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[...] the corpus of Marx’s writings [...] excels in problematizing that which we experience as our sensory and intellectual ecosystem, namely what he once termed capitalism’s “religion of everyday life”. The image of our social life as a problem, whose lines of solution are to be conjured and cajoled out of its conflicts and blind-spots, its lacunae and contradictions, but also by reading against the grain the stories our society tells about itself, remains indispensable. We need to reactivate the networks of concepts Marx forged to elucidate the capitalism of his age, but we also need – in these stupefying and grotesque times – his capacity for satire, polemic, for the painstaking labour of division that makes a true politics of association possible.
so prettyyy
[...] the present moment has greater potential for a revitalisation of a Marxist research open to the unpostponable demands of the present, to the imperative of a problematizing practice that cannot presuppose it already has all the analytical tools at its disposal, as though Marx’s restless, multifarious and unfinished writings provided some kind of secure and comforting canon. The lesson that Stuart Hall drew from Gramsci in the 1980s remains relevant: ‘Gramsci … came face to face with the revolutionary character of history itself. When a conjuncture unrolls, there is no “going back”. History shifts gears. The terrain changes. You are in a new moment. You have to attend, “violently”, with all the “pessimism of the intellect” at your command, to the “discipline of the conjuncture”.’ What we have to ask then is not whether readings of Marx are open, heterodox or heretical – as though these were values in themselves – but whether they subject themselves to the ‘discipline of the conjuncture’, and if that means jettisoning, mutating or demoting certain aspects of Marx’s work, so be it (let’s not forget Marx wasn’t so precious about his own concepts as to cherish them for their own sake). Shining the flickering light of the present onto the corpus of Marx’s writings has brought into relief aspects of his thought that might in other moments have seemed secondary. [...]
wish i could write like this omg
[...] it is important to learn how to discern the classed and anti-capitalist dimensions of what is sometimes misconceived reductively as ‘identity politics’. After all, how could the political movements and militant theorising of those whose labour and lives have been confiscated, devalued and ‘primitively’ accumulated through gendered and racialized exploitation not concern class understood in its most crucial, which is to say its relational dimension? If start from class as a relation rather than class as an identity (an identity that would allow us to demarcate, as too many Marxists beginning with Marx have done, a good working class from bad lumpen, free from forced labourers, etc.) then we can begin to attend to the invisible ‘iceberg’ of exploitation (to borrow Maria Mies’s characterisation of the role of ‘women, nature and colonies’ in capitalist accumulation, recently revisited and revitalised by Jason W. Moore) which lends class determination its full weight. Ironically, as I already suggested, beginning with a more orthodox, even dogmatic definition of class (relation to the means of production, etc.) would today perforce lead one to recognise how the working class, globally conceived, but also in the so-called ‘North’, is anything but a white, male redoubt. None of this is to ignore that a focus on identity (including in a narcissistic-individual sense) to the detriment of collective experiences of exploitation and antagonism remains an ideological problem, that liberal (or even reactionary) reflexes inhabit us all to varying degrees. But I think that to reproduce this dichotomy – class politics versus identity politics – is not only to freeze the necessary internal debates in the left into the sterile terrain of 1980s skirmishes around postmodernism, but to conceal all the ways in which political and theoretical work across the twentieth century had already dismantled it. Stuart Hall et al.’s turn to the language of experience and mediation in their landmark Policing the Crisis is very instructive in this regard, when, in speaking of the Black British proletariat they write: “racial oppression was the specific mediation through which this class experienced its material and cultural conditions of life, and hence race formed the central mode through which the self-consciousness of the class stratum could be constructed”. Analogous if not identical arguments could be made in terms of gender or sexuality.
[...] Marx’s famous 1852 letter to Weydemeyer (put to illuminating use in Andrea Cavalletti’s acute essay on class, which I’m currently editing), where he clearly states that it was not he who invented the concept of class, but rather bourgeois historians – and that his contribution was rather to historicize class, to envisage the dictatorship of the proletariat, and to posit the revolutionary abolition of class. In other words, there is nothing particularly Marxian or Marxist about reference to class, nor indeed about the idea of class politics, and thus nothing contradictory or unusual about a reactionary politics that uses class as one of its chief signifiers (the history of fascisms and related political and ideological formations teaches as much). With this proviso in mind, there are a multiplicity of non-exclusive responses to this predicament: one can engage in the work of sociological demystification and undermine this inconsistent entity (i.e. ‘the forgotten white working class’); one can explore the historical and material grounds that lead particular sections of workers to develop passionate attachments to their ethno-racialised class identities; one can agitate among the targets of these reactionary discourses; above all perhaps one can foreground the fact that exploitation and exclusion (or indeed social ‘forgetting’) disproportionately affect the non-white working class. All of this without underestimating the depressing allure of the ‘psychological wages’ of whiteness that DuBois wrote about in Black Reconstruction, which remind one that any kind of ‘class unity’ or ‘solidarity’ is a very precarious product of political work and not some underlying and secure ground which is merely obfuscated by capitalist brainwashing, liberal ideology or, indeed, ‘identity politics’.
