https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/public/ recent bookmarks from matthewmcvickar 2022-10-16T04:52:13+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/14/kanye-west-keeps-moving-further-and-further-to-the-right-why matthewmcvickarThe problem is, Kanye behaves as if the only real and brave truth tellers today are conservatives with money. He acts as if the rich right wing holds a monopoly on criticisms of the Democratic party or liberal activists. This ignores a host of progressives and radicals – people like Cornel West, Nick Estes, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Mariame Kaba, Aja Monet, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, and too many artists and grassroots organizers to name who criticise the liberal establishment more fiercely than the right and with commitments to end oppression. In fact, entire progressive and radical traditions exist where people of all races offer vigorous critiques of the status quo with surgical precision. We need fewer “free thinkers” and more critical thinkers who ask about these traditions and find their places within them. The question for me is whether billionaire Kanye can ever really know about these robust traditions. Not because he doesn’t already know or will never learn about them, but because to know them is to also learn their critiques of gross wealth accumulation, Black capitalism, desire for imperial leadership, and so much more of what Kanye currently represents. Supporting free thinkers with weak conservative analysis does not threaten his status, land, antisemitic views or bank account.]]> racism america wealth capitalism music https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:2b238a766eae/ 2022-07-15T15:25:43+00:00 https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism matthewmcvickarIn the late modern world something like socialism is the only possible way of embodying Christian love in concrete political practices. --- Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy? […] …where health care in particular is concerned, Americans are slaves thrice-bound: wholly at the mercy of a government that despoils them for the sake of the rich, as well as of employers from whom they will receive only such benefits as the law absolutely requires, as well as of insurance companies that can rob them of the care for which they have paid. […] States depend upon capital for revenues, material goods, and political patronage. Without the support of an omnicompetent, vastly prosperous, orderly, and violent state, global corporate capitalism could not thrive. Without corporations, the modern state would lack the resources necessary to perpetuate its supremacy over every sphere of life.]]> capitalism christianity politics socialism america https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:a527bfed8ba5/ 2022-04-02T21:12:20+00:00 https://slate.com/culture/2022/03/hey-arnold-gentrification-capitalism-millennial-nostalgia-podcasts.html matthewmcvickarArnold wasn’t just a football-headed fourth grader. He was an urban planning pioneer. --- The stories of a group of fourth graders coming of age in the big city at times mimicked the neoliberal objectives of Clinton-era policy: The bullies that Arnold and his friends faced might as well have been the state and private capital, which linked arms in the name of urban renewal while actually threatening the sanctity of working-class life. And although Hey Arnold! did not present itself as a manifesto for a generation that would grow up to cast doubt on the normalcy of capitalist logic, the cartoon did provide a cultural experience that remains salient, 25-plus years on—and one that fans tell me, surprisingly for a cartoon, broached these subjects more blatantly than many are willing to do today. […] Geographers have since explored the long-term deleterious effects of these 1990s schemes. In 2019, for instance, Samuel Stein published Capital City, where he explored how the $217 billion industry that is global real estate follows the movements of a “creative class,” whose members move to poorer neighborhoods after being priced out of more expensive places already overrun by high rent costs. Only then do urban planners see these neighborhoods as “livable”—as Stein puts it, “a euphemism for White people with disposable income”—before tearing down old buildings and erecting new ones that ultimately price out the creative class that made neighborhoods attractive to capital in the first place. […] It’s not so much that Hey Arnold! radicalized millennials in their youth, it seems, but that it infused their inchoate political and social consciousnesses with ways to respond to their material realities later on. A lot of the rhetoric of liberal capitalism—that it is driven by natural turns in the market—was flipped on its head in Hey Arnold. In the show, capitalism was nothing more than the destroyer of fun. It threatened not only the displacement of the city’s working class, but also the places in which young viewers played. And as millennials are now feeling many of the neoliberal structural changes of the 1990s, including being unable to buy homes or even rent in cities, it’s no surprise that the majority of young Americans now look unfavorably upon capitalism—just as their favorite cartoon characters did two decades ago.]]> television capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:cfc530e2a1b4/ 2021-03-25T22:57:05+00:00 https://theintercept.com/2021/03/25/amazon-drivers-pee-bottles-union/ matthewmcvickarAn email that Brown received from her manager this past August has a section titled “Urine bottle” and states: “In the morning, you must check your van thoroughly for garbage and urine bottle. If you find urine bottle (s) please report to your lead, supporting staff or me. Vans will be inspected by Amazon during debrief, if urine bottle (s) are found, you will be issue an infraction tier 1 for immediate offboarding.” While Amazon technically prohibits the practice — documents characterize it as a “Tier 1” infraction, which employees say can lead to termination — drivers said that this was disingenuous since they can’t meet their quotas otherwise. “They give us 30 minutes of paid breaks, but you will not finish your work if you take it, no matter how fast you are,” one Amazon delivery employee based in Massachusetts told me. Asked if management eased up on the quotas in light of the practice, Brown said, “Not at all. In fact, over the course of my time there, our package and stop counts actually increased substantially.” This has gotten even more intense, employees say, as Amazon has seen an enormous boom in package orders during the coronavirus pandemic. Amazon employees said their performance is monitored so closely by the firm’s vast employee surveillance arsenal that they are constantly in fear of falling short of their productivity quotas.]]> amazon labor capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:25d791f526f6/ 2020-10-11T19:58:46+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-racism-african-americans.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article matthewmcvickarTo give just a few, relevant examples, black Americans are more likely to work in service sector jobs, least likely to own a car and least likely to own their homes. They are therefore more likely to be in close contact with other people, from the ways they travel to the kinds of work they do to the conditions in which they live. Today’s disparities of health flow directly from yesterday’s disparities of wealth and opportunity. That African-Americans are overrepresented in service-sector jobs reflects a history of racially segmented labor markets that kept them at the bottom of the economic ladder; that they are less likely to own their own homes reflects a history of stark housing discrimination, government-sanctioned and government-sponsored. If black Americans are more likely to suffer the comorbidities that make coronavirus more deadly, it’s because those ailments are tied to the segregation and concentrated poverty that still mark their communities. […] American capitalism did not emerge ex nihilo into the world. It grew out of existing social, political and economic arrangements, toppling some and incorporating others as it took shape in the second half of the 19th century. White supremacy was one of those arrangements. The Civil War may have destroyed slave society, but the racial hierarchy that was central to that society survived the carnage and disruption of the conflict to shape the aftermath, especially in the absence of a sustained program to radically restructure the social and economic life of the South. […] Which is to say that, as it developed in the United States, industrial capitalism retained a caste system with whites as the dominant social group. This wasn’t just a matter of prejudice. As it did under slavery, race under industrial capitalism structured one’s relationship to both production and personhood. Whiteness, the philosopher Charles W. Mills notes, underwrote “the division of labor and the allocation of resources, with correspondingly enhanced socioeconomic life chances for one’s white self and one’s white children.” […] But if you look at the full picture of American society, it is clear that the structural position of black Americans isn’t so different from what it was at the advent of the industrial age. Race still shapes personhood; it still marks the boundaries of who belongs and who doesn’t; of which groups face the brunt of capitalist inequality (in all its forms) and which get some respite. Race, in other words, still answers the question of “who.” Who will live in crowded, segregated neighborhoods? Who will be exposed to lead-poisoned pipes and toxic waste? Who will live with polluted air and suffer disproportionately from maladies like asthma and heart disease? And when disease comes, who will be the first to succumb in large numbers? If there was anything you could predict about this pandemic — anything you could be certain about once it reached America’s shores — it was that some communities would weather the storm while others would sink under the waves, and that the distribution of this suffering would have everything to do with patterns inscribed by the past. As long as those patterns remain, there is no path to a better society. We have to break them, before they break us.]]> racism america capitalism covid19 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:04a2209ed827/ 2020-08-13T17:19:41+00:00 https://www.democracynow.org/2020/6/12/angela_davis_2020_race_biden_trump matthewmcvickarAMY GOODMAN: We only have two minutes, and I want to get to the election. When I interviewed you in 2016, you said you wouldn’t support either main-party candidate at the time. What are your thoughts today for 2020? ANGELA DAVIS: Well, my position really hasn’t changed. I’m not going to actually support either of the major candidates. But I do think we have to participate in the election. I mean, that isn’t to say that I won’t vote for the Democratic candidate. What I’m saying is that in our electoral system as it exists, neither party represents the future that we need in this country. Both parties remain connected to corporate capitalism. But the election will not so much be about who gets to lead the country to a better future, but rather how we can support ourselves and our own ability to continue to organize and place pressure on those in power. And I don’t think there’s a question about which candidate would allow that process to unfold. So I think that we’re going to have to translate some of the passion that has characterized these demonstrations into work within the electoral arena, recognizing that the electoral arena is not the best place for the expression of radical politics. But if we want to continue this work, we certainly need a person in office who will be more amenable to our mass pressure. And to me, that is the only thing that someone like a Joe Biden represents. But we have to persuade people to go out and vote to guarantee that the current occupant of the White House is forever ousted.]]