The day after Thanksgiving. No, wait. Thanksgiving.
November 29, 2013 at 2:22 pm | In business, social_critique | 3 CommentsToday is Black Friday. It has for a long time been the start of the Holiday shopping season, and, went the thinking, if retailers could get shoppers into stores today – the day after our Thanksgiving holiday – they had a reasonable chance of getting “in the black,” that is, having a profitable season.
Black Friday was supposed to be a kind of litmus test that would indicate whether consumers were willing to spend enough in the remaining days of the holiday season to bring up retailer profits (or whether there would be any profits at all).
Well, that’s obviously all gone out the window because now some stores are opening on Thanksgiving. In a seemingly continuous non-stop race to the bottom, Thanksgiving, which had a certain magic about it because it was non-religious and non-gifting (i.e., not linked to shopping), is now removed from that privileged place of non-consumption. Instead, it’s more and more a day like any other: Go forth and shop.
As one 18-year old Thanksgiving shopper put it while standing online with a pal at a suburban Chicago mall, “Thanksgiving dinner is over… And there’s nothing else to do.” (source) I seriously expected her to say, “Thanksgiving dinner is so over,” that is: we’re not doing that anymore.
Which brings me to another pet peeve: the so-called politically correct crowd that gets its kicks from pointing out that white settlers screwed the indigenous population, that this happened at “the original” Thanksgiving, and that therefore all Thanksgiving festivities are a sham if not outright a white man’s plot to keep injustice alive.
I have news for you, dear Leftie comrades of mine: you are the latter-day stirrup holders of the bourgeoisie, except now you’re holding the stirrups for the oligarchic disrupter class. Your corrosive criticism of Thanksgiving as a “white man’s” holiday that somehow represents the oppression of Native populations is the hand that reaches across an ever-diminishing Thanksgiving gathering table to shake the hand of today’s ultra-capitalism.
Hey, if Thanksgiving is just a sham, if Thanksgiving isn’t actually the nice holiday we were told it was, then why not turn it into a day like any other? And so the capitalist disrupter smiles, sits down to his fully-larded table, while the rest of us are harried into ever-greater sacrifices …for the effing economy!
Excuse me while my head explodes.
To whit: yesterday I read an article in one of my favorite news sources that claimed it was ok to shop on Thanksgiving because the economy needs it. (source) Who is this “economy” and why does it need my blood? Ok, that’s a silly rhetorical question because of course I know why it needs my and your blood. But really? This is the best case the writer can make? It was also interesting to me, an immigrant twice over (first to Canada, then to the U.S.) to see the author, who was born in the U.S. but is of Indian extraction, born to immigrant parents, bolster her case this way:
Some countries actually embrace the US system of more work, less pay. Multinationals especially deal with large variances in different countries’ holiday calendars. Their solution often is to offer a more liberal number of personal days so employees can pick and choose the holidays of importance to them. In countries such as India—which, like the United States, has a polyglot of faiths and cultures across its workforce—some state governments have been trying to limit the number of official holidays. [emphasis added]
Well, if you don’t celebrate any religious holiday, I’m fine with that. But Thanksgiving was never an expressly religious holiday – it has nothing to do with “polyglot[s] of faiths and cultures.” It was simply a holiday: a day to stop, cook a good meal, sit down together, break bread, be peaceful (just for a bit), and give thanks. That’s all.
But now, here we are: in all, Thanksgiving has been “exposed” by my Leftie friends as a vile white man’s holiday whose origins lie in the oppression of Native populations; youthful “innovators” tell us that the economy needs us to go shopping; and “disrupters” of all stripes tell us that we live in an age of extreme personalization, whether it’s in the Quantified Self movement or our social media personae, so why shouldn’t I pick and choose the holidays, too? I mean, isn’t social media all about creating my tribe, man, that ultra-personal self-expression of mine that’s just about the effing same as everybody else’s, except I can spend personalized money on mine? If I’ve got my tribe, why should I bother with something as corny (and destructive to our holier-than-thou 1%-enriching economy) as a non-gifting, non-shopping, boring old dinner-based holiday? (And by the way: if everybody is off in their personal and personalized tribe, there will be no more unions, and without unionized bargaining power, there will be more oppression of people, irrespective of whether their skin color is white or brown or black or anything in between. Continue to splinter into tribes, children, and The Man will eat your effing lunch.)
