I’m taking business courses right now, which sometimes seems to mean memorizing a lot of pop-psychology mnemonics for different personality and management models and theories. One of the models of behavior we have learned is called “Influence Without Authority” and it begins with treating your opponents as potential allies. This seems hopelessly naive sometimes but I’ve tried to apply it to my daily life anyway.
For example, the Somerville Ward 3 Democrats mailing list lit up this week about a project to turn a former function hall into apartments. Neighbors were concerned about parking and about the addition of rental units, because they felt that renters don’t stick around and create a stable community. I managed to gently guide the discussion toward the far less controversial topics of immigration policy and classism by pointing out that if our town wants to be welcoming to immigrants and people with modest means, it need to begin by making it possible for them to find a moderately priced apartment. It kind of worked, in that it led to a non-furious internet disagreement. Which, I guess, is a small miracle in its own way.
Links
Injustice: That prison is literally made of poison. Obviously they told nearby citizens about the danger of drinking local water, but not the prisoners.
Note also that in a sad echo of the three-fifths compromise, prisoners are counted in the census as residents of their prisons, but not permitted to vote, distorting representation, voting power, and funding distributions.
Sarcasm: A modest proposal on what else we could replace with Amazon services.
Buckminster Fuller in 1970, complaining about “this nonsense of earning a living,” seems to have been prescient. Or perhaps he was just rehashing Keynes from way back in ’28. Anyway, anthropologist David Graeber’s 2013 article on bullshit jobs, a piece I mentioned a few months back, is now a book that’s getting quite a lot of press.
The Economist has an interview with him discussing the yoke of managerial feudalism. The New York Times, which can’t bear to spell out s-h-i-t in the article copy, distinguishes itself by using the word “bullshit” only in the article URL of the online edition. And of course Bloomberg tries to out-hip its media rivals by using the word LOLOLOLOL as a complete sentence.
The New Yorker has a take which is somewhat different from the others, and worth noting:
It leads to a realization that Graeber circles but never articulates, which is that bullshit employment has come to serve in places like the U.S. and Britain as a disguised, half-baked version of the dole—one attuned specially to a large, credentialled middle class. Under a different social model, a young woman unable to find a spot in the workforce might have collected a government check. Now, instead, she can acquire a bullshit job at, say, a health-care company, spend half of every morning compiling useless reports, and use the rest of her desk time to play computer solitaire or shop for camping equipment online. It’s not, perhaps, a life well-lived. But it’s not the terror of penury, either.
Anyway. Six months into unemployment, I’m still looking for work. Even in a low-unemployment economy, employers are incredibly demanding and stingy. Just yesterday I spotted a junior marketing communications job that requires at least an MS, and ideally a PhD, in biochemistry.
I suppose it makes sense. If it’s a bullshit job, then it doesn’t actually need to be done, so there’s no need to hire people based on their ability to do the work. Instead, they hire based on shiny credentials that make their bosses look impressive. “Check out the PhD in the cube over there! We’ve got highly-credentialed research scientists doing direct mail!”
LOLOLOLOL.
Politics Look up who makes money from ICE in your state. Give ’em a call. Let ’em know you think they should stop.
Direct action Are you a LinkedIn user? Are you connected with any of the people on this list? Perhaps you should speak with them about their life choices.
Interesting The town of Liberal, Kansas has undergone pretty dramatic demographic shifts over the past 30 years, and that’s resulted in the formation of a new regional accent in which Anglo and Latinx people alike speak with some Spanish inflections.
Definitely not a wolf
I WOULD LIKE TO ONCE AGAIN APOLOGIZE FOR WHAT WAS A SUBSTANTIAL MISUNDERSTANDING ON MY PART ABOUT WHAT YOU ALL MEANT BY ACQUIRING THE PERFECT BEACH BODY
One of America’s biggest entertainment sectors is video games, and one of the biggest genres in the industry right now is “survival.” In the first half of 2017, the category made $398 million, and it doesn’t appear to have slowed down at all since then.
There are dozens of them: DayZ (zombie apocalypse). Fallout 76 (nuclear apocalypse). Raft (player is adrift on a raft at sea). Don’t Starve (haunted landscape). Ark (fight dinosaurs). Rust (includes nudity). Some of the games have charmingly lo-fi graphics, and others are full GPU-crunching 3D wonderlands.
I played a bit of one recent hit, Subnautica, the other day. You crash-land on a watery alien planet and must swim around to find minerals and plants and fish you can use to make clean water, food, swim fins, air tanks, and so on.
The stunningly beautiful landscape isn’t quite hostile, although there are some predatory fish to avoid, but there isn’t really much fighting and there aren’t any guns. It’s mostly indifferent. There’s not even much plot. You’re just scavenging and scrambling and keeping a constant eye on how much air, food, and water you have left.
