#his PR team has been using this kind of method to further narratives for years | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

smokeybrandreviews · 4 years

Text

Binary

This started out as a whole thing about Brie Larson. She’s started a YouTube channel and i figured I'd follow it just for kicks. I’m not a huge fan of massive Hollywood stars invading more accessible spaces but, technically, they’re the “You” in YouTube, too. I can’t be too mad at that. Of course Google is going to cater more to their brand, mostly because they bring in the duckets and understand PR so they know ho not to cause an ADpocolypse, but it’s still mad sh*tty. Larson’s first post was just her being goofy, trying to figure out how to even be a YouTuber. You kind of see a side of her that i figured was there, but never really was able to confirm. Brie Larson is the poster child for Millennial geekdom and i find that adorable as f*ck. Which is why i don’t understand the MASSIVE waves of hate she’s getting from the community. Cats are reveling in her perceived failure, it’s actually insane.

Now, before we go any further, i just want to be clear; I am a fan of Brie Larson. I think she is excellent at her craft. Ma is from my hometown and it’s always great to see someone make it out of this cowtown. I believe she has every right to her opinions and the fact that she voices them from such a visible platform, makes her one of the most endearing and real celebrities in an industry maligned by the phony. Brie ain’t quite Russell Brand but she is very vocal about the unjust sh*t she sees and will totally let you know it. That, i think, is why she garners such vitriol. Look, I'm a black dude living in the US. If she gets on TV and says f*ck white dudes, I'm inclined to agree. But she didn’t say that. What she said was there needs to be more voices making film, different perspectives in the arts. White dudes dominate the industry and she’s tired of seeing that movie. I don’t understand how that’s a controversial statement. It’s true. We need more dynamic, more diverse, storytellers making films out in the wild. The thing is, that one statement earned her the ire of every entitled white boy with time and and the internet. These motherf*cker decided to take that personally and we were off to the races.

When Brie Larson was announced as Captain Marvel, i was okay with it. I thought Charlize Theron or Katee Sackhoff would have been a better look but i get it. Larson is young and can portray the character for years to come. Kind of how Florence Pugh is going to take over Black Widow duties from Scarlett Johansson. Pugh can be that character for close to a decade, as can Larson. Once again, however, the interwebs were set asunder with rage and malcontent over the Cap Marvel announcement. It was f*cking ridiculous to me. Sure, she didn’t look the part going into this but neither did Gal Gadot, the latter turned out to be the best thing going in that trainwreck DCEU. Larson grew into the part, put in the work to look the part, and is committed to the role. She did her research, consuming massive amounts of the comics, trying to find Carol’s head space, which was a goddamn feat. Captain Marvel is as controversial as Brie Larson, herself. And it’s just as stupid.

Look, i adore Captain Marvel. She’s my fifth favorite Marvel character after Spider-Man, Doctor Doom, Laura Kinney, and Illyana Rasputin. In that order. Captain Marvel grew on me during the whole Mighty Avengers and Disassembled story lines from years ago. I have no love-loss for Bendis but that cat did wonders for building up more obscure characters, Carol being one of them. I also like what he did for Luke Cage, too, but that’s not what this essay is about. I’ve been a fan of this character since the early 00s and have rode this Carol train for years. I jumped on bored when she was rocking her leotard, which i miss terribly, took my time to dig up the back issues where she was in the original red and blue digs and moonlighted as Warbird for a bit. Then, Marvel Now happened and f*cked it all up. Carol went from this attractive, uber-powered, mess of a woman to a cold, manly, aggressively stupid caricature of herself. The Carol Danvers i had grown to love, with all of her faults and trauma, became some sort of butch nightmare and the poster child for why Woke Marvel was failing. I don’t think that’s fair.

Comic Carol was on her way to becoming a real force in the Marvel universe. She had learned there was worth in her strength, one she had to drag out through deep introspection and an understanding of who she really is. No longer was she just a gender-swapped, copyright placeholder that no one knew what to do with. Now she had agency. Now she was a force. Now she was relevant. Now tore all of that away. After Marvel Now, all of that growth and nuance was thrown out of the window. She became the idealized version of what the SJWs thought a “Strong Woman” should be. Marvel gave her a massive push in an effort to cater to this burgeoning Tumblr dynamic and it failed miserably. Marvel wanted that Steven Universe crowd and they tried real hard to get it but that sh*t did not work. The changes to the universe weren’t extreme or feminist or PC enough. Courting a fanbase that had no longevity, Carol was sabotaged and thrown to the wolves. That’s the environment we were saturated in when Disney announced Larson as Carol for the MCU. It was a perfect storm of Nerdrage, one that has not died down in any capacity all these years later for either Brie or Carol.

