#professional managerial class.

[edwad]

PMC as in private military company?!

yes. they let me build the nukes

[theculturedmarxist]

I like how libs, mostly white cishets, talk about how trump is worse than Biden while using every minority under the sun as their scapegoat victim. "oh but gay people will suffer worse under trump" "oh but minorities will suffer worse under trump" "oh but disabled people will will suffer worse under trump" instead of asking the people they seem to be "fighting" for what they think. And the smugness too thinking they figured it out and how they are the main smart person that has figured it out and everyone around them is stupid. I honestly do hope trump wins and is as horrible as they say he will be they really deserve it. Oh and this coming from someone who is gay, a minority, and disabled, Biden has materially been worse than trump has been. If the vote blue maga people want to do something useful they should kill themselves

I like how libs, mostly white cishets

I think the problem is less their physical identity and more that they're comfortable petite bourgeois/Professional-Managerial Class types. For them, Trump is worse than Biden. While the PMC isn't exclusive to the Democratic Party, that's where you'll find that they predominate. They're the same people that are saying "what do you expect me to do, NOT work at Raytheon?"

Minorities, the disabled, etc, sure, they care about them, but only insofar as they care about themselves as a part of that group. This mindset is fixed in their heads even if only subconsciously because their own position requires exploiting all those identities as they exist in the working class. Sure, they care about the quality of life of their paraplegic employees, but they'd damn well better clock in on time.

The promise of the Democratic Party is that its members aren't supposed to be touched by the same miseries as the hoi polloi. Their credentials mark them out as a better sort of person. They're smarter, they worked harder, they earned it. They don't really have a problem with the GOP preying on people, they have a problem with the GOP preying on them. Just take this leaking dickhole as an example:

It's fine to talk shit about Biden! 😌 But you still better vote for him🤬

The problem isn't that Trump is deporting people. Biden's busy doing that very fucking thing, after all. No, the problem is that now the wrong people might be deported! This is so much worse than when regular brown illegals get imprisoned and deported en masse.

You can take the right to abortion as another example. Trump's plan is to let the states figure it out for themselves. Well, it turns out that's the Democrat plan too. The Democrats and the PMC aren't really concerned about abortion because their class position basically guarantees they'll be able to get it. They live in states where its protected, or they have the money to take care of the problem some other way if the need arises. It's an abstract problem for them. Their only real fear is if that suddenly isn't the case, that they would face the real problems of regular people. That's the terror and threat of Trump to them, not that he'll commit genocide like Biden is, but that their ass might be the one in the fire this time, which of course makes Trump "worse."

[holycartoonwarrior]

The stewy ethos is in a world of ppl scared to get fucked, and wanting so badly to do the fucking. He sees the inherent profit motive of being a tight reliable hole. And then he’d make a comment abt how hookers were the first entrepreneurs and joke at Willa’s expense abt hiring her.

[wiserebeltiger]

One thing Tim Dillon does not appreciate is that the psychology of the zoomer is fundamentally different from the psychology of the boomer. Tim always says “the zoomers will sell out like the boomers did in the 80s.” But he fails to understand that, while it is possible the zoomers may do something morally insane at some point, it will not take the form of simply selling out. Rather, it would come with the embrace of a demented Stalinism or such like psychosis. Zoomers have been “managed” by the boomers all their lives; they want power, not an electric guitar. They have been abused at a time when they are acutely aware that they are being abused; which creates anger and in some a desire for revenge. The boomers were crazy, like any generation; but their craziness was fundamentally a weak one; weakness for simple materialism, narcissism, etc. On the other hand, the generation that grew up not only being molested by priests but also groomed online and cyber bullied, had their body deformed because they weren’t allowed to transition, is mired (this is big) in 20k of student debt, pays ridiculously for rent, and has for company only other people who are similarly cracked and depraved—no; this generation will do very strange things. They will not merely lose touch with reality and let bad things happen. They will get what they want, what they deeply know they have been deprived of, or they will die profoundly and absurdly in the most unforeseen fit of mental illness.

Perhaps, as we get older, the mental illness in our generation will become less pronounced; or perhaps it will get worse. There seems to be a division, a significant historical divergence, that is now occurring between those who are mentally sorting themselves out, and those who fail to do so, and who seem bound to go off the deep end. These are the two tendencies in the zoomers—not so much left vs. right, though that is another division, but sane vs. insane; time will tell which will prevail.

We will see too, if we manage to make something new, or merely become the conduit for our parent’s rage and abuse, taken out on society, as the generation of the 30s and 40s took their parents’ WWI bitterness out on “enemies.” A deranged rage, really at the dead king, that they failed to move on from and instead became consumed by… from which detachment from reality followed.

The professional managerial class seems to be losing influence on the left; at least in public discourse and public sentiment. But in the organizations themselves, the DSA, the unions? I am not so sure. These people are really the worst gen z has to offer. They perfectly encapsulate this failed rebellion against the parent that winds up only fulfilling the parent’s vision (because the child never really wanted to rebel to begin with, because they have been so heavily managed that they do not know how).

