65 posts tagged with culture and capitalism.
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A Land of Contrasts ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Sinicisation
How China is tearing down Islam [ungated; viz. cf.] - "Thousands of mosques have been altered or destroyed as Beijing's suppression of Islamic culture spreads."[1,2] [more inside]
Is Finland the best place in the world to be a parent?
What the world can learn from childcare in Finland [yt] - "Finland is a world leader when it comes to early years education. Childcare is affordable and nursery places are universally available in a system that puts children's rights at the centre of decision-making. Now the country is applying the same child-first thinking to paternity-leave policies in an attempt to tackle gender inequality in parenting."[1,2,3] [more inside]
The Memory Bank*
A Hidden Currency of Incalculable Worth [ungated] - "We need to start thinking about policies aimed at freeing up time for impoverished families as a form of aid. We could begin by defining a healthy society as one in which everyone has a place to stay, food to eat and time to enjoy the fruits of their labor with those for whom they labor. A living wage should be one in which there is space for something beyond work." [link-heavy FPP! ;] [more inside]
California dreamin' 2 (electric bugaloo ;)
When Did Hospitality Get So Hostile?
In a new era of rage, dining out has become downright volatile — with both customers and servers aggrieved. [slNYT] [more inside]
Abundance: Aplenty for All
Making energy too cheap to meter - "The great slowdown began when we started rationing energy. Restarting progress means getting energy that is so abundant that it's almost free." [more inside]
Practical Utopias from Degrowth Pastoralism to Star Trek Futurism
Why the Age of American Progress Ended [ungated] - "Invention alone can't change the world; what matters is what happens next."[1,2,3,4] [more inside]
Less is more: If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.
It's official: The world's biggest 4-day workweek trial proves there's no reason to work five days a week [ungated] - "The pandemic has proven that our modern notions of how the office and our week should look are not as set in stone as we might think, exposing our ideas of what is needed to ensure productivity. Now that we've discovered that work can be done from home just as effectively, the next step is questioning how many working days are actually needed."[1,2] [more inside]
The Sunflower Movements: Useful Fictions and Consensus Reality
corporate libertarianism v synthetic technocracy v digital democracy: "Yes I think the defining political divides of the 21st century will be roughly captured in the terms laid out by Civilization VI: Gathering Storm Expansion... Current crisis is largely transition from the 20th century mode of fascism v communism v democracy to this." [more inside]
Waiting for the Weekend
Japan proposes four-day working week to improve work-life balance - "The Japanese government has just unveiled its annual economic policy guidelines, which include new recommendations that companies permit their staff to opt to work four days a week instead of the typical five."[1,2,3] [more inside]
Is it time for the four-day work week?
A raise or a four-day week; biggest German union seals new deal - "Germany's largest trade union, IG Metall, agreed a 2.3% wage increase, to be paid either in full or as part of a switch to a four-day week, in a key industrial region, setting the benchmark for 3.9 million metal and engineering workers nationwide."[1] [more inside]
Age of Discord II
Welcome To The 'Turbulent Twenties' - "We predicted political upheaval in America in the 2020s. This is why it's here and what we can do to temper it."[1,2] (via) [more inside]
What we didn't get
Politics is an American industry - "Industries like technology, finance, health care, higher education, and media dominate our collective lives, and yet they are not regulated by anything recognizable as open competition for the custom of decentralized consumers. These industries share some things in common." [more inside]
The chickenization of everything
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (thread) - "Surveillance Capitalism is a real, serious, urgent problem... because it is both emblematic of monopolies (which lead to corruption, AKA conspiracies) and because the vast, nonconsensual dossiers it compiles on us can be used to compromise and neutralize opposition to the status quo."[1,2,3] [more inside]
