#unnecessariat

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Survival of the Richest

In 2018, Douglas Rushkoff had a bizarre experience: he was asked to speak at a billionaires’ retreat, only to find that he had been summoned to help the plutes in attendance figure out how to plan for the end of the world:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity

The super-rich attendees at the conference were obsessed with “The Event” — civil unrest, environmental collapse, some other end-of-the-world scenario — and how to survive it: where to site their bunkers, how to command the loyalty of their mercenaries after money lost its value.

Rushkoff realized that these guys were obsessed with outrunning the end of the world that they were creating through their drive to outrun the end of the world. They were singularly uninterested in preventing the end of the world, or even in surviving it through solidarity and mutual aid. They were committed to the Thatcher Doctrine that “there is no such thing as society” — and they were willing to destroy society to prove that it was true.

Four years later, Rushkoff has turned his experience with the wealthy, the technology-addled, and the selfish-solutionist wing of Silicon Valley into a book called Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. It’s great.

https://wwnorton.com/books/survival-of-the-richest

Rushkoff’s key insight is that the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world understand on a deep level that they way they live has a good chance of causing civilizational collapse, mass die-offs, and terminally poison the only planet in the universe known to be capable of supporting human life.

They understand this, but they’ve made a virtue of it. Our society, our lives, and our planet are viewed as the booster stage of a rocket — a disposable thruster made to get us into orbit before it is discarded. We might wipe out our planet and civilization, but they can retreat to islands. Or orbit. Or Mars. Or the metaverse.

Rushkoff is a philosopher and media theorist, and Survival is an inquiry into the origins of this bizarre and suicidal impulse, asking how psychedelics, cybernetics, and techno-liberation movements could have resulted in this bizarre embrace of the end of the world.

The book revisits the touchstones of the tech world — Burning Man, the MIT Media Lab, Wired Magazine, John Brockman’s star-studded “Edge” salons, TED talks — and shows how each contributed in its own way to “The Mindset” — the ideology of the rich preppers.

Rushkoff doesn’t condemn all of this — he’s a product of it, as am I. Rather, he’s interested in how a movement that was once filled with people who decried greed and hubris incubated a movement that lionizes both. For Rushkoff, much of the blame can be traced to the “scientism” of materialism without ethics, the idea that the universe has no moral arc and any attempt to declare a morality is sentiment or cynical manipulation.

I’m a pretty staunch materialist myself, and so some of this made for uncomfortable reading (Rushkoff is an old friend and we’re scheduled to appear on stage together later this fall to discuss this, and I’m looking forward to it). I think ideology can explain how we act, but I think it’s a mistake to view ideology as a weightless and immaterial thing. Our material circumstances are key to what we believe — and how important those beliefs are to how we live.

But ideology is important, and I agree with Rushkoff that The Mindset is an ideology, and a bad one. I think he’s right that you can trace a line from a nihilistic scientism to Jeffrey Epstein’s plan to breed a race of superhumans by buying a private island and populating it with underage girls who would bear his children.

The private island is key. The Mindset is obsessed with leaving society behind, with creating a private space where the unnecessariat can’t make demands on the moral sentiments of their betters, whether that’s an island, a space colony or a seastead. This project of “libertarian exit” is beautifully documented in Raymond Craib’s book “Adventure Capitalism”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius

Craib and I will be discussing that book live on Sept 29 at Skylight Books in LA; I’m looking forward to bringing Rushkoff’s book into the talk:

https://blog.pmpress.org/events/raymond-craib-and-cory-docrorow-discuss-adventure-capitalism-at-skylight-books-in-los-angeles/

Rushkoff’s original essay really hit home for me. It crystallized two longstanding obsession of mine: the obsession of rich people with runaway AI and their obsession with running away from the rest of us.

The obsession with runaway AI gets a good look-in in Survival. For me, I think the best way of understanding why self-styled capitalist titans are terrified of runaway AI is that they are externalizing their dread of the “slow AIs” (hat tip to Charlie Stross) that they created in the form of limited liability companies:

https://locusmag.com/2015/07/cory-doctorow-skynet-ascendant/

You don’t have to wait for AIs to live in a world dominated by immortal, remorseless colony organisms that view us as inconvenient gut-flora and want to take over the world and turn us all into paperclips — corporations fit the bill very well. What’s more, the super-rich who nominally control these companies know better than any of us how much these artificial life forms are in charge.