I don’t think the feminist slant given to the Captain Marvel movie was actually such a big deal. I think the vitriol that flick faces stems from the combined maliciousness both the new version of Carol in the comics and Brie Larson, herself, garnered. It’s kind of crazy the massive tantrum everyone decided to throw over this movie. Cats were looking for this thing to fail as some sort of petulant schadenfreude ignoring the fact that this movie wasn’t made for them. As frustrated as i was with the ludicrous discourse, i knew this movie wasn't for me. his wasn’t my Carol and i was good with that. Unlike Marvel who pandered to the trend of PC nonsense, the MCU had a clear vision in mind for the audience they wanted; Young girls. They wanted a character who was strong enough to hang with Thor, stand equally with Iron Man, and have the respect of Captain America. Captain Marvel was the best option. She would be the tentpole hero of the MCU going forward and i accepted that. I went into the film with that understanding and, on my way out, i saw, firsthand, what this movie meant to the target audience. There was a little girl, about nine or so, gushing abut how cool Captain Marvel was. She as ecstatic to see a girl like her, kicking so much butt. In the face of that, every entitled argument you have against the character falls apart in my eyes. Captain Marvel is to young girls and woman, as Black Panther was to us black folk. It’s the same energy.

Do i think the film could have been better? F*ck yea, i do. I think the script should have had one more revision and the directors definitely felt out of place. They’re good at their jobs, they mostly make A24-esque fare, but a massive, multi-million dollar, space epic connected to the most popular film franchise in history? Nah, these cats were way out of their depth. I think Feige dropped the ball on this one, a rare miss. I think Kathryn Bigelow, Patty Jenkins, Lynne Ramsay, Claire Dennis, or Lorene Scafaria would have constructed a much better film, both visually and narrative wise. I think if the movie was better as a whole, a lot of the controversy and vitriol would have been neutered. Carol is written quite wooden and a little pretentious. The interactions between the supporting cast feels forced. The overall narrative is fine but definitely could have been embellished at parts. Captain Marvel is boring and i don’t know how that happened. You have one of the strongest characters in comics, with a distinct, visually appealing powerset, and you make her movie boring? Really? More than anything, though, is the absolute mistreatment of Sam Jackson and Nick Fury.

The writing reduces Nick Fury, the mind behind the entirety of the Avengers Initiative, to lap boy sidekick in an effort to up Carol’s own stature. That sh*t is poor writing and it’s mad frustrating to see. I hate narratives that have to job established characters, in an effort to push new additions. I just wrote a whole goddamn thing about that with Punchline, Joker’s new “partner”. It’s bogus, cheapening the character and opens up an avenue for bad-faith complaints. Rey Palpatine is another great example. Her entire character is built on the slow, methodical, violent, destruction of the Skywalker legacy. Interestingly enough, that character was launched in the same environment as New Carol so i understand why the movie is the way that it is. I don’t agree with it, but i know why. It was an incredibly poor choice to introduce Captain Marvel in this way, however, and she’s never recovered. Brie has never recovered. You want a 90s buddy-cop space opera? Lethal Weapon with Skrulls and starships? You need your Murtaugh and Riggs to stand on equal footing. That was not the case with this flick. Having Nick Fury job to Carol Danvers for two hours was the wrong way to go about all of this and i think a different creative team could have made something truly excellent.

It’s nuts to me that this is even a thing though. Brie’s personal controversy is so f*cking stupid, i choke every time i think about it. How are you mad she stand up for herself, her gender, and everyone else in a position of persecution? Don’t you want though with a platform speaking up about the inequities of our country? I feel like the same people who hate Brie for her vocal advocacy, are the same people who stan “All Lives Matter” when ever someone says Black Lives Matter. That sh*t feels like the same energy to me. I feel like the criticisms launched at comic Carol have real validity, even if most of them are just whiny man-children who miss the leotard. I miss the leotard, too, but come on? We’re passed that now. I do think, when written well, Carol can be a force in the books. Her run as part of the new Ultimates was pretty chill I think she needs that in order to be her true self, until we establish a true self for the character. It’s weird to say but Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel previously, has been around for fifty years, and no one has any idea who she is as a character. I think Captain Marvel in the MCU, both the character and film, are hated for the wrong reasons. The fact that no one has any idea who this character is, makes for a lousy cinematic experience. The team put together in an effort to flesh this character out, didn’t have the creative capacity to do so and we were left with little more than PC tropes and Feminist agenda. The MCU let both Brie and Carol down in that regard.

