society's "spatial practices" — the idea that someone always has to be at the center. Why can't interactions be decentralized, as "relationships and ecosystems" already function in reality? Arguing with centralized power systems "is unsettling work, and requires disruption." mayed also recommends to us the work of Aníbal Quijano on the "coloniality of power."

You can also see what Sabrina Meherally at Pause and Effect posted recently on LinkedIn on this topic, saying: "this practice has been informed through an Indigenist philosophy."

And see Farzin Farzad on LinkedIn: What's needed is "better governance and regulatory structures that work for all." We have to "change our systems to reflect what the purpose of society is in the first place" and "work for the collective well-being." Diverse hiring is "a modest compromise to provide incremental gains" and tends to backfire by "giving people access to the positions of power to oppress their own." We're stuck in cycles of "progress and reactionary backlash...unless we develop real methods to divest."

And see Puneet Singh Singhal on LinkedIn, posting about Disability Pride Month: We must not merely include people, but value them too. We must understand lived experiences as a source of knowledge.

On backlash:

"One of the nastiest consequences of the success of the backlash is that politicians have been scared by it. Even when taking steps in our support, their enthusiasm will be tempered by the realization that a lot of people really don’t give a damn about LGBTQ+ rights or welfare. So they will seek compromise, and implement half-measures that will extend the life of the backlash even as it weakens. We can see an example of this sort of reaction in the recent proposal of the Biden Education Department regarding transgender athletes in schools, which, while it presents itself as supportive of transgender participation in athletics, in fact provides validation to the idea that it is really okay to discriminate against transgender people if cisgender people really want to and are willing to take a bit of trouble to say so."
— Alyssa Ferguson, "A Meditation on the LGBTQ+ Backlash, a Glimpse of Better Times Ahead," Prism & Pen, May 10, 2023

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If you become a member of Medium, you can read my essays there.

See especially: "Re-Envisioning Environment". It's an 8-minute read on Medium.

Discussing fiction on a moral level at a book club

After:

Naomi Kanakia, "The Dreariness of Book Club Discussions," Los Angeles Review of Books, November 2, 2022.

---

The book club exists because we'd like to think the book will "improve our minds in some way" and "contribute measurably to our intellectual lives."

Yet even those of us who are talented critics struggle to say more than whether we liked the book. Adults consider our own enjoyment as an "explicit factor" in choosing to read.

Book clubs "interfere with the way a book is meant to be experienced," i.e., for pleasure, and thus "obviously draw their inspiration from that great temple of forced reading: high school." A book club has the broad form of a class discussion — "the schedule, the discussion, the forced reading."

Nonfiction is easier to discuss

It's easy to talk about books that are "fundamentally about ideas: What does the future hold? What motivates a person to kill for a cause? These are big, open questions that you can readily discuss. We all think about ideology. We all think about current events. We can engage easily with these texts and do it on a more even footing, arguing with their conclusions and adding our own experiences to provide a counterpoint."

Fiction is hard "unless you resort to deconstruction, power analysis, or high school–style New Criticism, there's simply not much to say beyond 'This is why you should/shouldn't read this book' - a topic for which, honestly, a few hundred words would usually suffice. Nonfiction, in contrast, offers a jumping-off point for talking about the broader implications of ideas and for arguing with the author's conclusions." You can't do this with fiction because "good fiction doesn't contain a clear viewpoint on the material," and insofar as it makes points, it "already contains whatever broader points you would want to make" but stated much better than you could possibly state them (which is why you read the book), and "moreover, fiction doesn't generalize: it's about specific people doing specific things," so for you to say that many people do not or should not do these things is N/A.

Yet book clubs choose fiction

They do so because fiction is enjoyable, or because of "a hangover from English class," or specifically because of "the complexity of the novel — for the way it eludes easy answers," which makes it seem as though there's something to be discussed, something to be gotten.