> voting democracy america trump capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:41cb4250f94e/ 2020-05-26T16:38:31+00:00 https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/04/28/why-are-farmers-destroying-food-while-grocery-stores-are-empty/ matthewmcvickarTurns out letting "efficient" monopolies control our food supply was a terrible idea. --- “If you pull out one little thing in that specialized, centralized, consolidated chain, then everything crashes,” said Mary Hendrickson, a rural sociology professor at University of Missouri. “Now we have an animal welfare catastrophe, an environmental catastrophe, a farmer catastrophe, and a worker catastrophe altogether, and we can trace a lot of this back to the pursuit of efficiency.”]]> farming food capitalism covid19 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:4d0a012be615/ 2020-05-18T00:02:20+00:00 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/venessawong/grubhub-phone-order-call-fee-coronavirus matthewmcvickarCustomers trying to avoid online delivery platforms like Grubhub by calling restaurants directly might be dialing phone numbers generated and advertised by those very platforms — for which restaurants are charged fees that can sometimes exceed the income the order generates. […] Here’s how phone fees work: Grubhub (which also owns Seamless, MenuPages, Tapingo, and LevelUp) generates a unique phone number for each restaurant on its platform; it appears on the restaurant’s Grubhub or Seamless page and redirects to the restaurant's own phone line (a restaurant cannot list its own phone number on its Grubhub or Seamless page). The redirect number can also appear higher in Google search results (including the Google panel for that business) than the restaurant’s own line. This leads some customers to call it even if they don’t intend to use Grubhub.]]> economics capitalism gigeconomy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:2dd6385c66b9/ 2020-05-17T23:59:03+00:00 https://themargins.substack.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage matthewmcvickarThese platforms are all losing money. Just think of all the meetings and lines of code and phone calls to make all of these nefarious things happen which just continue to bleed money. Why go through all this trouble? Grubhub just lost $33 million on $360 million of revenue in Q1. Doordash reportedly lost an insane $450 million off $900 million in revenue in 2019 (which does make me wonder if my dream of a decentralized network of pizza arbitrageurs does exist). Uber Eats is Uber's "most profitable division” 😂😂. Uber Eats lost $461 million in Q4 2019 off of revenue of $734 million. Sometimes I need to write this out to remind myself. Uber Eats spent $1.2 billion to make $734 million. In one quarter. Amazon just bailed on restaurant delivery in the U.S. What is it about the food delivery platform business? Restaurants are hurt. The primary labor is treated poorly. And the businesses themselves are terrible. […] A few months ago, in the pre-pandemic times, I was at an East Village pizza place and watched as the owner was arguing with a Doordash driver. The owner insisted the driver take the pizza in a heated bag so the customer didn’t get cold pizza, but leave an ID so the driver would be compelled to return the bag. The driver argued the amount of time it would take to come back to return the bag would mean he couldn’t make enough deliveries to “pay my rent”. #Innovation.]]> economics capitalism gigeconomy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:fb768170e4f2/ 2020-04-25T15:32:33+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/apr/23/spotify-tip-jar-musicians-pay-fans-donate-artists matthewmcvickarFans can now donate to their favourite artists via Spotify, but this feature is a tacit admission that the firm undervalues the musicians that make it viable. --- Spotify’s method of generating the premium subscriptions that will turn it a profit was canny: draw people in with an excellent user experience and relatively light advertising in the free version during its early years, then ramp up the advertising to near-intolerable levels and wait for users to cave in to spending a tenner a month. Many casual music fans are now spending money more regularly on music than they did in the download or CD era. But the nature of the exchange has utterly changed: people are not paying for music but for a lack of advertising. The music is available either way. This is why the inclusion of the “tip jar” button is such a slap in the face for artists: it’s being initiated by the very service that helped to break the link between art and money. By paying royalties via both ad-funded and paid-for streams, Spotify has taken the onus off the consumer to pay the artist, and then, via low royalty payments, quietly eroded the monetary value in music that consumers and labels once propped up. The tip jar, while helping to replace lost touring earnings, is a tacit admission that artists are not being paid enough by the very service offering it – a similar admission was made by Amazon on Thursday in revealing that it paid £250,000 to a coronavirus hardship fund for authors. […] For consumers, Spotify’s staggeringly vast and high-quality library remains one of the greatest things to have ever happened in music, but it is nothing without the artists who add to that library every day. Maybe subscriptions should cost more – the competitiveness between the streaming companies has forced down the value of music, and this now perhaps needs correcting. That would require a recalibration of how we value music, and it would need Spotify and its competitors to lead it. For now, donate to your favourite musicians, buy their T-shirts, cherish their artistry, and never let the company that built an empire from their labour off the hook.]]> spotify musicindustry capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:fc36f870befd/ 2020-04-24T17:34:47+00:00 https://medium.com/@matdryhurst/interdependent-music-vs-independent-music-ba265e2ea996 matthewmcvickarIndependent music: • Listeners rent music for pennies on streaming platforms • Artists rent listeners for ad dollars on ad platforms • Isolated artists make tunes in their bedrooms for isolated listeners in their bedrooms • “Hustle” myth makes a virtue of being selfish and finessing others • Trickle up attribution (lone genius myth) and compensation models (star makes all the $) • Irreverent of institutions and the archive in favor of individual freedom and ahistoricity • 20th century kitsch individualism • Fracking / short termist Interdependent music: • Listeners pay artists directly on Bandcamp/Patreon/Mixcloud/Currents.fm • Artists own and nurture their contacts and supporters • Artists and audience contribute to global scene ecosystem where the sum is greater than the total of its parts • Humble ethos makes a virtue of being considerate and supporting others • Artists attribute and pay their collaborators • DJs pay the producers whose music they use • Respect the archive and understand strong institutions actually make it possible for individuals to thrive • 21st century democratic socialism • Permaculture / long termist]]> musicindustry music capitalism socialism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:ef8cd7836f06/ 2020-04-23T16:44:50+00:00 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/ matthewmcvickarThe coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken. --- When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category. The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message. Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos. […] The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s. […] Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end. Read: It pays to be rich during a pandemic This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future. […] It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat. The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning. We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.]]> politics trump america health capitalism covid19 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:17daa83544ed/ 2020-04-23T16:35:26+00:00 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kadiagoba/coronavirus-new-york-brooklyn-essential-workers-black-poc matthewmcvickar“We’re telling you that no one should be out here because it’s dangerous, but we’re sending you out there and we’re not giving out any masks.” --- The bus driver, who declined to be named for fear of losing her job, is one of hundreds of thousands of Brooklynites still working essential jobs, even as the borough is hit hard by the coronavirus. Twenty-eight percent of New York City’s essential workers live in Brooklyn — the most in any borough — and the vast majority of them are people of color. In Brooklyn, the number of deaths outpaced those in Queens on Sunday. Brooklyn has more than 2,606 confirmed COVID-19 deaths and 865 “probable” COVID-19 deaths, according to NYC data released April 19.]]> racism capitalism america nyc medicine healthcare covid19 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:c550845910e4/ 2020-04-22T03:45:04+00:00 https://vittles.substack.com/p/vittles-63 matthewmcvickarToday’s newsletter is written by a member of Angry Workers, a collective of people who have dedicated their working lives to changing this system from the inside, observing it and embedding themselves in it, trying to change minds one by one. The member who wrote this has been working at Bakkavor for the last four years and has witnessed first hand how these places operate and are designed to wear workers down, keeping them disempowered. For their safety they have asked to be anonymous. The sacrifice involved to do something like this is beyond the imagination of most of us, even those who organise, so if you wish to support them in any way, even if its just by buying their book, then there are links at the end of this piece on how to help. --- Not all food workplaces are so downtrodden – but there is something about how this kind of work is organised that lends itself to bad behaviour and repressive practices. Firstly, the whole thing about line work is that it enforces a passivity onto you – you have no control over the speed of the line and so you’re always working to someone else’s schedule. You can’t break out of it unless you want to seriously piss off everyone else down the line who’ll be affected if you fuck up or bow out. Being chained to one spot, with no autonomy, slowly robs you of something as the months and years go by. After around four months I realised that my gait had changed, my shoulders slumped forward, I felt more subservient, my fate controlled by the arbitrary commands of some idiot middle manager who thought he was better than me just because he wore a different coloured hairnet. […] Some people think that ‘being unionised’ creates this ‘right situation’, but I think this is naïve. My factory, like many food factories, already has union recognition – but this has hindered, rather than aided, workers’ power. Most workers, especially the women, were still languishing at the bottom end of the wage scale, 16p above the minimum wage. Now the National Minimum Wage has superseded that, so they are on minimum wage again. Having been a member and shop steward within the mainstream unions, I can safely say that the union structures themselves are pretty rotten. Reps are often handpicked either by management or the self-serving incumbent reps. Many reps are managers themselves, undermining the trust workers have in them to be on their side in a dispute against management. Reps are bought off and given perks that make them reluctant to rock the boat. Unions partner with management to preserve their recognition agreements. When the union feels it’s losing its grip on control they suppress workers’ own initiatives. In my factory, the union actively participated in the development of a new skill grading structure that not only divided the workforce, but sold out all the women assembly line workers by regarding them as ‘unskilled’ and putting them on the lowest pay. I came to realise that being in a union and having a real and collective strength in a workplace are two entirely different things. A real collective strength requires encouraging workers’ own actions – for them to start relying on themselves and each other rather than waiting around for ‘the union’ to sort things out for them, and then being disappointed when they don’t. To think about their own power and how to use it directly to put pressure on management, without necessarily having to put their heads above the parapet and be singled out for victimisation. To create their own independent structures. There is strength in numbers, but the workplace is divided in so many ways that this can’t be fixed overnight with a simple call for ‘unity.’ […] It’s worthless to be labelled as ‘heroes’ or even ‘essential’ workers when in reality this doesn’t translate into even a basic level of respect – the expression of which would be higher pay and the confidence to demand better terms and conditions, especially in these scary times. ‘Heroes’ are expected to go above and beyond, and risk their lives for the benefit of others. ‘Heroes’ don’t expect recognition or a wage set to a level that actually corresponds to the social necessity of their work. ‘Heroes’ can just be applauded for their altruistic ways and we don’t have to question a world where people who work in the City, or in advertising, are valued exponentially more – both financially and in terms of social status – than the people who actually make it go round. So let’s ditch all this ‘hero’ talk and instead let’s think about why the people who make the meals you eat, who are on the bottom rungs of the labour market, are really continuing to put their lives at risk. It’s not heroism. They just don’t have a choice.]]> capitalism labor covid19 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:cc4b34913579/ 2020-04-20T05:59:20+00:00 https://www.latimes.com/food/story/2020-04-18/ppp-cares-act-small-business-loan-relief-failure matthewmcvickarThe [Paycheck Protection Program] was supposed to save our small restaurants and businesses. But where's the money? --- The vast majority of the nation’s 30.2 million small businesses have been left flapping in the wind. Meanwhile, the rich get richer. […] Banks, naturally, will profit. Collecting fees ranging from 1% for loans over $2 million to 5% for loans under $350,000, they stand to make billions from the PPP. […] Andy Ricker, the owner and chef of Thai restaurant chain Pok Pok, wrote that his loan application was on hold and that he and other small business owners had been “snookered by publicly traded companies who received millions and left independent small business in the gutter as the well ran dry.” […] Glanville, like James, ticked off all of the boxes. He had an existing relationship with a major bank; he applied the morning the applications went live. If it’s this difficult for those experienced with the banking system, what about business owners without banking relationships or those who face language or cultural barriers? […] Restaurants, more than any other kind of small business in this country, are symbols of promise. They’re frequently opened by immigrants and first-time business owners, non-English speakers, and others simply wishing to feed others and provide for their own families. For many, restaurants and small businesses are the quintessential entrée into the dream of creating a life in America and standing on one’s own two feet. That dream is quickly dying, and our government has been particularly pitiless during this crisis. If we can bail out our bloated airlines, we can bail out our small restaurants. They need money, with few or no strings, and they need it fast. Otherwise, these beloved institutions that give our cities character and drive our economy will go away, and they won’t come back.]]> restaurants capitalism covid19 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:2801919cd0be/ 2020-04-17T16:49:18+00:00 https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-apocalypse-myths/ matthewmcvickarPop culture has been inundated with catastrophe porn for decades. None of it has prepared us for our new reality. --- Capitalism cannot imagine a future beyond itself that isn’t utter butchery. This is because late capitalism has always been a death cult. The tiny-minded incompetents in charge cannot handle a problem that can’t be fixed simply by sacrificing poor, vulnerable, and otherwise expendable individuals. Faced with a crisis they can’t solve with violence, they dithered and whined and wasted time that can and will be counted in corpses. There has been no vision, because these men never imagined the future beyond the image of themselves on top of the human heap, cast in gold. For weeks, the speeches from podiums have suggested that a certain amount of brutal death is a reasonable price for other people to pay to protect the current financial system. The airwaves have been full of spineless right-wing zealots so focused on putting the win in social Darwinism that they keep accidentally saying the quiet bit out loud. The quiet bit is this: To the rich and stupid, many of the economic measures necessary to stop this virus are so unthinkable that it would be preferable for millions to die. This is extravagantly wrong on more than just a moral level—forcing sick and contagious people back to work to save Wall Street puts all of us at risk. It is not only easier for these overpromoted imbeciles to imagine the end of the world than a single restriction on capitalism—they would actively prefer it.]]> media capitalism covid19 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:6ebca5a60409/ 2020-04-16T21:17:57+00:00 https://gen.medium.com/parents-are-not-ok-66ab2a3e42d9 matthewmcvickarThe coronavirus pandemic exposes how even the most privileged households, with two working parents, are struggling to make it work. --- Viruses, or in this case, global pandemics, expose and exacerbate the existing dynamics of a society — good and bad. They are like a fun-house mirror, grossly reflecting ourselves back to us. One of those dynamics is the burden we put on individual parents and families. We ask individuals to solve problems that are systemically created. […] This cannot be solved by tweaks to the schedule, helpful routines, and virtual activities. We have to collectively recognize that parents — and any caregivers right now — have less to give at work. A lot less. The assumptions seem to be that parents have “settled into a routine” and “are doing okay now.” […] It exposes everything from the lack of paid sick leave and parental leave to the fact that the school day ends at 3 p.m. when the typical workday goes several hours longer — yet aftercare is not universally available. And that says nothing of our need for universal health care, irrespective of employment. Parents pour endless energy into solving for systems that don’t make sense and don’t work. […] This current situation is almost prophetically designed to showcase the farce of our societal approach to separating work and family lives. We are expected to work from home full time. And care for our children full time. And we cannot have anyone outside our immediate household help. It can’t work and we all are suffering at the illusion that it does. Our kids are losing out — on peace of mind, education, engagement, the socialization for which they are built. Our employers are losing out, too. Whether the office policy is to expect full-time work or whether, like in my experience, we are offered a lot of flexibility — work is less good, there is less of it, and returns will be diminishing the longer this juggle goes on.]]> parenting education america capitalism covid19 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:d4f795a8026d/ 2020-03-24T16:34:18+00:00 https://longreads.com/2015/01/28/friendship-is-complicated/ matthewmcvickarArt, commerce, and the battle for the soul of My Little Pony. --- Branded toys routinely make more money than the films and cartoons on which they are based—sometimes a lot more—so it’s logical in a way that yes, children’s television shows and movies are basically long, elaborate toy commercials. If they are to provide something, anything, more interesting or positive for children than a siren call to the toy store, any other potential motives—humor, pleasure, an observation on human nature or a philosophical or moral lesson—are incidental to the prime directive of selling toys, lunchboxes, T-shirts, and all the other branded merchandise known in the trade as “CP,” or consumer products. […] In effect, it’s no longer possible to produce mass-market children’s entertainment outside the parameters of “selling out.” […] All the bronies I have met share this effortless camaraderie; some are shyer than others, but basically they are twenty-somethings with the simple, unaffected friendliness of 5-year-olds. […] There’s a temptation to reckon the attempts of artists like Lauren Faust to create entertaining and meaningful shows within the straitjacket of corporate commerce as entirely futile, hopeless. A mug’s game. But then I remember the Grand Galloping Gala in full swing. In time the techno music was blasting and a throng of kids massed together in the center of the dancefloor, dressed in cosplay pony ears and swishing tails and all sorts of homemade cartoon finery, pogoing, and suddenly it became clear that they were all chanting together. Evan, I said. Are you hearing what they’re chanting. He’s all, What is it? It was this: “Friendship! Friendship! Friendship!”]]> art capitalism media television children https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:9ba00e9f8064/ 2020-03-24T16:32:21+00:00 https://popula.com/2019/03/19/this-call-may-be-monitored/ matthewmcvickarHow did a person grow up in a society governed by financial institutions and never get taught how they work? --- Navigating life in this century revolves around our ability to interact with an interlocking series of bureaucracies run according to their own precise rules and delicate timescales. No matter how consumer-focussed these institutions are or deem themselves to be, you will, in the end, have to follow their procedures in order to perform tasks that are essential, unavoidable, or necessary stops in the pursuit of your own happiness. We all know that we often need to look out for our elderly friends, neighbours, and relatives, who learned to navigate a very different maze, and sometimes struggle to keep up with the rules of this one. That’s because it’s hard. It’s a complicated business. And we all know how rubbish a bad interaction with a corporation makes us feel. The recurring term, chosen spontaneously by thousands of callers, is nightmare. […] This inner machinery reveals the billions of ordinary “consumers” who use Facebook to be Romans in their baths: enjoying the futuristic technology of adjustable plumbing and heating, blissfully unaware of the Thracian slave shovelling coal into a boiler just a few feet below. Except, in this case, the facility we are all using and responsible for keeping alive influences elections, convinces people to join the far right, pushes Britain to leave the European Union. […] As stable work has started to disappear, call centre work and other customer service has remained one of the best options for entry-level work. Nearly everyone in my