As most of you know by now, I’m looking for a full-time job. It’s an unpleasant process, and even good headline unemployment figures aren’t that encouraging when you’re part of the unemployed percentage of the population.
And even more discouraging, the folks who actually have jobs don’t seem to be much happier. Think of the poor archivists whose job it is to tape torn papers back together because nobody can persuade the president to stop tearing documents up as he reads (or doesn’t read) them. We only found out about the gig because two of them got fired for no reason, but they’re pretty sure someone else is still doing it.
The boss likes to break things for no reason, and so some schlimazel has to tape it back together. That’s the job. That’s all there is.
Short-form commentary
Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” This seems increasingly true.
[[Insert introductory paragraph here to create illusion that I’m not just aggregating other people’s content]]
Performative worklike activities
But the point is that in a modern economy, actually making stuff work is only part of the job. The other part of the job is performing that making-stuff-workiness to customers and executives. If your goal is to hire engineers to write code to protect your accounts from hackers, first you have to hire different engineers to build maps that shoot lasers, and show the laser maps to executives, to convince the executives to give you money to hire the real engineers to do the real work. … It suggests something about the future of work, doesn’t it? Eventually, robots will do a lot of the real work of, like, producing goods and performing services and writing computer programs to spot hackers. And humans will do the overlay of performative meta-work; we’ll put on little plays to convince each other to use a particular robot’s goods or services. For all the high technology of the laser maps, they respond to a particularly human need: The robots would be perfectly happy just to get on with protecting the servers from hackers, or improving the settlement processes, but the humans need a little razzle-dazzle
Workplace protest Here’s Ed Burmila on Roseanne, explaining why we keep trying to pretend that Trump and his fans are just misunderstood:
Barr may have wanted to use a fictional version of herself to prove that white people who love Donald Trump—people like her, in short—are not racists who traffic in ludicrous conspiracy theories and detest anyone who isn’t like them. She failed because that is exactly what she is. ABC, in abetting this mess, found that even Hollywood magic can’t make sympathetic characters out of such people, although I suspect it will keep trying. The alternative is confronting the fact that the beliefs of a substantial number of Americans are malevolent and dangerous, not mere differences of opinion that can be resolved in 20 minutes, with a hug.
But let’s have a word about what kinds of speech merit getting canned. At what point do we fire people for speech that’s protected under the 1st amendment? If we endorse firing Roseanne, must we also endorse the punishment of Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players who kneel in protest during the national anthem?
If we agree with Matt Yglesias’ argument that Kaep is really a victim of right-wing “no-platforming” must we also endorse neo-racialists like Charles Murray and Ben Shapiro who keep getting shouted down when they visit college campuses?
If we’re going to address only the fact that people are saying or doing things that got them fired or shouted at, we should have similar opinions about Roseanne Barr and Colin Kaepernick. But we don’t, most of us. Most of us will tell you that it’s a fair and just outcome for one of those two people to get fired, and that the other person shouldn’t have lost their job over what they did.
Why is that? Perhaps it’s because of our political alignments: The left lines up behind a left-leaning celebrity, the right lines up behind a right-leaning celebrity. We signal our political affiliation in our choice of which controversial celebrity we defend, just like we signal our regional affiliation by following a sports team.
And maybe the difference is that Kaepernick is asking for a reduction in police brutality, and Roseanne Barr is reanimating Lee Atwater’s rotting corpse and giving it a Twitter account. And maybe, if you support one and endorse the firing of the other, then you’re making a distinction on the content of their speech and the character it reveals.
Not that it changes anything: Even if other players can take a knee in protest and have protection from the player’s union, Kaep’s never going to be a QB again, and Roseanne’s always going to have a spot on the lecture circuit where she’ll blame her racism on economic anxiety and liberal condescension. The NFL owners might back down on the kneeling ban, but they’ll always be the bosses and the players will always be men destroying their bodies and minds in exchange for a chance at a few years of fame and a fraction of the bosses’ wealth.
If you really want to cultivate joy in a more systematic way there’s always this quick summary of the Yale class on being happy. (Yes, NextDraft scooped me on this and the wine story, but they’re both worth a link anyway).
Long reads “I haven’t heard about anyone selling out for a long time.” Toby Shorin writes a long piece titled After Authenticity, covering the hipster aesthetic, the difference between “selling out” and “blowing up,” and how we define currency in an age of infinite frictionless reproduction.
You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride Acting on a hunch they got from an Infowars video, the FBI held an African-American man for 5 months before finally admitting he had not actually committed any crimes. He did lose his job and his home while locked up, so at least they were able to hurt him anyway.