The parents, managers, wanted to manage a neoliberal society; their children, whom they groomed to carry on in their footsteps, may wind up managing a democratic socialist society—the state agencies, the beaurocracies, are likely to be full of these people.

People say it’s ok to be rich and leftist. “You shouldn’t shit on someone who is rich and leftist.” But they bury the real fact: that you and working people should be very suspicious of anyone who is rich, and wants to take control of a worker’s organization. What do they want but control and a job; a little bit of power; a little bit of familiarity. The communist part of old, after all, ran internally like any corporation: you interviewed for an entry-level position, then worked your way up through the ranks, maybe to reach a post on the board of directors—sorry, the politburo. Beware the organizational forms that arise from failing to unlearn the ones you already exist in; otherwise you will never escape. [the second half of this paragraph is mostly wrong but I am too tired to edit it.]

[epitome-the-burnkid-viii]

[acesammy]

ugh applying to jobs recently has felt like back when i was in college the first time applying to movie theater jobs and getting denied without an interview despite being 19 with 2 years of experience - including managerial experience

[infinitysisters]

“Moral grandiosity seems to have infected the nomenklatura class of giant corporations. It is not enough for them to ensure that the corporations make a decent profit within the framework of the law; they must claim to also be morally improving, if not actually saving, the world.

So it was with Alison Rose, the first female chief executive of the National Westminster Bank, a large British bank 39 percent owned by the British government. When first appointed to the position, she said that she would put combatting climate change at the centre of the bank’s policies and activities. Whether shareholders were delighted to hear this is unknown.

But the bank, under her direction, went further. Its subsidiary, Coutts, founded in 1692 and long banker to the rich, compiled a Stasi-like dossier on one of its customers, Nigel Farage, before “exiting” him from the bank, to use the elegant term employed by Ms. Rose. (Defenestration will come later, perhaps.)

Farage is, of course, a prominent right-wing political figure in Britain, as much detested as he is admired. There was no allegation in the dossier that he had done anything illegal; indeed, in person, he had always acted correctly and courteously toward staff. What was alleged was that his “values” did not accord with those of the bank, which were self-proclaimed as “inclusive” (though not of people with less than $3.5 million to deposit or borrow). Farage was depicted as a xenophobe and racist, mainly because he was in favour of Brexit and against unlimited immigration. That anyone could support Brexit for any reason other than xenophobia, or oppose unlimited immigration other than because he was a racist, was inconceivable to the diverse, inclusive thinkers of Coutts Bank.

Ms. Rose saw fit to leak details to the BBC about Farage’s banking affairs, claiming to believe that they were public knowledge already. She did not mention the 40-page dossier that her staff had put together, about Farage’s publicly-stated views. The Stasi would have been proud of the bank’s work, which comprehensively proved him to have anti-woke views.

Whatever else might be said about Mr. Farage, no one would describe him as a pushover, the kind of person who would take mistreatment lying down. Even the Guardian newspaper, which cannot be suspected of partiality for him, suggested that the bank and its chief executive had questions to answer.

It was not long before Ms. Rose had to beat a retreat. She issued a statement in which she said:

I have apologised to Mr. Farage for the deeply inappropriate language contained in [the dossier].

The board of the bank said that “after careful reflection [it] has concluded that it retains full confidence in Ms. Rose as CEO of the bank.”

The following day, Rose resigned, admitting to “a serious error of judgment.”

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐤 𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐲 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 $𝟏 𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧.

The weasel words of Ms. Rose and the bank board are worth examination. They deflected, and I suspect were intended to deflect, the main criticism directed at Ms. Rose and the bank: namely, that the bank had been involved in a scandalous and sinister surveillance of Mr. Farage’s political views and attempted to use them as a reason to deny him banking services, all in the name of their own political views, which they assumed to be beyond criticism or even discussion. The humble role of keeping his money, lending him money, or perhaps giving him financial advice, was not enough for them: they saw themselves as the guardians of correct political policy.

It was not that the words used to describe Mr. Farage were “inappropriate,” or even that they were libelous. It is that the bank saw fit to investigate and describe him at all, at least in the absence of any suspicion of fraud, money laundering, and so forth. “The error of judgment” to which Ms. Rose referred was not that she spoke to the BBC about his banking affairs (it is not easy to believe that she did so without malice, incidentally), but that she compiled a dossier on Farage in the first place—and then “error of judgment” is hardly a sufficient term on what was a blatant and even wicked attempt at instituting a form of totalitarianism.

This raises the question of whether one can be wicked without intending to be so, for it is quite clear that Ms. Rose had no real understanding, even after her resignation, of the sheer dangerousness and depravity of what the bank, under her direction, had done.