office works there because they needed stable hours and a guaranteed income, and nothing else available to us offered those things. Nearly everyone is under 30. And as impenetrably designed digital services take the place of more and more straightforward face-to-face interactions, more and more things will be contested, and thus explained, assessed, queried, and escalated to a payment expert. Maybe you’re cool with that. Personally, it sounds pretty dystopian to me, considering that those interactions are nearly all immiserating. […] If you must contact a bank or an insurer, do so knowing that it has been made impossible by design for you to talk to anyone with real authority. When you scream down the phone you’ve ruined my life, your system error means I can’t get a mortgage, you will rarely if ever be screaming at anyone who could help you. This design places those with power and responsibility safely away from the impact of their actions, and pits two enormous groups of stressed-out working people against each other. Rather than resolve conflicts in a constructive or efficient way, we are forced to abuse and hate each other as proxies. […] If somebody has to be traumatized in order for Facebook to function as a business, then Facebook doesn’t function as a business. If somebody has to be mistreated and dehumanized for a business to function, then it doesn’t. […] I’m not sure if many know this, but a great many people every day, in this society we live in, destroy their finances on Amazon or ASOS, buying four pairs of $200 trainers on credit when they live on minimum wage and support a family. I can’t say how many, all I can say is that I speak to around five of them a day. Who failed them? How did a person grow up in a society governed by financial institutions and never get taught how they work?]]> money capitalism poverty https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:bb08177c53e6/ 2020-03-16T05:32:40+00:00 https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/coronavirus-tsa-liquid-purell-paid-leave-rules.html matthewmcvickarAll over America, the coronavirus is revealing, or at least reminding us, just how much of contemporary American life is bullshit, with power structures built on punishment and fear as opposed to our best interest. Whenever the government or a corporation benevolently withdraws some punitive threat because of the coronavirus, it’s a signal that there was never any good reason for that threat to exist in the first place.]]> america capitalism covid19 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:71dc8c30ceeb/ 2020-03-11T01:28:39+00:00 https://theoutline.com/post/8279/parasite-us-revolutionary-gothic?zd=1&zi=hufwsrvm matthewmcvickarAn emergent genre explores how class conflict is always part ghost story, and how the only answer is insurrection. --- Interpreting Parasite and Us in tandem, regardless of their differences, helps us understand crucial and complicated elements they share. In both movies, the violence enacted by the subterranean specters is emotionally and morally fraught — exactly who deserves to suffer or die like this, and why? Is it doing anyone any good? Once we understand these movies as Revolutionary Gothic, it becomes clear that’s the wrong question. We’d have to start with: Why wouldn’t we expect spectacular violence to erupt from the hidden violence of forcing human beings underground? Why would we expect the ghosts we’ve created not to haunt us? […] Revolutionary Gothic is less about the inevitability of overthrow than the inevitability of rupture, of all that haunts us coming back for a reckoning. These stories don’t try to comfort us with victory; they unsettle us with the implications of ongoing defeat.]]> film capitalism society https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:3fb6457bff4d/ 2020-03-05T16:35:15+00:00 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/against-chill-apathetic-music-to-make-spreadsheets-to matthewmcvickarBackground music was once relegated to elevators and waiting rooms. Now the groundless consumption of music has become omnipresent. --- The idea of purposeful listening—which is to say, merely listening—is becoming increasingly discordant with the way that music is sold to us. […] In March, Warner Music Group’s Arts Division signed a twenty-album distribution deal with the German app Endel. The app’s proprietary algorithm “creates personalized soundscapes to give your mind and body what it needs to achieve total immersion in any task.” The company reports that its technology “is backed by science and uses personal inputs such as time of day, location, heart rate, weather to create custom sound frequencies to enhance one’s mood towards sleep, relaxation and focus.” Though I appreciate Endel’s creators not calling the app’s output “music,” I am nonetheless agog that my fellow-humans are comfortable with a late-capitalist robot voice telling them, “It’s 3:30 P.M. It’s a great time to get some work done,” and then generating electronic sounds designed to propel them deeper into their to-do lists. […] It makes sense that, in 2019, as we grow collectively more uncomfortable with our own quiet, inefficient sentience, we have also come to neglect the more contemplative pursuits, including mindful listening, listening for pleasure, listening to be challenged, and even listening to have a very good time while doing nothing else at all.]]> music capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:21eb58bd9a05/ 2020-03-01T22:28:24+00:00 https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/spread-of-corporate-speak.html matthewmcvickarThe pernicious spread of corporatespeak, or garbage language, as Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley calls this kind of talk. Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. --- In other words, to “parallel-path” is to do two things at once. That’s all. I thought there was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about the phrase’s assumption that a person would ever not be doing more than one thing at a time in an office — its denial that the whole point of having an office job is to multitask ineffectively instead of single-tasking effectively. Why invent a term for what people were already forced to do? It was, in its fakery and puffery and lack of a reason to exist, the perfect corporate neologism. […] But unlike garbage, which we contain in wastebaskets and landfills, the hideous nature of these words — their facility to warp and impede communication — is also their purpose. Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. It is obvious that the point is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide. […] Our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning. Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyperefficiency, while the language of self-empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re doing may actually be trivial, that the reward of “free” snacks for cultural fealty is not an exchange that benefits us, that none of this was worth going into student debt for, and that we could be fired instantly for complaining on Slack about it. When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project — that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institution’s worthiness — it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem. Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves. […] One reason for the uptick in garbage language is exactly this sense of nonstop supervision. Employers can read emails and track keystrokes and monitor locations and clock the amount of time their employees spend noodling on Twitter. In an environment of constant auditing, it’s safer to use words that signify nothing and can be stretched to mean anything, just in case you’re caught and required to defend yourself. […] Usage peeves are always arbitrary and often depend as much on who is saying something as on what is being said. When Megan spoke about “business-critical asks” and “high-level integrated decks,” I heard “I am using meaningless words and forcing you to act like you understand them.” When an intern said the same thing, I heard someone heroically struggling to communicate in the local dialect. I hate certain words partly because of the people who use them; I can’t help but equate linguistic misdemeanors with crimes of the soul. […] The meaningful threat of garbage language — the reason it is not just annoying but malevolent — is that it confirms delusion as an asset in the workplace.]]> business culture language work capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:50f0e37878b8/ 2020-02-18T06:38:09+00:00 https://newrepublic.com/article/156202/silicon-valley-economy-here-its-nightmare matthewmcvickarLow pay, soaring rents, and cities littered with e-scooters. Welcome to the future. --- But what is less widely acknowledged is how the gig economy interacts with other trends in California and forces unleashed by Silicon Valley—rising housing costs, choked infrastructure—to make life hell for those who live at or near the epicenter of America’s technology industry. Together, they constitute a nightmare vision of what the world would look like if it were run by our digital overlords, as they sit atop a growing underclass that does their shopping and drives their cars—all while barely able to make ends meet. […] When Uber and Lyft announced they would guarantee California drivers a $15.60 minimum wage as an alternative to a new law aimed at curtailing gig companies’ misclassification of workers, Chair Ken Jacobs of U.C. Berkeley’s Labor Center found that the pledge was largely an empty one. Once you take into account drivers’ expenses and unpaid time between rides, their true gross wage would be $5.64 per hour. California’s state minimum wage is $12.00 an hour—far more than what rideshare companies were paying after expenses. […] There’s also evidence that Lyft and Uber, the two most popular ridesharing companies, contribute to a decline in public transit ridership. City governments thus have less incentive to invest in more infrastructure, creating still more negative repercussions for poorer communities and communities of color. In November, voters in San Francisco elected to levy a 1.5 percent tax on rideshares, in a bid to incentivize riders to consider public transit. […] The companies say that e-scooters are a “greener” form of transit than cars, but the evidence is underwhelming. One study published in August in an environmental journal, Environmental Research Letters, posited that whatever emissions electric scooters saved were offset by the greenhouse gas that gig workers expended chasing after scooters to perform maintenance and charging duties. The companies also say that e-scooters encourage a more diverse ridership, but San Francisco authorities reportedly found that e-scooter ridership tended to skew male, wealthy, and Caucasian.]]