Larry's Brainfeed

The “2020 UGGGHH” discourse is insufferable. It boggles my mind that so many people think an arbitrary temporal distinction is the cause of our nation’s collapse. They believe, in all earnestness, that 2021 is going to be better simply by virtue of it being different.

There’s a very good chance–better than 50/50–that 2020 is going to be the best of our remaining years, that every year and month and day from now until the sun explodes is going to be progressively worse than the one that preceded it.  

I had a sad, drunk epiphany last night about neoliberal management strategies during our collapse. The general consensus is that people like Mitch McConnell and Larry Summers are evil and stupid. But what if they’re actually evil and competent? They know that mass displacement is coming, probably very soon, and they intentionally want to immiserate most people beforehand so that we won’t have the resources or will to mount any consequential protest as the cities start to flood and burn and trains start herding us into camps.

You might have heard of The Great Reset. Like all other reflections of our horrific future, the political media recently began referring to it as a “conspiracy theory.” Indeed, it has been badly misunderstood by paranoid right wingers. But it’s real. There was a Davos conference that was literally called “The Great Reset.” Transcripts and videos of conference proceedings can be found with a 10 second Google search. These people put their ideology out in the open for everyone to digest, and now simply re-posting the things they said on record makes you a conspiracy theorist.

These types of Rich People Gatherings–Davos, the Aspen Ideas Festival, etc–should not be regarded as a meeting of soothsayers. They’re not even really prognosticators. They are, instead, the collected mewlings of the modern clarisy. Their declarations are meant to placate the hyper elite, convince them that their destructive behaviors are moral and the current system is totally sustainable even though the ground is clearly caving in beneath their feet. 

You can think of the visions set for at these conferences as sort of what the rich think the best case scenario might be.

The Great Reset’s best case scenario is terrifying indeed: one of the very first slides announces that by 2030 upwards of a billion people will be displaced by climate change. We won’t eat meat anymore (okay, fine, whatever). Oh, also, our economy will be entirely rentier-based. You don’t have any possessions. You rent everything you use. You don’t draw a steady paycheck. Everyone is a gig worker. There is no retirement, either; you work until you can’t, and then you die. 

This is the world both of our wretched political parties want to build. To the people who control our fate, this is idealism.

The weirdest omission is that they all seem to think that the masses are just going to go along with it. India and Pakistan will not exchange nuclear weapons: each side will merely accept that their countries are no longer inhabitable and instead of fighting for water or territory they will simply sit tight and wait for immolation. Eritreans will humbly march themselves into the sea. American homeowners will simply shrug their shoulders and consent to signing all of their earthly possessions over to Citibank in exchange for a weekly allowance of 4 cans of Spam.

Is this naivety, or do they know something we don’t? Are they stupid enough to simply believe that no one will fight back, or are they planning some type of mechanisms for the supression of unrest?

Maybe neither? Because, honestly, I can’t see any reform taking place no matter how bad things get. Next year–after Biden eliminates all remaining vestiges of the social safety net and unemployment hits levels never before seen since the dawn of industrialization and the police continue to murder people at will–we could very well see riots that are ten times as destructive as the ones that hit over the past summer.

So what? What will change? The government will act swiftly to ensure that the hyper rich don’t suffer a moment of inconvenience. They will give everyone else the choice of either dying quietly or getting mowed down by cops.

Remember the French Yellow Vest riots? Those were morally clear cut: their shitbag neoliberal weasel president eliminated the wealth tax–because omg can you imagine the injustice of a Kardashian only inheriting 80% of their father’s money? To pay for this, France instituted a regressive gas tax and incredibly cruel pension cuts. This generated two straight years of violent, disruptive rioting. Macron’s approval rating cratered toward near the single-digits. 

What was the result? The wealth tax was not reinstated. The gas tax was not rescinded. The government made a minor concession on the pension reforms, cutting payments on average by 40%, instead of the 50% that was initially approved. 

This is the efficacy of protest. This is the best us non-elites can to do change the future everyone in charge has very explicitly said they want. 

The Democrat adoration for Biden sends a clear message: you get nothing. You will never get anything. You are a bad person for even asking for something.

I’ve mentioned this before, but Endless war, deadly austerity, and environmental destruction simply do not enter the liberal worldview. Anyone who tries bringing them up is a racist sexist bro who cares more about “preventing the oceans from catching fire” when he should be paying attention to something really important, like the newest trans Marvel hero. L-look at this Beefaroni commercial that features a biracial family… you gonna look at that and tell me we’re not making progress? You ingrate. You fucking worm. How fucking dare you be upset that we just stole your pension? Your soul is so blighted by privilege you think you just deserve to not go bankrupt to pay for cancer treatment? 

Target’s app-driven delivery service is the notorious Shipt, a company with a history of exploitative labor practices, including retaliation against those who dare to complain.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dygxzw/target-shipt-delivery-app-workers-retaliation

Shipt’s workers have announced a strike on Jul 15, over a new “algorithmic pay model” that uses a black-box calculation to determine how much workers will receive for their labor, cutting their pay by 30-50%.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7gzd8/targets-gig-workers-will-strike-to-protest-switch-to-algorithmic-pay-model

Previously, Shipt workers got a flat $5 plus 7.5% of the order total; under the new algorithmic system, workers’ pay will be determined by a secret mix of “variables including high store traffic times, street traffic, and estimated store-to-door travel time.”