ICE grabbed DACA recipient Daniel Ramierez Medina during an immigration raid, and made up gang affiliations to try to deport him despite his permit to stay. Courts eventually ruled that he’d done nothing wrong and should be allowed to remain in the country, but Medina spent quite a bit of time in jail before being exonerated.
An unmarked NYPD vehicle knocked a cyclist off his bike, claimed his bag was full of marijuana, and charged him with resisting arrest. It kinda looks like they just hit a guy on a bike and then lied about it.
A homeless man scraped together $10 to buy a meal at Burger King. The cashier thought his bill was fake. He spent three months in jail.
Sweden’s gone almost entirely cash-free. So have its criminals. That means mostly online scams, some jewelry smash-and-grabs, and the odd spectacular The Fast and the Furious-inspired heist in which hijackers jump onto a moving truck from a blacked-out car… but also owl trafficking. Obvs.
Maybe one of the reasons David Brooks still has a job is that he can continue to come up with a column even when he has no ideas. If there are no relevant or interesting or novel things to communicate, but you need to fill a column? David Brooks: As consistent as a spokesman for Movantik.
(Ask your doctor if Movantik is right for your ennui-induced writer’s block. May cause pants-shitting.)
Anyway, I got nothing, and I’m not willing to fake it unless there’s actual money on the line, so on to the links, right?
Death throes of journalism The Times this week has continued in its quest to prove that celebrity right-wingers like Bari Weiss, Ben Shapiro, and Joe Rogan are “censored” and “unheard,” by giving them an even larger platform.
A bracing look at these bold, daring, iconoclastic thinkers with unconventional ideas like “multiculturalism is bad,” “feminism has gone too far,” “white men are the truly oppressed,” “Islam is also bad,” and “maybe minorities shouldn’t complain so much.” https://t.co/0vymcYv9ZM
Wait a minute. Maybe I did have a column in there. Eh, whatever.
The grind With respect to last week’s newsletter: 19th century workers spent a lot of time on the job, so a 40-hour week seems pretty luxurious by comparison. But life wasn’t always constant toil. Academic studies support it: capitalism and industrialization have not saved us much labor at all. (Of course, this counts only the number of hours of compensated labor and not the enormous amounts of work required to have water and fuel and food in a pre-industrial setting. Or the sheer amount of work it would take to collect and read all the newspapers you can skim in five minutes with Feedly… ).
Campus political correctness is out of control Some campus cafe workers lost their jobs because a VP heard profanity in their Spotify playlist. (This is a totally different Duke University VP from the one who, in 2014, was accused of hitting a parking attendant with his car while calling her a racial slur beginning with the letter N.)
A moment of popular culture that is absolutely worthwhile There are 57 people on this mailing list right now, which means that in all probability at least one of you has not seen “This Is America,” the latest video from Childish Gambino. Even if you are not a regular consumer of popular music, please take four minutes to watch the video. Or at the very least read a quick take from CNN on why this is an officially Important Cultural Phenomenon
Curiosities of translation The NBA has become increasingly popular in China. Fans there have developed an elaborate set of nicknames for their favorite players. Re-translating them back into English is hilarious.
James Harden – 景德镇镇长 “The Mayor of Jingdezhen”
Jingdezhen is a town famous for making fragile porcelain, so “Son of Jingdezhen” (景德镇之子) is a term for an NBA flop artist. Harden is perceived to be the best at this “art,” so he gets to be the “mayor” of Floptown.
Imagine if after putting in a full day at the office—and school is pretty much what our children do for a job—you had to come home and do another four or so hours of office work. Monday through Friday. Plus Esmee gets homework every weekend. If your job required that kind of work after work, how long would you last?
What can one say to this but laugh? Obviously, the 21st century job, the one that capital and management want us to have, requires evenings and weekends. I mean, you want a career, not just a job, right? If you’re not working til ten on a Friday night, how will the boss know you’re worth keeping around? If the big meeting doesn’t make you vomit with anxiety, are you really taking it seriously enough? This is an at-will economy, jagoff. You can be fired for any reason or no reason at all, so you better not give anyone an excuse. Perfect, every time, or else. (Recall, also, that Americans in general don’t have any savings. One bad break, and penury looms).
And of course you need your “lifelong learning.” Rachel Paige King’s recent essay on career guidance literature, “Is Your Job Lynchian, or More Kafkaesque?” notes that “Today, to be successful in the workplace, one must not simply find one’s vocation or ‘calling.’ One is expected to engage in a program of constant self-reinvention in accordance with the latest trends, contorting oneself to fit whatever job is trendy these days … while continuing to gather ever more degrees and professional certificates.”
