View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
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.
[...] NAFTA and American agribusiness are treated not as political circumstances but as metaphorical storms: since "we cannot control the volatile tides of change," they write," we can learn to build better boats." These examples are all part of a long tradition of naturalizing our contemporary political and economic order, treating food shortages and layoffs as if they are acts of nature that can never change. Resilience, once a property of the environment, has become a property of people. And those most vulnerable to the environmental shocks associated with modern capitalism are also responsible for becoming more resilient against them.
If the technology behind the sharing economy is not the source of its dominance, though, what is? "Financialization" may be the most relevant answer. "Finance, at its most basic level," writes the cultural critic Alison Shonkwiler, "is the domain in which value is less likely to be produced than captured and/or extraction, typically by managing a degree of risk." The "financialization" of the ecconomy is the orientation of capital accumulation (i.e., making money from the labor of others) around this extraction of value. Shonkwiler, following critics like David Harvey, argues that financialization is what is really new about the economy of the turn of hte twenty-first century. In the sharing economy, neither homes nor technologies are produced; instead, rents are extracted from assets owned by others. [...]
i like this, very clear
The growth of growth requires a different kind of person, one whose abilities, skills, emotions, and even sleep schedule are in sync with their role in the economy. We hear a sweetened version of this fact whenever politicians talk about preparing young people for the twenty-first-century labor market, and a slightly more sinister version from police officers and guidance counselors when they talk about working hard, flying right, and not making mistakes. It’s tough love, and young Americans are getting it from all sides. This advice is uncontroversial on its face, but its implications are profound. In order to fully recognize the scope of these changes, we need to think about young people the way industry and the government already do: as investments, productive machinery, “human capital.” If people have changed as much as other engines of productivity have over the past three or four decades, it’s no wonder the generation gap is so significant.