View all notes
"Noeliberalism" is sometimes used in a similar shorthand way - basically, to name everything bad about the contemporary world - and there is considerable disagreement about the term's meaning and scope. Some dismiss it as leftist jargon, meaningful in too many different ways to be useful. David Harvey defines it rather succinctly, though, as "a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade," all of which are to be enforced by a strong state. Quinn Slobodian's recent intellectual history of neoliberalism has emphasized the project's goals - primarily the "complete protection of private capital rights" from democratic interference - and the importance of "extra-economic" means to secure these rights. These extra-economic means can include, for example, global institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), which can override national laws that restrict capital's power. [...]
more defs of neolib! this one includes criticism of the term's overly broad usage
[...] Relentlessly busy, visionary, and creatively enterprising, speculating upon the future appreciation of one's present (educational and material) assets, the financially leavened-self treats work as a way to pursue one's purpose. Work as labor - exhausting, exploitative, but performed with and for others - fades into the background of work as the acquisition of self. [...]
alternatively: slides grimly
p,,,[ Audaciously taking its name from the shops it set out to displace and superfluous if not sinister in the actual service it purported to offer - a sort of glorified vending machine with facial recognition software - Bodega crystalllized the venality of the tech economy. All that technical expertise, and for what?
daaamn
Today, empowerment is most common as a feminist concept - or at least as a brand identity alluding to feminism. Here as well, the discourse of empowerment is driven by a celebration of individual participation in structures of authority, and less by a critique of the structures themselves. [...] what arose as a critique of the insidious operation of power at the level of the street, the school, the home, and the body - grasping the political in the personal, in short - has become another way of disguising the political by exalting the personal. As Tolentino puts it, "'empowerment' invokes power while signifying the lack of it. It functions like an explorer staking a claim on a new territory with a white flag."
citing Jia Tolentino's NYT piece on empowerment being a thing for women to buy
[...] The cult of entrepreneurship's commodification of imagination, its celebration of self-sacrifice, and its bootstraps individualism make it a perfect ethic for social disinvestment masquerading as reform and profiteering disguised as charity. Entrepreneurship means that now you're on your own, kid.
[...] Sophisticated scheduling software allows managers to plan their employees' schedules days or hours in advance, calibrating them to respond immediately to the smallest fluctuation in demand for labor. Here, it is the employees' time that is made flexible, not the firm's, and workers who want to maintain school commitments, family responsibilities, or even regular free time away from work must bend into shape. Flexible employees, who are ostensibly "free" from managerial pressure to conform to a standard working day, are in fact valued insofar as they assimilate to it.
a thought i had: scheduling software that was designed to prioritise the needs of workers while also keeping the store running ok. people could rank their shift choices, and the algo would optimise for their happiness if at all possible? and anyone who has to take shifts they dont want should be compensated more somehow (by collecctive agreement)
[...] Grit literature also reassures the desperate and frustrated that their situation is still within their control: a few tweaks or a new attitude are all you need to triumph in a job you love. One can imagine, however, how the payoff of such a philosophy could be pointless when it is not cruel. [...] In neither case is there anything different you could now do about it. In other words, grit offers an explanation for what exists rather than giving us the tools to imagine something different.
[...] defying the odds is, by definition, improbable. And while it may work as advice in a business world predicated on competition, to fashion a democratic educational policy around the possibility of defying odds makes little sense. If everyone, or even many people, could defy the odds, then casinos would be bankrupt.
on charter schools based on the idea of grit
[...] Another advantage to employers of treating education or health care as human capital development is that risk in labor markets can be outsourced to employees. Why train someone on the job when they might just leave and take their knowledge elsewhere? Why spend time and money teaching skills that may prove obsolete sooner than you think? And why pay into the health insurance of workers who insist on eating too much junk food on the weekend? Instead, let employees pay for their own college credentials and pursue their own wellness plan. The ideology of human capital asks one to think of nearly every form of social existence in terms of an actuarial calculation.
[...] As Young himself wrote in a 2001 essay deploring his term's enthusiastic adoption by the New Labour government of Tony Blair, that education had become a means of concentrating power. "It is good sense," he wrote, "to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others." In short, Blair had missed the point of meritocracy, embracing the ideal of "merit" while forgetting the "aristocracy" part.