> economics technology capitalism business https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:19b39b9d889f/ 2020-02-18T06:36:44+00:00 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-pitfalls-and-the-potential-of-the-new-minimalism matthewmcvickarJia Tolentino on how the mantra of “less is more,” which obeys a logic of accumulation, hints at genuinely different ways of thinking. --- It is rarely acknowledged, by either the life-hack-minded authors or the proponents of minimalist design, that many people have minimalism forced upon them by circumstances that render impossible a serene, jewel-box life style. Nor do they mention that poverty and trauma can make frivolous possessions seem like a lifeline rather than a burden. Many of today’s gurus maintain that minimalism can be useful no matter one’s income, but the audience they target is implicitly affluent—the pitch is never about making do with less because you have no choice. […] Today’s most popular minimalists do not mention Marx. Sometimes they address the importance of freeing oneself from the dictates of the market. In “Goodbye, Things,” Sasaki writes about the importance of figuring out your minimum required monthly income, and encourages readers to consider the environmental consequences of their life styles. Millburn and Nicodemus write about the joy that comes from choosing to earn less money, even if they avoid discussing the more common situation of having your wages kept low against your will. But they also assure their audience that “capitalism is not broken”—we are. They insist that there’s “nothing wrong with earning a shedload of money—it’s just that the money doesn’t matter if you’re not happy with who you’ve become in the process.” Even these sincere prophets of anti-consumerism are hesitant to conclude that the excessive purchasing of stuff may be a symptom of larger structural problems, or that a life built around maximum accumulation may be not only insufficiently conducive to happiness but actually, morally bad. The worst versions of life-style minimalism frame simplicity not as a worthy end in itself but as an instrument—a tool of self-improvement, or of high-end consumption, or of self-improvement through high-end consumption. It is a vision shaped by the logic of the market: the self is perpetually being improved; its environment is ready for public display and admiration; it methodically sheds all inefficiencies and flaws. This vision also forgoes any recognition that the kind of salvation so many people are seeking can happen only at the level of the system rather than at that of the individual. […] This is, in the end, the most convincing argument for minimalism: with less noise in our heads, we might hear the emergency sirens more clearly. If we put down some baggage, we might move more swiftly. We might address the frantic, frightening, intensifying conditions that have prompted us to think of minimalism as an attractive escape.]]> capitalism minimalism culture consumerism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:c405d7c35133/ 2020-02-18T06:14:47+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/opinion/parasite-movie-oscar-inequality.html matthewmcvickarAmerican popular culture hasn’t caught up to a world where brains and gumption are no match for larger material forces. At least, it hasn’t caught up consciously: “Parasite’s” feting at the Academy Awards — where nominees received gift bags worth more than $225,000 that included gold-plated vape pens — could itself be seen as a decadent satire about inequality. Recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elicited spasms of outraged mockery from the right-wing media when she called the idea of lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps “a joke.” But maybe “Parasite” has struck such a chord because for too many people inequality is turning modern capitalism into not just a joke but a nightmare.]]> film capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:cbf3b93cebde/ 2020-02-18T05:18:04+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/movies/parasite-movie-south-korea.html matthewmcvickarThe movie is the latest South Korean film to pit the haves against the have-nots: see this year’s No. 1 movie there, “Extreme Job,” as well as recent titles like “Burning” and 2013’s “Snowpiercer.” It’s no coincidence that income inequality is a recurring theme in the nation’s cinema. Experts say the films, for the most part big hits at home, capture the essence of Korean sentiments at a time when the country’s income gap continues to widen. South Korea’s income distribution is remarkably lopsided. In 2015, the top 10 percent of South Koreans held 66 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the poorer half of the population held only 2 percent.]]> film inequality capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:eccc061b02f7/ 2019-12-07T16:43:58+00:00 https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/money-is-the-oxygen-on-which-the-fire-of-global-warming-burns?verso=true matthewmcvickarBill McKibben on what would happen if the banking, asset-management, and insurance industries decided to move away from fossil fuels, and on how the financial sector affects climate change. --- Persuading giant financial firms to give up even small parts of their business would be close to unprecedented. And inertia is a powerful force—there are whole teams of people in each of these firms who have spent years learning the fossil-fuel industry inside and out, so that they can lend, trade, and underwrite efficiently and profitably. Those people would have to learn about solar power, or electric cars. That would be hard, in the same way that it’s hard for coal miners to retrain to become solar-panel installers. But we’re all going to have to change—that’s the point. Farmers around the world are leaving their land because the sea is rising; droughts are already creating refugees by the millions. On the spectrum of shifts that the climate crisis will require, bankers and investors and insurers have it easy. A manageably small part of their business needs to disappear, to be replaced by what comes next. No one should actually be a master of the universe. But, for the moment, the financial giants are the masters of our planet. Perhaps we can make them put that power to use. Fast.]]> capitalism climatecrisis https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:c1b6bb93a0aa/ 2019-12-04T20:04:49+00:00 https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/wu-tang-clan-cream-cash-rules-everything-around-me-misunderstood/ matthewmcvickarTwenty-five years after its release, the iconic rap group’s biggest hit remains deeply misunderstood. --- If Deck’s life, at the ripe old age of 22, felt no different inside or outside of prison, Meth’s cries to “get the money” are utterly meaningless. They sound less like a rallying call and more like desperate pleas of escape shouted into a void. Chasing cash, by whatever means available, is the only option for survival, as it rules everything around us—but should it? Should a lack of money make one’s life indistinguishable from prison? These are questions that arise if we’re listening to the song as a whole, but pop success alters the way music is heard. As such, “C.R.E.A.M.” has been stripped for parts: The only aspects of real interest to a mass audience are the use of “cream” as slang for money and the repetition of the hook as an admonishment to work harder, longer, and more ruthlessly in the pursuit of it. The song has become a tool of the unscrupulous system it was meant to expose. By 2014, Drake and JAY-Z were interpolating the hook into their opulent collaboration “Pound Cake” without any semblance of the struggle Wu was rapping about, while Financial Times was using “Cash Rules Everything Around Me” as a headline for a story detailing a select few rappers’ immense wealth. At this point, there’s even a nerdy YouTube tutorial that borrows the acronym to extol the virtues of Google Instant Buy. In this way, “C.R.E.A.M.” has become something like the hip-hop equivalent of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” Right out the gate, Springsteen’s hit was being co-opted into a bland patriotism. After attending one of his concerts in 1984, the conservative columnist George Will wrote: “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings songs about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’”]]> music capitalism hiphop america racism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:f08288ff1316/ 2019-11-03T04:45:12+00:00 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/why-dont-i-see-you-anymore/598336/ matthewmcvickarOur unpredictable and overburdened schedules are taking a dire toll on American society. --- When so many people have long or unreliable work hours, or worse, long and unreliable work hours, the effects ripple far and wide. Families pay the steepest price. Erratic hours can push parents—usually mothers—out of the labor force. A body of research suggests that children whose parents work odd or long hours are more likely to evince behavioral or cognitive problems, or be obese. Even parents who can afford nannies or extended day care are hard-pressed to provide thoughtful attention to their kids when work keeps them at their desks well past the dinner hour. […] What makes the changing cadences of labor most nepreryvka-like, however, is that they divide us not just at the micro level, within families and friend groups, but at the macro level, as a polity. Staggered and marathon work hours arguably make the nation materially richer—economists debate the point—but they certainly deprive us of what the late Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter described as a “cultural asset of importance”: an “atmosphere of entire community repose.” […] Even if you aren’t asked to pull a weekend shift, work intrudes upon those once-sacred hours. The previous week’s unfinished business beckons when you open your laptop; urgent emails from a colleague await you in your inbox. A low-level sense of guilt attaches to those stretches of time not spent working. […] Wall Street demands improved quarterly earnings and encourages the kind of short-term thinking that drives executives to cut their most expensive line item: labor. If we want to alter the cadences of collective time, we have to act collectively, an effort that is itself undermined by the American nepreryvka. A presidential-campaign field organizer in a caucus state told me she can’t get low-income workers to commit to coming to meetings or rallies, let alone a time-consuming caucus, because they don’t know their schedules in advance. Reform is possible, however. In Seattle, New York City, and San Francisco, “predictive scheduling” laws (also called “fair workweek” laws) require employers to give employees adequate notice of their schedules and to pay employees a penalty if they don’t. Then there’s “right to disconnect” legislation, which mandates that employers negotiate a specific period when workers don’t have to answer emails or texts off the clock. France and Italy have passed such laws. It’s a cliché among political philosophers that if you want to create the conditions for tyranny, you sever the bonds of intimate relationships and local community. “Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She focused on the role of terror in breaking down social and family ties in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin. But we don’t need a secret police to turn us into atomized, isolated souls. All it takes is for us to stand by while unbridled capitalism rips apart the temporal preserves that used to let us cultivate the seeds of civil society and nurture the sadly fragile shoots of affection, affinity, and solidarity.]]> labor work america capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:17ead5c6fdf5/ 2019-09-14T23:08:37+00:00 https://popula.com/2019/09/10/less-human-than-human-the-design-philosophy-of-steve-jobs/ matthewmcvickarSteve Jobs was, in short, too much a plutocrat and too little an artist or craftsman to produce an ultimately satisfying appropriation of the warmer, more humane minimalism of the mid-20th century, which had been rooted in a vision of a more egalitarian and fairer world. To what degree do “good design,” or “taste,” depend on human values?]]