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[R]When The Jobs Are Disappearing, It Really Is Time To Seek Full Lives <^><^> [a] Merchandise as Self-Affirmation <^><^> [R]"The Urban Experience" <^><^> [R]Roommate's Coming Back -- Time to Return the Crass Records <^><^> [a] Dissatisfaction with Computers <^><^> [R]Political Graffiti <^><^> [R]Modem Troubles (still) / Voting for Dennis / Sidney RIP <^><^>
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^^^ March 26, 2004 When The Jobs Are Disappearing, It Really Is Time to Seek Full Lives
[Richard]
Yesterday, taking a tip from a message over the Storming Heaven list, I found the Web site for a new campaign called Show Us The Jobs. The object of this campaign is to fight for "good jobs." Specifically, following a sort of protectionist impulse, the campaign aims to "keep" the good jobs in the U.S. There are good things coming out of this campaign, such as a tour in which people who were formerly middle class are speaking to others throughout the nation to inform them of the hardships that they've been undergoing trying to find decent-paying jobs -- or any jobs at all, as the case may be. Those of us who are in exactly that situation know about those hardships, but this kind of tour could be very educational for a lot of people who are still safely employed, who are not fully aware of the extent of the jobs depression that has plauged us for the past few years or, more specifically, the pain that it has caused so many of us. There also might be some politicians out there who will be a little more motivated to act on behalf of unemployed or underemployed workers when they hear people openly speaking out about the subject and see those people stirring up crowds. Or, these are the results that we can hope for, at best. Yet, I have to wonder, when I see campaigns like this, if they aren't really a bit limited.
Workers are so defeated these days by capitalist interests, it's considered a leftist act simply to request that the government make some effort to help the citizens of the nation find jobs. It's considered a truly radical act to request a government policy aiming for full employment. But if you look at it another way, these demands are actually very conservative. A more radical -- and perhaps more appropriate -- approach would be to admit that the jobs in our society are disappearing and to begin making demands that the society be changed so that our survival, social inclusion, and social worth no longer depend so much on having jobs.
I am reminded of the utopian forecasts I used to hear as a child, back in the late '60s or so, that automation would free workers up from menial labor, allowing everyone to spend more time focusing on creative endeavors, philosophical studies, and more meaningful activities in general. We didn't hear those forecasts so much once the '70s got underway, because the increase in automation and the decline in the demand for labor -- especially socially necessary labor (i.e., labor that is required for necessary public services and the production of real things, as opposed to work for bureaucracy, advertising, the spread finance capital, etc.) -- actually led to an increase in economic hardship, an increase in menial labor for a large number of people, a decline in job security, and even a resurgence in the once seemingly disappearing phenomenon of sweatshops. Moreover, as a defensive reaction to the increasingly obvious fact that less labor was necessary in our society, the forces of capital increased the economic and social pressure put upon everybody to get (increasingly scarce) jobs. Eventually, social programs were cut and the economic safety net was shredded, putting more pressure on people to find work at the exact time that work became harder to find. This may not seem like a logical concurrence of events, but, then, these developments helped to show -- for those who really want to think about these things -- that capitalism, which is so often portrayed as a practical/pragmatic system, is profoundly illogical, at least for the vast majority of people in the world.
A number of times, I have mentioned the social-political thinker Andre Gorz. I've probably most often pointed out his book Ecology as Politics, which is a '70s collection that broke a lot of ground in terms of showing that there were many common interests and, potentially, a common strategy, to be shared by socialists and environmentally conscious Greens. In Staten Island, where certain members of the Greens have accused me of being a "watermelon" ("green on the outside, red on the inside"), I point to this book by Gorz as a place to read about how much so-called "red" and "green" factions really do have common interests and goals. Personally, however, I've developed even more interest in some of Gorz's other works, i.e., the books that are focused more specifically on those "red" issues of workers' struggle and the future of labor. One such book is Reclaiming Work, which discusses, brilliantly and succinctly, the ideas that I've mentioned above. Gorz portrays the disappearance of jobs as we know it not as a horrible fate that we need to defend against, but as an opportunity, a sort of cue for us, to finally begin the process of transforming our attitudes towards work and eliminating the pressures that our society puts on everyone to find and work at jobs.
As Gorz puts it:
...[E]veryone, unemployed and potentially insecure workers alike, is urged to fight for a share of the 'work' capital is abolishing all around him/her; and every march and every banner declaring 'We want work' proclaims the victory of capital over a subjugated humanity of workers who can no longer be workers, but are denied the chance to be anything else.
This is the nub of the problem, then, and the nub of the conflict: the aim must be to disconnect from 'work' the right to have rights, chief among these being the right to what is produced and producible without work, or at least with increasingly less work. It has to be recognized that neither the right to an income, nor full citizenship, nor everyone's sense of identity and self-fulfillment can any longer be centered upon and depend upon occupying a job. And society has to be changed to take account for this.