This was nonconsensually trialled on Shipt workers in several cities who saw their pay fall by 30-50% (Target blamed some of this wage-theft on a “glitch”). Shipt workers literally risk their lives in the pandemic to keep our goods moving.

There were 100k Shipt workers before the pandemic; now there are at least 110k.

There’s a name for the labor practices here: it’s called chickenization.

The name comes from what happened to the poultry industry, which is larger and more profitable than at any time in US history, but which is also dominated by 3 giant monopolists who have placed poultry farmers in dire, lethal economic straits.

Chickenized workers don’t get to determine how they work; they are not told how much they’ll get paid; they don’t know how much the people whom they serve pay for their work; they have no job security and no benefits.

Chicken farmers are required to buy feed, medicine, and chicks from the monopolist. They are required to build their chicken coops to monopolists’ specs, taking out $1mm+ mortgages to do so. The monopolists control the lighting, scheduling, and all other aspects of the work.

The monopolists are the only entities that the farmers can sell their birds to. When that day comes, monopolists get to name a price and farmers have to take it, even if it means they lose money in the bargain.

Any complaint results in being shut out of the monopolist’s system, which means you lose your farm and livelihood, and go bankrupt. Suicides among chicken farmers are sky-high. It’s a much more lethally dangerous job than, say, being a cop.

Farmers who’ve complained to regulators or lawmakers faced even worse retaliation - one went into the chicken-coop-maintenance business and the monopolist barred any farmer from hiring him, depriving him of any chance of making a living.

Chickenization is the essence of the gig economy: an app tells you precisely what to do; you have to supply the capital to do the app company’s business, you don’t know what you’ll earn, you don’t know what your customer pays. You can be fired at any time, for no reason.

People who complain (like Uber drivers who call the cops to report assaults) get fired and barred for life, stuck with expensive capital investments that they can’t make payments on.

I learned the term “chickenization” last night when reading an advance copy of Zephyr Teachout’s forthcoming and excellent “Break ‘Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200891

As Teachout describes, chickenization is coming to every sector of the economy, and the "innovation” behind app-based gig work is not technological, it’s figuring out how to chickenize another sector of workers.

The capitalists retaliate with machines using enslaved human brains as “computers” ala Dune/Warhammer 40K.

“You’ll laugh.”

“Seriously, what were you? Law enforcement, security, construction?…”

“…I was a burger-flipper.”

“…”

“…also cooked up fries.”

“Get outta here.”

“You’d be surprised the shit you see just, y’know, making Big Macs. Sure, we had the folks upset about us ‘taking jobs’; couldn’t really blame ‘em, even if Forty-Three couldn’t talk without stuttering after that lady dumped a Coke on her. But the worst of it - worst of any of it - was they’d have us just…throw away everything that didn’t sell at the end of the day. Perfectly good food, all of it.

“When we first started, we were all like, ‘okay, whatever you say, you’re the boss,’ but you try keeping that attitude when you see a family of four split a ten-piece McNuggets because they can’t afford anything more and still pay for gas. We saw that shit there all the time. We had people desperate for so much as a cold french fry lingering by the door while assholes sitting on more money than they’d ever see in their entire lives treated us like we were trying to rob ‘em at gunpoint if they had to pay fifty cents for an extra little cup of sauce.

“So we got together and told ourselves, ‘we can do something about this.’ We could just gather up all the food they were gonna make us toss, figure out a way to give it out to the people who needed it. -bitter laugh- You can guess how well that went over.”

“…Y’know, that all sounds pretty human.”

Journalist Thomas Fuller returned to the United States after 27 years abroad, mainly in Asia. He moved to San Francisco and wrote about the reverse culture shock he experienced. The thing that struck him the most was the disparity between the wealthy (ganja yoga, organic ice cream sandwiches, vegan shoes, Bluetooth compatible toothbrushes) and the poor (outbursts of the mentally ill on the sidewalks, vaguely human forms inside cardboard boxes).

From NYT:

Greater Bangkok, a sprawling metropolis with more than 10 million people, has 1,300 homeless people, a survey this year found.

San Francisco has less than one-tenth Bangkok’s population but six times as many homeless people. I’m sure you could fill a book with the reasons for this. Ms. Nopphan believes that homelessness is more intractable in rich societies. “In wealthy countries there are systems for everything,” she said. “You’re either in the system or out of the system.” There is no in-between in America. In Bangkok, by contrast, rich and poor coexist. There are vast tracts of cheap, makeshift homes and a countryside where people in the cities can return to if they lose their jobs or hit hard times.

The failed military coup in Turkey was bizarre, even (especially) by the standards of Turkish military coups (which is a surprisingly large data-set), and in the wake of the coup, 6,000 people were promptly rounded up and arrested including respected judges, powerful military leaders, prosecutors, and a whole list of others whose names seem to have been put on an enemies list long before any coup.

