by
Adam Fisher
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Scott Hassan: That same type of technology will be used in tele-operated robots; some people call them Waldos. Think of this device as a set of arms that rolls around, that’s able to do stuff—two hands that can be manipulated from afar. Let’s say it fits where your dishwasher used to be, and whenever you need it, it comes out of there and it unfolds and it’s operated by somebody else in another location that has expertise that you want at that time. You want dinner made? Well, it’s just remote-operated by a chef, in some type of rig, so that when they move their arms, the robot moves its arms, in the exact same way. And that person is wearing these gloves, so that whenever the robot touches something, they can feel that touch. So that that person can pick up things and chop things and go into the refrigerator, open the doors, as if they were there. Then that same Waldo, when that person is done with making dinner for you, instantly switches over to this other person who loves to clean up, and then they go and clean up the whole kitchen for you. It’s the service economy, but it’s in your own home, right? And so you basically have expertise on demand. So, well, something like that is going to be widespread in maybe ten years.
is this guy a fucking moron? he is basically asking to be eaten
In the Silicon Valley where I'm from, the stories were almost never about money. They were tales about resistance, heroism, and struggle, yarns about the creation of something out of nothing-and the derring-do required to pull such a feat off. In short, they were about dragon slaying. That's still true, at least in the Silicon Valley I know.
Those were the stories that got me excited. And they still do.
I'm not saying there isn't an economic story to be told. In fact, I think that we are witnessing the greatest transition since the industrial revolution. A new economy— the information economy—is being created, and the center of that new economic order will be Silicon Valley. And if that's not the business story of the century, what is?
Still, the bigger question, in my humble opinion, is how that transformation will transform us. We begin to see the answer in the culture that's being created in Silicon Valley, now. It's future obsessed and forward thinking. It's technical and quantitative. It's market oriented. [...]
he's both wrong and not
I was a worker once.
Lent my labor to
the appetites of mass.
Like a caged animal,
my master said,
beautiful, self-contained.
Only once was I asked to sacrifice
the fingers of my left land,
which I gave willingly
and mostly without regret.
I could follow
my master's reasoning.
I was sympathetic
to her plight.
The company had
its own hunger.
We all would
have to give.
What of the other workers?
Where did they figure in?
I kept my gaze
on the task
in front of me.
I waited for
my shift
to end.
"It's okay," Jose says, stirring yogurt with his spoons. "He'll find another job."
Andrew shakes his head and tosses his fork onto his tray.
The next morning, he plods past half-finished office buildings, overturned construction cones, and hulking orange cranes. Mist nips at his cheeks. He bows his head against the wind.
It had been silly to think of himself as a spy, he thinks as he trudged up the office building steps. There is no one to report to, no authority who determines right and wrong. He is a cook, not a spy. Someone who holds power over nothing but his food.
Inside, he turns the induction burners to high and pours until the frying pans are full. He cooks the eggs quickly. He does not worry about keeping them nice and soft.
cafeteria worker at Microsoft. inspo somehow?
You want more police, you said, more patrols,
all of the Aurora crap pushed away,
to some other neighborhood, some other
place, someone else's
problem now, another
community's fate.
Those people don't want
help, anyway.
They want to snort powder
in the back seats of cars,
to break into decent
people's homes, to make
your mom afraid.
Our system is capitalism
and democracy, which means
people will be poor.
Just keep them the hell away.
In the poem
I have been trying
to write you,
I tell you about the hole
in my car
where the radio used to be,
how it was taken
two days before
we shared garlic prawns
at the Thai restaurant on Eastlake,
everything civil,
our disagreements peaceful,
all of us equal
so long as our bank accounts were sturdy enough
to sustain cocktails and Pad Thai and beef salad
alongside talk of the homeless
and criminal justice and the mayor and your lawn
You see? I have been trying to write you a poem,
but all I can come up with
are these banal thoughts
and prosaic observations.
In the poem I have been trying
to write you, I tell you about the hole
in my car where the radio used to be,
how before work each morning
I look down at cords and wires
and Styrofoam.
How its absence reproaches me
like a wound, a rupture
between how I live now
and the experience that used
to belong to me.
I tell you about the thief,
who I never saw but now sense,
a small man a little ashamed
as he reached down to detach
the wires exacting the minimum
amount of damage.
I tell you about the pity
that he felt for me
and the lack of peace
that he held in himself.
I tell you about his sadness
and fragility and fear.
I tell you that the police
will not help you.
I tell you that the prawns
will not help you.
I tell you that playing civil
or socialized or familial
will not help you.
I tell you
that you will die.
fuck
Three months ago, the boy moved to Seattle without knowing anyone at all. He had spent the summer delivering pizza and bussing tables while living with his parents at home. He saved enough money to survive for a few months while figuring out what to do with his life.