A blind and opaque reputelligent nosedive
Data isn't just being collected from your phone. It's being used to score you. - "Operating in the shadows of the online marketplace, specialized tech companies you've likely never heard of are tapping vast troves of our personal data to generate secret 'surveillance scores' — digital mug shots of millions of Americans — that supposedly predict our future behavior. The firms sell their scoring services to major businesses across the U.S. economy. People with low scores can suffer harsh consequences."[1] [more inside]
And you thought Tom Nook was the dodgiest capitalist
Art For Libertarians
“I told him that this was the first time I’d been to an exhibition where the majority of the attendees vocally opposed public funding for the arts. He, too, believed that the NEA was a waste of money: given a finite budget, weren’t there many other social welfare programs that deserved the funding more than art? He paused for a moment, before admitting this was a straw-man: “I mean, we don’t think the government should be paying for those either.” Culture Worriers (The Baffler)
Narrative, Fiction and World-Building Reality
Ursula K. Le Guin's Revolutions - "Le Guin's work is distinctive not only because it is imaginative, or because it is political, but because she thought so deeply about the work of building a future worth living." [more inside]
The Chomsky Drop
Noam Chomsky: “Worship of Markets” Is Threatening Human Civilization (Truth Out) An Hour with Noam Chomsky on Fascism, Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, Julian Assange & More (Democracy Now) Current Affairs - A Chat With Chomsky (transcript) “The Task Ahead Is Enormous, and There Is Not Much Time” (Jacobin) There are reasons for Optimism (Catalyst)
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
MANIFESTO (2014-2015): Artist Julian Rosefeldt worked with Cate Blanchett to create monumental video installations distilling and interpreting various artistic manifestos - FUTURISM - DADAISM - POP ART- SURREALISM - FLUXUS - CONCEPTUAL ART, and more
Your Data, Your Money, Your Laws
Your data could be at the centre of the fight against big tech (NYT) - "Furman, a Harvard professor advising the British government on tech regulation, said that rather than relying on antitrust law alone, countries should create a dedicated regulator for the tech industry, to match those covering the banking, health and transportation sectors of the economy. He said a watchdog with expertise in the field could better review a company's behavior and use of data on a case-by-case basis." [more inside]
For I Have Tasted The Fruit
Can video games have an ideology? (Previously on Sim City) Yaz Minsky thinks so: Sid Meier at the End of History: the Philosophy and Politics of Alpha Centauri (58:00) can working on video games have an ideology? On March 4, 2019, three creators—two of the creators of independent video game Night in the Woods, Scott Benson and Bethany Hockenberry, along with prolific artist/musician Wren Farren—announced rather suddenly that they’d established The Glory Society, a new worker cooperative video game studio.
Technology, Law and Political Economy for Humans
How China Is Planning to Rank 1.3 Billion People - "Yet educated, urban Chinese take a positive view, seeing social credit systems as a means to promote honesty in society and the economy rather than a privacy violation, according to a poll by Mercator Institute for China Studies."[1] [more inside]
Economic Possibilities
A Four Day Workweek Could Be Coming to the U.K. (a podcast for work! or leisure ;) - "If you live in the U.K., your workweek could soon be a day shorter if the political winds tilt more heavily toward the left. Jess Shankleman reports on how the proposal is gaining momentum and how it might affect Britain, then Bloomberg Opinion columnist Noah Smith joins host Stephanie Flanders for a deeper look at the economic questions raised by the four-day week."[1,2] [more inside]
Common Wealth and Collective Power
Bernie Sanders' plan to empower workers could revolutionise Britain's economy (among others') - "Giving employees a stake in firms would reshape power: this could be the start of a transatlantic challenge to neoliberalism." [more inside]
Peripheral Belters or Retooling Finance and Tech for Everyone's Benefit
Going to Space to Benefit Earth - "Bezos then went on to discuss his plan to ship humans off of the best planet in the solar system and send them to live in floating cylinders in space." [more inside]
Can you made a whole society wealthier?
