#i work through my gender crises by falling into youtube holes

[cupparosielee]

Me, entering yet another phase of my gender realisation:

[chocolateburgundy]

Intellectual spelunking

The best thing about holidays is that they free up time. From routine, from deadlines, and most importantly, from its inane compartmentalization into finite google calendar events that the strict temporalities of the academic semester force.

I long for this free time when I don’t have it because it means the potential for intellectual exploration outside the confines of class, and the opportunity to enrich myself culturally by catching up with music and movies so that I’m not just consuming them for self-care.

However, the more reptilian parts of the brain thirst for this free time, which promises them satisfaction through the endless consumption of Netflix shows (old and new) and youtube videos and by endlessly scrolling through the bottomless facebook and twitter feeds. With these, one cannot help but feel that their brain is degenerating but hopelessly clings on to the promise that the next movie, video, post, tweet or more generally ‘piece of content’ will provide some entertainment and satisfaction. In this way, every time my mind drifts even slightly, I fall prey to the internet-hyper attention-dopamine inducing-slow exhaustion matrix.

I’ve decided that the only way of keeping myself from entering these 12 hour internet rabbit holes and actually being productive (I hate this word but I can’t think of another one) intellectually is to have a list of questions, books and topics that I’ve wanted to think more deeply and write about which I can turn to in moments of impending crisis.

So here they are:

Innovation and creativity in political economy:

What could innovation under socialism/communism look like? How could this innovation be detached from the stifling qualities of the state? What essential and useful aspects of entrepreneurship could be salvaged in the construction of this future as we leave its harmful aspects behind? In what ways are markets necessary for innovation and to the extent that they are, how can they be disembedded from capitalist private property relations?

What does innovation and creativity in our present capitalist imaginary entail? What is the history of discourse around the words innovation, creativity and popular phrases like ‘disruption’? What is the role of these terms in neoliberal discourse?

Is innovation an epistemological question? Is innovation inextricably tied to certain capitalist ethical values?

I often get this feeling that socialists propose nationalisation as a self-evident solution to the ills of capitalist exploitation. But nationalisation is inherently confined to national boundaries and nationalisation of companies like google and facebook (with their international workforces) just doesn’t make any sense.

Identity and class:

To what extent is historical materialism as a method class reductionist? What exactly is the critique of historical materialism by race and gender scholars, thinkers and activists? I want to think about this in the context of debates around political platform building (where certain ‘class’ related issues are prioritised over race and gender-related ones) and the issues of representation and diversity (in the context of race, gender and also caste). I also want to interrogate the concept of intersectionality more deeply.

History:

I’m intending on completing a history major because I feel like by studying certain historical phenomena that I’m interested in, I will hopefully be able to get a glimpse into how specific the periodic crises I experience are to this era. Reading history and literature seems like the only way I can understand the specificity of my present reality a little more fully.

I’m interested in the histories of state building in emerging post-colonial nations and the history of revolutions and crises (like May ‘68)

Right now, I’m reading Walter Rodney’s lectures on The Russian Revolution.

I’m also trying to blend history and philosophy by reading intellectual histories of neoliberalism as a concept. This entails trying to figure out the historical evolution of an ideology by reading the works of its architects and proponents.