> design capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:9dd6ae360caa/ 2019-09-05T06:22:56+00:00 https://popula.com/2018/11/11/amazons-endangered-species-world-culture/ matthewmcvickarIt might not sound like much, but text-string searches represent the lowest impediment to the free flow of information. To be able to search a whole giant corpus at will for the needle of your desire in the Brobdingnagian cultural haystack means that your personal interests needn’t take a back seat to corporate imperatives of any kind. Full, absolute text searches should be the goal for all searchable databases. […] American business practice in our time consists not only in offering an attractive product, but also in throwing as many spanners as possible into the works of your competitors. The goal is not to become one among many, but to crush all alternatives. This may explain why, in the first dot-com boom that began in the mid-1990s and ended in April of 2001, so much money went to the acquisition and eventual strangling of so many promising mom-and-pop online startups. These businesses must not be allowed to grow, or they must be acquired, in order that markets might be captured by those who’d attracted the most power in the form of capital—not through any particular excellence of product, or of management. With the results that you see all around you. In the opinion of this former bookseller, Amazon represents a threat to the commons; a threat to libraries; a threat to independent publishing; a threat to an informed, intelligent public.]]> capitalism internet tech https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:f73050547f4e/ 2019-09-04T01:45:30+00:00 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/ matthewmcvickarA small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes. --- “The problem is that software engineers don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve, and don’t care to,” says Leveson, the MIT software-safety expert. The reason is that they’re too wrapped up in getting their code to work. “Software engineers like to provide all kinds of tools and stuff for coding errors,” she says, referring to IDEs. “The serious problems that have happened with software have to do with requirements, not coding errors.” When you’re writing code that controls a car’s throttle, for instance, what’s important is the rules about when and how and by how much to open it. But these systems have become so complicated that hardly anyone can keep them straight in their head. “There’s 100 million lines of code in cars now,” Leveson says. “You just cannot anticipate all these things.” […] Programmers were like chess players trying to play with a blindfold on—so much of their mental energy is spent just trying to picture where the pieces are that there’s hardly any left over to think about the game itself. […] “Human intuition is poor at estimating the true probability of supposedly ‘extremely rare’ combinations of events in systems operating at a scale of millions of requests per second,” he wrote in a paper. “That human fallibility means that some of the more subtle, dangerous bugs turn out to be errors in design; the code faithfully implements the intended design, but the design fails to correctly handle a particular ‘rare’ scenario.”]]> programming software engineering safety capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:c2bb6322f456/ 2019-08-21T16:32:43+00:00 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work matthewmcvickarThe more I tried to figure out my errand paralysis, the more the actual parameters of burnout began to reveal themselves. Burnout and the behaviors and weight that accompany it aren’t, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It’s not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments. And it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives. That realization recast my recent struggles: Why can’t I get this mundane stuff done? Because I’m burned out. Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us. […] Those expectations encapsulate the millennial rearing project, in which students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about. Whether that job is as a professional sports player, a Patagonia social media manager, a programmer at a startup, or a partner at a law firm seems to matter less than checking all of those boxes. Or at least that’s the theory. So what happens when millennials start the actual search for that holy grail career — and start “adulting” — but it doesn’t feel at all like the dream that had been promised? […] The crisis affected everyone in some way, but the way it affected millennials is foundational: It’s always defined our experience of the job market. More experienced workers and the newly laid-off filled applicant pools for lower- and entry-level jobs once largely reserved for recent graduates. We couldn’t find jobs, or could only find part-time jobs, jobs without benefits, or jobs that were actually multiple side hustles cobbled together into one job. As a result, we moved back home with our parents, we got roommates, we went back to school, we tried to make it work. We were problem solvers, after all — and taught that if we just worked harder, it would work out. […] “Branding” is a fitting word for this work, as it underlines what the millennial self becomes: a product. And as in childhood, the work of optimizing that brand blurs whatever boundaries remained between work and play. There is no “off the clock” when at all hours you could be documenting your on-brand experiences or tweeting your on-brand observations. The rise of smartphones makes these behaviors frictionless and thus more pervasive, more standardized. In the early days of Facebook, you had to take pictures with your digital camera, upload them to your computer, and post them in albums. Now, your phone is a sophisticated camera, always ready to document every component of your life — in easily manipulated photos, in short video bursts, in constant updates to Instagram Stories — and to facilitate the labor of performing the self for public consumption. But the phone is also, and just as essentially, a tether to the “real” workplace. Email and Slack make it so that employees are always accessible, always able to labor, even after they’ve left the physical workplace and the traditional 9-to-5 boundaries of paid labor. Attempts to discourage working “off the clock” misfire, as millennials read them not as permission to stop working, but a means to further distinguish themselves by being available anyway. […] This is why the fundamental criticism of millennials — that we’re lazy and entitled — is so frustrating: We hustle so hard that we’ve figured out how to avoid wasting time eating meals and are called entitled for asking for fair compensation and benefits like working remotely (so we can live in affordable cities), adequate health care, or 401(k)s (so we can theoretically stop working at some point before the day we die). We’re called whiny for talking frankly about just how much we do work, or how exhausted we are by it. But because overworking for less money isn’t always visible — because job hunting now means trawling LinkedIn, because “overtime” now means replying to emails in bed — the extent of our labor is often ignored, or degraded. […] “To adult” is to complete your to-do list — but everything goes on the list, and the list never ends. […] That’s one of the most ineffable and frustrating expressions of burnout: It takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed. The end result is that everything, from wedding celebrations to registering to vote, becomes tinged with resentment and anxiety and avoidance. Maybe my inability to get the knives sharpened is less about being lazy and more about being too good, for too long, at being a millennial. […] But dumb, illogical decisions are a symptom of burnout. We engage in self-destructive behaviors or take refuge in avoidance as a way to get off the treadmill of our to-do list. Which helps explain one of the complaints about millennials’ work habits: They show up late, they miss shifts, they ghost on jobs. Some people who behave this way may, indeed, just not know how to put their heads down and work. But far more likely is that they’re bad at work because of just how much work they do — especially when it’s performed against a backdrop of financial precariousness. […] The problem with holistic, all-consuming burnout is that there’s no solution to it. You can’t optimize it to make it end faster. You can’t see it coming like a cold and start taking the burnout-prevention version of Airborne. The best way to treat it is to first acknowledge it for what it is — not a passing ailment, but a chronic disease — and to understand its roots and its parameters. […] Personal choices alone won’t keep the planet from dying, or get Facebook to quit violating our privacy. To do that, you need paradigm-shifting change. Which helps explain why so many millennials increasingly identify with democratic socialism and are embracing unions: We are beginning to understand what ails us, and it’s not something an oxygen facial or a treadmill desk can fix. Until or in lieu of a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system, how can we hope to lessen or prevent — instead of just temporarily stanch — burnout? Change might come from legislation, or collective action, or continued feminist advocacy, but it’s folly to imagine it will come from companies themselves. Our capacity to burn out and keep working is our greatest value.]]> millennials capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:048456a86f63/ 2019-08-21T16:29:33+00:00 https://popula.com/2019/08/19/the-case-for-climate-rage/ matthewmcvickarPeople in power have never willingly dismantled the systems that benefit them. Thus David Wallace-Wells earned an eye-popping advance for The Uninhabitable Earth, a book in which he makes some solid and necessary points, and then concludes, in the absence of credible evidence, that “we,” who are responsible for climate change, will solve it with geoengineering; Nathaniel Rich was given a whole issue of the New York Times Magazine in which to wax poetic about “our” failure to stop climate change, a story optioned almost instantly for a book and a film; Jonathan Safran Foer will soon join them with his own version of the “we are all to blame” narrative, We Are the Weather, in which he argues first, incorrectly, that human diets are the primary cause of climate change, and then that “we” need to tackle it by making the necessary lifestyle changes. There are more, believe. The system explicitly rewards these men for visualizing the future as a parallel system that leaves the patriarchal, capitalist pyramid intact. It’s all they know how to imagine, and all the rest of us are permitted to imagine: a future in which the right politicians, coupled with the right scientists and corporate executives, will turn climate change into an opportunity, not a crisis, with jobs and profits for all! It’s an epic saga in which they are the heroes, an apocalyptic sci-fi video game or movie in which a few good men will just get rid of the bad guys in the third act. No need to dismantle patriarchy and white supremacy, envision a different and better way of living, re-think economic and societal structures, or remove power over the fate of humanity from the hands of a self-interested few. […] There was also a lot of talk back then about natural gas stores and how to make them profitable, and eventually US companies developed the technology to do just that (via hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”), and exported it around the world. When other countries said no thanks to contaminating their water sources for the sake of natural gas, U.S. companies said no worries, we’ll frack here and export it. That’s one reason the U.S. became the world’s number-one energy supplier and why, at a time when scientists are saying we need to have started on a path toward zero emissions yesterday, global emissions are climbing. How exactly was the general public supposed to stop that? […] Rather than imagining an industrial or corporate-friendly response to the crisis, what it would look like to shut down fossil fuel production tomorrow? What if conversations about “adaptation” focused on acclimating to that new reality? It matters because the same patriarchal elites have remained comfortably in power for so long that their imaginations are unequal to the task we face. Arguments for civility, for “forgiveness,” for “we’re all in this together”, for a preservation of the status quo with just a few tweaks, won’t keep us all from going over the cliff.]]