Choose moral analysis

So if you're going to read fiction for a book club, Kanakia suggests, you can do "moral analysis," which "is a bit simpler [than power analysis]: it takes the work as given, almost as if the story were nonfiction. In a moral analysis, you talk about the characters as freely and simply as if they were real people you know," which "we're usually unafraid to exercise when it comes to television shows or the lives of our friends." For context: Tolstoy's What Is Art? (1897) in which he argues that art is about moral edification, not pleasure. (This approach allows us to stay friends with each other, believe that reading the book was worthwhile, and avoid summarizing the whole book.) See also John Gardner's On Moral Fiction (1978).

Asking moral questions "might be uncomfortable, but if we don't want to explore that discomfort, we should probably just join a knitting circle instead."

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See also: "Moral analysis of what is 'at stake in this story'". It's a 4-minute read on Medium. Consider a paid membership on the platform.

Heschel: Overawed

Based on a Pixabay image

The passages below are from:
Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Sabbath (1951). Prologue. Reprint: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

“Indeed, we know what to do with space but do not know what to do about time, except to make it subservient to space. Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face. Time to us is sarcasm, a slick treacherous monster with a jaw like a furnace incinerating every moment of our lives. Shrinking, therefore, from facing time, we escape for shelter to things of space. The intentions we are unable to carry out we deposit in space; possessions become the symbols of our repressions, jubilees of frustrations. But things of space are not fireproof; they only add fuel to the flames. Is the joy of possession an antidote to the terror of time which grows to be a dread of inevitable death? Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness, they are a threat to our very lives; we are more harassed than supported by the Frankensteins of spatial things.
It is impossible for man to shirk the problem of time. The more we think the more we realize: we cannot conquer time through space. We can only master time in time.”
— Prologue

“Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture of time.” — Prologue

“To Jewish piety the ultimate human dichotomy is not that of mind and matter but that of the sacred and the profane. We have known profanity too long and have become accustomed to think that the soul is an automaton. The law of the Sabbath tries to direct the body and the mind to the dimension of the holy. It tries to teach us that man stands not only in a relation to nature but in a relation also to the creator of nature.”
What is the Sabbath? Spirit in the form of time. With our bodies we belong to space; our spirit, our souls, soar to eternity, aspire to the holy. The Sabbath is an ascent to the summit. It gives us the opportunity to sanctify time, to raise the good to the level of the holy, to behold the holy by abstaining from profanity.”
— Chapter: Intuitions of Eternity

"Yet those who realize that God is at least as great as the known universe, that the spirit is an endless process of which we humbly partake, will understand and experience what it means that the spirit is disclosed at certain moments of time. One must be overawed by the marvel of time to be ready to perceive the presence of eternity in a single moment. One must live and act as if the fate of all of time would depend on a single moment."
— Chapter: Intuitions of Eternity

"Time to us is a measuring device rather than a realm in which we abide. Our consciousness of it comes about when we begin to compare two events and to notice that one event is later than the other; when listening to a tune we realize that one note follows the other."
— Epilogue

“Time does not permit an instant to be in and for itself. Time is either all or nothing. It cannot be divided except in our minds. It remains beyond our grasp. It is almost holy.”
— Epilogue

Wait until you see what I did with it!! "‘Overawed by the Marvel’ of Trans". It's a 7-minute read on Medium. Consider a paid membership on the platform.

Night of the Murdered Poets (1952)

What happened:

"The Night of the Murdered Poets (Russian: Дело Еврейского антифашистского комитета, romanized: Dela Yevreyskovo antifashistskovo komiteta, lit. 'Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair'; Yiddish: הרוגים מלכות פֿונעם ראַטנפאַרבאַנד, romanized: Harugim malkhes funem Ratnfarband, lit. 'Soviet Union Martyrs') was the execution of thirteen Soviet Jews in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow on 12 August 1952.[1] The arrests were first made in September 1948 and June 1949. All defendants were falsely accused of espionage and treason as well as many other crimes. After their arrests, they were tortured, beaten, and isolated for three years before being formally charged. There were five Yiddish writers among these defendants, all of whom were part of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee." — Wikipedia, accessed June 17, 2023

One of the writers was David Bergelson, and one of his novels was translated into Spanish (Nov 1, 2015): Al final de todo.