Brie Larson isn’t a terrible person and she deserves more respect put on her name. She an accomplished actress with a bevy of awards and accolades to her name. She’s been in great films like Room and Scott Pilgrim, never once garnering a controversy. The fact that she speaks her truth, a truth the establishment doesn’t want to hear, should not disqualify her talent or the fact that she seems like a really chill person. Carol Danvers is a dope ass character with an amazing amount of potential. When she’s written well and not traded upon for trends, she can have real staying power. Her abilities open up a plethora of interesting, creatively fertile narratives yet to be written. Disregarding her just because Marvel decided to gamble on the pretentious third-wave feminism wave is shortsighted and makes you look like a childish brat. You’re entitled to feel however you want but let’s be clear; Brie Larson and Carol Danvers deserve so much better.

#Captain Marvel #Carol Danvers #Brie Larson #Marvel

6 notes · View notes

bluewatsons · 6 years

Text

Atosa Araxia Abrahamian, Money for Nothing, New Republic (August 29, 2018)

Many jobs are pointless. Others are being automated away. In the future, who will still work for a paycheck?

Some years ago, I had a colleague who would frequently complain that he didn’t have enough to do. He’d mention how much free time he had to our team, ask for more tasks from our boss, and bring it up at after-work drinks. He was right, of course, about the situation: Although we were hardly idle, even the most productive among us couldn’t claim to be toiling for eight (or even five, sometimes three) full hours a day. My colleague, who’d come out of a difficult bout of unemployment, simply could not believe that this justified his salary. It took him a long time to start playing along: checking Twitter, posting on Facebook, reading the paper, and texting friends while fulfilling his professional obligations to the fullest of his abilities.

The idea of being paid to do nothing is difficult to adjust to in a society that places a high value on work. Yet this idea has lately gained serious attention amid projections that the progress of globalization and technology will lead to a “jobless” future. The underlying worry goes something like this: If machines do the work for us, wage labor will disappear, so workers won’t have money to buy things. If people can’t or don’t buy things, no one will be able to sell things, either, which means less commerce, a withering private sector, and even fewer jobs. Our value system based on the sanctity of toil will be exposed as hollow; we won’t be able to speak about workers as a class at all, let alone discuss “the labor market” as we now know it. This will require not just economic adjustments but moral and political ones, too.

One obvious solution would be to separate income from labor altogether, a possibility that two recent books tackle from radically different angles. Give People Money, by journalist Annie Lowrey, offers a measured, centrist endorsement of Universal Basic Income—the idea that governments should give everyone a certain amount of cash each month, no questions asked. The anthropologist David Graeber posits that the link between salaried positions and real work has long been tenuous in any case, since many highly paid jobs serve little purpose at all. In Bullshit Jobs, he tries to make sense of the peculiar yet all-too-common situations in which people are hired, after much fanfare, to do a job, then find themselves not doing much—or worse, performing a task so utterly pointless that they might as well not be doing it.

In the absence of a truly useful job, most people, Graeber considers, would be better off living on “free” money. Lowrey views UBI less as a way to eliminate useless work than a way to compensate invisible forms of labor, such as caring for a relative or doing housework, or to bolster underpaid workers. Cash transfers, she proposes, could also stimulate entrepreneurship and creativity. Either way, the idea of paying people just for being alive is now one that both a radical scholar and a reasonable Beltway journalist can take seriously—though neither author fully reckons with the social reordering that would arise from a world organized around love and leisure, not labor.

Graeber’s book expands on his viral 2013 essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” in which he took aim at “employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” Eric, who worked as an “interface administrator” at a design firm, found himself in such a job. His responsibility was to make sure the company’s intranet system worked properly, which sounded useful enough. But, it turned out, he was set up to fail. None of the employees used the system because they were all convinced it was monitoring them. It had been designed with the worst, buggiest software. A confluence of office politics and poor management had led the company to hire Eric, who had no experience working with computers. He was to oversee a system that was never supposed to work in the first place.