The other great theme in Survival is, of course, survival — prepping. At the root of every prepper’s feverish labors is the fantasy of a civilizational collapse in which they are finally recognized as a hero. Water chemists dream of mass water-poisonings in which they — and only they — can save us all. CEOs dream of collapses that require their own bitter soup of managerialism, esoteric financial knowledge and sociopathy can steer us out of the dark ages:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared

That’s what I was thinking of when I wrote my 2019 novella “The Masque of the Red Death,” which depicts the slow decline of a wealthy prepper and his hand-picked cohort of bunker-mates when society experiences The Event:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#masque

The story is basically a series of contrasts, between the world that the protagonist dreams of entering, in which the skills of a high-frequency trader turn out to be The Right Stuff for leading a plucky band out through the apocalypse; and all the things that less self-obsessed people do to actually rebuild civilization.

It’s meant to be a tonic to the kinds of stories that Rushkoff’s Mindset types repeat to themselves over and over again — imaginary stories of the lives of “cavemen” that describe the competiton (for women, food, territory, etc) that created the “human nature” that makes it inevitable that they would be so greedy and selfish.

Like all evolutionary psychology, these are just-so stories, unfalsifiably thought-experiments of how the human mind must have been shaped for the Mindset to feel so natural. Like all evo-psych, it’s ideology dressed up as science — not “evidence-based policy” so much as “policy-based evidence.” As the biologist Anne Innis Dagg put it in her stellar takedown of evo-psych, “Love of Shopping Is Not A Gene”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/04/love-of-shopping-is-not-a-gene-exposing-junk-science-and-ideology-in-darwinian-psychology/

The actual evidence for the societies and arrangements that shaped our distant ancestors lives is much gnarlier and more interesting, as documented in David Graeber and David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything,” which describes the incredible variety of ways that successful civilizations organized themselves under for hundreds or even thousands of years:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/08/three-freedoms/#anti-fatalism

More than anything, Graeber and Wengrow describe how there was never a time in which there was “no such thing as society.” At every turn, we have had to live our lives with care and compromise for the lives of others. There is no escaping the need to balance your own desires and yearnings against those of others.

This was a lesson of the pandemic, of course — at a foundational, microbial level, we have a shared destiny. Our microbiology is a commons that has to be collectively managed. But that’s true on the macro level, too: without coordination and compromise, you end up with situations where your neighbors decide it’s okay to feed wild bears that then lumber into your front yard:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/12/maskholio/#maskholes

The fantasy of escape from the needs of other is a fantasy of escape from empathy — and humanity — itself.

[artbyblastweave]

As someone left-leaning, I’m very curious to see what happens to the tone and rhetoric on display in the automation debate now that it’s starting to come for the asses of professions that the left, in my experience, collectively likes more. (Artists. I mean Artists.) 

The uncharitable part of me always had this sense that part of the animus towards the swelling rural post-industrial unnecessariat was in part motivated by the unspoken knowledge that we didn’t really have a great plan for what to do with them, and so it was easier to just fall back on calling them all racist and saying they had it coming anyway. Something similar to this, I think, is what necessitates those posts you see where someone angrily reminds tumblr that they aren’t allowed to, like, write off the entirety of the deep south or trivialize the power grid collapse in Texas or whatever. If you feel powerless to help, there’s a psychological incentive to look for reasons you aren’t obligated to help, why people suffering deserve it. Just world, baby!

So, now that the artists (and soon the writers, probably the coders) are on the chopping block, there are, like, two ways this can go- either we start talking about UBI much more earnestly and with vigor (and we get honest with ourselves about how that’s only gonna go so far in terms of filling the cultural gap left by post-employment, people like to feel useful!) or we start constructing narratives about how actually, artists as a class are pretty regressive, when you think about it, sucking up all that money to produce goods at prices nobody can afford, thinking they’re better than us, living in their parents basements, get a job, hippies....

uh oh

[ki6-7-l8r]