As for the argument that shopping shopping shopping consumption consumption consumption is absolutely necessary to keep the economy going, ask yourself what kind of economy we’re enabling. Heck, back in the day that swine Henry Ford at least made sure his workers made enough money to buy a family car. Today’s equivalent industry moguls? Not so much. (see this) We’re all in love with the Creepy Crawleys of Downton Abbey, worshiping their wealth and “glamor.” But even they took better care of “their” workers than the Waltons of Wal-Mart do.
Was tun? you may ask. Well, there is Buy Nothing Day, although I have to admit it always sat the wrong way with me (not sure why). And there’s the buy local movement (see Katrina Scotto di Carlo’s excellent talk at Portland Oregon’s Creative Mornings).
Beyond that, it’s up to government and law makers to create protections for workers. Not sure however that there’s much to be done about the sheeple who take advantage of all the glorious opportunities to buy ever more junk no one (not even they themselves) need.
The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
November 24, 2013 at 8:20 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
Your Long Commute Is Sapping Your Will to Care About Politics – Emily Badger – The Atlantic Cities
No doubt there are some flaws in this study, but the conclusions are intriguing. Is it the commute? Is it the isolation that commuting often entails (sitting singly in one’s car, or avoiding eye-contact on public transit)? We forget how to be social when we commute?
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The longer the commute, the less likely people are to participate in politics through behaviors like voting, frequently talking about politics, or giving to political campaigns. And the authors believe this is a causal relationship, not merely a correlation between people who travel long distances to work and those who live in cloistered bedroom communities.
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Anyone can learn to be a polymath – Robert Twigger – Aeon
Beautiful article. Here’s to polymathy.
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The average job now is done by someone who is stationary in front of some kind of screen. Someone who has just one overriding interest is tunnel-visioned, a bore, but also a specialist, an expert. Welcome to the monopathic world, a place where only the single-minded can thrive. Of course, the rest of us are very adept at pretending to be specialists. We doctor our CVs to make it look as if all we ever wanted to do was sell mobile homes or Nespresso machines. It’s common sense, isn’t it, to try to create the impression that we are entirely focused on the job we want? And wasn’t it ever thus?In fact, it wasn’t.
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The secrets of the world’s happiest cities | Society | The Guardian
Great article.
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If one was to judge by sheer wealth, the last half-century should have been an ecstatically happy time for people in the US and other rich nations such as Canada, Japan and Great Britain. And yet the boom decades of the late 20th century were not accompanied by a boom in wellbeing. The British got richer by more than 40% between 1993 and 2012, but the rate of psychiatric disorders and neuroses grew.
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As much as we complain about other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than a social desert. The more connected we are to family and community, the less likely we are to experience heart attacks, strokes, cancer and depression. Connected people sleep better at night. They live longer. They consistently report being happier.There is a clear connection between social deficit and the shape of cities. A Swedish study found that people who endure more than a 45-minute commute were 40% more likely to divorce. People who live in monofunctional, car‑dependent neighbourhoods outside urban centres are much less trusting of other people than people who live in walkable neighbourhoods where housing is mixed with shops, services and places to work.
(…)
Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. On the other hand, for a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love.
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“…we adapt quickly to the joy of a larger house, because the house is exactly the same size every time. But we find it difficult to adapt to commuting by car, because every day is a slightly new form of misery.”