This essay is my attempt to explore that question. I look at the ways people have been successful in the past, where their societies invested, who actually got to keep the wealth, and who is trying to copy each strategy today. I touch on Politics, Economics, History, Culture, and Technology — a few of my favourite things — and all play a part in building Wealth. [more inside]
The appropriate place for regulation is where there is market failure
A Regulatory Framework for the Internet - "There are, in Internet parlance, three types of 'free'... Facebook and YouTube offer 'free as in speech' in conjunction with 'free as in beer': content can be created and proliferated without any responsibility, including cost. Might it be better if content that society deemed problematic were still 'free as in speech', but also 'free as in puppy' — that is, with costs to the supplier that aligned with the costs to society?" [more inside]
When there's nothing left to burn you have to set yourself on fire
A New Americanism: Why a Nation Needs a National Story - "The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine; of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome." [more inside]
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
Clock-time no longer measures our temporal relationship to nature, but instead regulates our daily activities in relationship to capitalism. Clocks tell us when we need to go to work, when it’s time for lunch, when we need to wake up, when we really should go to sleep. We don’t do those things when we want to, we do them when others have determined they should be done. Those others aren’t the sun, stars, planets and moon of the pagan and animist worlds, but the bosses, the owners, the managers, and the bankers for whom we work.
A 4 Day Week
The case for a 4-day workweek - "The campaign for the 4-day work week has been a talking point for many British progressive politicians in the Labour Party... Last September, Frances O'Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), made headlines for positioning the 4-day work week as a priority issue for the Labour Party. She emphasized its urgency at the organization's 150th annual gathering, arguing that evolving technology should be cutting the number of hours spent at work." [more inside]
Saudade: Homebrew Retro Games & The Interrogation of Capitalism
It is easy to view retro gaming as regressive. With the arc of history bending towards justice, the past is problematic and its celebration can hurt the vulnerable. Archival efforts are literally conservative. It is impossible for a community which celebrates long dead brands to escape the shadow of consumerism. Despite all of this, portions of the hobby—consciously or not—can be seen as casting doubt on the standard narratives regarding the proper roles of capitalism and politics in the creation of culture. [more inside]
Intersectional sustainable crop science, and GIFs
Dr. Sarah Taber is an aquaponics and agricultural consultant and food safety scientist, Doctor of Plant Medicine, Plant Protection and Integrated Pest Management, and science communicator who's attracted a Twitter following and is writing a book. Following the jump, a collection of links. [more inside]
Organize the Mushroom Kingdom!
Vampire capital, undead labor, toxic assets, and possessed houses
“Gothic Marxism then allows for these texts (Paranormal Activity, Insidious, Sinister, The Purge, Get Out) to be interpreted as sites of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled but solutions to the concerns and material anxieties to which they respond and draw from seem far less evident. The shadow of the crash earlier this century is still haunting popular culture as the development and persistence of these films concerned with the issue of housing goes to prove. Furthermore, these cultural expressions of anxiety reflect the persisting material and political issues still plaguing the ways in which capitalist society handles the question of housing. “ - Your Home May Be Repossessed if You Do Not Keep Up With Your Payments: A Marxist Approach to Post-Recession Horror Film, Jon Greenaway. [more inside]
How to undermine monopoly capitalism's control of our identities
Can blockchain protocols fix the internet? - "Why did the internet follow the path from open to closed? ... A closed architecture like Facebook's or Twitter's puts all the information about its users — their handles, their likes and photos, the map of connections they have to other individuals on the network — into a private database that is maintained by the company." (via) [more inside]
The chronic capitalism of Christmas movies
Elizabeth King : The way Christmas movies tell it, the generosity of individual tycoons is sufficient to mitigate the harms of class inequality. Tanya Gold: All I want for Christmas is a film that doesn’t preach capitalism. Jacqueline Isaacs: A Christmas Carol: A Capitalist Story. Counterpoint: C.D. Carter: ‘Christmas Vacation’ provides a Marxist critique of capitalism.
Neo-Feudal Political Division
Finance isn't just an industry. It's a system of social control - "A system for constraining the choices of other social actors." [more inside]
When Corporations Make History
"The language repeatedly emphasizes consumer choice as particularly important. Residents “prefer to drive alone” and the car became “the option of choice.” But consumers can only choose among the options that are provided to them. The implication here is that people don’t want good public transit, they want GM cars." - Blight At The Museum, how corporate donations are taking control of American history at the Smithsonian.
Fellow prisoners...
