whatever you think misanthropy is, none of it comes even close to the sheer hatred that the average gentrifier has for all signs of humanity, of life
This world was one of great contrasts, she thought, and if the richest part of it was to be fenced off so that people like herself could only look at it with no expectation of ever being able to get inside it, then it would be better to have been born blind so you couldn’t see it, born deaf so you couldn’t hear it, born with no sense of touch so you couldn’t feel it. Better still, born with no brain so that you would be completely unaware of anything, so that you would never know there were places that were filled with sunlight and good food and where children were safe.
Ann Petry, The Street
As a sociologist, it’s easy for me to see how that blame is deeply misplaced — how women should be blaming our government for failing to stop the spread of the virus, for failing to pay people to stay home, for failing to provide an adequate social support system with affordable childcare, affordable healthcare, and sufficient financial protections for people who can’t make ends meet…how women should be blaming their employers for putting profits before people, for setting unrealistic expectations, and for failing to provide the support that workers need…how women should, in many cases, be blaming their own spouses or partners for prioritizing their own careers, for not doing enough at home, and for denying the science about COVID-19.
In the U.S., most of us aren’t taught to use our sociological imaginations. We’re not taught to think about social problems as structural problems. We’re not taught to see the forces that operate beyond our control – forces like capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. And we’re not taught to see how those forces create many of the challenges we face in our lives and constrain our ability to make choices that could help us overcome those challenges.
Instead, we — especially women and people from other systematically marginalized groups — are taught to self-help-book our way out of structural problems. To believe that all our problems would go away if only we were to strictly follow some seventeen-step plan.
Q: What has this pandemic confirmed or reinforced about your view of society?
JIA TOLENTINO: That capitalist individualism has turned into a death cult; that the internet is a weak substitute for physical presence; that this country criminally undervalues its most important people and its most important forms of labor; that we’re incentivized through online mechanisms to value the representation of something (like justice) over the thing itself; that most of us hold more unknown potential, more negative capability, than we’re accustomed to accessing; that the material conditions of life in America are constructed and maintained by those best set up to exploit them; and that the way we live is not inevitable at all.
goodpark reblogged
Hey guys? Maybe its bad that all social interactions online are owned and controlled by private american companies….
My personal rule is that if you aren’t quite certain that a certain action will be good for you and the world, you shouldn’t do it. Do nothing, which is likely to be pleasant and unlikely to hurt anyone. Few atrocities have been committed by people lying in bed, whereas the urge to Do Something has led to serious catastrophe. Productivity is extremely dangerous.
At every moment, you are hurtling through space at around 70,000 miles per hour, while also rotating along with the rest of the Earth’s surface at a speed of a thousand miles per hour. You’re filling your lungs with air, over and over, and as long as you’ve eaten recently, blood is taking nutrition to every part of your body and creating it anew. Even if you’re sleeping, your mind is always occupied with something. Do you really, actually, need to be doing any more than this?
I refuse to believe is that all of this was just the buildup to Donald Trump being given the power to end all human life, neoliberal capitalism devouring the earth, Elon Musk buying all of outer space, and everyone eventually ending up working as a drone in an Amazon warehouse until the planet boils or eventually the sun explodes. That cannot possibly be the end of history. Surely not. No. That isn’t how this story goes. That would be a tale told by an idiot, signifying fuck all. I would want my money back. Zero stars. Liked the plot but that ending was garbage.
Yet this is the direction a lot of people seem to believe we’re heading in, and I don’t think they’re wrong. I mean the first thing already happened: The United States gave the world’s most selfish and ignorant man control of its 4,018 nuclear weapons. He’s joked about making himself president for life. Monopolistic corporations are steadily wrapping their tentacles around every part of the economy. There should be hardly any doubt that the U.S. in particular is one major terrorist event away from a frightening concentration of power in the hands of a single unstable person, if you’re not already frightened by the whole nuclear weapons thing.
This makes a lot of people I know feel hopeless and uncertain. They see people with no qualifications except wealth being put in charge, and see Jeff Bezos building a 42 million dollar clock in the desert while his workers pee in bottles because they can’t take bathroom breaks. They see their fate in the hands of grotesque individuals who could not care less about anyone but themselves, and many ask themselves the question that Navy veteran Seth King asked himself when he found himself in the “revolving door of bodies” known as the Amazon fulfillment warehouse: “If this is the best life is going to get why am I even still here?” Every year, in the United States alone, 40,000 people take their own lives because they cannot find a satisfactory answer to that question.
LinkedIn is a death cult. Becoming a guy that posts on Linkedin is essentially like joining a religious extremist group, but for first-world people that went to Stanford. You’re lost, you don’t know what to do with yourself, so you latch onto the dominant ideology, and throw your life into its service. If you were somewhere in the world else it might be radical Islam, or militant Buddhism, but you work in digital sales, so it’s just lots and lots of posting about how to get a promotion.
goodpark reblogged
Please write 50 times “systematic problems can’t be solved by personal purity.”
Why do people want to live in the sad little world where STEM is the only thing worth doing, anyway? Is your ideal society a battleship with no windows because seeing outside is a needless luxury? Is your personal mascot a worker ant? Do you read 1984 and sigh wistfully, then throw the book away in rage because reading fiction is not Productive and writers are not Productive People?
or are you big ‘ol hypocrites who actually enjoy the fruits of art and design and liberal arts every day, but you just don’t want to admit it because then you won’t feel special for knowing how to slap together three lines of javascript
goodpark reblogged
mysimpsonsblogisgreaterthanyours
Guys, this is season ONE of the Simpsons.
goodpark reblogged
Potentially damaging productivity
Source: sickfuture
goodpark reblogged
“i’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative”
goodpark reblogged
“Do what you love” disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is a privilege, a sign of socioeconomic class. Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art school and co-sign a lease for a slick Brooklyn apartment, she can bestow DWYL as career advice upon those covetous of her success.
If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves, what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.
Do what you love, love what you do: An omnipresent mantra that’s bad for work and workers. (via bakcwadrs)
a couple of other quotes from the article i really like:
According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation but is an act of love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, presumably it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace
and
Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life! Before succumbing to the intoxicating warmth of that promise, it’s critical to ask, “Who, exactly, benefits from making work feel like nonwork?” “Why should workers feel as if they aren’t working when they are?” In masking the very exploitative mechanisms of labor that it fuels, DWYL is, in fact, the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism. If we acknowledged all of our work as work, we could set appropriate limits for it, demanding fair compensation and humane schedules that allow for family and leisure time.
(via mercy-misrule)