Yes, we in the underclass are all dying….. The system is too strong to fight. What will happen when economic suffering turns everyone in the working class; into catatonic vegetables that cannot function? When drug ODs, Suicides, and death from organ failure from drug and alcohol abuse happen at epidemic levels? When infrastructure collapses because there are not enough tax payers left to fund essential services, because people have become too poor to pay taxes? When shops and malls close because nobody has any money? When only high end shops exist because only the affluent and rich can afford to buy anything? You will have a Bronx and Detroit wasteland outside and the affluent will live behind spiked gates, and they will not venture out without a security detail armed to the teeth. This will be the new America, doubt it not. God has abandoned us, so we will seek solace with our Dark Father, Satan, The Devil Himself…..Who knows better than He what it is like to be oppressed by the cruel and stupid order of things? Our Credo: Nihilism, Our Way: Implacable Hate. Our work to bring the Destruction Of All by any and all means. To be free means to know in your soul that you would push the doomsday button and bring about the annihilation of the whole world without a moments hesitation. That you would seek out with every possible means to turn the great powers of the world against each other and bring about a Nuclear Holocaust, and inspire the geniuses with the means to do this with the will to carry it out? That you will renounce procreation, and seek all means to abort every fetus that would come into this accursed world and therefore suffer existence to be snuffed out before it would be born? That you will hail suicide and murderous vengeance as a sacrament, and in envy and hate, wish only evil upon those who would enjoy the great bounty of life at your expense, who would deign to look down you in your poverty, and by secret means find ways to visit misery upon them, as they do to you? Forget socialist ideals, envy and hate are more than enough! Yet seek common cause with the Servants Of The Master, among the rich, have no doubt that they wish for the end of all things, as do you in your poverty. The Time Of End Is Now, and by all of the Legions Of Hell may we have Our Vengeance, in the annihilation of the world and of Mankind, and even the Death Of God and the Universe, in the maelstrom of Infinite Destruction wherein All That Is Is No More!

[schaferj]

raison d`être

We live in an era of disruption in which powerful global forces are changing how we live and work. As a global community we face climate change and the consequences of global warming; resource scarcity – particularly for energy, minerals and fresh water; societal ageing, as life expectancy increases and birth rates concurrently fall; a growing surplus of global poor who form an ever-larger ‘unnecessariat’; and, perhaps most critically, a new machine age which will herald ever-greater technological unemployment as progressively more physical and cognitive labour is performed by machines, rather than humans. On an individual Level we face another challenge. Since Information Wants To Be Free and wants to be expensive and that tension will not go away the internet has become our primary source of knowledge and guidance. What used to be the idea of a decentralized stateless society in which people interact with purely voluntary ideological and moral transactions  is gone and the virtual space has become another battlefield. Our vision is increasingly universal, but our agency is ever more reduced. We know more and more about the world, while being less and less able to do anything about it. If we find that play is based on the manipulation of certain images, on a certain "imagination" of reality (i.e. its conversion into images), then our main concern will be to grasp the value and significance of these images and their "imagination". Our left behind traces are the currency in which we pay for our curiosity. Data is an asset, an asset that grows in value through use. A single person’s data is not very valuable. Combining the data generated by thousands of people is a completely different story. Coupling that with data generated in different situations, combining datasets, creates new insights and value for different actors and stakeholders. Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system: capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. Unfortunately there is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment. 

In 2018, the Oxfam report said that the wealth gap continued to widen in 2017, with 82% of global wealth generated going to the wealthiest 1%. The 2019 Oxfam report said that the poorest half of the human population has been losing wealth (around 11%) at the same time that a billionaire is minted every two days. Fake news travels faster and further on social media sites. Algorithm-driven news distribution platforms have reduced market entry costs and widened the market reach for news publishers and readers. At the same time, they separate the role of content editors and curators of news distribution. The latter becomes algorithm-driven, often with a view to maximize traffic and advertising revenue. That weakens the role of trusted editors as quality intermediaries and facilitates the distribution of false and fake news content.

The resulting sense of helplessness, rather than giving us pause to reconsider our assumptions, seems to be driving us deeper into paranoia and social disintegration: more surveillance, more distrust, an ever-greater insistence on the power of images and computation to rectify a situation that is produced by our unquestioning belief in their authority. 

We may consider the entire man as made up of body, soul, and intellect (Lord Lindsay, meaning the same thing, says inaccurately sense, intellect, and spirit. As long as we are not able to change that, we need to trust our eyes and feelings and listen to our eyes. But man began to think that he could manipulate and dominate an objectified, external reality.

Today our senses (or more accurately, our mental interpretations) have betrayed us. And what can betray us in one instance, may do so in another.

We started to confuse information input with process. We started to merge language and thought. 

In order to establish once again fruitful thought and conversation, we need to recalibrate our senses and locate ourself amid the chaos.