Eric ended up doing little. He kept irregular hours and explained to the odd employee how to upload a file or find an email address. He started drinking one, then two, beers at lunch; reading novels at his desk; learning French; and taking trips for nonexistent “business meetings.” If this sounds idyllic—a salary with no work and boozy lunches!—Eric didn’t experience it that way. Instead, he acutely felt “how profoundly upsetting it was to live in a state of utter purposelessness.” Graeber suggest two reasons for Eric’s despondency. One concerns social class: The first person in his family to go to college, Eric wasn’t expecting the white-collar world to be such, well, bullshit. Another reason is existential: When faced with it, “there was simply no way he could construe his job as serving any sort of purpose.

By Graeber’s metric, my old gig wasn’t quite bullshit, mainly because I rather enjoyed it and found it meaningful. The term is subjective: If someone thinks a job is pointless, it probably is. There are also many repetitive, grueling, or boring jobs that do not qualify as bullshit because they meet an essential need: If a cleaner or bus driver doesn’t report for work, it hurts other people. (These Graeber terms “shit” jobs.) His method for identifying bullshit is, by his own account, unscientific. He draws from a pool of anecdotes to produce an anatomy of bullshit workers, who fall into five categories: “flunkies,” “goons,” “duct-tapers,” “box tickers,” and “taskmasters.”“Flunkies” are the modern equivalent of feudal minions who make bosses feel big, important, and strong. Whereas they were once doormen and concierges, they now tend to be receptionists who do little besides answer cold calls and refill the candy bowl, or personal assistants who drop off their boss’s dry cleaning and smile when he walks through the door. “Goons” essentially bully people into buying things they don’t need: Marketing managers and PR specialists do this, as do telemarketers. “Duct-tapers” are employed to fix things that aren’t or shouldn’t be broken or do tasks that could easily be automated—data entry, copying and pasting, photocopying, and so on. “Box tickers” help companies comply with regulation (or offload responsibility for complying), and finally “taskmasters,” or middle managers, spread more BS by assigning it to others.

“The creation of a BS job,” one manager tells Graeber, “often involves creating a whole universe of BS narrative that documents the purpose and functions of the position as well as the qualifications required to successfully perform the job, while corresponding to the [prescribed] format and special bureaucratese.” She explains that her organization’s bureaucracy created odd incentives to retain employees whose work was inadequate. It was easier for her to hire someone in a new position than to fire and replace the incompetent employee. This, she notes, helped BS jobs proliferate.

Graeber attempts to quantify just how much—and after some back-of-the envelope calculations, he wagers that 37 to 40 percent of all office jobs are “bullshit.” He further contends that about 50 percent of the work done in a nonpointless workplace is also bullshit, since even useful jobs contain elements of nonsense: the pretending to be busy, the arbitrary hours, the not being able to leave before five. “Bullshitization” is even infecting the most nonbullshit professions, with teachers overloaded with administrative duties that didn’t use to exist and doctors forced to deal with paperwork and insurance firms that probably should be abolished.

There’s no sure way to verify Graeber’s estimates, but for white-collar workers, they seem basically right. Work backward: How much activity on social media takes place during work hours? How many doctor’s appointments, errands, and online purchases occur between nine and five? In other words, how many of us could stand to work half as much as we currently do without any significant consequences? And yet we insist over and over that we are terribly, endlessly busy.

This state of affairs seems to defy not just human reason, but also basic capitalist logic: Wouldn’t a profit-seeking organization tend to cull unnecessary compensated labor rather than encourage it? Graeber proposes that there is an explicitly irrational reason why such jobs exist—a system he calls “managerial feudalism,” wherein employers keep adding layers and layers of management so that everyone can feel their job is important or at least justified. (They’re “mentoring” young people. They’re helping others develop careers!) The bigger the staff, the more important the company and its leaders feel, regardless of purpose or productivity.

There might be something refreshing about the fact that capitalism has not yet gained full control over its means and ends, and that there are millions of people sitting around getting paid to do nothing all day. Graeber doesn’t buy it. On the contrary: He considers bullshit jobs to be a profound form of psychological violence, a scourge that’s fueling resentment, anomie, depression, and apathy. Patrick, an employee of a student union convenience store, mostly agrees with this judgment. He didn’t mind the work itself; what he resented was being assigned inane busywork, like rearranging things, after he’d finished his tasks six times over. “The very, very worst thing about the job was that it gave you so much time to think,” he tells Graeber in an email:

So I just thought so much about how bullshit my job was, how it could be done by a machine, how much I couldn’t wait for full communism, and just endlessly theorized the alternatives to a system where millions of human beings have to do that kind of work for their whole lives in order to survive.

