i am an academic who lives in a cosmopolitan city in Europe, so you can believe me when I say I understand the average American worker. after all, I lived in Washington D.C. for almost a decade
overt in the film. the house is targeted because it's the wealthiest family in the neighborhood. the film's humor is based on culkin's precociously bourgeois behavior even sans parents, and then he relishes in a baroque execution of the castle doctrine on working class burglars
everyone should know the script by now: digital technology "automates" jobs by splitting work between the user (in this case you were trained on self-checkouts) and outsourced hyperexploited labor in other countries
Both of Kamala's parents were leftist academics who met at a Black Panther meeting. Her mom was Indian, her dad is Jamaican. She lived in Canada, Namibia, and Berkeley. She went to Howard. Her family was surprised she became a prosecutor.
How is she like this?
the stuff that the UK does that the world likes, and that actually make money -- university education, art, music -- is the stuff they are actively destroying because people with mortgages find them annoying
Honestly, I have no idea why Mississippi taxpayers should pay $ to educate an urban studies or women’s studies major.
These programs are basically indoctrination factories.
How about nursing, managerial economics, mech engineering instead.
I teach in a new media studies university program and it's real. Young people have primarily used phones and apps, and new operating systems really try to prevent you from accessing the system's file structure (which is why I hate them)
It's called "aufheben," Ton. It means "cancel" but like it also means "preserve." This guy Hegel said it does both at the same time after he saw Napoleon. Turns out if you do it now, you get to communism. Fucked up if you ask me
oh you "don't make the rules"? my guy, you instantiate the rules via ritualized social practice, you are literally making and unmaking them all the time
when our children ask why we let the cities flood and the crops die, we will tell them about the good years of on-demand reruns and cheap car rides from the app-slaves
So much of my lifestyle in 2016 was funded by cheap VC money. I rode Uber across town for $4 and watched a million great shows on Netflix. Thanks, VCs. You gave me some memorable years. 💖
Rather than fall back on liberal humanist calls to "resign" we should use the Feinstein moment as a reminder that "Senator" is not an individual but a network of actants -- advisors, lawyers, constituents -- cohering via affective bonds, including the ambivalent ones of care.
the adroitness of modern manufacturing threw the parallel skilled production process of art-making into crisis at the precise moment that industrial total war delegitimated any pretence to progress by "western civilization." now quit whining and Contemplate The Urinal
come for the nakedly colonial epistemology, stay for the realisation that this fantasy continent of 100 billion slaves is actually millions of workers in formerly colonized places being exploited by core colonising countries
My mind was blown when I heard this earlier today..
"Imagine we discovered a new continent with 100 BILLION people on it, and they're all willing to work for free!
That's what's about to happen with
#AI
, so you'd better factor that into your plans."
@natfriedman
#Abundance360
this is the reason behind the oft-observed fact that "young people don't know how to pirate." in fact, this was likely the goal of reorganising UX this way, keep you safely within the app/streaming paywalls
Social selling factory in Indonesia 🤯
This is UGC industrial mass production. This is a freaking factory.
Selling things online is changing so fast. Everything is changing so fast.
This is unreal
@waltbogdanich
Here's a grab from a slide deck McKinsey prepared for Altria around 2016, showing a mock-up of an iphone app for a loyalty program for Marlboro cigarettes. Buy smokes, get little prizes like bottle openers. (3/x)
@T0Paine
white ethnic villains threatening the WASP bourgeois household... Chris Columbus will answer to a people's tribunal for his ideological crimes, a pity since he has a proletarian background
every day tech execs obsess about what will happen if a computer decides to treat people as means to an end… buddy it’s literally your job to pay people a dollar an hour to watch beheadings all day so they don’t disrupt grandma’s “Every Democrat is a Pedo” meme consumption
surely anyone with even the most basic socialist sympathies would agree that the abysmal pay and working conditions in meat processing must be improved, even if this likely triples or quadruples the price, which would thereby incentivize reduced consumption
degrowth is about banning shit, socialism is also about banning shit. less arguing over labels and more discussion about what are the coolest things to ban and how best to do it
This is probably idiosyncratic but the most annoying thing to me about “technofeudalism” is the assumption that feudalism = highly centralized power, when it was the opposite
sanders campaign was a substitute for actual strategic vision, bootstrapping rising radical sentiment to America's biggest spectacle, the presidential campaign. thus its merits and its limits, and the vacuum in its wake.
as someone who reads "new materialism" for my job, what I appreciate about it isn't "rocks have agency" but its often sophisticated challenges to humanist notions of autonomous agency. personally i think marxism should also challenge the liberal subject
Anthropologists are the test pilots of academia: the widest theoretical breadth, the most intense methods, extremely intricate arguments, and a completely fucked job market.
If Marx were around today, he’d be into freedom, apple pie, baseball on a warm summer evening, kicking back and having a couple cold ones with the boys while playfully joshing about the events of the day. He’d be an American, through and through
No one shat on smartphones in their early days because their usefulness was immediately apparent to anyone… instead it took 15 years for regret to set in
The people claiming AI is useless are the same types of people who were shitting on PCs, smartphones and the internet during their early days.