As for the board’s somewhat convoluted declaration that “after careful consideration, it concluded that it retains full confidence,” etc., it suggests that it was involved in an exercise of psychoanalytical self-examination rather than of an objective state of affairs: absurd, in the light of Ms. Rose’s resignation within twenty-four hours. The board, no more than Ms. Rose herself, understood what the essence of the problem was. For them, if there had been no publicity, there would have been no problem: so when Mr. Farage called for the dismissal of the board en masse, I sympathised with his view.

There is, of course, the question of the competence of the bank’s management. Last year, the bank’s profits rose by 50 percent (I wish my income had risen by as much). I am not competent to comment on the solidity of this achievement: excellent profits one year followed by complete collapse the next seem not to be unknown in the banking world. But the rising profits under Ms. Rose for the four years of her direction seem to point to, at least on some level, of competence. How many equally competent persons there are who could replace her, I do not know.

Still, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐛𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐚 𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲 ��𝐜𝐫𝐮𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐬, as illustrated in this episode, is worrying. Would one trust such people if the political wind changed direction? Their views would change, but the iron moral certainty and self-belief would remain the same, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. How many meetings have I sat through in which some apparatchik has claimed to be passionately committed to a policy, only to be just as passionately committed to the precise opposite when his own masters demand a change of direction?! The Coutts story is one of how totalitarianism can flourish.”

—

Theodore Dalrymple

[utilitymonstermash]

YouTube Video: MIT SLOAN Management Review "RTO is Backfiring" I don't hold a lot of credence towards the validity of any of these "management" studies, but I do think shifts in what these management school types are saying does drive change in the work place.

[kaydub80]

The fact that editorial staffs at two of the largest newspapers in the nation are more pissed off that they've been blocked from endorsing the vice president who's backing a genocide rather than the fact a genocide is happening in the first place is peak First World Problems.

[redsolon]

Proudhon said exactly this shit.

"The spirit of rapine and greed is the true characteristic of the modern epoch: the poor exploit the rich, the workers their employers, the tenant his landlord, the company promoter his shareholders, no less than the capitalist exploits and puts pressure on the industrialist, the industrialist his workers and the landlord his tenants."

-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Revolutionary Life, Mind and Works by E Hyams

This is what no class analysis does to a motherfucker. Vague criticism of "the system" but no analysis of its logic, and no plan for confrontation. Any time I run into a self-proclaimed "radical" squeamish about confrontation, thinking the bourgeois state can be ignored because they're just smol beans--any time I run into someone with a purely critical, vague "anti-authoritarian" ideology--I think, "Ah, Proudhon yet lives!" It was insufficient for the Paris Commune, and it's insufficient now. Anarchism becoming a primarily communistic and syndicalist movement is the only reason it still has any influence today at all. Marx saved them from Proudhon.

Kay and Skittles did a video on Bong Joon-Ho's politics, and he gets at the heart of the problem with his worldview. (Kay and Skittles has perfected the art of using media analysis for actual, solid political education. All his stuff is great.)

if i had to materialize the epitome of petite bourgeoise intellectual's high horse attitude when it comes to class struggle it would be bong joon-ho talking about parasite (and his film itself)

[collapsedsquid]

What then is the explanation? Why do workers typically push for more consumption rather than for shorter hours? Here I think Cohen’s argument is untypically unclear. He tells us that workers do indeed want more goods (other things being equal) but it is also plain that they dislike the toil then need to engage in to get those goods and evidences that claim by making the point that if workers were granted money such that they didn’t need to work at their jobs, very few of them would choose to do so gratis, and there would be a dramatic decline in the amount of work done. His suggestion seems to be that since there is a permanent propaganda campaign in support of people getting more stuff and no corresponding campaign in favour of free time of the kind one can enjoy without extra spending, extra consumption always has a salience for people that additional leisure lacks. I think Cohen’s uncharacteristically feeble discussion of this point can be explained in part by a blindspot in his thinking. First of all, he neglects the way in which states support and encourage consumer spending and simultaneously encourage a culture of work and effort through moralizing campaigns, stigmatization of “shirkers” and the like. Take the first of these elements: states help establish and support structures of lending to help people to do things like buy their own homes and then furnish their homes. They do this in a variety of ways, by providing support to banks and other financial institutions but also by giving borrowers all kinds of tax breaks. In order to buy the things they want, consumers have little choice but to borrow, but once they have borrowed they have to repay and repaying requires income, which requires work. Now perhaps workers could simply refuse the blandishments of capital and refuse to borrow in order to consume and then the option to work less would be more available to them. But I think this neglects the competitive and social aspects of consumption that Cohen rather dismissively refers to as “keeping up with the Joneses”. One need not be of a particularly competitive or comparative disposition to be caught up in social standards of self-presentation that are inherently comparative in nature, as Adam Smith knew in that famous passage about labourers being ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt or, in some countries, leather shoes.