What generally happens when people in tech have made lots and lots of money? They often escape. If they're young, they go to South America and do ayahuasca rituals - they try to find the meaning of life by repurposing somebody else's culture for quick 'insight'. If they're older, maybe they buy a farm. They work on the programming that comes out of the ground: plants and animals. They try to spend the real time it takes to rediscover a sense of identity.
interview with Amber Case. zing
A lot of your work has to do with design as a solution to human and technical problems. Can better design solve inherently unethical business practices?
I don't think so. I've seen this happening in major companies: you'll work on a design that will be better for users or communities. But then it bubbles up the chain of command someone higher up sees that it's negatively impacting their KPI. And so it gets deprioritised.
Corporations are a kind of AI, in the sense that no one individual directs them, and they just operate on their objective function of maximising share price through the proxy of engagement metrics. And it's hard to push up against that.
One of the original sins of the internet was not having a good business model in mind, which meant that it defaulted to the advertising business model, which has led to surveillance capitalism, and now persuasion capitalism.
So I think that we as designers can no longer get away with living in a sort of Eden where we get to ignore business models. If we do so, our designs will always be subverted.
good answer, tho i would argue that it would have been hard to imagine an alternative trajectory given the larger political/economic trends
As designers, how can we convince business minds that what works isn't always what's right?
[...]
[...] Companies are made out of people and we are their most valuable assets. They can't operate without us. So, because Uber was no longer a cool place to work and people were leaving, that changed who ran that company.
As humans, we feel small sometimes against something the size of Google. By voting with our feet, and refusing to work for companies that are exploitative, we can make really big differences. You refuse to do things that you believe have gone too far down the path of giving up what's right for what works.
cool. though, tbh, idk if it's possible to refuse to work for all companies that are exploitative ...
[...] Section 2030 from the 1996 Communications Act is a piece of deregulation that says that a platform isn't responsible for the content that a user posts.
I'd like to see it amended in one specific way. There are a lot of people posting content for which you can't necessarily make the platform responsible. But if the platforms were to make the curatorial choice to promote that content in a recommendation engine, and it reached a certain number of people, they would then have to be responsible for it. I think that would have the effect of curtailing, for example, YouTube's pushing of conspiracy theories by placing certain videos in their 'top trending' boxes. [...]
it's an algorithm, sure, but it's an algorithm that has at least some human curation, and could probably have more. have simple guidelines: dont promote it if it could be construed as hate speech or sth similar acc to some guidelines. it might not be perfect but it would sure as hell be better than now
and ofc the human curators should be paid very well, given lots of employment security and authority and guidelines and report to someone high up
something to think about: the dream is to get rid of human action entirely, but maybe that's a dumb dream? an impractical one? there'll always be human curation needed as long as human society and culture and interaction cannot be described/generated by a finite algorithm
Is there any way to give ourselves antibodies versus targeted persuasion?
To me this is about using everything we know about design and human psychology to fight back. For example, Amazon famously found that for every hundred milliseconds more slowly their page loads, they lose one percent of revenue. So we know that attention is directly correlated to how fast apps or pages load. Why not just turn that back around and design it whereby the more you use something you know you don't want to use, you insert a longer and longer delay, and soon you'll just ask 'why am I here anyway?' It would give your brain the chance to catch up with its impulses.
[...]
As a non-profit social enterprise, ReDI's sponsors provide donations of money or equipment in exchange for tax deductions. But for the likes of Cisco, Salesforce.org, The Coca-Cola Foundation, Deloitte, and German steel-distribution company Klöckner & Co., there's an additional incentive to supporting ReDI: talent. The schools' inventory of skilled junior programmers is a goldmine for HR departments - ReDI's students are often fluent in multiple languages, well-educated, and hungry for opportunities.
yeeep, there it is. "hungry for opportunities" how useful
also, the coca-cola foundation!!! fuck me!!!