Things I Like
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Seeing these contradictions harmoniously coexist is as comforting as it is challenging. In those moments when everything is too much, these paintings can remind me that understanding isn’t a zero sum game, that it’s possible to reduce a problem to manageable contours without ignoring its finer details, that merely acknowledging those finer details can be a sufficient substitute for actually making sense of them. We don’t have to know it all, and knowing how much we don’t know is its own kind of knowledge and can bring its own kind of peace.
Rob has been writing not only about his own art and process but also about art field trips and the things he's looking at and I've enjoyed all of it oh so much. This is mostly a link to say you should follow his site if you're not already, it's great.
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Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience. But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come?
Solnit has a way of asking the right questions at the right time and this piece is no exception. What if changing our attitude about climate change led to stronger communities working together and, this is key to me, not striving for growth or money but striving for everyone to be fed and secure.
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In that spirit, I’d like to see knitters, perhaps led by Mrs. Obama, next aim their needles at the fashion industry, pushing for the kind of large-scale overhaul here that is beginning in the European Union: an unprecedented series of measures addressing the catastrophic environmental and social impact involved in the making and disposal of our clothing. The goal by 2030 is for all textiles sold in that market to be, among other things, reparable, recyclable, often made from recycled fibers that are free from hazardous chemicals and produced with respect for labor rights.
I just finished Orenstein's book Unraveling and it's great and in this shorter piece she highlights some of what she talks about in the book. As a knitter I find it easy to source yarn that is ethically sourced, from the sheep to the spinning, to the dyers, to the local yarn shops. I wish the same could be said of fabric, since I'm now sewing a lot. I'd love to see more done to regulate and correct the awfulness of the fashion industry.
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I know it can be difficult, with so much choice, to figure out what to focus on. But on top of everything, you can preview most anything before committing. What’s not to like? Build a library, and you can be your own algorithm.
I don't listen to a lot of music, but this is the way I feel about my RSS feed and what we I consume via streaming services. I'm rarely persuaded by the algorithms of the services and usually end up seeking things out in my own peculiar way.
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But in many instances, the real source of concern at these companies comes down to boneheaded decisions made by CEOs — whether it's Mark Zuckerberg at the company formerly known as Facebook, who authorized a hiring binge over the pandemic and invested billions of dollars into his metaverse folly before having to cut 11,000 jobs, or Tobi Lütke at Shopify, who laid off 1,000 people based on a bet on the future of e-commerce that "didn't pay off."
I've watched the increasing number of layoffs and really wondered who it is the executives are trying to make happy. Layoffs cost a lot and they usually don't help in the ways that we think, in fact, they usually hurt a company and the workers left behind, for quite some time after it happens. And yet, and yet they are happening a lot right now. It seems this isn't about what's best for the company but maybe about what's best for the investors, or possibly it's a show for the investors. Either way, it's quite sad.
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But each invitation to be entertained reinforces an impulse: to seek diversion whenever possible, to avoid tedium at all costs, to privilege the dramatized version of events over the actual one. To live in the metaverse is to expect that life should play out as it does on our screens. And the stakes are anything but trivial. In the metaverse, it is not shocking but entirely fitting that a game-show host and Twitter personality would become president of the United States.
Some really interesting threads and connections here between writers I've read and their thoughts on entertainment and what's going on now. If everything is supposed to be entertainment how do we tell what's really going on?
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But I’m sure another part of the annoyance stems from a desire not to reflect too hard on what I think Cope is saying, which is that if you’re waiting for some outside authority to give their stamp of approval to what you’re doing with your life – if you’re telling yourself things will only be truly OK once they’ve done so – then you’ll be waiting a long time. And even if they were to give it, it wouldn’t be worth getting.
I've read this several times since it arrived in my inbox last Thursday and it's resonating with me so much because ever since I started doing the things I wanted to do, regardless of what some of the people in my life thought about that, I've been so much happier. It's meant, at times, not telling some folks all about my life because explaining my decisions can be exhausting. It's also meant not keeping up certain relationships at times, but that's part of figuring it all out, what's important and what matters the most.
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In other words, constantly running through the long list of things you want to get done or that you feel “should” be doing—because you’ve fully embraced #nodaysoff #hustle culture, or because you literally cannot miss work without losing the income you need to survive—is not the same as meaningfully resting, even if you’re sitting down or wearing your pajamas. “It does you very little good to be in bed while your mind is racing,” Conlon says.
So many times when people take needed rest they are categorized as lazy. We aren't supposed to rest in our culture and in many ways we learn this from early ages. But rest is vital. Being bored and letting all of you rest—mind and body—is necessary. Maybe some day we can accept that and find ways to make it possible for everyone to get the rest they need.
