#ultra-com

The growing media consensus that "China is quickly becoming the most important (enemy) country in the world" - from Obama's 'Pivot to Asia' through trumps tariff's to Elizabeth Warren's intimidation pledge - should be understood as such: if the US were do an oopsie and expand our Afghanistan occupation into China, or Accidentally™ step a lil too much in the South China Sea, that would be irreparably disastrous to the US economy. The US ruling class recognizes this, and although they are willing participants in an anti-satanic suicide cult, they're not at that stage of reckless abandon (yet). They want to relocate production away from China (mainly to other south/east Asian countries, only rly to the US when it's profitable), thus loosening the tie for when the Always Stumbling US Empire inevitably "aw shucks :/"'s it's way into hot war.

Crossfit has adopted a visual and ideological aesthetic that fits the upper-middle class, white collar worker. Culturally, Crossfit harnesses a nostalgia for a simpler past, and combines it with the romanticization of the natural in order to craft a comprehensible view of the present that embraces precarity by being prepared for everything. This is not simply a pre-lapsarian fantasy, though. The idyllic and savage “primal” is coupled with modern science in an attempt to recreate a born-again human that specializes in the unspecialized. As lean management forces all employees to be flexible in their working hours and expertise, Crossfit demands the same from their consumers. Crossfit is the figurative and literal lean production of the body. To avoid precarity, one must embrace precarity. Do a little of everything, and then do more of it. The fragmented sense of progress in lifting a heavier weight or beating an old WOD time creates a fleeting autonomy in a managed subject. Through Crossfit, despair and uncertainty are replaced by trust in the primal, one simulated shoveling exercise at a time. As capital flows back into the city once again, old auto clearing houses and factories are prime locations for Crossfit boxes, and the loft condos that house many of their customers. Crossfit promises a physique that matches the aesthetic of new city wealth. The body as repository for the ghost signs of production reflects the social relations of labor and leisure presented by the economy. You can get strong, but not too big. The workouts are quantifiable and scalable, but never boring. Companion to the rise of beards, tattoos, “work” boots, and lumbersexuality, Crossfit sculpts a body that appears to have labored. Reminding us that physical labor was done at one point, the shell of industry now has a core of chiseled abdominal muscles. Crossfit reverses the traditional relation of labor to the body in that the bodies appearing to have labored the most now reflect the highest material conditions of leisure. Similar to the way that new technology introduced into the production process is embedded with the value of past labor, the Crossfit body is also imbued with the surplus value of past generations. In Scientific Management, Taylor remarked, “In the past man has been first; in the future the system must be first.” Today is the future, and the Crossfit box offers a concise summary of our post-industrial predicament. “People walk through the door and say, ‘Hey, where are all the machines?’” To which Crossfit boldly replies: “We’re the machines!”

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When I started writing all my feelings down about this, I meant it as sort of a worker’s inquiry (despite never having read an actual worker’s inquiry in my life) but instead found myself realizing that I’m actually just mad. Like, super mad. Not only does my job suck so hard that I legitimately contemplate throwing myself down the stairs on my way to the staff bathroom so I can claim some workman’s comp, but also because we’re here staring at the ugly mug of the end of the world. Like, bruh, I read the news. I don’t wanna be just another dick on the internet making apocryphal claims re: the apocalypse, but California is drying up. Oregon and Washington (and California, again) are fucking on fire. The ice caps are melting, bees are disappearing (???) and the world is generally becoming more and more strange as we realize how indifferent it is to our survival, which would be cool if the planet was, idk, an absentee parent or a long-lost romantic interest: the sort of thing whose indifference we’ve already learned how to cope with, but I spent a good part of my life really thinking that mankind’s big problem was gonna be the sun exploding in five billion years and then I grow up just to learn that shit’s gonna get super hairy in my lifetime? And I have to spend my time before then sitting around at work handing out cups of noodles and listening to so many stories about gendered violence that they start sounding like madlibs where only the names, dates and places have been changed? That’s some shit, man. I mean, work would still suck even if one day I was gonna get to retire to some beautiful grassy meadow somewhere that looked like The Shire but where everyone was really cute and had a crush on me and life was free of troubles, but if all I get to look forward to is an increasingly depressing, dystopian cyberpunk future interspersed with exponentially-worsening deadly acts of g-d (which are actually byproducts of our shitty cyberpunk society that doesn’t even have the sweet aesthetic I was promised by 1980’s sci-fi movies), then this sucks, and I’m not having it. Anyway, fuck work. Fuck my job. Fuck all jobs, but fuck mine in particular. Y’know?

Because “helping people” is the form of labor I am compelled to squeeze out of myself for money, I sometimes resent myself if I ever go out of my way for anyone: for working for free. I already don’t get paid enough for the work that I do. Why do I keep doing more? For fucking free? Naw. Fuck that. Being a professional “good person” is literally making me a bad person. If there’s any merit to categories like those in the first place, they’ve utterly inverted themselves through the imposition of labor in my life.

Am I being overly-dramatic? Yeah, probably, but in my defense, that shouldn’t be a reason to dismiss what I’m saying. If anything, it’s evidence of what this job is doing to me. It drives me crazy when people suggest that it’s good, at least, that my work helps people. Excuse you. I don’t do my job because it helps people and I’m really nice and care about people. That’s just why I’m good at it and honestly, I am really good at it. You know what though? I’ve always cared about people, but you never caught me volunteering my time in this shelter before they started paying me. Sometimes I feel like a contestant on a reality game show: “I didn’t come here to make friends. I came here to make money.” This job sucks. I’m here because I have to go to work in order to feed and house myself, which is a whole bigger cauldron of stewing dogshit to complain about. For the love of g-d, if you catch me in the street and we start talking about work, please don’t imply that what I do purely for money makes me a good person because it only underscores the strictly self-serving reasons that I undertake the business of helping people. As defined by my job, my relationship to being a good person is analogous to the mercenary’s relationship to being a soldier. There is no cause but food in the belly. This bears restating. I am obliged to care, however grudgingly, and not out of some misplaced notion of goodness or some stupid idea about making the world better place or anything, but because five nights a week, I am here, in a room with somebody and because I relate to them in some real way. Some people I’ve known talk about the homeless with this weird tinge of true prole authenticity, which is just a weird and gross application of identity politics that reduces a real person into some kind of political object. Of course, some people have to make something political before they can force themselves to give a fuck about it. Honestly, I just like a lot of these people. They’re funny, or maybe sweet. Maybe they come from some place near where I’m from. Maybe they remind me of someone. I care about them because I’m in the room with them. The reason I’m in this room though, is the money. That’s it.

I hate work. One of my coworkers makes a habit of assuring me at least once a week that we have it really good. “You’re not gonna find another job like this one, dude.” He has a point. I make more than minimum wage and spend a healthy part of my shift watching T.V. On the other hand, it hardly surprises me that the coworker telling me how good I have it is the same one that a lot of the ladies dislike and complain about. The reason, I realize, is that he’s actually the one doing the least real work. Don’t get me wrong, he’s totally eager to pop up and run over to get people towels, blankets and cups of noodles from the storeroom, but in terms of actually social work, he’s not the one connecting with participants and sitting with their problems. It is precisely the sociality of this work however, that makes it challenging. When we run out of essential supplies like toilet paper, he’s right to get mad that the management isn’t giving us the tools to do our job. But that’s where it stops for him. For those of us who have built up what feel like real, genuine relationships with these people, it starts looking a lot more like people we know, care about, or even love are being deprived of vital resources for survival, or beaten up by their boyfriends and husbands, or being arrested, or being stolen from, or having their kids taken away, or dying out on the street with no next of kin, or…