> capitalism climatecrisis https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:1fe251fe8177/ 2019-08-07T18:41:03+00:00 https://popula.com/2018/07/10/china-silicon-valley-state-surveillance/ matthewmcvickarThe social credit system being developed by China is more like America's tech-surveillance state than many would like to admit. --- […] Recent scandals regarding Facebook, its ties with the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, and the question of user data ending up in private hands should prompt us to ask just how different the Chinese system is from what exists in the United States and other Western countries in terms of the surveillance state. Certainly, restrictions on freedom of movement and political expression remain far more extensive in China, but is China, in fact, “the future”? Sensationalist reporting tends not to note that while the Chinese state may be working toward building the dystopian future, they aren’t there yet. And if we take into account the gap between that totalizing aspiration and the existing surveillance state, we find something that looks more like the United States, as it already is. “China” is still the future in China, as well. […] Telling stories about the _future_ surveillance state with Chinese characteristics only obscures the uneven development of the Technoleviathan that has already arrived. After all, Western banks use an expansive (and unregulated) system of credit scores to evaluate the likelihood of an individual repaying a loan, while credit card companies have long rewarded loyalty with the same kind of kickbacks and other benefits offered through Sesame Credit. […] Is it that we fear only attempts to encourage loyalty to the state? Encouraging loyalty to multinational corporations doesn’t seem as threatening to Americans. Given such disregard for corporate actions, it may not be surprising that outrage against longstanding practices by Facebook exploded only in the wake of the controversy regarding accusations of Russian state interference in American elections. […] While commentators sometimes attribute Chinese economic growth to uniquely Chinese cultural characteristics, they made similar claims regarding the supposedly uniquely Japanese cultural characteristics undergirding the “Japanese economic miracle” (and more broadly pointed to “Asian values” as propelling the rise of the four “East Asian Tigers”). But just as China has long been a latecomer to modernization, and often looks to the West as a model, its economic “rise” could as be seen as its convergence with the already industrialized West. The same is true with technology. […] That the bleeding edge of both surveillance states starts with minority populations that the government deems potential threats only demonstrates the extent to which China continues to take its cues from the US. China has adopted American military rhetoric in order to justify crackdowns on the incipient independence movement in Xinjiang; the claim that China is combating Muslim extremists draws on a discourse of rising global Islamophobia that is largely advanced by America to justify its War on Terror. China similarly appeals to the precedent of American global interventionism, justifying foreign interventions on the basis of defending the international community, much as America has done for decades. […] Western tech companies are not immune to American anxiety about China. But the main difference between Silicon Valley companies and their Chinese counterparts is their illusions about their relation to the state: China has no pretensions about the relation of the state to its powerful Chinese tech companies. If Silicon Valley will not look in the mirror—and if the Western press can see only their own distorted projections—it is possible to see, in China, how free competition between tech companies today will enable the rise of twinned corporatist states. Powerful tech companies supplying the technologies for the state to surveil the lives of citizens in return for being allowed by the state to operate and to profit. ]]> tech china america surveillance capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:cb2b0996fc8d/ 2019-08-07T05:12:12+00:00 https://popula.com/2018/11/18/a-way-out/ matthewmcvickarWhy do nonprofits exist? The generous answer is that society is imperfect: people have needs that the government cannot meet (and that corporations refuse to meet). But the cynical answer is that there’s money to be made in nonprofits. Not for the people actually working at them, of course; they make very little. But for their extremely wealthy patrons, the rich people who want to protect their capital from being taxed and expropriated by the government, nonprofits are not only lucrative—they’re an effective way to provide legitimacy to the ruling class. [...] Meeting the needs of millionaires is not easy. When their needs are vague and undefined—or poorly thought through and unsuited to the needs of local communities—it requires labor and stress (and ulcers) to keep them satisfied. It also requires a great deal of exploitation: the people working the hardest at nonprofits often make the least. People will work themselves to literal sickness chasing vague grant imperatives and using their dedication to The Work as a justification for their physical and mental burnout. The treatment of workers in the nonprofit industry is perhaps its most disturbing feature, and it often goes unnoticed by larger society. There is a confusion, a frustration, that arises when you don’t see society changing at the scale or speed with which you’d like it to, especially when that “change”—however vaguely defined—is your literal job. But as long as nonprofits exist, it will be this way. This is because nonprofits exist to manage the contradictions of capitalism. When you find yourself unable to do that—or unable to deal with everyone around you blindly accepting that the contradictions can only be managed, rather than changed—you simply lose your mind, or the lining of your stomach. In the absence of concrete results—and in my experience, the absence of concrete results begins to look more like the norm than the exception—you start to see the concrete function of the nonprofit sector differently. For all the good intentions it’s paved with, philanthropy is an illusion, a mirage. And it tricks you into accepting (or even embracing) the underlying fact of philanthropic giving: that rich people have a lot of surplus capital, from exploiting and immiserating thousands of lives, and they need somewhere to put it. It doesn’t matter if the millionaire is a Koch brother or an eco-friendly crusader. Vast profits, often the direct spoils of exploitation—the rightfully earned wages denied to workers, or the profits made from poisoning people’s water—are plowed right back into a system that, by design, can never alter the balance of power.]]> activism capitalism politics nonprofit america https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:59df7eae8d06/ 2019-08-02T15:28:41+00:00 https://hmmdaily.com/2019/02/08/do-your-job-like-its-work/ matthewmcvickarHere are my tips for doing time in a cubicle farm.]]> work capitalism labor https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:ca5ea2eba162/ 2019-07-12T16:18:06+00:00 https://slaveryfootprint.org/ matthewmcvickarHow many slaves work for you? There are 27 million slaves in the world today. Many of them contribute to the supply chains that end up in the products we use every day. Find out how many slaves work for you, and take action.]]> slavery capitalism labor https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:873c7c1b3dff/ 2019-03-22T16:45:27+00:00 https://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2019/03/21/0 matthewmcvickarA ton of fiddly expensive-if-you-make-a-mistake labor has emerged or shifted onto the middle class's shoulders, without commensurate logistical, psychological, or financial support for that shift.]]> life millennials capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:01add1584310/ 2019-01-22T19:16:49+00:00 https://gizmodo.com/tag/blocking-the-tech-giants matthewmcvickarReporter Kashmir Hill spent six weeks blocking Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple from getting her money, data, and attention, using a custom-built VPN. Here’s what happened.]]> internet commerce capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:2f13f672a658/ 2018-11-23T00:00:35+00:00 https://theoutline.com/post/6587/nationalize-amazon-make-bezos-our-bitch?zd=1&zi=mqibxi3u matthewmcvickarIs this a realistic demand? Perhaps not yet, but that’s the point. — Amazon gets what it wants by being so big and powerful that it can bring state governments to heel. No one company should have all that power. ]]> america capitalism business industry government taxes https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:1aa55ace7542/ 2018-11-22T23:57:14+00:00 https://theoutline.com/post/6620/ask-a-fuck-up-ashamed-of-being-broke?zd=1&zi=rjx66xno matthewmcvickarTry to remember that your financial and emotional anxiety is a necessary aspect of an economic system that excels at both producing and consuming it: more anxiety means more work for less money... which means more anxiety. It’s a beast that eats its own shit. The fact that you “knew what you were signing up for” by going into a sometimes-noble profession does not make any of this your fault, or in any way diminish your right to feel awful about it. There is no job that grants nobility to economic precarity — struggling does not build character, it serves no one save those who profit from our immiseration.]]> money america capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:2a008c16b048/ 2018-09-24T20:22:13+00:00 https://popula.com/2018/09/20/in-the-dismal-swamp/ matthewmcvickarThough Donald Trump has made it into a catchphrase, he didn’t come up with the metaphor “drain the swamp.”]]> history trump language capitalism imperialism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:f0c9b6a0df7b/ 2018-09-20T07:20:32+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/articles/smartphones-electric-cars-keep-miners-digging-by-hand-in-congo-1536835334 matthewmcvickarSupply chains at Apple, VW and others still include the owner of a mine where workers produce cobalt without safety equipment]]> apple capitalism labor https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:2fab02a8ffff/ 2018-06-08T16:21:42+00:00 https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is-safer-but-it-left-injuries-off-the-books/ matthewmcvickarUndercounting injuries is a symptom of a larger problem: Tesla has put electric car manufacturing above safety concerns, former safety experts say.]]> capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:cf964cdb3a03/ 2018-06-04T18:07:09+00:00 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-united-states-of-japan matthewmcvickarJapan made itself rich in its industrial era by selling things like cars, TVs, and VCRs, but it made itself loved in those Lost Decades by selling fantasies. Hello Kitty, comics, anime, and Nintendo games were the first wave—“the big can-opener,” as the game designer Keiichi Yano put it. Now those childhood dreams haven given way to a more sophisticated vision of a Japanese life style, exemplified in the detached cool of Haruki Murakami novels, the defiantly girly pink feminism of kawaii culture, the stripped-down simplicity of Uniqlo, the “unbranded” products of Muji, and the Japanese “life-changing magic” of Marie Kondo. That these Japanese products are so popular, not only in America but in developed nations around the world, may indicate that we’re all groping for meaning in the same post-industrial haze.]]