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The stop sign can be added to the list of empire-killing technologies. Taken together, they have had a formidable effect. Synthetics diminished the great powers’ need for strategic raw materials by offering substitutes. Aviation, cryptography, radio, and satellites, meanwhile, enabled those powers to run secure transportation and communication networks without worrying about contiguous territorial access. Innovations in medicine and engineering—such as DDT, antimalarials, plastic-based packaging, and “world-proofed” electronic equipment—further reduced the need for territorial control. They allowed objects and humans to safely travel to hostile terrains, meaning that colonizers didn’t have to soften the ground beforehand.
The U.S. military was, in fact, a major employer in Japan. On the base, Japanese found jobs as interpreters, stenographers, drivers, maids, and construction workers. Off the base, the bars and brothels did a steady business. And then there were the servicemen stationed around Asia who converged on Japan for their furloughs. Officially the program was called R&R, for rest and recuperation, but informally the men spoke of I&I: intercourse and intoxication. Whatever the letters, it meant money flying around hotels, shops, bars, and brothels.
More transformative still were the large military procurement orders, which began in 1950 with the Korean War. Goods from the U.S. mainland heading for Asia might take weeks to arrive. Those from Japan could be made cheaply and arrive in hours. And so the U.S. military began a shopping spree. From the start of the Korean War to the end of the Vietnam War, Japanese firms took in at least $300 million a year from U.S. purchase orders. At the peak of the Korean War, 1952, it was nearly $800 million.
This was huge. The president of the Bank of Japan called the procurement orders “divine aid.” Japan’s prime minister called them a “gift of the gods.” On the eve of the Korean War, the auto firm Toyota had laid off workers, cut wages, and reduced pensions by half. It was the military contracts that reversed its fortunes. They were, the firm’s president recalled, “Toyota’s salvation.” Toyota’s output swelled between three and four times its size in the six years between 1948 and 1954.
Like Puerto Rico, the Northern Marianas were subject to some U.S. laws but not others. The federal minimum wage and much of immigration law were waived. The nearest Occupational Safety and Health Administration office was thousands of miles away. At the same time, for the purposes of trade, the Northern Marianas counted as part of the country. The combination was potent: a legal environment where foreign workers could toil for paltry wages with little oversight to stitch garments labeled MADE IN THE USA.
Saipan functioned as a sort of standing loophole. Starting in 1995, as stories of its exploited workers made their way to the mainland, members of Congress sought to close it. Over the next decade or so, they would submit at least twenty-nine bills to change some part of the relevant law. Twice the Senate voted unanimously for wage and immigration reforms, only to have the bills die in the House Committee on Resources. A 1999 House bill had 243 cosponsors, a substantial majority. But it, too, died.
The Northern Marianas government and the garment manufacturers, it turned out, had hired a lobbyist to defend their lucrative arrangement. A really, really good lobbyist. He offered junkets to every Congress member and congressional aide who wanted to visit Saipan—more than 150 went. The visitors enjoyed golfing, luxurious hotels, snorkeling, and, in some cases, the services of prostitutes (some of the guest workers on Saipan were driven by poverty into sex work, others were forced into it outright).
mf
[...] The next stage of our emancipation can be achieved through the education of the people in effective political participation. But we are at a crossroads. If we don't equip the people with the skills to make change, and if we don't trust them to have power, then they will be resigned to apathy, will continue to lose trust in those who govern on their behalf and be open to manipulation and division by those who seek to gain power through exploiting discontent. [...]
I agree completely; the real question is how you can change it (it's almost a chicken and egg situation)
- Feeling completely powerless.
- Rejecting any compromise and so choosing principled loss over pragmatic gain.
- Stereotyping the powerful and believing your side has a monopoly on morality.
[...] the problem is that many people who want to make a difference are idealistic: they want to move from where we are now to where we ought to be in one go. They've spent years dreaming of a better world and a small incremental step in that direction feels such a long way off. [...]
As scholars of science fiction have long noted, the genre is a powerful and engaging medium because it uses extrapolation and speculation to explore possible worlds and to encourage the reader to reflect on how those worlds came into being, how they operate, and how they differ from and reflect our present world. As such, they use the tactics of estrangement (pushing a reader outside of what they comfortably know) and defamiliarisation (making the familiar strange) as a way of creating a distancing mirror on society and to offer cognitive spaces to reconsider assumptions, rationales and viewpoints. In our cases, the stories seek to be plausible and consistent given existing technologies, business models, trends, news coverage and academic critique, though sometimes they push the logic, ethos, and the form and use of technology to an extreme to emphasize a point; they are sometimes satirical, sardonic and playful. They are designed to prompt critical thought about contemporary neoliberal urbanism and digital, networked technologies.
‘Why is garbage collection another tenner?’
‘Didn’t I tell you? There are no taxes at EasyCity.’
‘And yet we have to pay £10 to have our garbage collected.’
‘Yes, that’s a fee. It’s not a tax. We have abolished all taxes. In fact, we don’t believe in taxes.’
‘But how do you pay for street cleaning, schools, health care?’
‘We believe in the personal responsibility of our tenants. That’s why we have introduced a garbage fee. We’ve patented this actually: EasyGarbage. In addition, EasyTenants takes care of weekly street cleanings. Schools, doctors, hospitals are all available in Lionsgate and Gateshead.’
[...] AR represents for Google not only a medium that can overlay the ‘real’ world with digital information (selected and provided by Google) but which also can be harnessed to make the movement, mobility, gaze and the attention of users in everyday situations computable in ways that go beyond the granularity currently offered by smartphones and other devices. Given the levels of data harvesting that those devices currently offer, AR promises to expand the platform economy of Google by extending the possibilities of data accumulation and processing. This economic model is one where a few companies dominate as they control of the medium of exchange that is critical in this model: attention.
The attention economy is based on an acknowledgement that time, not material goods, is the key scarcity in modern society. The key to the attention economy is to create an environment where the attention paid in the present can refer to a past and a future within a given experience or platform. As a platform, Google stores our past and aims to predict our future. With AR, it can harvest more of the present, shape behaviour in real-time, and anticipate and direct future behaviour.
Sales: ‘You’re looking at it the wrong way. This is an opportunity more than a risk. Customers are seeking meaningful relationships with the brands they love. Their phone is the best way to connect with them. They keep their phones on them at all times, and interact with them about 150 times a day, if not more! They’re on the go seeking information that’s locally relevant, such as a nearby restaurant for lunch. We see these moments as opportunities, and unlike those boring banner ads you see on websites, our ads are much more authentic because they use location data.’
fuck you