It’s true: some employers will actively discount or invalidate your old-fashioned 20th century degrees these days, so you better keep those continuing education certificates coming. You may or may not learn anything, but it’s most important to have a piece of paper saying you’ve paid $3,000 for a course about it. And of course if you picked something to specialize in that turns out to be out of date a few years later, well, that’s your fault.
While you’re at it, you obviously need a side hustle. Maybe it’s sporadic, selling crafts and art on Etsy, or a sideline that you could ramp up in a pinch if you needed more work. Maybe it’s regular, like a weekend retail gig or dog walking or tutoring or stripping. I mean, you’re not going to pay off those masters degrees just working as a teacher or librarian.
King notes:
The perverse question that [What Color Is Your Parachute? author] Bolles, who appeared to believe in the logic of the system and in the fundamental decency of most workplaces, never seems to consider is: What if today’s world of work is not incidentally or accidentally cruel, but in fact intentionally designed to ensure that workers’ self-esteem is crushed and their sense of self-worth eroded? In today’s professional climate, is the dream job Bolles urges us to look for available? Is finding even a bearable one likely?
If school means endless homework, staying up past midnight crying, stumbling through days like a zombie, certain that you’re falling behind in a lifelong struggle for adequacy, well, that sounds like great preparation for adulthood. Best to teach them young that pointless tasks trickle down from on high through layer after layer of management until they land on our desks with rubrics and worksheets. Best to teach them young that they better start grinding. As above, so below.
Campus political correctness is out of control George Mason University has insisted for years that its Mercatus Center is a fully independent policy group. Surprise, the libertarian-leaning think-tank is basically controlled by the Koch Foundation. And yes, they’ll fire professors who aren’t libertarian enough.
Mike Pence watch Mike Pence says Joe Arpaio defends “the rule of law.” (It’s easy to understand if you realize that “the law” for this crew means “white men.”
He also headlined an event at a PAC headed by Carl Higbie, whom you may recall as someone who lost his job with the Trump administration for being so unambiguously racist even the GOP couldn’t stomach it.
Contrition watch Former Obamacare opponent Tom Price admits that the individual mandate he helped kill was actually a good idea, now that it’s too late to do any good.
Welfare chauvinism One of the principles of contemporary Republican politics is that Our People deserve help but Those People don’t. So it’s only natural that Michigan’s latest legislation would impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, but exempt people in counties with high unemployment. Not cities, though. So mostly white rural Michiganders can keep getting Medicaid even if they can’t find work, but not Those People in Detroit.
The only good David Brooks take on Twitter:
So APPARENTLY my New York Times column “Something Like Shirley Jackson’s Lottery, But for Sex, and That’s Really The Only Reasonable Way to Keep Men From Doing Violence” wasn’t received well by the Wags on twitter dot com
A fraternity at Syracuse has been suspended after a racist video surfaced. See, mainstream conservative positions are now banned on campus. Oh, these are pretty bad. Excuse me, I mean, it was just a joke. Or is it pretty mainstream, given the president’s description of “illegals” coming to “breed” in our cities.
Not for the squeamish Climate change is great news for ticks and for Lyme disease. But it’s killing moose. (Try not to imagine how many ticks it takes to bring down a moose).
There’s some irony in the fact that Ryan, who famously called poverty a “culture problem” of “men not even thinking about working,” who said the social safety net is a “hammock that lulls able-bodied people into complacency and dependence,” and who extolled the virtues of children seeing their father working, will be quitting his job at 48 in order to do less work for more money.
A former compiler of the Forbes List of the super-wealthy goes back over his tapes of “John Barron” talking up DJT’s wealth and is appalled at the degree of deception. Even by the standards of puff-piece wealth journalism the lies are astonishing.
As we all know, news is bad for you. At least, constantly hearing about about terrible things happening in the world that you can’t do anything about is bad for you.
So here’s some good stuff that’s going on. And yes, I’ve used this image before.
It has previously been reported that women in Texas were dying in childbirth at alarming rates, possibly due to legal restrictions on women’s healthcare. It looks like most of that anomaly was caused by poor user interface in the reporting tools. (Women’s health care in the US and in Texas especially still sucks… but at least it’s not getting any worse!)
A little perspective on the dangers of social media:
The printing press destabilized western society and contributed to a century of sectarian warfare that lead to death and destruction on a previously unprecedented scale. https://t.co/nfGw3YpTsb
The guys who run the show in pro sports aren’t generally known for doing the right thing, especially when it comes to race and social justice. But Patriots owners Robert Kraft is putting his considerable clout behind Meek Mill in his quest for freedom.
Secretly Ironic 