The first step in regard to the subjects of pure reason, and which marks the infancy of that faculty, is that of dogmatism. The second, which we have just mentioned, is that of scepticism, and it gives evidence that our judgement has been improved by experience. But a third step is necessary—indicative of the maturity and manhood of the judgement, which now lays a firm foundation upon universal and necessary principles. This is the period of criticism, in which we do not examine the facta of reason, but reason itself, in the whole extent of its powers, and in regard to its capability of a priori cognition; and thus we determine not merely the empirical and ever-shifting bounds of our knowledge, but its necessary and eternal limits.

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/featured%20insights/innovation/navigating%20a%20world%20of%20disruption/mgi-briefing-note-navigating-a-world-of-disruption-jan-2019.ashx

Bastani_Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communism

Brandt_Information_Wants_To_Be_Free

https://wpmu.mah.se/nmict171group3/2017/03/14/digital-anarchy-anonymity-freedom-the-internets-lawlessness/

Briddle_New_Dark_Age

Huizinga__Homo_Ludens

https://medium.com/@ODSC/data-valuation-what-is-your-data-worth-and-how-do-you-value-it-b0a15c64e516

Martin Luther King. Fellowship Magazine September 1958

https://twitter.com/noamchomskyT/status/892003483435532288

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality

Martens_Bertin_The_digital_transformation_of_news_media_and_the_rise_of_disinformation_and_fake_news

Briddle_New_Dark_Age

Ruskin__The_Stones_of_Venice

Perrault__Ordonnance_for_the_five_kinds_of_columns_after_the_method_of_the_ancients

Grimes_Problems and Perspectives in Religious Discourse: Advaita Vedanta Implications

Kant__Critique_of_Pure_Reason

[macbookismydream]

Life had lots of meaning for the Victorian gentlemen, defined as such by having no need to work. They had no need because they had a private income; lacking that, a workless lumpen faces imperatives, not lack fo meaning. A better headline would, then, have been "The Imperatives of Life in a World Without Work", but then it's the Guardian and Harari, a duo generally fatal to rationality. The real questions are twofold: first, are we developing a permanent unnecessariat, or will this phase die with the current generation? Second, if we are to have such a class, how are we to manage them and keep them occupied, non-polluting and non-criminal? Frankly, this is hypothesis piled upon unjustified hypothesis - robots will steal all the jobs, etc - tht it's not worth discussing unless you want to script a dystopian SF movie.

The meaning of life in a world without work : Economics

[thoughtsonabender]

Heavy and valid

[brotheralyosha]

“In 2011, economist Guy Standing coined the term “precariat” to refer to workers whose jobs were insecure, underpaid, and mobile, who had to engage in substantial “work for labor” to remain employed, whose survival could, at any time, be compromised by employers (who, for instance held their visas) and who therefore could do nothing to improve their lot. The term found favor in the Occupy movement, and was colloquially expanded to include not just farmworkers, contract workers, “gig” workers, but also unpaid interns, adjunct faculty, etc. Looking back from 2016, one pertinent characteristic seems obvious: no matter how tenuous, the precariat had jobs. The new dying Americans, the ones killing themselves on purpose or with drugs, don’t. Don’t, won’t, and know it.”

“Every four years some political ingenue decides that the solution to “poverty” is “retraining”: for the information economy, except that tech companies only hire Stanford grads, or for health care, except that an abundance of sick people doesn’t translate into good jobs for nurses’ aides, or nowadays for “the trades” as if the world suffered a shortage of plumbers. The retraining programs come and go, often mandated for recipients of EBT, but the accumulated tuition debt remains behind, payable to the banks that wouldn’t even look twice at a graduate’s resume. There is now a booming market in debtor’s prisons for unpaid bills, and as we saw in Ferguson the threat of jail is a great way to extract cash from the otherwise broke (thought it can backfire too). Eventually all those homes in Oklahoma, in Ohio, in Wyoming, will be lost in bankruptcy and made available for vacation homes, doomsteads, or hobby farms for the “real” Americans, the ones for whom the ads and special sections in the New York Times are relevant, and their current occupants know this. They are denizens, to use Standing’s term, in their own hometowns.”

“If I still don’t have your attention, consider this: county by county, where life expectancy is dropping survivors are voting for Trump.”