Still feels like everyone's discourse on consumerism & capitalism is stuck in the 1960s, he criticizes Cohen's view and maybe I'm out of touch but this doesn't feel much better. Maybe because the only people who write on consumerism are petite-bourgeoisie who unlike most people do live like this.

Speaking as a member of the salaried class, while I do appreciate the gee-gaws I am able to purchase with my full-time job, speaking as I believe a somewhat representative member of the professional-managerial class I am more concerned with rent, health insurance, and the ability to hopefully retire at some point, and these guide my financial decisions. I purchase some fun stuff I didn't choose my career to be able to afford a fancier grill. I crave the respectability of not living in a van.

Now there Is perhaps a discussion of how I could move to somewhere cheaper like Montana or Spain and why I don't do that but if you're going to discuss this issue I think you gotta address issues like that directly

[theculturedmarxist]

These days I mostly avoid being around art spaces and the dwindling population of people that frequent them. This is for the same reason you might duck an old friend who’s been transformed by time and circumstance into a thing that you scarcely recognize. Sometimes it’s better to remember them as they were.

I broke my rule the other night to attend the closing of a theater I built long ago, and it was every bit as sad and disappointing as I would have expected. Hardly anyone came to send her off, and the ones that did could muster nothing better than a couple of beers and off to bed. The whole thing was over by 11.

“Who are you voting for,” a pudgy, bearded, graying Xer, asked me before I left. He was wearing a kind of middle-aged bohemian get-up, right down to the hipster hat, that made him look like he’d just stepped out of a commercial for a new Type II diabetes drug. I’m down to talk my doctor about . . .

“I’m writing in Dave Chappelle,” I said.

He opened and closed his mouth a few times, trying to find the part of his brain that knew how to process a dissenting opinion. Not finding one he sputtered, “But you’re not for Trump.”

“No.”

Then a skinny, wan, pale guy with sunken eyes, and long, greasy black hair, sober as a judge, like someone who’d acquired all the physical attributes of heroin addiction, without ever having had any of the fun, said, “Then you have to vote for Biden, or Trump wins.”

“So what,” I said.

And that was when they both shit themselves and I had to do the whole red-pill/blue-pill thing. By the time that was over, everyone else had gone and I followed suit. Leaving the building for the last time, I thought of livelier days when the whole place, the whole block, the whole city, was full of life and crazy energy.

How did this happen? How did we get here?

This is an article I’ve started, abandoned, and started again a few times over the years. That’s partly because I still had some hope when I began that I might one day be able to return to my craft as a theater director without revealing my opinions. But that was before Due Dissidence had a YouTube show. Now I very visibly express ideas 3-4 times a week that would get me professionally and socially cancelled in about 5 minutes as soon as anyone from that crowd took the time to check out the channel, which of course they would.

Another thing that’s kept this one at the bottom of the digital drawer is lingering affection for a lot of people who are still making the music, lighting the lights, and all that. I have dear friends in the arts and this is going to hurt some of their feelings. Except for the ones who regularly DM to thank me for saying what they can’t without risking career suicide. Those will be greatly cheered by this piece, in the way of a bullied child watching their tormentor take a hard fist to the nose, so I guess in the end that part’s a wash. Here goes.

In the 8 years since the election of doom that transformed me from the kind of guy who wanted to have a beer with Rachael Maddow, to the kind of guy who would protest her book reading, I’ve had lots of debates with lots of people.  Enough to notice a distinct pattern

Conservatives will generally keep it on the issues; they may not agree with you, but as a rule they aren’t going to go right to ad hominem attacks on your character.  Liberals can go either way: they may debate the issues with you, but they’re just as likely to attack you personally as a closet Republican, a Russian plant, or if you happen to be a white man, that’s kind of their go-to.  But the absolute worst people you can find yourself engaging with are members of the arts community.  I know this because I’ve been a member of it since at the tender age of 19, I bullshitted my way into a directing gig at the still extant 13th Street Repertory Theater. 

The artists I worked with then as a kid from Queens dazzled by the bohemian world I had infiltrated wouldn’t recognize the artists of today, and I suspect they wouldn’t like them all that much.  Heirs to a 60’s counter-culture ethos of distrust for authority and institutions, and to an older tradition of the artist-intellectual, they generally thought of all politicians as dishonest psychopaths, and spent more time discussing Kafka than the evils of Soviet Russia, which occupied the same position of public enemy #1 that its successor state does today.  And lest the wokeratti immediately jump to its aforementioned go-to, the scene was far more substantively diverse than what you might find at a theater or a gallery today.  They were gay and straight, old and young, black and white and brown, and in a major departure from the current moment, both penniless and well to do.  There were artists living rent free in the loft above the theater, others renting $250 apartments in pre-hipster Williamsburg who had to walk across the bridge to get to rehearsals for lack of train fare, and still others living comfortably on the Upper West Side.  If there was a failing it was in a tendency towards pretentiousness: when a middle-aged woman pronounced confidently at a post-rehearsal dinner that the principal crisis of the modern age was the “post-Nietzschean vacuum,” I almost laughed in her face.  No one had that problem in my native Flushing, and I suspected that was true most places.  But the problem wasn’t racism, sexism, or homophobia-expressing those sorts of views would have been just about the only thing that could have gotten you ejected in an atmosphere where pretty much anything went, and it was that way in the arts community for as long as I was a part of it.