But this was the fall of 2008. The housing crisis had just hit and the wheels of the national economy were beginning to fall off. He applied for every job that he could find. Office jobs and restaurant jobs. Coffee shop jobs and valet parking jobs. Telemarketing jobs and casino security guard jobs. He didn't hear a word.
[...]
But he also had known what it was like to serve people. During high school, he had worked in a restaurant and grocery store. In college, he work-studied, keeping time at swim meets and setting the stages for visiting authors and musicians.
For him, though, the money that he earned had been extra, since his parents paid most of his serious bills. It was different for the people who he had worked with, many of whom were older and had no college degree. Others had earned advanced degrees but could find no work to which apply their skills. One woman held a doctorate in English Literature. She had written her dissertation on Ezra Pound. She spooned garbanzo beans into plastic containers.
At the time, he had felt sorry for her, sure. But mostly he hadn't given her much thought.
Online, he learned that more than forty percent of the nation's resources were controlled by the top one percent. Thirty million people had no health insurance. Fifty million were on food stamps.
Had it always been this way? he wondered. Or was this something new?
He sent in an application to the union on a whim. He was invited to interview the very next day.
daaamn
"The union?" the woman asked after he introduced himself.
"Like I was saying, ma'am, I'm here because workers from all over the state are coming together -"
"Let me guess. To take out of my pocket? To pay people like you?"
"No, ma'am, they're coming together because -"
"Look at you." She considered him. "You don't look much more than a boy. What's your name, son?"
"My name?" the boy repeated.
"Who are you?" she asked. "How about we start there."
"I don't see how that matters," he whispered, shrinking back. The woman's eyes - they seemed to drill right through.
"It matters plenty, son," she said wearily. "It's practically the whole goddamned thing."
damn
At home, I tell my vegetarian friends
that I admire them,
and I do, I think, sneaking mouthfuls
of boiled bird
from the walk-in freezer
I am a dissolute
and undisciplined creature,
but I harbor no illusions
that I am alone.
[...] The current racial reality of China is informed by a 2000-year history of Chinese cultural imperialism and a more recent history of Han ethnocentric nationalism, as much as it has been moulded too by Western colonialism. It should be no surprise then, that Han Chinese people who have grown up in the West are often vastly different beings from those raised in a country where they are the normative citizen.
What does all this mean? On a personal level, I will never find representation in Chinese serial dramas; language aside, the only culture I really know is one that is entirely different, in which people like me are marginalised. Beyond this, British Asian, Asian-American, Asian-whatever Western diasporic identities are shaped by specific experiences of Eurocentric racial alienation as much as by any links we might have left to the homeland. This is the context that bounds our specific requests, and is not one that ‘real Asians’ share. We are not born racial subjects, but become so through our location in a racialised context. [...]
In addition to the political and economic changes that brought about the new economy, there were new ways of talking about risk. These new ways of discussing risk led to new ways in which people managed, dealt with, and expressed risk. And, as we’ll see in this chapter, these ways of dealing with risk in turn led to new exposures. The dot-com era was both a rhetorical and discursive strategy for reframing work relationships of the new economy. As Nigel Thrift put it, it was in part the “the romance” of exciting, interesting, and risky new jobs in a rapidly growing field, not the financial rewards, that attracted many people to work in the dot-com boom.34 This allure combined with the newness of many companies in the Internet industry meant that workplace-level changes flourished in the industry. With few established conventions or work practices, dot-coms could reinvent professional work as fun, young, and exciting, turning jobs from white-collar into what Andrew Ross has called “no-collar.”35 As new companies in a new industry, they emerged distinct from established institutions and models of work in older industries, and the individualism of this new era could thrive. Fred Turner has convincingly argued that early cyberculture was deeply influenced by a particular brand of political libertarianism of the countercultural movement.36 Similarly, the culture of risk was just as important to the rise of the commercial Internet. Surely, the economic rhetoric of both Clinton and Reagan resonated with the changes that people felt; in turn, political talk helped shape a culture that accepted economic risk. While wide-reaching economic and political changes precede the dot-com boom, these changes informed and supported a cultural shift that occurred—making risk a central narrative in how people talk about their work. Not only did these changes set the ground for a new economy, but the discursive shift toward risky work also helped constitute new work practices and new relations to work. Decades of industrial change hinged on a fulcrum between two regimes—an “old” industrial economy in which economic growth and cultural norms supported stable employment practices in a “new” information, cultural, and technological economy driven by highly individualized and flexible work. This distinction between the old and new economy I have shown in this chapter is not a clear-cut one, and the rhetoric and reality of the scope of the economic changes was hotly debated at the time. But accompanying this discussion of a new, “renewed” innovative economy was talk of risk taking, entrepreneurship, and individual initiative that informed the ways in which people think about their jobs. It is in this economic, political, and cultural environment that a new medium arose, and embedded into these new technologies and messages were the entrepreneurial values of the people who were creating it, as we will begin to see in the next chapter.