These people lack vision and insight. Don’t listen to them.
at a party last night I met a guy who was in Greenpeace in the 90s... they did incredibly wild actions, including a 3-week hike to Chernobyl to occupy it. he's banned from a bunch of countries now. anyway, it's cool how we have no ability to preserve institutional memory of this
my kids will only study things that have long-term practical utility: philosophy, literary criticism, historical research, foreign languages, and how to install mods
draft of a new syllabus for a 4-week module on Marxist theory and technology... had to make some tough choices and may have to make further cuts, we'll see
So not only do they need copyrighted material for their technology to function, but energy demands are getting so high (think small country), they also need a nuclear fusion breakthrough to sustain it. The whole thing is such a joke.
You can also find this in cultural criticism and media studies 70s-00s. I think this is not necessarily a reason to abandon critiques of social media/smartphones but to recognize in them the continuity with and intensification of TV
saw Repo Man yesterday and Videodrome today and it’s wild the degree to which all the alienating harms now ascribed to social media were, with incredible accuracy and understanding, used in reference to television in the early 80’s
the prelude to this was firing, marginalizing, and intimidating in-house researchers, mostly women, on algorithmic harm, who documented actual and plausible abuses visited upon poor and PoC, before pivoting to white boy scifi "existential risk" scenarios
Great new chapter of Twitter when you can simply say you’ve seen “reports of” something because 50 blue check hinduvta accounts posted it without attribution
Even with the BBB bill dead, we can still look forward to the rich Keynesian policy fan fiction universe to continue on its network of blogs, a beautiful example of the participatory culture fostered through the internet
it’s possible that, had Elon taken an ethics class, he would have realized torturing monkeys is wrong, and not done it. But it’s possible he already knew that and did it anyway. A more effective alternative is that Elon is punished and forcibly barred from animal torture
the barbershops in Amsterdam have all followed the American trend of having Sons-of-Anarchy-style branding, with skulls with greaser hair, beer, etc... but they don't understand the aesthetic and botch the details, like today my place was playing "I Wanna Dance With Somebody"
mastodon is a thousand petty fiefdoms ruled by whim rather than profit, squabbling through fractious "federated" alliances -- the true technofeudalism. say what you will about the value form, at least it leads to predictable constraints and tendencies!
Gen Z has discovered the 50+ year old tradition of forcing yourself to become a connoisseur of commercial shit that mostly sucks that used to be popular… imo a pretty fun, cheap, and harmless hobby
A growing group among Generation Z is listening to nu metal bands for the first time. Bands like Deftones and Slipknot are resonating with younger fans, thanks to TikTok, the Y2K revival and, of course, enduring teenage angst.
Tic Tacs are 94% sugar and yet claim to be sugar free…
The FDA says anything can be labeled sugar free if it has <0.5g of sugar, so each tic tac is 0.49g and they can claim they have 0 sugar on the label
that's only part of the story. there used to be widely accessible torrent sites -- you could even find torrent files via Google. those have been shut down by authorities, pirates have been sued and prosecuted, and platforms ban new pirate outlets or bury them via algorithm
not long from now, the absence of a radical left strategy to swindle crypto traders out of millions of dollars through DeFi scams and use the money to seed new organizations will be judged a world-historical failure
Curious about the content of these lessons… NL liquidated a much larger proportion of Jews than neighboring countries. a bit reductive but it’s weird that a popular right-wing policy here is to lecture people being discriminated against w the racist crimes of your grandparents
Mona Keijzer, often talked about as a potential prime minister, saying Dutch Muslims (and only Muslims) should have compulsory lessons on the holocaust
@futzo23
the "digital native" metaphor is correct but in the opposite way as intended: if you are naturalised to a particular environment, you take it for granted and do not know how it really works
hustlegrindset entrepreneurs, tradwives, crypto bros... all individualized flights from wage labor. notably they all advertise the large amount of work this escape requires...
Germany’s approach to antisemitism is to see it as an alien influence brought from without that threatens to corrupt the pure German soul, and thus its nefarious bearers must be reduced to bare life and expelled… lessons have not been learned
Just learned that
@Columbia
has locked down every building on campus (deactivated swipe access) and that faculty wishing to visit their offices today require a campus police escort to gain access.
the problem with "long" decades and centuries? they assume continuity. we need to get a little wilder with periodization, start claiming that 1998 no longer belongs in the 1990s even though 1997 and 1999 do
“What if an AI figures out a way to” let me stop you right there, you’ve already figured it out, it’s called “global labor arbitrage,” you’ve set up clickwork farms in literal refugee camps
I love literary studies approaches that get really granular, like "we know Lenin was reading this particular copy of Hegel's Logic and here are his margin notes." In the future it'll be like "so they had these 15 browser tabs open, but half of those were never read..."
the best way to study conspiracies is learn about some evil weird shit the CIA or FBI did 50-70 years ago, get a lot of important facts wrong, and then workshop with heroin addicts the best way to project it on to whatever news story is happening that day
some people are like "well socialism is really about freedom." and that's true: the freedom to ban annoying shit so it stops ruining everyone's lives. so let's ban it up
hoarding is bad capitalism -- you need to deploy your money to accumulate more capital, M-C-M'. Romantic capitalism would mean putting your lover on the market so that they might come back to you with a higher value (and a few more tricks up their sleeve)
there is no organized left in the US to arm. there is no serious revolutionary movement that currently exists. it's just individuals buying guns to irrationally address their own anxieties, the gun manufacturers' chief marketing strategy for decades
we don’t have more mass shooters now because there was suddenly more guns, we have them because fascism has been growing and recruiting and getting bolder for the last three decades.
we are beyond gun control fixing this. the left needs to arm itself in turn