Generally, I like to heavily source everything I write, ‘cause when you’re offering controversial opinions, you had better cross all your t’s and such.  But because the arts are such a distinct subculture and the kinds of institutions that have the means to conduct a wide survey on questions like: what class background do artists usually come from, or, when did artists start to favor censorship, never would, I must of necessity rely on my personal observations and speculations.  Which makes this, by definition, a personal essay, so take it as you will. 

I’m starting from the premise that something has gone very wrong when you have an American arts community that tends to be politically conservative in the sense of being to the right of general sentiment in the Western world on class and economics; that mindlessly supports politicians like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton who’s records are at odds with even the identitarian issues that they claim to care about, and that sees de-platforming and cancelling figures like Joe Rogan as a legitimate tactic, never considering the idea that once you let that genie out of the bottle, no one will be more vulnerable to having it turned against them than artists.  I’ve given a lot of thought to how a bohemian scene of intellectuals and misfits turned into something resembling a PTA meeting in Scarsdale. This is what I came up with:

I will concede this to the painfully woke white people that dominate the arts even as they lately denounce their own position: rich white people are the crux of the problem, with the emphasis being on “rich” rather than “white,” as some would have it. The low to no pay circumstances of most creatives are beside the point, even though many of them will point to this as evidence of their moral authority to speak on matters of poverty and marginalization. If “artist” isn’t a Professional Managerial Class job, what is it? It sure ain’t factory work. The pretense of artists to social disenfranchisement calls to mind John Goodman’s line in Barton Fink, where his serial killing salesman tells John Turturro’s slumming writer, “You’re just a tourist with a typewriter, Barton. I live here.”

Most of these folks are just playing dress up for a while before they pack it in for Grad School and take up residence in the same sedate suburban enclaves from whence they came. Just as in every other sphere of American society, the arts are, and always have been, dominated by these kinds of middle and upper-middle class, mostly white people, whose sensibilities reflect that reality.  The higher up the food chain you go, the more evident that becomes.  The same exact advantages of money and connections that favor people in every other industry, favor those who attempt a career in the arts.  Perhaps even more so because the standards are so nebulous.  If you’re a doctor, or an attorney, you either do your job well, or you don’t.  If you’re an artist, the quality of your work is subjective which leaves a lot of room for just hooking up the people you relate to, which in the arts is going to mean a lot of rich white people, hooking up other rich white people.  The net effect of that is, if a lot of bad ideas are coming out of the suburbs, that’s going to be reflected in the work.

When the PMC’s were more rooted in the New Deal, with its focus on class and economics, as was the case when I first entered the scene, so were the arts. Now that they’ve turned to neoliberalism in their economics, and the post-modern turn has unmoored their social activism from observable reality, we have an arts community that has nothing to say about the current moment that strays an inch from what you might hear on MSNBC. This is why, as just one example, in a moment of social strife and economic dislocation, the Artistic Director of Connecticut’s Long Wharf Theater recently seized on the idea of a Black Trans Women at the Center festival as the best use of his platform and resources. The company lost their home of 55 years shortly thereafter.

Whereas in the 30’s a good many artists responded to the Depression by adopting a Marxist-Leninist posture and playwrights like Clifford Odets, (the writer being satirized by the Cohens in Barton Fink), and later Arthur Miller and Rod Serling, began writing plays for the first time that placed working class people “at the center,” this generation of artists greets the moment with only contempt for the struggles of working people, seeing them as reactionary Trumpers who sadly lack the education and sophistication to realize that the economy is great, incremental change is the best we can hope for, and getting all bent out of shape about books full of graphic cocksucking in your child’s middle-school library is totally uncool. Rather than to represent the struggles of average people, these artists offer them nothing but derision and when they do bother to acknowledge them, it is only to portray them as wrong-think culture war enemies.

Adding to the problem, poor people who manage to get to college usually don’t decide to major in something that’s going to almost guarantee that they end up poor.  Being an artist is a luxury most people from economically disadvantaged environments just don’t think they can afford.  You’re a lot more likely to choose it if you have a trust fund to fall back on.  So, essentially you end up with a scene dominated by trust fund babies, no matter what identity group they align with.  Their politics proceed from there.  All these artists going on about white privilege is partly a case of, to use a phrase with which any theater aficionado will be familiar, “Methinks thou dost protest too much.” And as with Diversity Equity and Inclusion efforts in other sectors, this results in pretenses at promoting “representation” amounting to nothing more than trying to find more black and brown people from similar backgrounds to the whites that are already there, and who consequently share the same attitudes. Barracks and Michelles are always welcome, but the Hueys and Assatas make these folks deeply uncomfortable. The theater party I walked into last week, was no more racially diverse than the scene I knew in the 80’s (perhaps a bit less), but it was palpably less wide-ranging in class perspectives.

