late stage capitalism
Sarah Drinkwater and
late stage capitalism
How ‘Your Package Has Been Delivered’ and other Automated Messages Erase Essential Human Labor ❧ Current Affairs
currentaffairs.org
“We have to overcome some legal hurdles, but we could unionize musicians tomorrow,” DeFrancesco said. “SAG is like an alternate history for musicians. We’ve done all this before and won, just not within recent memory.”
Some musicians are in fact unionized. The American Federation of Musicians, with 80,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, collectively... See more
Some musicians are in fact unionized. The American Federation of Musicians, with 80,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, collectively... See more
August Brown • Musicians deal with stingy streamers and AI threats, too. So why aren't they on strike?
Alternative to What? | Thomas Frank
thebaffler.com
the patina of daring had begun to wear thin on the eighties’ chosen crop of celebrity-rebels. Entire new lines of insolent shoes would have to be designed and marketed; entire new looks and emblems of protest would have to be found somewhere. Consumerism’s traditional claim to be the spokesman for our inchoate disgust with consumerism was hemorrhaging credibility, and independent rock, with its Jacobin ‘authenticity’ obsession, had just the things capital required.
Out went the call for an “alternative” from a thousand executive suites, and overnight everyone even remotely associated with independent rock in Seattle—and Minneapolis, Chapel Hill, Champaign, Lawrence, and finally Chicago—found themselves the recipients of unsolicited corporate attention
Love and effort create magnificent places. Genius inhabits them. People go to them because they know such places and landscapes offer consolation of the soul, and the soul is not fooled by substitutes. We let those places turn our moods, we want them to, they do so easily. Today it is not always hard to find such places, but why is it difficult to make new ones?
the urge to commoditize alone improves a seen monetary cost at the expense of the unseen. We must not think it comes free of charge.
That which is unique, breaks. When finished objects become commodities they break too, but they are easily replaced. When you break a chair, you buy another chair. We know well how to make one thousand chairs. They sit in boxes, lining the warehouses, ready for two-day shipping.
To mend is to comprehend a human scale problem, and without this understanding our creations become strange creatures
When the unique is created, it also creates the creator.