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Seattle Presses Pause on Its Mass Surveillance Plans – Mike Riggs – The Atlantic Cities
Big Brother scariness taken to the nth…
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Capable of geo-locating smart phone and computer users across the city, Seattle acquired its “mesh network” the same way other cities got theirs: the Department of Homeland Security helped pay for it, a private contractor built it, and the city council approved it without public debate. Then The Stranger ran a lengthy exposé in which a member of the Seattle PD responded to a question about rules governing the use of the mesh network by saying, “[We’re] not comfortable answering policy questions when we do not yet have a policy.” (The Stranger also published a list of questions the Seattle PD refused to answer.) Roughly a week later, Seattle PD Sgt. Sean Whitcomb told the alternative weekly, “The wireless mesh network will be deactivated until city council approves a draft policy and until there’s an opportunity for vigorous public debate.”
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The Beatles Succeeded Through Talent, Ambition, and a Lot of Arrogance – The Daily Beast
Love it just for its take-down of Malcolm Gladwell. (The rest of the article is good, too!)
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On a basic factual level, Gladwell doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about. Contrary to his claim in Outliers, the Beatles didn’t have to wait until 1964 to enjoy “their first burst of success.” They scored their first top 20 hit in late 1962 and their first number one single in either February or May of 1963, depending on which chart you consult; as of New Year’s Eve, they had notched two additional U.K. chart toppers and sold nearly 300,000 copies of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in the U.S. By the time 1964 began, Beatlemania was blossoming on both sides of the Atlantic.Gladwell seems confused by his own statistics, too. According to Lewisohn, The Beatles played roughly 1,110 hours of music in Hamburg, the equivalent of three hours every night for a full year; when Gladwell writes that they “performed live an estimated twelve hundred times [emphasis mine],” he’s either mixing up his measurements or claiming that the Beatles averaged more than one show per day from the time they went professional until the day they invaded America. The former seems much more likely. Finally, the Beatles weren’t the only act to play endless hours in Hamburg. So did Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Tony Sheridan, who landed in Germany before the Beatles and stayed on long after they left. None of them became the Fab Four.
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The Internet Ideology: Why We Are Allowed to Hate Silicon Valley – Debatten – FAZ
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If Ronald Reagan was the first Teflon President, then Silicon Valley is the first Teflon Industry: no matter how much dirt one throws at it, nothing seems to stick. While “Big Pharma,” “Big Food” and “Big Oil” are derogatory terms used to describe the greediness that reigns supreme in those industries, this is not the case with “Big Data.” This innocent term is never used to refer to the shared agendas of technology companies. What shared agendas? Aren’t these guys simply improving the world, one line of code at a time?
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Evgeny Morozov im Gespräch: Es ist lächerlich, das Internet erklären zu wollen! – Debatten – FAZ
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Leute, die bezahlt werden, das Internet zu studieren, bekommen im Grunde ihr Geld nur, um dessen Logik, Vokabular und Weltsicht zu perpetuieren. Es ist lächerlich, das Internet erklären zu wollen. Was erklärt werden müsste, ist das beständige Bedürfnis, das Internet zu erklären, als wäre es eine theologische Kraft mit Bedeutung. Eine selbsternannte Priesterklasse hat sich formiert, um das Wesen und die Auswirkungen des Internets zu erklären. Ich halte das für ein moralisches Denken und Reden, das man besser vermeiden sollte.
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Evgeny Morozov on Why Our Privacy Problem is a Democracy Problem in Disguise | MIT Technology Review
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Simitis knew even in 1985 that this would inevitably lead to the “algorithmic regulation” taking shape today, as politics becomes “public administration” that runs on autopilot so that citizens can relax and enjoy themselves, only to be nudged, occasionally, whenever they are about to forget to buy broccoli.Habits, activities, and preferences are compiled, registered, and retrieved to facilitate better adjustment, not to improve the individual’s capacity to act and to decide. Whatever the original incentive for computerization may have been, processing increasingly appears as the ideal means to adapt an individual to a predetermined, standardized behavior that aims at the highest possible degree of compliance with the model patient, consumer, taxpayer, employee, or citizen.