Of course, some people can escape by focusing on creative pursuits during the hours they are idle. And it helps if everyone in said job acknowledges, if tacitly, that they serve no purpose by being there. But that’s hard, too, Graeber argues, because of the structure and nature of the modern workplace: the rules, the conventions, “the ritual of humiliation that allows the supervisor to show who’s boss in the most literal sense.”

The existence of bullshit jobs has, further, led to the devaluation of vital occupations. Workers in essential, nonbullshit jobs are constantly told by moralizing politicians that their work is noble and that they ought to be grateful for the often low pay they receive. Even though the middle managers and box tickers of the world can console themselves with the thought that they are “generating wealth” and “adding jobs” by virtue of their “economic output,” they secretly envy the real, human sense of purpose that useful workers—teachers, garbage collectors, care workers—share, Graeber writes, and end up vilifying them out of “moral envy.” This impulse plays out politically: Nurses, teachers, and bus drivers, for example, are constantly portrayed as “greedy” when they bargain for better union contracts, or they’re said to be “stealing” from the state when they make overtime wages. When voters in bullshit jobs hear these words over a campaign season, it can swing legislative bodies to the right.

Would it be better if those workers stuck in bullshit jobs could simply walk away? Graeber isn’t one for policy recommendations, but he does float UBI as a potential salve to our sad professional predicaments. A UBI would “unlatch work from livelihood entirely”: If, guaranteed enough money to live on, people could choose between bullshit or nothing, he wagers that they’d choose nothing and do something more useful and interesting with their time instead.

In Give People Money, Annie Lowrey is less concerned with dissatisfied professionals than with some of the world’s poorest (including those in the United States), who in addition to already being overworked and underpaid—if they are employed at all—will likely face the harshest economic consequences if or when menial tasks are automated. These workers are already up against weakened unions, corporations dead set on extracting maximum value from their workforces by scaling back benefits and slashing wages, the rising costs of education and health care, and other trends that wind up concentrating wealth at the very top. When the robots come, as Lowrey believes they will, there’s little that governments, companies, or other organizations can do to make them go away. The best shot for these people, she comes to believe, is unconditional money.

Lowrey makes a convincing moral argument for UBI, insisting that “every person is deserving of participation in the economy, freedom of choice, and a life without deprivation—and that our government can and should choose to provide these things.” She also points out to great effect the destructive moralizing that Americans, at least, attach to money. “We believe there is a moral difference between taking a home mortgage interest deduction and receiving a Section 8 voucher,” she writes, in a refreshing moment of indignation. “We judge, marginalize, and shame the poor for their poverty.” Gaining support for UBI would mean persuading people to reject those assumptions; convincing a majority to see, as Graeber and Lowrey both urge, that commanding a high salary doesn’t automatically make you a good person.

A further challenge for advocates of UBI today is the lack of definitive, long-term surveys “proving” the mechanism’s efficacy: There have been no truly universal cash transfers within one country for an extended period of time, and there are thus no narratives to follow or macroeconomic conclusions to draw. Thanks to increased interest in the phenomenon, though, there are more and more smaller-scale studies, and Lowrey visits one of them in Kenya with GiveDirectly, a charity that essentially hands out cash through mobile payments in poor places. There she meets a man named Fredrick Omondi Auma, who “had been in rough shape when GiveDirectly knocked on his door: impoverished, drinking, living in a mud hut with a thatched roof. His wife had left him,” she writes. “But with the manna-from-heaven money, he had patched up his life and, as an economist might put it, made the jump from labor to capital.”

More money, Lowrey reports, turns the villagers into good capitalists who invest their savings in education and supplies, start businesses, and help grow the local economy. Her observations recall the breathless and somewhat naïve boosterism that surrounded microcredit programs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She even meets three sister-wives who plan to pool their funds and create a small bank to lend to women. In the United States, too, she finds clear-cut potential for success. In separate chapters, she illustrates the promise of cash transfers for the American poor with more clarity and purpose, visiting a family with disabled children and speaking to women whose jobs just don’t pay enough for them to get by. Simple cash could help teenagers finish school instead of working to support their families; it could adequately compensate women who stay home to care for sick loved ones; it could spare the elderly or disabled from the bureaucratic hell of waiting in line to plead for meager welfare benefits.