Another reason the censorious Victorian lady in high dudgeon pose that has become the liberal class default setting over the past 10 years or so, has had so much appeal to this group in particular, probably has to do with the psychological afflictions common to artists, combined with the insecurities inherent in the profession.  This is something else I’d love to see a study on: common psychological illnesses in artists, but lacking such a study, I can only tell you what I’ve observed.  Most people don’t choose a career in the arts because they’re very secure, contented and happy sorts.  The level of personal psychological torment that’s driven them to such an irrational career choice varies, but deep neurosis, emotional neediness, and pervasive self-doubt are kind of a base line.  I do not except myself from this analysis: my head is the kind of snake pit that Indiana Jones has nightmares about.  Proceeding from there, you’ll find a fair amount of narcissism, borderline personality disorder, manic-depression, and just plain old depression-depression.  These qualities are not at all ameliorated by constant rejection and criticism, which is kind of the nature of the beast.  In some ways the people who are attracted to the arts are the least capable of enduring its vicissitudes without severe psychological damage.  So, you have a bunch of deeply insecure, neurotic people, trying to make their way in a profession where the rules are vague and the agreed upon standards of successful work are non-existent, and then you hand them a secular religion that gives them not only rules and standards, but a weapon with which to bludgeon their critics as -ists, phobes, and reactionary heathens.  That’s like throwing crackers at a starving man.  Naturally they jumped on it en masse, without ever thinking through the consequences.  Critical Social Justice gave artists something they haven’t had since Duchamp signed a urinal and called it a sculpture: certainty.  And this group is far too ignorant of the past to know why their forbears rejected the kind of formalism that these standards impose, and what the price paid in quality, creativity and individual expression will be in the long run. Insofar as they embrace Duchamp’s lesson, it is only in using the precedent set by his famous prank to avoid being interrogated on the basis of quality, talent and craftsmanship.

Which brings us to my final observation.

I’m going to let you in on a secret, although if you’ve ever been dragged to a “new interpretation” of Hamlet on the Lower East Side, back when we still did that sort of thing, you probably already know: talent is rare.  That’s why we call it talent.  If it was common, we’d call it something else.  I’ll give you a breakdown from something I have a fair amount of expertise in-auditioning actors.  If you audition 100 actors, it’s going to go something like this: about 10% will be so God-awful you have to wonder where they got the encouragement; around 60% will be passable in the way of people who have had a lot of training; 20% will be very good; 8% will be excellent; a final 2% will be exceptional-in other words, talented.  So, based on my admittedly subjective observations, only about 30% of the people who call themselves “artists” have any business pursuing it.  And only 2% of those are really gifted.  So, the scene is, and always has been, mostly populated by hangers-on who are only one 30th Birthday away from packing it in and getting a Masters in Social Work.  The appeal of a set of standards that remove the basis of evaluating work from its quality to its adherence to a set of clearly defined political beliefs is obvious.  If you can’t out-talent people, you can at least out-woke them.

None of this is to say that representation in the arts isn’t a problem or wasn’t a problem until these meddling kids started performing their virtue for likes and clicks.  It’s always been a problem, particularly at the level of management and project leadership, in the arts as in every other sector of society.  I would posit that DEI efforts are a solution in search of a problem, only in that part of the reason for that lack of representation, has always been a lack of artists of color walking in the door, which in turn has to do with the economic realities I’ve mentioned.  There aren’t a lot of poor white people walking in the door either; I’ve owned 5 theaters in NYC across three decades, and I never met another theater owner or director, who grew up on welfare.  In my experience, that lack of representation never had to do with virulent racism in the arts community. It always had to do with class realities and broader issues of structural racism society-wide that stop POC from ever making it to the door to be considered.  If you were paying any kind of attention, that lack of diversity was always an embarrassment, but you can’t work with people who simply aren’t there because of societal problems that reach far beyond the arts.  If we really want to do something about this, we need to go out into impoverished and marginalized communities, provide training and encouragement to young people in particular, then offer them jobs in our theaters and galleries, instead of only looking for POC from similar backgrounds to the people who are already there in order to assuage their white guilt.  Until we see arts institutions doing that, we will know DEI efforts in the arts for what they are: one more example of rich white people protecting the privileges of their class, even if they have to outwardly denounce them in order to do it.