What Simitis is describing here is the construction of what I call “invisible barbed wire” around our intellectual and social lives. Big data, with its many interconnected databases that feed on information and algorithms of dubious provenance, imposes severe constraints on how we mature politically and socially.
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The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
November 17, 2013 at 5:43 pm | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
Project MUSE – Reconstructing the Subject: Modernist Painting in Western Germany, 1945-1950 (review)
Reread this great review of my 1995 book the other day; had to bookmark it, even if I am tooting my own horn here!
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Inside the deliberately circumscribed limitations of her topic, Yule Heibel makes a profoundly sophisticated contribution to scholarship on post-World War II art history. Concentrating on German artists’ and critics’ efforts to reestablish viable cultural practices, she turns her evaluation of the relatively minor painter Nay into a discussion that has implications for a great range of visual art produced after 1945.
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DRM in Cars Will Drive Consumers Crazy | Electronic Frontier Foundation
This is frightening. A car where you have to rent the battery (i.e., you don’t own the whole vehicle), and if you let your contract lapse, it stops working?
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As our friends at iFixit say, if you can’t fix it, you don’t own it. Users need the right to repair the things they buy, and that is incompatible with blanket restrictions on circumventing DRM.
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By 2017, your smartphone will be smarter than you | SmartPlanet
Creepy. (Reading about this while reading Dave Eggers’s The Circle just makes me want to hurl…)
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By adding an array of features to mobile devices including GPS trackers, cameras, apps and sensors that can improve and record our daily lives and browsing habits, the addition of personal cloud computing gives applications the opportunity to acquire knowledge over time and predict what we need and want in real-time.
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Indoor Location Technology Uses Wi-Fi to Track Shoppers | MIT Technology Review
This is the stuff that Evgeny Morozov RIGHTLY would call creepy…
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You’ve just tossed a jar of peanut butter in your grocery cart when your smartphone buzzes. You glance down at the screen to see a message that seems downright clairvoyant: Buy some jelly. Get $1 off.Convenient? Certainly. Creepy? Maybe.
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A City With No Children – Kaid Benfield – The Atlantic Cities
Sad state of affairs:
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Saratoga Springs in New York made national news some years ago when a middle school refused to admit a student who, on national Bike to Work day, bicycled to school with his mom. On the other side of the country, Laguna Beach’s schools declined to join the other 425 in California who participated in Walk to School Day in 2010 because walking to school, the decision-makers determined, was inherently unsafe, no matter how coordinated and supervised.
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Saudi Bike by Nicole Gelinas – City Journal
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Girls don’t ride bikes, Wadjda hears repeatedly from her mother and her (all-female) teachers. Such a ban isn’t superfluous from the point of view of controlling society; one feels independent and in charge when pedaling a bicycle, a state of mind that an authoritarian government frowns upon. But as Wadjda secretly practices her balance on Abdullah’s bike, she grows more determined to get one of her own. Her desire for spokes and wheels grows as she begins to realize everything else that girls and women aren’t permitted to do. She’s reaching the age where teachers want her to drape her face and hair on her way to school, lest she pose too much of a temptation to the catcalling men she meets along the way.
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Complete Streets: It’s About More Than Just Bike Lanes
Great video.
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The truth is, no matter how hard some media outlets try to spin it otherwise, these new street safety projects have broad community support. And while the story of these changes often gets simplified in the press, the fact is that the benefits of the redesigns go far beyond cycling. A street with a protected bike lane also has less speeding, shorter pedestrian crossings, less lane-shifting and more predictable movements for drivers, and the opportunity to add more trees and plantings. Injuries to pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and car passengers drop wherever the new designs go in. And on the East Side, these improvements have been paired with dedicated bus-only lanes with camera enforcement, making service more convenient and attractive for thousands of bus riders.
