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Ganz’s explanation for “Why Culture Sucks” (as the post is titled) draws on Arendt and the destabilizing, ephemeralizing character of the internet. I think he’s more or less right, but his explanation is incomplete. Our broken phenomenology is inextricably bound up with the broken material basis for cultural production. Yes, the internet as it is shares some of the blame — but that’s the internet as it is, not as it had to be. Background economic conditions helped build that internet.
I don’t want to suggest that materialist explanations are the only explanations that matter. But I do want to argue that a nation’s material and economic circumstances have profound implications for its spiritual, moral, and artistic health. Sickness along one dimension leads to sickness in the other. And reinvigorating the cultural realm is going to require close attentiveness to the economic conditions that make certain types of culture possible.
I was surprised that “Why Is Everything So Ugly?” didn’t actually argue or demonstrate how the visual culture of New York City is symbiotic with “neoliberalism.” The only contention was that the apparent popularity of five-over-one mixed-use apartments coincides with a period of low interest rates (compared to what?). Some attention was given to the environmental and labor problems with fast furniture, fast fashion, and the circular economy, but these were given far fewer words than the piece’s aesthetic commentary.
It would have been helpful to consult a construction expert to understand whether the “Josh” apartment building is actually decaying and whether the old “perfectly serviceable” building it replaced was actually such. I know from other news stories that rainproof paneling is a new technique to protect buildings, and that new apartments of any price point usually have more efficient and healthy HVAC, better insulation, double-pane windows, and none of the asbestos/mold/lead residue that plague so much of our country’s substandard urban housing.
Without any strong attempts to actually prove new visual cultures and built environments are inferior beyond the eyes of the beholder, your criticism is indistinguishable from archconservative attacks on brutalism and modernism. What unites both types of criticism is knee-jerk cynicism.
Time marches on. I’m afraid that derogatory insinuations (“behemoths” and “monoliths” governed by insidious “logics”) and winking callbacks (“all that is solid . . .”) will grow ever poorer as a substitute for deep, patient inquiry.
by Cameron Wilson. good letter
I knew about the union effort before I started (ten of my MFA classmates also worked as Brendas), and although I had no organizing experience, I started attending union Zoom meetings in my first month. My coworkers pushed me to think about the job beyond collecting party anecdotes (my favorite was about a prospective renter who encountered a boa constrictor at a self-guided tour) and consider its context at the intersection of tech and real estate.
The union platform was focused on better pay, benefits, and a path to career advancement, but the organizers also wanted Brenda to be better, for example by requiring the properties Brenda worked with to be transparent about whether they offered wheelchair-accessible units or accepted Section 8 vouchers.
Like ChatGPT and DALL-E, Brenda the chatbot depended on the work of writers and artists. The company hired opera singers and creative-writing adjuncts because these professions tend to draw perfectionists accustomed to precarious work. Then, the software engineers designed and adjusted conversation flows in response to operator feedback. I’ve come to resent phrases like “human fallback” and “chatbot operator” that obscure that we were underpaid bot trainers and technical writers.
Maybe it was naive to think a union could address that. The company announced its intent to outsource Brenda operators to an international staffing company at the very first bargaining session. Still, the union secured a tech stipend for all remote workers at the company, pushed the company to comply with state paid-sick-leave laws, and became a resource for career advice. An increasing number of former BOT union members now hold full-time jobs in the tech industry. A union can’t make the uncanny valley beautiful, but it meant something that we tried.
by Irina Teveleva. sweet! (Brenda, the real estate chatbot described in issue 44 by Laura Preston)
Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer features many great anecdotes, like Derluguian’s discovery that “the headquarters of the Islamic battalion are now located at Rosa Luxemburg Street, 12,” in Grozny. But no one — except grad students — reads a two-decade-old work of historical sociology for the details. What is most impressive and resonant about Derluguian is his methodological approach to the real political, economic, and military complexities and contingencies that “civilizations” are composed of. “Let us be more precise,” he writes,
when trying to identify the historical moments and institutional locations in which human agency might liberate itself from structural constraints to shape the course of history. Evidently, this becomes more likely in moments of historical transition, when structural constraints are overloaded, eroded, battered, and imploding. But it is always a relative situation. Structures rarely fall apart completely, and besides, complete chaos would deny human agency the structural basis for exercising its plans or might undo that agency itself. The two sides of the equation are surely relational. Furthermore, let me add that the impression we gain may depend on our instruments. The greater the magnification, the more important do acts of human will appear.