> japan culture america history capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:c8e3680127e6/ 2018-04-10T19:26:07+00:00 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-09/bitcoin-is-ridiculous-blockchain-is-dangerous-paul-ford matthewmcvickarThe true believers won’t stop until they’ve remade the world. Some of it will be thrilling. Some of it will keep us up at night. [...] What Silicon Valley loves most isn’t the products, or the platforms underneath them, but markets. “Figure out the business model later” was the call of the early commercial internet. The way you monetize vast swaths of humanity is by creating products that people use a lot—perhaps a search engine such as Google or a social network like Facebook. You build big transactional web platforms beneath them that provide amazing things, like search results or news feeds ranked by relevance, and then beneath all that you build marketplaces for advertising—a true moneymaking machine. If you happen to create an honest-to-god marketplace, you can get unbelievably rich.]]> capitalism tech money https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:88fe0e32ffdc/ 2017-06-26T00:15:56+00:00 https://medium.com/@alxpmorgan/the-terrorists-of-capitalism-a-response-to-gary-vaynerchuk-bcf5a2f860d6 matthewmcvickarWe’re being devoured by people infected with the Damnable Trinity of capitalism, white supremacy, and kyriarchy. They are munching on people’s bones and baying to those infernal gods while our blood drips down their faces.]]> capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:99b40d6787b8/ 2017-04-13T15:56:44+00:00 https://fusion.net/airlines-can-treat-you-like-garbage-because-they-are-an-1794192270 matthewmcvickarThis is the end result of decades of corporate consolidation—aided by economists and regulators and politicians from both parties—that has greatly enriched a few at the expense of workers, consumers, and citizens in general. People chose to create a world that allows what happened on that plane to happen. Direct your outrage at the policymakers, economists, and industry cartels that created this future.]]> unitedairlines capitalism america https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:43f5eac99e04/ 2017-03-12T05:49:20+00:00 https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/food-stamps-snap-welfare-soda-new-york-times/ matthewmcvickarWhat also makes O’Connor’s article so troubling is that he wraps the usual scurrilous myths about SNAP in a veneer of health promotion — a framing that’s sure to win over some left-leaning readers who’d otherwise recoil at the usual trumped-up claims about food stamps. Yet in the end, O’Connor’s health paternalism doesn’t just run aground morally, but empirically: the study provides no evidence that SNAP encourages soda purchasing, and no evidence that SNAP funds (as opposed to personal funds) were used to buy soft drinks. O’Connor writes a lot about sugar, and not much about social policy. So perhaps his main target here is the sugar industry. If so, he has thrown millions of food-insecure Americans — most of whom work or have significant disabilities — under the bus to advance his agenda. Just as political attacks on social protections are on the rise, the article panders to the worst stereotypes of “welfare,” ignoring the SNAP program’s many successes. In the process, it tells people who imagine the worst about food stamps that they’ve been right all along. Facts be damned.]]> capitalism poverty politics food https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:d6d8af684eff/ 2015-12-15T02:39:19+00:00 http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-guy-searches-amazon-for-the-worst-things-you-can-buy matthewmcvickarQ: Does a tiny part of you think it's sort of wonderful that these horrible things exist, and that someone out there presumably owns them? A: Absolutely not. The issue I'm trying to get at with this body of writing is that our happiness has been pulled from us bit by bit, by industry, by labor, by law, and is being sold back to us at a profit. I have empathy for the seven billion people in the world that try to quiet their own sadness by purchasing products. The products themselves are a global self-perpetuating emotional and economic problem.]]> capitalism shopping america https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:6096f7235bfc/ 2015-09-16T17:45:05+00:00 http://quietbabylon.com/2014/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-making/ matthewmcvickar capitalism labor tech https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:b2bb0ecd30b5/ 2015-08-10T01:52:34+00:00 http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/get-there/restricting-the-spending-of-federal-benefits-should-include-the-rich/2015/04/21/4014bec0-e862-11e4-9767-6276fc9b0ada_story.html matthewmcvickarIt would be fiscally irresponsible not to make sure public benefits are wisely spent, but if we are going to place restrictions on the poor, let’s be fair and require the same standards and scrutiny for everyone who gets financial help from the government. After all, if you buy too much house that consumes too much of your income, you’ll have trouble saving enough to help take care of yourself in your old age. And isn’t that a poor choice that shouldn’t be subsidized, either?]]> politics capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:ad67961af8c3/ 2013-07-28T04:30:12+00:00 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-industrial-complex.html matthewmcvickarMoney should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.]]> capitalism nonprofit charity https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:8297c8ff6445/ 2013-07-12T23:14:13+00:00 http://azanichkowsky.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/why-i-oppose-marriage-equality/ matthewmcvickarI have two main problems with the marriage equality movement: 1. That its operation takes a tremendous amount of money, energy, and attention away from far more pressing issues. (Sometimes this is clear and direct, such as California spending $43 million on Prop 8 while $85 million was being cut from HIV/AIDS services. Sometimes this is more subtle, the successes of which can be measured when every single straight person I know uses their approval for same-sex marriage to demonstrate their allyship to me.) 2. That its strategies actively work against movements for queer economic justice, by removing capitalism, meaningful immigration reform, and gender/sexual deviance from the discussion entirely.]]> capitalism class society america politics queer gaymarriage https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:d3e27290045b/ 2013-03-30T20:26:54+00:00 http://qz.com/67991/you-didnt-make-the-harlem-shake-go-viral-corporations-did/ matthewmcvickar“Harlem Shake,” was a meme made by an amateur, George Miller, but its rapid replication was driven by media and marketing professionals, led and orchestrated by three companies: Maker Studios, Mad Decent, and IAC.]]> internet culture capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:d49963aea766/ 2013-03-01T01:44:25+00:00 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/ matthewmcvickar women business government success capitalism work https://instapaper.com/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:cb2cffb93236/ 2013-02-22T05:46:42+00:00 http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-resentment-machine/ matthewmcvickarOur system has relentlessly denied the role of any human practice that cannot be monetized. The capitalist apparatus has worked tirelessly to commercialize everything, to reduce every aspect of human life to currency exchange. In such a context, there is little hope for the survival of the fully realized self.]]> technology capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:aa963262613c/ 2013-02-11T08:03:04+00:00 http://themagnetisalwayson.com/moocs-as-capital-biased-technological-change/ matthewmcvickar capitalism education technology https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:914ee0059513/ 2013-01-09T02:28:20+00:00 http://marathonpacks.tumblr.com/post/39580410206/uncool matthewmcvickarSo the attempt to launch a from-scratch, celebrity-free outlet for longform music journalism has failed. Can a Kickstarter fail “spectacularly”? I don’t know. But reaching 17% of a proposed goal is something, for sure. This isn’t schadenfreude, though; there’s nothing in the Uncool idea to root against, per se. It’s more an opportunity to consider how campaigns like this, when undertaken in good faith, can underachieve. In brief: the idea may be modern, but the underlying realities are rooted in basic political economic realities that date back a very, very, long time.]]> music writing internet celebrity capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:5e6d86e0fedf/ 2012-06-23T06:20:21+00:00 http://www.thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars/P5 matthewmcvickarThat pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.]]> future society government capitalism invention https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:86ffede31aa2/ 2012-06-18T10:38:02+00:00 http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8865-harnessing-ineffable-desire-beach-house-and-the-creative-commercial/ matthewmcvickar "Much of the power of Beach House's music lies in the way it forgoes simple, this-means-this storytelling in favor of communicating indescribable emotions," wrote Lindsay Zoladz in her Pitchfork review of their latest album, Bloom. Switch a few words around, and this perfect evocation could have emanated from DDB's pitch meeting to Volkswagen. Which is not to belittle Zoladz's criticism, nor to build up ad-speak as any more than means-to-an-end capitalist labor. Instead, this connection highlights the idea that critics and marketers often seek the same positive criteria in art.]]> music advertising money business writing capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:37cb95363792/ 2011-10-11T08:18:56+00:00 http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/736-slavoj-zizek-at-occupy-wall-street-we-are-not-dreamers-we-are-the-awakening-from-a-dream-which-is-turning-into-a-nightmare matthewmcvickar capitalism economy america history occupywallstreet https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:aba965cd7564/ 2011-10-06T21:25:56+00:00 http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8685-steve-jobs/ matthewmcvickar apple music history capitalism consumerism musicindustry https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:07a848bfecb4/ 2011-01-22T22:18:22+00:00 http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/11_05/b4213090559511.htm matthewmcvickar consumerism capitalism labor america forever21 shopping plagiarism copyright https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:9b2c4763447b/ 2010-08-03T08:33:18+00:00 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/08/01/how_puritans_became_capitalists?mode=PF matthewmcvickar religion capitalism america history market christianity puritanism https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:7c34ebbfa117/ 2009-05-19T11:21:40+00:00 http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10784 matthewmcvickar eno music america capitalism business https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:0515cfb650fb/ 2009-05-19T09:46:52+00:00 http://chisafist.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-magic-or-how-i-learned-to-stop.html matthewmcvickar money america capitalism https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:eaaaff9b4bd4/ 2008-03-09T20:49:03+00:00 http://jakoblodwick.com/post/28385228 matthewmcvickar capitalism debate internet blog https://pinboard.in/u:matthewmcvickar/b:d2bae82b3b09/