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[...] hat a relief it was. A vacation from the self, to attend to their needs. Like Giddle, the so-called best friend, but a betrayer who barely had a self, who had a sociopathic freedom from any need for relating. He enjoyed that kind of thing. On occasion. Or rather, he let himself be enjoyed by these women who dictated. He needed a break from his devoted girlfriend, who submitted to his generosity and demanded so little. She was like a daughter. Young Reno. She was both innocent and ambitious and looked to Sandro for direction, and fine, but not all the time. Sometimes he just wanted to forget himself. Doesn’t everyone?
His father had said to him, “As you get older, you tolerate less and less well women your own age.” “You mean you do,” Sandro had said. “Yes, I,” his father said. “That’s right. And I used to think it was because I’d escaped time and women didn’t. But that’s not the reason. It’s because I’m stunted. Many men are. If you are that kind of man when you grow up, Sandro, you’ll understand. You’ll go younger in order to tolerate yourself.”
That’s what it was about, at the end of the day. His father was right. It’s what you can stand of yourself.
brutal
A boarding announcement for his flight. He stood up from his seat as the blanketing echo of many small conversations ricocheted around the high-ceilinged terminal, Trans World. A great white puff through which sailed both swallows and the underside of modernity. Even if the association was not direct. Because TWA was not Oscar Niemeyer but Saarinen. Still, its melted meringue lines told him Brasília equaled death, a nasty little message, private, from the terminal to Sandro.
“Stupidest people on earth,” his father said of the rubber tappers in the Amazon, who made him rich, whose slavery paid for the stunning paean to modernism like the one he was in, the terminal. So dumb and uncivilized that they had weighted their souls with stones. An act whose grave sophistication still impressed Sandro. It suggested they understood what was at stake, how fragile presence, true and felt and lived presence, really was.
new tag idea: cruelty? something like that? esp capitalist cruelty?
So it has to be posited simultaneously that economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital and that these transformed, disguised forms of economic capital, never entirely reducible to that definition, produce their most specific effects only to the extent that they conceal (not least from their possessors) the fact that economic capital is at their root, in other words--but only in the last analysis--at the root of their effects. [...]
[...] Thus the more the official transmission of capital is prevented or hindered, the more the effects of the clandestine circulation of capital in the form of cultural capital become determinant in the reproduction of the social structure. [...]
[...] Interest, in the restricted sense it is given in economic theory, cannot be produced without producing its negative counterpart, disinterestedness. The class of practices whose explicit purpose is to maximize monetary profit cannot be defined as such without producing the purposeless finality of cultural or artistic practices and their products; the world of bourgeois man, with his double-entry accounting, cannot be invented without producing the pure, perfect universe of the artist and the intellectual and the gratuitous activities of art-for-art's sake and pure theory. In other words, the constitution of a science of mercantile relationships which, inasmuch as it takes for granted the very foundations of the order it claims to analyze---private property, profit, wage labor, etc.---is not even a science of the field of economic production, has prevented the constitution of a general science of the economy of practices, which would treat mercantile exchange as a particular case of exchange in all its forms.
Put another way, anybody who matters in the consumer world is for Apple. Young Democrats (millennials with college degrees) didn’t just inherit the Earth, they conquered it, led by engineering grads from MIT and Harvard dropouts. They are growing their income, spending it irrationally, as young people do, and have a facility with technology that makes them influential and important to business. 4 They sided with Apple, as the firm embodies their own maverick, antiestablishment, progressive ideals—and conveniently ignored the fact that Steve Jobs gave nothing to charity, almost exclusively hired middle-aged white guys, and was an awful person.
love 2 make my consumer purchasing decisions in a monopolized hellscape based on which charities the CEOs donate to
As a species, we are weaker and slower than a lot of our competitors. Our developed brain is our competitive differentiation. Empathy is what makes us more human. The explosion in images distributed on social media platforms has led to more empathy, which should make us less likely to gas children, or at least inspire us to hunt down those who do these things. It’s common knowledge that countries that trade with one another are less likely to go to war with one another. As deaths from violence continue to decrease (and they are decreasing), I believe we will discover that one of the causes for the decrease is more people feeling closer to … more people. 12
i - i just -
Amazon has also effectively conspired with half a billion consumers to use algorithms to starch the margin brands used to garner and deliver those savings to their ally, consumers. A retailer leveraging its power to grow a higher-margin private label is not new. We’ve just never seen anybody this good at it. Just as U.S. allies were “shocked” we were listening in on world leaders’ phone calls, they all knew we spied on each other. What pissed them off is how much better we, the United States, are at it. This alliance between Amazon, consumer, and algorithms gives consumers enormous value, and Amazon’s resultant (blistering) growth garners hundreds of billions in shareholder value for employees and investors. As consumers we benefit enormously from a relationship with the most powerful allies you could ever have on your side. As citizens, wage earners, and competitors, we know we are being abused but just can’t break up with the hot girl.
does he have an editor?
First, I say something in my talks. I highlight that Apple is the largest tax avoider in the world because lawmakers treat it like the hot girl on campus—if she pays a little attention to them, they swoon and are willing to enter into an abusive relationship. I say that Uber is fomenting an ethos in business that’s terrible for society. Four thousand Uber employees and their investors will split $80 billion (or more) as the 1,600,000 drivers working for Uber will see their wages crash to a level that makes them the working poor. We used to admire firms that created hundreds of thousands of middle-and upper-class jobs; now our heroes are firms that produce a dozen lords and hundreds of thousands of serfs.
seriously. stop