by
The Baffler
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How strange and predictable it is, then, that wages for housework have, at last, become widespread—but in the form of our subscription to digital services and gig economy labor. This work has become concretely valuable at the precise moment its value can be effectively captured by a small cadre of men sitting at the top of the tech industry.
This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident. It is no coincidence that the first artificial intelligence boom began around the same time as the sexual revolution; no coincidence that the history of women in computing has been roundly overwritten by the myth of male coding genius; no coincidence that the voice coming out of your smart device is almost always a woman’s. Stemming from a fundamental arrogance on the part of men—the idea that work historically performed by women is so straightforward, so mindless even, that it can be effectively programmed— the latter part of the twentieth century saw a rise in technologies aimed at making traditional women’s work faster, simpler, or redundant.
What concerns me as much as these developments is the broader picture of which they form only a part: a world in which the exact forms of labor women have fought to have recognized and remunerated—chief among them caretaking labor, tedious household labor, buoying-the-male-ego labor, service-with-a-smile labor—are being co-opted, monetized, and sold back to us as shiny, premium, cutting-edge tech, the intermediary step of individual households outsourcing such tasks to workers primarily from the Global South having been insufficiently profitable for the Silicon Valley brain trust. As automation rises, technology will increasingly undercut the wages of these workers; the human workers who depend on these precarious gigs are viewed by the tech industry and the broader economy as a temporary inefficiency.
This is the dark ethos of the twenty-first century: most of us are performing labor that can and will be at least partially automated. We work, and as we work, we audition for the right to continue working. There is no room at the negotiation table; any unpaid work will remain unpaid until, in due course, we will pay to have that work done for us by automation. And like that, the mainstays of human life become premium services we pay for. Like that, the value only flows up.
There is tremendous evidence that people deeply invested in fundamental system preservation do consciously proceed with “business-as-usual” knowing with a reasonable degree of certainty the likely climate outcomes. I often jokingly call this the Rex Position, after Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil from 2006–2016, and Secretary of State under Donald Trump for parts of 2017–2018. Tillerson famously proclaimed “my philosophy is to make money. If I can drill and make money then that’s what I’ll do.” Tillerson is not a climate denier per se. He just doesn’t share the urgency of his many critics. Tillerson is more than willing to talk about a shift to renewables, but there’s no rush. People will adapt to climate change, there are “engineering” solutions. It’s only those trapped within a different temporality who think otherwise. There are many clear and bright futures for business-as-usual in the meantime. There’s a certain clarity and precision even in Tillerson’s public arguments: “Our view reflects the reality that abundant energy enables modern life.” The Rex Position is not one single positive political ideology but the convergence point of the politics of right-now for a panoply of right-wing climate realism.
The Rex Position is not shortsighted or irrational once one accepts that climate change does not “produce” a universal human subject. One does not have to construe Tillerson as “evil.” Tillerson and those he works with are not in some kind of shadowy conspiracy. The Rex Tillersons of the world have taken a look at the same data, the same trends, the same underlying social and political conditions, and they have noticed that in the probable world in which nothing changes for them, business-as-usual, they end up on the “winning” side of a sharp global and local dividing line. Every structural incentive serves to reinforce such thinking. The best outcome in such a position is to push on with business-as-usual; the costs of climate change will largely be borne by those who already bear the cost today. Indeed, as I will argue, that other people will be bearing those costs helps keep the system going as long as possible and makes the Rex Position of maximal extraction for maximal maintenance, or cashing out, that much better. Even modestly successful climate mitigation and adaptation for the vast majority of people would require socioeconomic and political changes that would pose a steep loss to the Rex Position.
Neofeudalism is also a steady-state economy—one in which growth is essentially nil or close to it—but characterized not by some harmonious socially sustaining socioeconomic life. Rather, it would be one in which the rate of return on “capital” lies at its historic norms of 4 to 5 percent for a rather much larger and much more comfortable ruling class than existed in pre-modern periods across the world, coupled with the conditions for at least a handful of distinct—if almost certainly overlapping—surplus populations: First, a massive number of socioeconomically expendable people (no longer needed for the basic stable reproduction of the sated and well-off) who face direct, permanent ecological adversity. (Think about the UN’s estimate of one to two billion who may “no longer have adequate water” if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius.) And second, an over-large body—also facing severe economic and ecological constriction—of what one might term “neoserfs”: people who work in basic production and extraction, maintenance, and non-essential service functions. In between these groups and a ruling class would be a third mass: loyal retainers, if you will. Those who perform high level services, especially governance and security.