Growing up, I thought that real politics was collective struggle, but over the past decade I’d begun to fear the era of mass movements had come to an end. My political life had desiccated. I briefed diplomats and wrote angry missives for the United Nations and Swiss NGOs about brutal government military campaigns in South Sudan. Increasingly, I became convinced that the diplomats who were the primary audience for my reports were deeply uninterested in changing their positions. For over a decade, they had backed a predatory government intent on pillaging South Sudan while the country descended into a low-intensity conflict, often fought along ethnic lines. I struggled to know how to position myself—neither ethnic militias nor diplomats are my constituency—and felt expectant about my trip to Sudan. If South Sudan was a land of ethnic violence and indifferent diplomats, Sudan, I told myself, was a country of political parties and street protests—protests so effective they had brought down Bashir. It was in Khartoum, I thought, that I would find the sort of collective politics I could recognize as my own.
We were at Ozone, a café in Khartoum 2, an area of the city popular with expats. I didn’t like the place. It was a well-watered fantasy, full of Khartoum’s favored families and the busy heads of humanitarian agencies. Yet there I was. Everyone wanted to meet at Ozone. The best waffles in the world, people said. Another such café, in a nearby neighborhood, is called Atmosphere, and I couldn’t help but think that the nomenclature reflected a dimly repressed awareness of the vast distance separating these spaces from the world outside. Diplomats often asked me with furrowed brows what “the street” wanted, as if it were a mysterious Sphinx whose motivations were unknowable to mere humans. The street, I wanted to tell them, was literally just beyond the café’s walls—you could walk there, if your driver wasn’t picking you up. At Ozone, politics was a soap opera played out by high-profile individuals, to be gossiped about over lattes. Will Hamdok make a speech? Is Minnawi still high?
She was enthusiastic about investing in human rights training for the Sudanese police. Unfortunately, she said, according to the embassy’s local perception studies, “people don’t trust the police, and we don’t want to invest irresponsibly.”
“Imagine,” she said, sighing, “a country where people don’t trust the police.”
“Imagine,” I said.
heh
One friend, whom I will call Fatima, told me her answer later, as we sat in the quiet garden at the Ethiopian embassy eating decent kitfo away from prying eyes. It was a fantasy to think that the transition would have gone anywhere without the international community, Fatima told me. Revolution might sound nice to our Marxist friends, but it is a theory from another era. Name a single mass movement in the past twenty years that has successfully taken power and held it, she said. I was silent, and she continued. “When we formed the transitional government, we were facing institutions that were full of kayzan intent on blocking our plans. We needed allies.” If Mohamed thought the Sudanese elite had allied with international financial institutions to continue Bashir’s neoliberal policies, Fatima thought this same alliance was the only way to fight against the persistence of the old regime. It was an almost textbook disagreement. In what aspects of the state did the old regime persist? Was it in the combination of austerity politics and militarized economics that characterized the transitional government? Or was it in the kayzan’s continued dominance of Sudan’s institutions?
The protest had been the biggest of the transitional period, and Hamdok lost no time in claiming it as his own. That night, he gave a statement. The Sudanese people have made it clear, he said, that there is no going back to the old regime. The next morning, back at Ozone, one diplomat plaintively asked me: “But do they favor Hamdok?” The question seemed absurd. The previous day’s protests had not been about political machinations but about recapturing the energy of the 2019 revolution. Real politics, seen from the perspective of the protest, was not that of institutions but that of movements, of the joyful confidence that comes from a mass of people feeling their own power. Demonstrations, I wanted to tell the diplomats, have their own realism.
[...] Late one night, over shisha in a half-ruined building, one friend told me, “I am a new species. They cannot take what happened from us. I have no fear. We cannot go back, because we have already come so far. The revolution is still happening.”