“What does it mean, to see the world’s narrative retreat into the distance? To know that nothing more is expected of you, or your children, or of your children’s children, than to fade away quietly and let some other heroes take their place? One thing it means is: if someone says something about it publicly, you’re sure as hell going to perk up and listen.”

[thewordgrafter]

Guy Standing believed that the Precariat heralded a new age of xenophobic nationalism and reaction, but at the same time hoped that something like Occupy, that brought the precariat together as a self-conscious community, would lead to social and economic changes needed to ameliorate their plight. Actively. The gay community didn’t just roll over and ask nicely for recognition, they had their shit together enough that they could fight their way, literally, into the studios of one of the top news shows in America, into the US capitol, the UK parliament, into the streets of every major city at rush hour.

UNNECESSARIAT, Posted on May 10, 2016 by Anne Amnesia (Blog Author)  

[mostlysignssomeportents]

After the precariat, the unnecessariat: the humans who are superfluous to corporations #1yrago

The heroin epidemic in America has a death-toll comparable to the AIDS epidemic at its peak, but this time, there's no movement coalescing to argue for the lives of the economically sidelined, financially ruined dying thousands -- while the AIDS epidemic affected a real community of mutual support, the heroin epidemic specifically strikes down people whose communities are already gone.

The Occupy movement rallied around the idea of the "precariat," the downwardly mobile former members of the middle class who were one layoff or shift-reduction away from economic ruination. Below the precariat is the unnecessariat, people who are a liability to the modern economic consensus, whom no corporation has any use for, except as a source of revenue from predatory loans, government subsidized "training" programs, and private prisons.

The precariat benefits from Obamacare, able to pay for coverage despite pre-existing conditions; the unnecessariat suffers under Obamacare, forced to pay into the system before going through the same medical bankruptcies they'd have endured in order to get the coverage they need to survive another day.

You're likely to be in the unnecessariat if you live in a county that has high levels of addiction and suicide -- the same counties that poll highest for Trump.

Corporations have realized humanity's long nightmare of a race of immortal, transhuman superbeings who view us as their inconvenient gut-flora. The unnecessariat are an expanding class, and if you're not in it yet, there's no reason to think you won't land there tomorrow.

https://boingboing.net/2016/05/24/after-the-precariat-the-unnec.html

[schaferj]

Preamble, Raison d`être

​We live in an era of disruption in which powerful global forces are changing how we live and work. ​As a global community we face​ climate change and the consequences of global warming; resource scarcity – particularly for energy, minerals and freshwater; societal ageing, as life expectancy increases and birth rates concurrently fall; a growing surplus of global poor who form an ever-larger ‘unnecessariat’; and, perhaps most critically, a new machine age which will herald ever-greater technological unemployment as progressively more physical and cognitive labour is performed by machines, rather than humans. O​ n an individual Level we face another challenge. Since Information Wants To Be Free t​ he internet has become our primary source of knowledge and guidance. What used to be ​the idea of a decentralized stateless society in which people interact with purely voluntary ideological and moral transactions​ ​is gone and the virtual space has become another battlefield. ​Our vision is increasingly universal, but our agency is ever more reduced. We know more and more about the world, while being less and less able to do anything about it. I​ f we find that play is based on the manipulation of certain images, on a certain "imagination" of reality (i.e. its conversion into images), then our main concern will be to grasp the value and significance of these images and their "imagination".

Our left behind traces are the currency in which we pay for our curiosity. ​Data is an asset, an asset that grows in value through use. A single person’s data is not very valuable. Combining the data generated by thousands of people is a completely different story. Coupling that with data generated in different situations, combining datasets, creates new insights and value for different actors and stakeholders. Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system: capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. U​ nfortunately​ there is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.

In 2018, the Oxfam report said that the wealth gap continued to widen in 2017, with 82% of global wealth generated going to the wealthiest 1%. The 2019 Oxfam report said that the poorest half of the human population has been losing wealth (around 11%) at the same time that a billionaire is minted every two days.

Fake news travels faster and further on social media sites. Algorithm-driven news distribution platforms have reduced market entry costs and widened the market reach for news publishers and readers. At the same time, they separate the role of content editors and curators of news distribution. The latter becomes algorithm-driven, often with a view to maximize traffic and advertising revenue. That weakens the role of trusted editors as quality intermediaries and facilitates the distribution of false and fake news content.