This is absolutely possible, pace the doom-mongers. But, in the same way, right-wing climate realism is hardly “bound to fail.” It is perfectly imaginable because the world as we know it already absorbs the scaling horrors of the Anthropocene. It is perfectly imaginable because the colonial relation has, necessarily, adapted and spread over time. It is perfectly imaginable that, per Parenti, even a modest amount “of walls, guns, barbed wire, armed aerial drones, or permanently deployed mercenaries will be able to save one half of the planet from the other.” It’s perfectly imaginable because the world we actually know and the one we can observe through the historical record makes the “politics of the armed lifeboat” far from a bad gamble for those whose stake promises a payout.
note: the online version omits the "per Parenti" oddly enough
Based on this discount rate model, Nordhaus suggested a relatively high social cost of carbon that grows at 3 percent per year from approximately now till 2050. In that time, this would suggest a carbon tax starting at approximately $19 per metric ton of CO2 and topping out around $53. This is only a minute difference from his most well-known critics in the Stern Report, whose proposals would differ by as little as a few dollars per metric ton of carbon to about a $150 difference. The recent IPCC special report on staying within a 1.5 world, in contrast, suggests costs as high as $14,300 by the end of this decade. The point isn’t the comical difference between these numbers. Nor how carbon taxing and cap-and-trade systems will never work or are ludicrously inadequate measures. Nor even how the IPCC models incorporate “Negishi weights” and their consequences which, as the economist Elizabeth Stanton notes, “freeze the current distribution of income between world regions,” and without which “IAMs [integrated assessment models] that maximize global welfare would recommend an equalization of income across all regions as part of their policy advice.” But rather how the very idea of “the discount rate” is so perfectly a “victor’s” story; how wonderfully it obfuscates reality. There is no universal “we” whose present benefits are being maximized. Profits, rather, are maximized for the few at extraordinary socioeconomic and ecological costs to the vast majority. Climate change does not negatively affect only prospective “future” generations but is already exacting costs from most people currently alive while benefiting a rather smaller number immensely.
Tensions between Watts residents and the police ran high. While the vast majority of Watts residents in 1965 were black, only 4 percent of the sworn personnel of the Los Angeles Police Department and 6 percent of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department were black. Police Chief William Parker used analyses of crime data to develop and justify a policy that explicitly targeted Watts and other black neighborhoods for heavy police coverage, including intrusive techniques such as routine frisking of people on the street. “I don’t think you can throw the genes out of the question when you discuss the behavior patterns of people,” Parker wrote in 1957. [...]
genes ... lmao
Watts exploded. On August 12, at 9:30 P.M., a group identifying itself as “followers of Malcolm X” arrived on Avalon Boulevard shouting “Let’s burn . . . baby, burn!” The next day, at 3:30 P.M., the Emergency Control Center journal recorded “6 male Negroes firing rifles at helicopter from vehicle, 109th & Avalon.” Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown cut short an aerial tour of South Los Angeles because of “sniper fire.” Delta Airlines rerouted flights over the city because rebels were “shooting at planes.”
this owns
The rebellion spread out over 46.5 square miles. All told, 34 people—almost all black—were killed, many by police, and more than 1,032 were wounded; 3,952 people were arrested. The rebellion caused more than $40 million in property damage to over six hundred buildings, completely destroying two hundred of them.
damn
The conference program featured the symbol of a black panther from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) that Carmichael was publicizing. The LCFO was part of a new effort by local blacks and SNCC to build an independent political party outside of the exclusive white Democratic Party, marking a departure from its strategy of mobilizing civil disobedience against Jim Crow segregation in the early 1960s. Lowndes County was 80 percent black, yet in early 1966, despite the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act, there was still not a single black person registered to vote in Lowndes County. So on May 3, 1966, with SNCC’s help, the LCFO convened and nominated candidates for sheriff, tax assessor, coroner, and school board and encouraged blacks to register to vote. As blacks registered, white resistance intensified. At one SNCC rally, a deputy sheriff fired into the crowd, shooting two civil rights workers and killing one, Carmichael’s friend Jonathan Daniels, a white ministerial student.
Because so many whites in Lowndes were illiterate, the ballot featured a drawing of a party mascot. The all-white Democratic Party featured a white rooster and the slogan White Supremacy/For the Right. The LCFO selected the black panther as its symbol to signify a fierce black political challenge. In a June 1966 interview, John Hulett, the chairman of the LCFO, explained the symbol of the panther: “The black panther is an animal that when it is pressured it moves back until it is cornered, then it comes out fighting for life or death. We felt we had been pushed back long enough and that it was time for Negroes to come out and take over.”
useful background context