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The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
November 11, 2013 at 3:50 pm | In links | 2 Comments-
Mobile Computing Puts the Location Back in Retail | MIT Technology Review
The whole article is super interesting, but this bit especially:
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Yet the offline environment is actually more important when consumers connect through a mobile device. With colleagues including Sang Pil Han of the City University of Hong Kong, we studied 260 users of a South Korean microblogging service similar to Twitter. What we found was that behavior on the small mobile screen was different from behavior on the PC. Searching became harder to do, meaning that people clicked on the top links more often. The local environment was also more important. Ads for stores in close proximity to a user’s home were more likely to be viewed. For every mile closer a store was, smartphone users were 23 percent more likely to click on an ad. When they were on a PC, they were only 12 percent more likely to click close-by stores.
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What makes a building ugly? The failure to become a place | MNN – Mother Nature Network
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You might sit for a drink at the stylish café on Medienhafen, gazing in wonder at Frank Gehry’s incomparable forms and all the rest of it. But then, acting on countless hidden cues in the context of those who don’t do context, you feel compelled to move on. In the Altstadt, though, you want to linger. You decide on one more Altbier, you follow the flow of the crowd down this street or that one, you find a comfortable spot down on the riverfront and stay later than you planned, sinking deeper into a conversation with a friend or reading another chapter of the book you brought. You disappear into the context. You become context.
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Norman Rockwell’s New England – NYTimes.com
Not a fan of Rockwell’s work, but Solomon’s article has lots to think about: depression, New England, the “national” character (or at least its regional variant)…
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I thought of his [Robert Frost’s] poem “Mending Wall,” in which the speaker recounts his impatience with his next-door neighbor, who each spring mends the stone wall separating their properties. The neighbor insists, “Good fences make good neighbors,” which, frankly, is not the most inspiring proverb. Certainly there are more important things to endorse in this world than distance and standoffishness.But the wall-building neighbor represents another New England, not the caring and concerned Rockwellian society where people gain strength from their neighbors and look each other in the eye when they talk. No, this was the Frost version, in which townspeople went out of their way to put up barriers, where neighbors electrify fences. I suppose the Frost version is closer to everyday life in America than the idealized Rockwell version. But then “art is no less real for being artifice,” as the critic Clive James once observed, and Rockwell clearly dwelled in the kingdom of his imagination.
In October of 1953, Rockwell and his wife abruptly left Vermont. They moved to western Massachusetts, to Stockbridge. It, too, seemed on the surface like a perfect New England town, with tranquil pastures and grazing cows. What few people realized is that Rockwell moved to Stockbridge to live near the Austen Riggs Center psychiatric hospital. His wife already was an inpatient there, and he was an outpatient. In his final months in Vermont, he had begun seeing the legendary psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, a German-born intellectual who coined the phrase “identity crisis.”
In the ’50s, Rockwell continued to paint pictures of a mythic New England, where contentment and community ties prevailed. But the national unity bred by World War II was already unraveling. The growing inclination among Americans was to define their battles in psychological terms rather than in political ones.
Over the years, their searching gave rise to yet another image of New England, one that had little in common with that of Rockwell, Frost or Grandma Moses. Rather, in James Taylor’s telling, New England was a place where people had nervous breakdowns and openly bemoaned their sorrows. He sang of it in 1970 when he described “the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston,” “covered with snow,” with 10 miles behind him and 10,000 more to go.