The resulting sense of helplessness, rather than giving us pause to reconsider our assumptions, seems to be driving us deeper into paranoia and social disintegration: more surveillance, more distrust, an ever-greater insistence on the power of images and computation to rectify a situation that is produced by our unquestioning belief in their authority.

Mobile technology has spread rapidly around the globe. Today, it is ​estimated​ that more than 5 billion people have mobile devices, and over half of these connections are smartphones.​ ​Today, if you don’t bring your phone along it’s like you have missing limb syndrome. It feels like something’s really missing. We’re already partly a cyborg or an AI symbiote, essentially it’s just that the

data rate to the electronics is slow.​ In some sense we have ​become screens for giant displays.​ This screen is established by the submersion of the individual in a flux of disparate messages, with no hierarchies of principles - ​a ​flat​ s​ urface,​ on which p​ ictures or words are s​ hown​. We`re all products of our environment, therefore we need to consider how screens affect us. For instance we should look at the flat nature of screens. ​Two dimensional thinking implies concepts that are flat or only partially representative of the whole. Three dimensional thinking implies the first part of 2d thinking conjoined with intersecting dimensions rendering a deeper field of meaning.

On the other hand ​it’s not how long we’re using screens that really matters; it’s how we’re using them and what’s happening in our brains in response. ​So what happens now, that we move less around just by ourselves, that we spend more time in public transport and soon in self driving cars, always linked to our devices? ​As tranquillity vanishes, the “gift of listening” goes missing, as does the “community of listeners.” Our community of activity [Aktivgemeinschaft] stands diametrically opposed to such rest. The “gift of listening” is based on the ability to grant deep, contemplative attention—which remains inaccessible to the hyperactive ego. Screen addiction is real.

If one only possessed the positive ability to perceive (something) and not the negative ability not to perceive (something), one’s senses would stand utterly at the mercy of rushing, intrusive stimuli and impulses. In such a case, no “spirituality” would be possible. If one had only the power to do (something) and no power not to do, it would lead to fatal hyperactivity​.

What we miss is time for contemplation, to listen to all senses of our bodies. Since ​we know, that the visual part of our brain is the dominant part of and if you can get it`s attention and get it on your message it talks the rest of your brain into anything you want it to. However it is the one sense which gets triggered in particular by the two dimensional screen.

The body is nothing but the fundamental phenomenon, to which, as a necessary condition, all sensibility, and consequently all thought, relates in the present state of our existence​ meaning the body is the door to our world and the overuse of one in particular warps the general perception and further what we make of it.

This becomes even more immanent when thinking on relationship and discussion. You cannot not communicate. ​Every behavior is a kind of communication. Because behavior does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behavior), it is not possible not to communicate. ​Therefore we miss important parts of a message, if it gets reduced to its verbality, meaning relationship and communication cannot be as strong as we wish them to be. Something is missing.

In an age when drugs or psychological techniques can be used to control a person's actions, the problem of free control over one's body is no longer a matter of protection against physical restraint.​ One must reclaim connection to his or her body in order to truly communicate - And speak about his or her body in order to understand his or her true perspective on this world.

[thewordgrafter]

Utopians on the coasts occasionally feel obliged to dream up some scheme whereby the unnecessariat become useful again, but its crap and nobody ever holds them to it. If you even think about it for a minute, it becomes obvious: what if Sanders (or your political savior of choice) had won? Would that fix the Ohio river valley? Would it bring back Youngstown Sheet and Tube, or something comparable that could pay off a mortgage? Would it end the drug game in Appalachia, New England, and the  Great Plains? Would it call back the economic viability of small farms in Illinois, of ranching in Oklahoma and Kansas? Would it make a hardware store viable again in Iowa, or a bookstore in Nevada? Who even bothers to pretend anymore?

UNNECESSARIAT, Posted on May 10, 2016 by Anne Amnesia (Blog Author)  

[thewordgrafter]

Here’s the thing: from where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that.

UNNECESSARIAT, Posted on May 10, 2016 by Anne Amnesia (Blog Author)  

[thewordgrafter]

In 2011, economist Guy Standing coined the term “precariat” to refer to workers whose jobs were insecure, underpaid, and mobile, who had to engage in substantial “work for labor” to remain employed, whose survival could, at any time, be compromised by employers (who, for instance held their visas) and who therefore could do nothing to improve their lot.

UNNECESSARIAT, Posted on May 10, 2016 by Anne Amnesia (Blog Author)