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Now I’m sounding like I’m fucking crazy, but hear me out. When I first started going to Gaza, I thought that I was going to see a place abandoned by capitalism. Then I got there and guess what? KFC was delivering chicken through the tunnels for free. I mean, you had to pay for the chicken, but the delivery was free. Why? I couldn’t understand it. It’s soggy by the time it arrives. It’s like KFC at the bus station. I’m a KFC addict and, like any KFC addict, I recognize that stuff is shit and it’s shit when it’s fresh. Four hours in, it’s really shit.
So why is KFC doing that? Why are they subsidizing free delivery? I also saw billboards everywhere for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which weren’t readily available at the time. There were also billboards for products that people could never afford, like a BMW or a Mercedes. And they weren’t just in rich districts — they were everywhere.
That’s when I realized, “Oh shit, these guys understand that this thing is almost over too.” Coca-Cola opened a bottling plant there in 2016 that uses more water than all of Gaza has available to it each day. What are they thinking? They’re thinking there’s going to be a day when people can buy Coca-Cola. They’re thinking, “We want to be there first.”
[...] It’s common for people who travel and volunteer to imagine that they are giving and to minimize the amount they’re taking from the society they’re in. The reality is that without absorbing the resilience of the Palestinians, I would have never understood what resilience was. And so I took hope from them. I took from them the idea that when somebody builds a wall, you dig a tunnel.
Whether Tarek Loubani gets justice is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If we could get a couple million dollars to put solar panels on some hospitals, that would be a legacy I would be proud of. What’s the best case scenario if there’s an investigation? The absolute best case scenario is some fucking nineteen-year-old getting thrown in jail for a year for what he did to me. So they would destroy some nineteen-year-old’s life even though we all know it’s a systemic problem? No thank you. I would rather make it so that that nineteen-year-old is never in the position where his whole life depends on him shooting a doctor. I would rather make it so that Palestinians don’t have to go up to the fence with their hands up begging for their humanity.
There are fish getting sick in lakes in Zhejiang, China. This is because Midwestern moms who lost their jobs during Covid have stepped up their side hustles selling freshwater pearls on Facebook Live. The pearl farmers in Zhejiang pour pig poop into the ponds to feed the algae that feed the mussels that grow the pearls. The phosphorus and nitrogen from the pig poop get into the groundwater.
There are landfills in Nigeria glittering with snow leopard necklaces because in Winter 2019 Facebook analytics told US dropshippers that in that Spring / Summer women 18-25 who liked something and something else would also like snow leopards, and AliExpress made it too easy for any dropshipper with a Shopify storefront and Oberlo integration to automate placing orders for the necklaces.
Mar’s community is just one of the hundreds of platform driver collectives spread across Jakarta. Each has its own membership rules, ranging from moral expectations (members must be honest) to socializing expectations (members must remain an “active” part of the WhatsApp groups, attend all social events of the community, come to the basecamp at least once a week, and so on). Communities hold internal elections and have mandatory monthly member meetings. Some even have membership fees, which go into a common pool of money used to support community expenses. Most communities have built basecamps where drivers meet between orders, some calling these spaces their “second home.” Many issue ID cards to identify members in case of road accidents, and as a way to solidify their sense of belonging. Collectively, they have set up their own joint emergency response services, and informal insurance-like systems that use community savings to guarantee members small amounts of money in the case of accidents or deaths. They have also provided their members with Covid relief, such as distributing personal protective equipment and free groceries.
sick
For many people in the Global South, work has long been isolating and uncertain by design. As “low-tech” workers such as platform drivers build community and collective power, they are able to draw on different local histories of resistance, and different methods for negotiating the social and political tensions in their cities.
Often, in the analysis of gig worker power by academics and observers in the Global North, an absence of unionization is thought to indicate an absence of worker power. Unions in the Global South, though, are not seen as the only or best way to collectivize in these labor regimes. This is not to argue that workers in the Global South do not unionize or that unions are unhelpful. Rather, they exist on a continuum of strategies to reshape work conditions, build collective worker identity and engage in mutual aid. (The political economists Arianna Tassinari, Matteo Rizzo, and Maurizio Atzeni, among other scholars, have examined in depth the role of unions in precarious work conditions.)
I went to the DWeb summit in 2016 and, I have to say, I was not impressed. It felt like an endless barrage of startup pitches by people who looked all the same, standing up on the stage and describing how they’re going to decentralize infrastructure, and how it’s going to save the world, upend this market, and change everything. To me, if decentralization has any political meaning, the people building it have to be very different from the types of people who built the World Wide Web. We can’t just replace the platforms and protocols we have today with other purely profit-driven companies that can only call their product “decentralized” because the technology functions in a more distributed manner. For decentralization to be a remotely revolutionary concept, we need to question the internal logic of the tech industry itself—how people are incentivized to build things, how people are treated in the process, and how the relationships and systems we operate with are controlled. How does decentralization redistribute power? That’s the fundamental question.
The cyborg vision of gender as changing and changeable was radically new. Her map of how information technology linked people around the world into new chains of affiliation, exploitation, and solidarity feels prescient at a time when an Instagram influencer in Berlin can line the pockets of Silicon Valley executives by using a phone assembled in China that contains cobalt mined in Congo to access a platform moderated by Filipinas.
Socialists aren’t the only ones who have been techno-utopian, of course. A far more prominent and more influential strand of techno-utopianism has come from the figures around the Bay Area counterculture associated with the Whole Earth Catalog, in particular Stewart Brand, who went on to play important intellectual and cultural roles in Silicon Valley.
They are not friends. They are not allies. I’m avoiding calling them enemies because I’m leaving open the possibility of their being able to learn or change, though I’m not optimistic. I think they occupy the position of the “god trick.” [Eds.: The “god trick” is an idea introduced by Haraway that refers to the traditional view of objectivity as a transcendent “gaze from nowhere.”] I think they are blissed out by their own privileged positions and have no idea what their own positionality in the world really is. And I think they cause a lot of harm, both ideologically and technically.
damn
I think the Anthropocene framework has been a fertile container for quite a lot, actually. The Anthropocene has turned out to be a rather capacious territory for incorporating people in struggle. There are a lot of interesting collaborations with artists and scientists and activists going on.
The main thing that’s too bad about the term is that it perpetuates the misunderstanding that what has happened is a human species act, as if human beings as a species necessarily exterminate every planet we dare to live on. As if we can’t stop our productive and reproductive excesses.
Extractivism and exterminationism are not human species acts. They come from a situated historical conjuncture of about five hundred years in duration that begins with the invention of the plantation and the subsequent modeling of industrial capitalism. It is a situated historical conjuncture that has had devastating effects even while it has created astonishing wealth.