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God does the wrath thing a lot in the Old Testament, punishing humans who would challenge divine authority. It makes sense to read the story of Babel in that light. But having lived through the past couple decades of the internet, I believe the story carries a different lesson. I’m an atheist, so take this theory with a grain of salt, or maybe even a pillar: God wasn’t keeping us out of heaven, smiting us for our arrogance. God was protecting us from ourselves.
I've seen this linked by several people I follow via RSS and I don't disagree that Twitter going down in flames is a good thing in many ways. But I do wonder at the promotion of another, seemingly at this moment better, social media site (Mastodon). Because the thing I've been thinking about a lot is if it's really good for us to be posting so much, scrolling through time lines, and generally participating in these types of things at all, even the open source, federated, (supposedly) better ones. I'm not sure the answer to figuring out that Twitter (or Instagram or Facebook or Tik Tok or, or, or) is awful is to do the same thing on a different site.
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But I’m convinced that a lack of faith in the work itself—or, worse, the recognition that the work is doing harm—is at least as much a contributing factor. Likely even more so. Tech companies haven’t spent decades building up grand stories of how they are changing the world for the better for no reason. And I suspect the rapid evaporation of any credibility to those tales will be a bigger disruption than any of them have planned for.
Mandy hits the nail on the head here. I fell out of love with tech the moment I realized how much utter bullshit was going around and how often that was what the company I worked for was selling. It's why I preferred working in media in a way, much more obvious what you're selling and what the value is even as imperfect as it is.
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The first reason for this is that forgetting is a filter. When something you read resonates with you sufficiently for you to recall it without effort, that means something; it means it connects with your ideas and experiences in some relevant way. Replace that natural process with a more conscious, willpower-based system for retaining information, and you risk losing the benefits of that filter.
I've started reading more slowly and a few years ago I dropped a lot of the underlining and highlighting and just read books. Occassionally I dog ear a corner of a page for something, but not too often. And if I'm still thinking about something I read a few weeks or months or years later, that's how I know it's meaningful. That's what's led me to reread, to see why I keep thinking about certain stories and concepts.
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I read Bowling Alone two decades ago: I'm tired of trend articles about loneliness. I am bored of talking about the busy-busy-busy nature of modern adult life when there is no structural reprieve in sight. And I really hate it when experts make social connection seem like a trick or a fluke. We have managed to socialize generations of women into this role on a family level, and some people on a community level, too. Imagine if we tried to expand the number of kinkeepers, even a little bit, by respecting this work as work. As vocation.
I'm still thinking about this and, quite honestly, the idea of happiness via relationships is true, but who keeps them going? How do we get both sides to want to do that? I think about that a lot, because too often I've been the one who's doing all the work and it's exhausting and I think Friedman hits the nail on the head here.
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What happens when engineers stop thinking of their interests as fundamentally aligned with the companies' owners and management, and develop their own class consciousness? Tech companies are not pursuing automation purely out of intellectual interest; they are trying to solve looming labor problems that can no longer be ignored.
There's a lot of really great stuff in this piece of the decline of tech, but I'd argue that the labor issue is one of the reasons why we're seeing all the of the layoffs. Layoffs don't make sense financially, but they do put fear into the tech workers who remain and there is a distinct feeling that the bosses want to put these same workers in their place. Tech workers have had a lot of leverage for a long time and now the people at the top want to claw some of that back. Unionization would help workers to retain those things that are most important.
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We’re not making a case for despair. Just the opposite. We need the facts so that individuals and policy makers can take concrete action. Proven solutions to the U.S.’s plastic-waste and pollution problems exist and can be quickly replicated across the country. These solutions include enacting bans on single-use plastic bags and unrecyclable single-use plastic food-service products, ensuring widespread access to water-refilling stations, installing dishwashing equipment in schools to allow students to eat food on real dishes rather than single-use plastics, and switching Meals on Wheels and other meal-delivery programs from disposables to reusable dishware.
I find the situation with plastic a bit depressing, to be honest. As a consumer it's impossible to avoid it and it also feels like a sisyphean task. It'd be great if some regulations came into play so that we aren't using as much because the product makers can't use it, because I'm so tired of making recylcing the problem of individuals when it needs to be a systemic change to have a real impact.
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Accommodating change and uncertainty requires a looser sense of self, an ability to respond in various ways. This is perhaps why qualified success unsettles those who are locked into fixed positions. The shift back to failure is a defensive measure. It is, in the end, a technique for turning away from the always imperfect, often important victories that life on earth provides — and for lumping things together regardless of scale. If corruption is evenly distributed and ubiquitous, then there is no adequate response — or, rather, no response is required.
Solnit's writing, and this piece is no exception, has helped me to see the small victories and to look for them around me. Small victories and incremental progress isn't sexy, it isn't what large media organizations want to write about, but it's what brings about the larger victories and the change that is so desperately needed.