In Times of Crisis, find solace and inspiration in the lucid voices of cultural critic John Berger (recently departed) and leading intellectual Noam Chomsky. [more inside]
Dataism: Getting out of the 'job loop' and into the 'knowledge loop'
From deities to data - "For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people... Now, a fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data." [more inside]
Trekonomics
The Economic Lessons of Star Trek's Money-Free Society - "[Manu Saadia] points to technologies like GPS and the internet as models for how we can set ourselves on the path to a Star Trek future. 'If we decide as a society to make more of these crucial things available to all as public goods, we're probably going to be well on our way to improving the condition of everybody on Earth', he says. But he also warns that technology alone won't create a post-scarcity future... 'This is something that has to be dealt with on a political level, and we have to face that.' " (via) [more inside]
Redefining Wealth and Prosperity in the 21st Century
Kennedy was right - "Much that is valuable is neither tangible nor tradable... Gross domestic product (GDP) is increasingly a poor measure of prosperity. It is not even a reliable gauge of production."* [more inside]
Should 'adjustment' be the goal?
In a 'sick' society, sanity is relative - "Is it good to be 'well-adjusted' to rapacious capitalism and consumerism? What defines 'mental health' (or illness) in such a culture?" Is Humanity Getting Better?[1,2] (via)
“I’d rather that everyone… could just stay obscure”
[T]here are immediate practical benefits to trolling. The way we’ve designed the Internet has made the old cliché “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” actually come true. It’s now possible to monetize any kind of attention, good or bad—and if your gift happens to be generating the bad kind of attention, then it’s well within reach to make trolling into a full-time career.
Arthur Chu writes about “The Big Business of Internet Bigotry” for The Daily Beast.
Arthur Chu writes about “The Big Business of Internet Bigotry” for The Daily Beast.
American Experience
Walt Disney - "An unprecedented look at the life and legacy of one of America's most enduring and influential storytellers -- Walt Disney."
The free development of each is the condition of the war against all
Some Paths to the True Knowledge[*] - "Attention conservation notice: A 5000+ word attempt to provide real ancestors and support for an imaginary ideology I don't actually accept, drawing on fields in which I am in no way an expert. Contains long quotations from even-longer-dead writers, reckless extrapolation from arcane scientific theories, and an unwarranted tone of patiently explaining harsh, basic truths. Altogether, academic in one of the worst senses. Also, spoilers for several of MacLeod's novels, notably but not just The Cassini Division. Written for, and cross-posted to, Crooked Timber's seminar on MacLeod, where I will not be reading the comments."
Chinese Christianity
Religion in China: Cracks in the atheist edifice - "Yang Fenggang of Purdue University, in Indiana, says the Christian church in China has grown by an average of 10% a year since 1980. He reckons that on current trends there will be 250m Christians by around 2030, making China's Christian population the largest in the world. Mr Yang says this speed of growth is similar to that seen in fourth-century Rome just before the conversion of Constantine, which paved the way for Christianity to become the religion of his empire." [more inside]
Kim Kardashian doesn't visit Versailles. She is Versailles.
"The work speaks volumes: She is her own best creation, a businesswoman, a brand, a socialite, a TV star, a wife, a mother, and the essential member of a sprawling family who are all getting rich under the umbrella of her fame. But most important, Kim Kardashian works full-time as professional metaphor. " - Rachel Syme on why Kim Kardashian's Hollywood was the most important game of 2014
Whatever Happened To The Metrosexual?
"In reconsidering the metrosexual, we must first distinguish between the metrosexual’s imagined and actual properties. Like hipsterism, metrosexuality is an insult more readily slung than substantiated. According to canon, David Beckham is the ur-metro. Although Beckham initially goes unmentioned in the word’s first printing (in 1994), the word’s progenitor, Mark Simpson, introduced American readers to metrosexuality through the British football star in 2002, when he called Beckham a "screaming, shrieking, flaming, freaking metrosexual…famous for wearing sarongs and pink nail polish and panties…and posing naked and oiled up on the cover of Esquire." " - Johannah King-Slutzky for The Awl on the 'Metrosexual' situation a decade later
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