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In Nihilism We Trust — I.M.H.O. — Medium
Thoughtful; important read. Agree with the author’s characterization of shows like Breaking Bad as “nihilism porn”…
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There were only so many times I could be told that Breaking Bad was the most amazing show on television before I finally overcame my lack of desire to see Bryan Cranston as anything other than Hal/Tim Whatley and gave the show a go. Though it took a similar process for me to finally start watching The Wire, a show that I could not stop watching and immediately became obsessed with, I found instead that I not only did not want to keep watching Breaking Bad, but that I had to force myself to go through the agony of watching more. From the acting to the storyline to the cinematography, I can certainly see why so many would marvel at the show’s accomplishments, but at the same time I cannot get over what to me appears to be the core of the show, a core that I fear is actually what most of the audience is truly marveling at, the core that I will refer to as nihilism porn.From episode to episode Cranston’s Walter White “broke bad,” but once the terminal cancer and fear for his family’s well-being was revealed to be a red herring as motivation, the true motivation of his descent seemed instead to be: I can, therefore I will. Likewise, the audience’s motivation for watching seemed to be: He can, therefore I will. Walt can let a girl die, I can watch. Walt can poison a child, I can watch. Walt can lie, I can watch. Walt can torture his wife, I can watch. Yet this worked both ways, for the writers of the show operated under a similar imperative: They can watch, therefore we will give them a Walt worth watching. To see Hal kill, to see Whatley destroy, is apparently what the audience wanted and it is definitely what the audience got.
I bring this up not to suggest that we have become distrustful because we have been traumatized by this television show, but rather that the success of the show reveals just how untraumatized we are. Death and destruction were not a cause for alarm but were a cause célèbre. If anything, this seemed to be the show’s point: We want to see a nice sitcom dad as a possible meth dealer, we want to see an annoying dentist as a possible crime kingpin. Why do we want these things? Because we’re desensitized to violence? Because we’re bored by sitcoms? Maybe it’s because we have not lost our faith, but rather have re-discovered it, a faith in He did, therefore I could.
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Once And For All: Tech is Not a Meritocracy | Lauren Bacon
This.
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Lest the conference organizers think I’m putting all the responsibility on them for those all-male speaker lineups (and let me just reiterate that I’m not just talking about conferences here—this applies to hiring, promotions, compensation, status—in short, all the ways we rank people professionally), there’s a whole other side to this, which is the stuff that prevents women, non-white people, and other marginalized groups from entering into “meritocratic” competitions in the first place.
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Ta-Nehesi Coates and Hendrik Hertzberg at MIT on opinion journalism | … My heart’s in Accra
Ethan Zuckerman live-blogged the conversation (intro’d and moderated by Tom Levenson) between Ta-Nehesi Coates and Hendrik Hertzberg at MIT on 10/29/13. Interesting point re leadership, politics, and its failures …and consequent shift of blame onto media:
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Levenson persists: as a science writer, he’s seen the polling shift on climate change and wonders to what extent that shift (away from a belief in human-influenced climate change) is the responsibility of opinion journalism. Hertzberg notes that the blame is more properly placed on the political system. If we’d not faced filibuster, we’d have had a cap and trade system for carbon emissions. How can we take climate change seriously if our government doesn’t do anything about it? “Our politican institutions can’t give us what we want, and eventually we stop wanting it. We blame the failure on the media,” rather than on the actual machinery of government that is supposed to solve our problems. Hertzberg explains that the filibuster is his “unified field theory” – he writes about it as much as his editors will allow him to.
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The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
November 3, 2013 at 12:25 pm | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
10 Most Bada** Comic Book Heroines (IMAGES) | Mike Madrid
Love the illustration for Betty Bates, Lady-at-Law (ha!). As she slugs a perp (knocking his gun out of his hand in the process), she tells him,”I’ll teach you to lie to a reputable attorney!” Needless to add, not one of her hairs is out of place. Sigh. 😉
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…Betty Bates, Lady at Law, a beautiful but tough attorney with jiu-jitsu skills. This lady lawyer spent more time investigating cases than she did in the courtroom, and often wound up taking the law into her own hands. Two-fisted Betty hadn’t completely left her working class roots behind, and wasn’t afraid to punch a crook in her role as “purveyor of justice.” Eventually Betty became a crusading district attorney and enjoyed one of the longest careers for a female hero, appearing in “Hit Comics” for an impressive run from 1940-50.
