5LL #9 - Self-Care, Climate Justice, Utopias, Capitalism is Working, Tech Futurists
Tell Me It's Going to be OK
Miya Tokumitsu, The Baffler
Given that we spend most of our waking hours in an alienated, desperate grind to obtain or maintain a life-sustaining job, blaming ourselves for every snag along the way, gospels of reassurance and self-care are precious cargo. We are denied the ability to seek comfort from colleagues, neighbors, or—heaven forbid—comrades, because neoliberalism has turned them into our competition. Instead, disaffected souls are relentlessly steered back into the thrall of a marketplace where we can access, individually, little hits of succor.
The 1.5 Generation
Eric Holthaus, Grist
In recent years, young people have realized that it’s their future — and that of the generations after them — at stake. And they’ve adopted the climate cause in increasingly audacious ways, from suing the federal government to planning mass nationwide rallies. Observers are anticipating shifts in public opinion to translate into escalating action as millennials and the oldest members of Generation Z begin to exercise their growing power.
The City of Dreams
Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs
I think it’s possible to pair feelings of joy/appreciation with corresponding feelings of realism/responsibility, and we can view perfect moments not as an ignorant indulgence, but as a vision of the kind of experience that we ought to make accessible to everybody. They’re little glimpses of what we should be fighting for, and it’s actually important to have reminders of what the good life might consist of, and to have reassurances that it’s not actually fantastical to think we can achieve heaven on earth. We already have heaven on earth, it’s that we only have it fleetingly, and it’s not available to everybody.
Capitalism is Beyond Saving, and America is Living Proof
Jacob Bacharach, Truthdig
Real wage growth has been nonexistent in the United States for more than 30 years. But as America enters the 10th year of the recovery—and the longest bull market in modern history—there are nervous murmurs, even among capitalism’s most reliable defenders, that some of its most basic mechanisms might be broken. The gains of the recovery have accrued absurdly, extravagantly to a tiny sliver of the world’s superrich. A small portion of that has trickled down to the professional classes—the lawyers and money managers, art buyers and decorators, consultants and “starchitects”—who work for them. For the declining middle and the growing bottom: nothing.
No Technology Has An Inevitable Future
Zachary Eldredge, Medium
The good thing about this is that avoiding tech dystopias isn’t really about shutting down technological progress. It’s about rethinking how technologies are deployed and by who — it’s about shutting down certain social arrangements before they can form. The truth about “inevitable” social forms of technology is that nearly all of them require time, money, and effort to create.
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