In the end, the arts scene as it exists today and the institutions that support it may have simply become too sclerotic, out of touch, and irrelevant for saving. The future is with activist-artists grown naturally from their communities, using new technologies and platforms to draw attention to concerns and realities that no gatekeeping clique of PMC’s will ever understand or think to explore. As our self-appointed creators of culture have abandoned us, it may be time that we abandon them in turn, leaving their venues to close as they should, leaving their 501c’s to go bankrupt, as they are doing, and taking the space their collapse opens up to create something new of our own.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Hate Machine

An outline of the institutional shape of this politics is coming in to view as well: there’s rich donor oligarchy on top, in the middle there’s the think tanks, magazines, and podcasts that serve as kind of currency exchanges where the coin of mob grievance is turned into respectable notes, and the concerns of elite politics are translated into terms the mob can understand and use, and then there’s the public platforms where little armies of trolls are mustered for whatever task is required by their political masters. In short, it’s a model of the kind of corporate society they wish to secure and reproduce on a larger scale: big bosses, middle-management, workers, all happily coordinated and cooperating. No unions, no pesky social movements, no restive professional managerial-classes with their moral pretensions, no federal bureaucracy meddling and gumming up the works with regulations. The “cancellers” will themselves be cancelled: subjected to harassment and intimidation by the mob if they get out of line. There will be no epistemic hierarchy: just “freedom,” an informational anarchy that translates into the impossibility of the exchange of real content and any rational deliberation. Just memes, nonsense, idiotic enthusiasms and fads, etc.

-John Ganz, Unpopular Front

[sunder-the-gold]

Communist Labor Theory of Value makes Communist Utopia impossible

The Communist Utopia is a world in which humanity does not need a central government, because everyone will be equal to each other and everyone will be provided what they need.

Let us skip over the question of who has to do the hard work of providing, and what those laborers get in exchange for providing everything that everyone else needs.

Let us skip ahead to the notion that "everyone" has enough of what they need, and so the only exchange of value happens in regards to luxuries.

Subjective Value Theory

The free-market theory of Subjective Value declares that two individuals will never truly agree on the value of what each wants and what the other demands in exchange. They must either reach a compromise with each other, or else make no voluntary exchange. If necessary, one or both must leave each other to seek someone else willing to make a more subjectively acceptable compromise.

From beginning to end, such an exchange is completely voluntary. Coercion may occur at any point, but no point mandates coercion.

Labor Theory of Value; Objective Value Theory

Under Marxism, that which is not mandatory is forbidden.

Marxists demand that a central managerial authority exist to act as God, laying down verdicts about the objective value of everything.

No one is allowed to voluntarily make a subjective decision about what their time or property is worth to them. The state tells them what their time and property is worth.

No one is allowed to voluntarily decide who they give their time or property away to. The state tells them who they must trade with.

No one is allowed to voluntarily decide what they must trade for. The state tells them what they must purchase and who they must employ.

From beginning to end, all exchanges in a Marxist system are coerced.

Such a system CANNOT abolish the state. This practice MUST perpetuate the state, forever.

Therefore, Marxism or Communism does not work even in theory. That which cannot work even in theory certainly can never work in practice, no matter how many times you try.

But Marxists never want to achieve true communism. Marxism works just fine in theory and in practice for achieving a Marxist's true desires: Ruling over the working class as a professional freeloader.

[epitome-the-burnkid-viii]

[3liza]

thank you for speaking rational thought AS AN ARTIST into the ai debate. i get so tired of people over simplifying, generalizing, and parroting how they’ve been told ai works lmao. you’re an icon

some of the worst AI art alarmists are professional artists as well but theyre in very specific fields with very specific work cultures and it would take a long and boring post to explain all the nuance there but i went to the same extremely tiny, hypefocused classic atelier school in San Francisco as Karla Ortiz and am actually acquainted with her irl so i have a different perspective on this particular issue and the people involved than the average fan artist on tumblr. the latter person is also perfectly valid and so is their work, all im saying is that we have different life experiences and my particular one has accidentally placed me in a weird and relevant position to observe what the AI art panic is actually about.

first thing i did when the pearl-clutching about AI art started is go on the Midjourney discord, which is completely public and free, and spent a few burner accounts using free credits to play with the toolset. everyone who has any kind of opinion about AI art should do the same because otherwise you just wont know what youre talking about. my BIGGEST takeaway is that it is currently and likely always will be (because of factors that are sort of hard to explain) extremely difficult to make an AI like Midjourney spit out precisely wht you want UNLESS what you want is the exact kind of hyperreal, hyperpretty Artstation Front Page 4k HDR etc etc style pictures that, coincidentally, artists like Karla Ortiz have devoted their careers to. Midjourney could not, when asked, make a decent Problem Glyph. or even anything approaching one. and probably never will, because there isn't any profit incentive for it to do so and probably not enough images to train a dataset anyway.