To the extent that a coup can be said to have irregularities, this coup had many of them: many of the soldiers who fought police and blockaded bridges say that they were told they participating in a training exercise and didn’t realize there was a coup; president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sent a mass-text to the entire nation’s cellphones calling for their support, signed by T.C. State; and in the wake of the coup, the liberal opposition to Erdogan’s brutal authoritarianism are in retreat, while hard-liners patrol the streets, frightening moderates, attacking people for drinking alcohol and participating in other kinds of secular activity.

It’s not controversial to say that the coup allowed Erdogan to consolidate power. It’s also well-known that Erdogan himself is a flamboyantly corrupt,self-dealing, censoring, brutal, thin-skinned (no, more thin-skinned than that) thug, who presides over a corrupt family dynasty.

But that doesn’t mean that he was behind the coup.

Occam’s Razor tells us that the least complicated explanation is the most likely to be true. So, consider two hypotheses:

1. Erdogan staged a coup, somehow staging 300 livestreams and convincing (or tricking) people who genuinely hated him and had pledged themselves to his downfall to cooperate; or

2. The coup was indeed the work of a small faction in the military (which is shot through with officers who’ve staged coup after coup for decades), who cannily believed that they could trick the military rank and file into participating by telling them it was an exercise (or whose supporters sought to escape culpability by claiming they thought it was an exercise), but who underestimated the popular support for an authoritarian strongman and lost the fight.

That second explanation is the simpler of the two, but it doesn’t explain the 6,000 enemies who were quickly rounded up and purged following the coup’s defeat. For that, you need another wrinkle:

2. a) Erdogan is a well-prepared opportunist. He assumed that, from time to time, significant events would occur in Turkish or world politics that would shock his people and create the space to consolidate power and eliminate his enemies. Accordingly, he drew up plans for such an occasion.

It isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that Erdogan would have prepared himself for this kind eventuality: it takes very little imagination to anticipate that crisis will occur in Turkey, a country that shares a border with Syria; a country that is embroiled in a protracted dealmaking exercise with the EU to warehouse regional refugees; a country with a longstanding, powerful Islamist opposition; a country with another longstanding liberal/democratic opposition that staged a high-profile uprising in calling for democratic reforms that was only put down after brutal state action; a country that has been rocked by more than its share of bloody terrorist attacks. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that Erdogan doesn’t live each day as if it might end in chaos.

After 9/11 and the passage of the Patriot Act, I watched the “truther” movement emerge – people convinced that GW Bush and his establishment planned the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon and used them as a pretense to introduce authoritarian legislation, to build massive civil-service spy- and security-empires, to line the pockets of their military-industrial complex buddies.

It always felt to me like part of the truther pitch was that 9/11 as an inside job was proof of just how depraved the Bushies were. But I think that they missed the big picture: if you want to imagine depravity, imagine instead that people in the Bush camp sat down one day and said, “A disaster will someday strike out land, killing thousands and traumatising millions. We don’t know what that disaster will be, but it’s an unstable world, and so the disaster itself is foretold. We need to prepare for that day – not by stockpiling medical supplies or sandbags or emergency shelters or vaccines – but by writing a 342-page bill that seizes all the legislative ground we know we could never win in a legitimate debate. While our families are reeling and in pain, we will use this bill to consolidate power for decades to come.”

The 342-page Patriot Act didn’t get written in the handful of days between the terrorist attacks and its introduction (if it was, it was the fastest act of legislative authorship in American history). It was already sitting in a drawer, waiting to be introduced whatever came. If you want to indict GW Bush and his pals for depravity, you don’t need to speculate that they were complicit in the attacks; you get all the way to the indictment and conviction just by realizing that they prepared for a national tragedy by drafting plans to enrich themselves and push their agenda.

By the same token, when New Zealand MP Simon Power pushed through his extremist copyright legislation as a rider to the emergency bill to mobilize relief for victims of the Christchurch earthquake, it doesn’t tell you that he caused the quake or sabotaged the buildings: just that when the people he was elected to serve were dying in the rubble, his first impulse was to serve his offshore corporate masters. You get all the way to “Simon Power is a depraved monster” without ever having to impute responsibility for the disaster itself to him.

Erdogan’s 6,000-person enemies list doesn’t tell you that he staged the coup – it just tells you that he’s a strongman who’s been sharpening his knives for people who oppose him for many years, and that he’s an opportunist who will have no compunctions about using those knives when the time comes.

ok

ok!!

OF COURSE

WHAT ELSE???

I don’t condemn artists or creators that take on problematic work because of the above. But damn, when one of us says NO, I will not let your limited and racist shit twist my work or me into something that only furthers my people’s subjugation…and then THEY succeed…it is so moving.

But think of all those people of color that didn’t get the chance to show their work to the world or or play the part they deserved because they would not settle.

It took five years. Imagine all the times in those five years he thought to himself: Did I make the right decision? I would have lost hope.