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The Collins also tread carefully around the power companies. The family has moved around in search of cheap energy and landed in rural Washington, where electric rates are as low as one fifth the national average thanks to hydroelectric power from the Columbia and Snake Rivers. They weren’t the only itinerant crypto miners to move to the area, especially when the price of Bitcoin grew by over 1,700 percent in 2017. According to the Wall Street Journal, some small local utilities in Washington were receiving upward of twenty calls per week from miners looking to use more electricity. Without sufficient infrastructure to meet demand, power companies have recently clamped down on crypto miners by placing limits on energy usage, requiring hefty deposits, and turning off power to those who don’t comply.
The goal of Japanese telerobotics isn’t to provide better access to remote expertise in the form of higher-skilled workers, in other words, but to technologically recuperate lower-skilled workers who might otherwise be excluded from the workforce entirely. What is envisioned is nothing less than a digital platform for physical work, one that could utilize previously untapped labor reserves to power global networks of on-demand robot avatars.
This may open up potentially meaningful opportunities for those unable to physically travel to a work site. At the same time, it risks further isolating the already immobilized, enabling remote access to their physical labor while fixing barriers to their social mobility ever more firmly in place. While the stated promise of teleworker robots is one of freedom for those employed, in practice it is employers who are most liberated by the arrangement.
Although open publishing was key to the success of Indymedia, the technical aspects alone weren’t what attracted its user base. Just as important were the anti-capitalist and justice-centered values. I came to the Tennessee Indymedia Center’s website, tnimc.org, to write and read stories about how people in Nashville, my hometown, were dying because of cuts to state health care, about how coal extraction had decimated whole mountains and polluted local water supplies, about how police were increasing their presence in public schools.
Local corporate media at the time were either ignoring these issues or, if they were covering them, failed to consistently center the voices of the people and communities affected. Our thinking was that it would be awfully hard to change local policy if our neighbors didn’t know what was happening, and we couldn’t count on the mainstream media to make people understand enough to care. In this way, as grassroots journalists on Indymedia, our work was tactical. We were reporting with an agenda.
Other Indymedia organizers and activists I spoke to felt similarly. “Self-publishing is great. I’m into it,” an early organizer of Indybay told me, who asked to remain anonymous. “But I feel like the main strength of Indymedia was this idea about tactical media. There’s like a purpose to what you’re doing that’s not just about publishing your story.” If you hung around Indymedia types during the early 2000s, there’s a good chance you heard the term “tactical media” batted around. What differentiates tactical media from some imaginary idea of pure journalism is that tactical media is made in support of a political project.
cool
To encourage competition, managers publicly post a ranking of employee productivity at the end of each day. In some warehouses, there’s a whiteboard; in others, a printed piece of paper or an electronic display. Ashleigh Strange, who worked at a warehouse in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania between 2013 and 2015, said this practice was also a “method of group shaming.” “If you were the worst person in the warehouse,” Ashleigh said, “you’re going to know it. And so will everyone else.” In some warehouses, bottom performers are automatically enrolled in remedial training — or written up.
Management also runs what employees called “power hours,” during which workers are incentivized by raffle tickets or Amazon “swag” to work as fast as humanly possible. “You get an unimportant reward for working as fast as you can,” said Charlie. “Everyone competes. This becomes the new baseline.”
Online Amazon worker forums are full of strategies for artificially boosting rates. One worker discovered that managers were basing his productivity numbers on how quickly he started work after a break. By leaving a count loaded in his scanner, he could trick the computer into thinking he had resumed work with a flurry of activity. Others boost their count by rapidly scanning several bins of small items.
Hefty reminders of corporeal nature. I’m always amazed by how successfully we do in fact banish all that from daily discourse. We all have our little dramas in the bathroom most days. Something’s not quite right. You can see the way a certain bit is going. And we’ve all got our back pains and our knee aches and so on, and yet people can spend the whole day together and it’s never mentioned—everyone’s got their little cargo of health anxieties, their little cargo of entropy.
in response to: " One motive that recurs again and again is the mortality of the body—the rotting, the decaying, the baldness, the toothaches and so on."
Well, all the voices are mine. All the characters are just shards of the fractured me. That’s why I sympathize with them all, even the monsters.
yes!! in response to a prompt about him using lots of different voices
At this moment I feel obliged to acknowledge a part of life that’s not subject to fantasies or projections and doesn’t care about how anyone sees it. I’m reading from a book of Simone Weil’s letters, Waiting for God. It was introduced by Leslie Fiedler, and he says something that I like very much:
This world is the only reality available to us, and if we do not love it in all its terror, we are sure to end up loving the “imaginary,” our own dreams and self-deceits, the Utopias of the politicians, or the futile promises of future reward and consolation which the misled blasphemously call “religion.” The soul has a million dodges for protecting itself against the acceptance and love of the emptiness, that “maximum distance between God and God,” which is the universe; for the price of such acceptance and love is abysmal misery. And yet it is the only way.
[...] The novel puts people in motion and, in that, tries to render invisible things visible and deal with questions that don’t have easy answers. I think fiction is a space in which you can use naïveté to bump up against ambiguities.
[...] The novel ideally is not reducible to the political. It’s a journey toward meaning that transcends the frame of politics. Blood Meridian—just to think of a great novel that traverses the political—is not simply a book about the violent policies of the American government paying out for scalps on the Western frontier. It takes up subject matter that is inescapably political, but it builds of systemic violence a work that comes to rest only in the territory of art, where the thing built is so elegant and strange that it cannot be justified or even really explained.
[...] the track is not for staying on, it’s for leaping off and then returning to. The notion of the page-turner always seemed foreign to me. I don’t want to be sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to find out what happened next. I want to be falling off my seat in ecstatic pain because of what language and consciousness are doing on the page. With The Ask, the plot may not be up to Grisham standards, but I’m certainly trying to achieve a sense of hurtling that I think all good books have—maybe not toward a plot point, but toward something more devastating.
sam lipsyte