Ending poverty around the world ought to be a priority, and Lowrey makes a strong case that unconditional cash transfers can help do that. But in the wrong hands, a UBI can do more harm than good. It can serve as a pretext to further decimate social programs and put more blame still on the individual for any mishaps or shortcomings. As Lowrey notes, libertarians love the idea that UBI could replace the welfare state, shrinking big government—a move that could render the whole program ineffective, since it’s hard to imagine a UBI stretching to cover market-rate housing and exorbitant private health care. Meanwhile, cash payments can also reinforce social and racial divisions by throwing money at a problem without addressing its causes. Giving the individual residents of an over-policed neighborhood cash transfers won’t, for instance, make them any less susceptible to unreasonable searches or violence.

That’s why it matters who supports UBI and, more significantly, whose policies it gets attached to. Many of the people funding UBI research or advocating for cash transfers—Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, to name just two—are in fact among those who do best from the current distribution of wealth. A UBI would, after all, benefit corporations: For any company that depends on people having money to buy their products—whether groceries, prescription drugs, or driverless cars—the idea of a jobless, incomeless population presents a threat to its bottom line. Free money lets consumers stay consumers; it maintains the current system. And that’s without getting into the possibility that unemployment and poverty might add up to riots, class war, and mass unrest. In that situation, the CEOs would be the first to go.

Both Graeber and Lowrey struggle with the fact that—for all work’s miseries and for all the promise of UBI—work is deeply ingrained in American society. While many of us might hate our individual jobs, most of us love the idea of a job. Our world is constructed around the idea that a job is not just a paycheck: It’s a status symbol and a form of social inclusion. This, of course, supports the creation of bullshit jobs, which prop up the socioeconomic status quo. Now that a jobless (or less job-full) future may be within reach, the question is how to reimagine our relationship with work.

Lowrey appreciates the extent to which people identify with their work—even if it’s bullshit or shit (in her parlance, “crummy”) work. Having reported extensively on the psychological toll that unemployment can take, she insists that the culture (or is it cult?) of work is most likely here to stay. It might not be the healthiest approach—she dislikes moralizing around the virtue of work almost as much as Graeber does—but she realizes it’s something we have to build in to our short- and medium-term expectations because “the American faith in hard work and the American cult of self-reliance exist and persist, seen in our veneration of everyone from Franklin to Frederick Douglass to Oprah Winfrey.”

For his part, Graeber insists that there’s no value in working for the sake of just working. That often gives the impression that anyone who does want to work for work’s sake must be a bit of a sucker and that the compulsion to work is a manifestation of false consciousness or, worse, stupidity. He thus glosses over the strongly felt benefits, be they professional, social, or psychological, that many people get from their jobs. If Graeber’s unscientific assertions about bullshit jobs feel vital, urgent, and intuitively true, his dismissals of work’s inherent value—not moral, but social—feel incomplete.

With a compulsion to work so deep-rooted, UBI is a solution that will only go so far, even if implemented in a way that truly does alter lives for the better. Giving people money will not make us less moralistic about labor: People used to working will not necessarily know what to do with themselves or with their time. (I certainly wouldn’t.) Such measures represent only a fraction of the socioeconomic overhaul that will be needed to deal—if not now, then for future generations—with this twin utopia-dystopia: a world with less work and less money.

A solution that neither Lowrey nor Graeber spends much time dwelling on is perhaps the obvious: to split the difference. In a 1932 essay titled “In Praise of Idleness,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell noted that he had come to think of work not as something morally necessary, but as a means to enhance pleasures in the rest of life (after all, would you want to attend a dinner party you could never leave?). While acknowledging that he is a product of a Protestant work ethic and thus a compulsive worker, Russell suggests halving the workday to four hours, which would be enough for a person to secure “the necessities and elementary comforts of life,” leaving the rest of his time to do whatever he wanted.

“There will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia,” Russell goes on. “The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion.”

#work #capitalism #the way we live now #bullshit jobs #ubi #universal basic income #modernity #automation #labor #identity #david graeber

3 notes · View notes

smokeybrand · 4 years

Text

Binary

0 notes