Tara McMullin

I think of it as the difference between order and a different kind of order. Because there’s nothing chaotic in diversity. There’s nothing chaotic in a city with many different subcultures all interacting and going about their business. That is an order of its own. It’s just — it looks different from the suburbs.

Because at some level, the mandate to love your work and be happy with it has a very simple and straightforward rationale: the dictate to work more. Love and happiness, these management gurus explain, are endless reservoirs of energy, concentration, and motivation. How do we make ourselves happy and in love with our job? Here is a typical response:... See more

It doesn’t have to be the way it is is a playful statement, made in the context of fiction, with no claim to “being real.” Yet it is a subversive statement.

Subversion doesn’t suit people who, feeling their adjustment to life has been successful, want things to go on just as they are, or people who need support from authority assuring them that... See more

The distinction Wark makes of the vectoralist class vs. the capitalist is its power not to actually own anything but to simply extract enormous profit from various flows of value.

The experience of affective friction is similar as well: a loss of fluency combined with negative emotional signals arising from the gap between social expectations and realities. Even when the difference between an old norm and a new one replacing it seems trivial, the disruptions caused by the shift can create feelings of anxiety, awkwardness –... See more

EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?

SAM COLE: Honestly the best way I know how to do this is talking to my friends. Everyone is experiencing a different internet these days. Algorithms have got us sorted and siloed away from each other, so one person is seeing memes and “discourse” and... See more

Although repetition is necessary, practice isn’t just repetition. When we practice, we do two things: we isolate a technique for study, and we engage with difficulty.