the labor issues with AI are real, but they are the result of the managerial class using AI's existence as an excuse to reduce compensation for labor. this happens at every single technological sea change and is unstoppable, and the technology itself is always blamed because that is beneficial to the capitalists who are actually causing the labor crisis each time. if you talk to the artists who are ACTUALLY already being affected, they will tell you what's happening is managers are telling them to insert AI into workflows in ways that make no sense, and that management have fully started an industry-wide to "pivot" to AI production in ways that aren't going to work but WILL result in mass loss of jobs and productivty and introduce a lot of problems which people will then be hired to try to fix, but at greatly-reduced salaries. every script written and every picture generated by an AI, without human intervention/editing/cleanup, is mostly unusable for anything except a few very specific use cases that are very tolerant of generality. i'm seeing it being used for shovelware banner ads, for example, as well as for game assets like "i need some spooky paintings for the wall of a house environment" or "i need some nonspecific movie posters for a character's room" that indie game devs are making really good use of, people who can neither afford to hire an artist to make those assets and cant do them themselves, and if the ai art assets weren't available then that person would just not have those assets in the game at all. i've seen AI art in that context that works great for that purpose and isn't committing any labor crimes.

it is also being used for book covers by large publishing houses already, and it looks bad and resulted directly in the loss of a human job. it is both things. you can also pay your contractor for half as many man hours because he has a nailgun instead of just hammers. you can pay a huge pile of money to someone for an oil portrait or you can take a selfie with your phone. there arent that many oil painters around anymore.

but this is being ignored by people like the guy who just replied and yelled at me for the post they imagined that i wrote defending the impending robot war, who is just feeling very hysterical about existential threat and isn't going to read any posts or actually do any research about it. which is understandable but supremely unhelpful, primarily to themselves but also to me and every other fellow artist who has to pay rent.

one aspect of this that is both unequivocally True AND very mean to point out is that the madder an artist is about AI art, the more their work will resemble the pretty, heavily commercialized stuff the AIs are focused on imitating. the aforementioned Artstation frontpage. this is self-feeding loop of popular work is replicated by human artists because it sells and gets clicks, audience is sensitized to those precise aesthetics by constant exposure and demands more, AI trains on those pictures more than any others because there are more of those pictures and more URLs pointing back to those pictures and the AI learns to expect those shapes and colors and forms more often, mathematically, in its prediction models. i feel bad for these people having their style ganked by robots and they will not be the only victims but it is also true, and has always been true, that the ONLY way to avoid increasing competition in a creative field is to make yourself so difficult to imitate that no one can actually do it. you make a deal with the devil when you focus exclusively on market pleasing skills instead of taking the massive pay cut that comes with being more of a weirdo. theres no right answer to this, nor is either kind of artist better, more ideologically pure, or more talented. my parents wanted me to make safe, marketable, hotel lobby art and never go hungry, but im an idiot. no one could have predicted that my distaste for "hyperreal 4k f cup orc warrior waifu concept art depth of field bokeh national geographic award winning hd beautiful colorful" pictures would suddenly put me in a less precarious position than people who actually work for AAA studios filling beautiful concept art books with the same. i just went to a concept art school full of those people and interned at a AAA studio and spent years in AAA game journalism and decided i would rather rip ass so hard i exploded than try to compete in such an industry.

which brings me to what art AIs are actually "doing"--i'm going to be simple in a way that makes computer experts annoyed here, but to be descriptive about it, they are not "remixing" existing art or "copying" it or carrying around databases of your work and collaging it--they are using mathematical formulae to determine what is most likely to show up in pictures described by certain prompts and then manifesting that visually, based on what they have already seen. they work with the exact same very basic actions as a human observing a bunch of drawings and then trying out their own. this is why they have so much trouble with fingers, it's for the same reason children's drawings also often have more than 5 fingers: because once you start drawing fingers its hard to stop. this is because all fingers are mathematically likely to have another finger next to them. in fact most fingers have another finger on each side. Pinkies Georg, who lives on the end of your limb and only has one neighbor, is an outlier and Midjourney thinks he should not have been counted.

in fact a lot of the current failings by AI models in both visual art and writing are comparable to the behavior of human children in ways i find amusing. human children will also make up stories when asked questions, just to please the adult who asked. a robot is not a child and it does not have actual intentions, feelings or "thoughts" and im not saying they do. its just funny that an AI will make up a story to "Get out of trouble" the same way a 4 year old tends to. its funny that their anatomical errors are the same as the ones in a kindergarten classroom gallery wall. they are not people and should not be personified or thought of as sapient or having agency or intent, they do not.

anyway. TLDR when photography was invented it became MUCH cheaper and MUCH faster to get someone to take your portrait, and this resulted in various things happening that would appear foolish to be mad about in this year of our lord 2023 AD. and yet here we are. if it were me and it was about 1830 and i had spent 30 years learning to paint, i would probably start figuring out how to make wet plate process daguerreotypes too. because i live on earth in a technological capitalist society and there's nothing i can do about it and i like eating food indoors and if i im smart enough to learn how to oil paint i can certainly point a camera at someone for 5 minutes and then bathe the resulting exposure in mercury vapor. i know how to do multiple things at once. but thats me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!