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The Snowden Leaks and the Public by Alan Rusbridger | The New York Review of Books
Must-read article.
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We have begun to glimpse how it’s all being done. The NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters), work closely with Internet service providers and telecom companies to amass enormous quantities of data on us. Some of it is done through the front door—formal legal requests. Some of it is done “upstream” of tech companies and phone companies—i.e., intercepting signals in transit. The agencies have attached probes to transatlantic cables, enabling them to vacuum up data on millions of users on both sides of the Atlantic. By last year GCHQ was handling 600 million “telephone events” each day, had tapped more than two hundred fiber optic cables, and was able to process data from at least forty-six of them at a time.We have also learned about how the agencies have spent vast sums of money on subverting the integrity of the Internet itself—weakening its overall security in ways that ought to concern every individual, public body, or company that uses it. A trapdoor that lets the NSA into your messages is, most cryptologists agree, quite exploitable by others. If you’re anxious about your bank details or medical records sitting online, you’re probably right to be.
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The New Economy Is Indentured TaskRabbits — Daily Intelligencer
More on the wretched temp economy:
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Surowiecki doesn’t say this, but the “world of work” isn’t just “changing.” Like ice floes and Miley Cyrus, its changes over time are the product of human intervention. In this case, the human error has been a jobs-destroying financial crisis, short-sighted fiscal policy, a credit crunch, and a well-funded deficit-reduction movement that has drawn attention away from the jobs crisis. If these things hadn’t happened, we might not be in the position of needing to mortgage decades of future earnings for the chance at a one-time loan. We’d work hard at full-time jobs with benefits, get fixed-rate loans when we needed to buy stuff, and keep our wages for ourselves once the loans were paid off.
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Slaves of the Internet, Unite! – NYTimes.com
So damn true. And as for professors writing books about gift economies, no matter how eloquently: it’s easy enough to wax poetic about gift economies when you have the assurance of a tenured job that provides a regular salary…
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I have read Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift,” and participated in a gift economy for 20 years, swapping zines and minicomics with friends and colleagues, contributing to little literary magazines, doing illustrations for bands and events and causes, posting a decade’s worth of cartoons and essays on my Web site free of charge. Not getting paid for things in your 20s is glumly expected, even sort of cool; not getting paid in your 40s, when your back is starting to hurt and you are still sleeping on a futon, considerably less so. Let’s call the first 20 years of my career a gift. Now I am 46, and would like a bed.
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I’d like to add that someone once told me that if you work for free, you must really hate yourself.
Also, this:
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Practicalities aside, money is also how our culture defines value, and being told that what you do is of no ($0.00) value to the society you live in is, frankly, demoralizing. Even sort of insulting. And of course when you live in a culture that treats your work as frivolous you can’t help but internalize some of that devaluation and think of yourself as something less than a bona fide grown-up.
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Our Fear of Al-Qaeda Hurts Us More Than Al-Qaeda Does – David Rohde – The Atlantic
Too true, all too true.
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Twelve years after September 11, 2001, the United States’ obsession with al Qaeda is doing more damage to the nation than the terrorist group itself.
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L.A’s Sprawling Modernism, and the Places That Came Before – Stephanie Garlock – The Atlantic Cities
“The story of L.A.’s hyper expansion is by now a familiar one. With more than a dozen miles sitting between downtown and the beach, Moeller explains, for the city’s budding school of developers, planners and modern architects, at the beginning of this period “it looked like they had as much space as they wanted.” But within this narrative of expansion and experimentation there is an embedded history of how a feverish pace of building changed the face of a city that was actually far from empty.”
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Big Red & Shiny: Art in the Innovation Hub Part 2
Great to see Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) get featured billing in this thoughtful piece:
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Trevor Smith described artists’ roles as change agents, highlighting their ability not only to create new forms, but to recognize connections between topics and to remix cultural DNA, keeping this DNA “alive in the present tense.”
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Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
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