Personally speaking, since I began to depend entirely on temp work a few years ago, I have been continually faced with the dilemma that I have to actively seek the opportunity to do things that I don't particularly want to do. As a temp worker, I must repeatedly call agencies and beg them for jobs. Especially when the work is slow, I must at least pretend to take the attitude that I really want to work and will be grateful every time that the agencies grant me this opportunity. Yet, it's not really work that I want but just the badly needed paycheck that comes out of it. The work, itself, does not make me feel better in any way; usually, it makes me feel physically and psychologically worse and robs me of a lot of valuable time. And the work of which I speak -- mainly proofreading, copy editing, and, occasionally, legal-clerical services -- is actually the most palatable that I have been able to find. Most other kinds of wage work would be harder for me to ask for and much harder to bear. For me, it is very difficult to imagine a situation in which I would actually want to find work per se; the real goal always comes down, simply, to economic survival. And, despite a lot of nonsense that we hear in our society about how regular work helps to make people feel useful and gives them self esteem, I would bet that the vast majority of people have the same attitude as I do: the only reason to find work is to get that badly needed paycheck; we'd all really feel much better about ourselves if we could do better things with our time.
Often I am reminded of an article from Ken Knabb and his Bureau of Public Secrets, We Don't Want Full Employment, We Want Full Lives!. This article outlines and broadcasts some thoughts and slogans that came out of the French jobless people's protest of 1998, which revived or echoed some ideas that had arisen during the Situationist-influenced uprising in Paris 30 years earlier. Most of all, this movement and the pamphlets that it generated pointed out the irrationality of increasing the demand to work at a time when less work is needed. As the first paragraph tells us:
If a household gets a washing machine, you never hear the family members who used to do the laundry by hand complain that this “puts them out of work.” But strangely enough, if a similar development occurs on a broader social scale it is seen as a serious problem -- “unemployment” -- which can only be solved by inventing more jobs for people to do.
It's a shame so many "progressives" don't realize that the demands they are making for "more jobs" or "more good jobs" never reach beyond the little box that capital has placed us into, in which an absurdly self-defeating logic reigns supreme. It's too bad that the left as we know it is so beaten down that it can't even peak over the edges of that box. Yet, the more the job market deteriorates, the more necessary it will become to think in new ways if we ever want to improve our lives (rather than settle for ever deteriorating lives). We can start in the right direction by daring to ask for shorter work weeks or shorter work years (broken by longer vacations); if we are really bold, we can start asking for a guaranteed social income, so that everybody can be promised food, medical care, shelter, and the small comforts (i.e., a small but reasonable amount of spending money) that comprise a tolerable economic existence, as oppposed to a life plagued by poverty and debt. We also need to start challenging the socially self-defeating work ethic wherever and whenever we find it. Obviously, we need to change both public policies and the private attitudes that have been inculcated, to some degree or other, into every one of us. This might seem like a tall order, but in another sense, this kind of mission is not really much more difficult -- though it may be a lot more inspiring -- than constantly beating our heads against the wall in our attempt to find or "keep" the same old disappearing jobs.
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March 18, 2004
"The Urban Experience"
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March 10, 2004
Roommate's Coming Back -- Time to Return the Crass Records
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March 4, 2004
Political Graffiti
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March 3, 2004
Modem Troubles (still) / Voting for Dennis / Sidney RIP
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[Continue to February Archive]
[asfo_del]
For several years, I worked in retail stores: one and a half years at a museum gift shop and four years selling high-end greeting cards and stationery. Both stores specialized in selling more expensive versions of the same items that are available in the K-Marts of the world. The justification for commanding higher prices was that these objects had a spin placed on them which connoted them as being more tasteful, more sophisticated -- qualities that would rub off on the purchaser, who could congratulate herself on her discernment for having selected them. Of course, the customers had at most selected the store from which to buy. Period. Once inside, all the choices had already been made for them. Whatever they picked off the shelf, they were already assured that it attested to their good taste, their wit, their urbane sophistication.
I say this with the unerring cynicism that grips any retail employee after mere weeks on the job, let alone years. We sold a lot of genuinely beautiful items, some designed with great skill and an excellent eye. But as an employee, someone who handled the same goods every day and whose job it was to display them in lighted cases to their best, gleaming effect, I could not honestly see the stuff in the store as anything but crap. Merchandise. Stuff to be sold. Stuff that was created specifically to appeal to a particular weakness in the target customer. And whose high price only added to its desirability.
I picked up a book from the library today, What Should I Do if Reverend Billy is in my Store?, by Bill Talen, Reverend Billy himself, the creator of the Church of Stop Shopping. As some of you may know, Reverend Billy is a New York performance artist who stages impromptu guerilla theater in retail meccas such as the Disney store and Starbucks to brazenly point out, with loud fanfare and circus-like antics, the hollowness and dispiriting blandness of the culture of shopping and corporate-manufactured experience.
Although the stores where I worked were not exactly corporate, since the museum was a nonprofit and the card shop was owned by a sole proprietor, the fundamental dishonesty and careful choreography of the shopping experience is pervasive and infectious throughout all retail. Even stores that appear not to be luring customers with design are still designed: Wal-Mart looks unattractive specifically to give the impression that shopping there means getting bargains. But beautiful-seeming design is even more pandering and insidious. Starbucks is relentless in its phony tastefulness. As Reverend Billy puts it, “Hell [is] defined as sitting here…surrounded by fake avant-garde wallpaper. Is there anyone here…who is not SICK TO DEATH OF GOOD GRAPHICS? Look at these walls, these impossibly hip earth tones.... We are all tourists in our own lives.... WE’RE IN THE FAKE CAFÉ, AND WE CAN’T KNOW THE REAL COST OF THAT LATTE!” Customers in Starbucks are “stuck...in a place that mocks them and makes them pay for it. ”
Not only is the décor mocking them. The sullen, underpaid employees who are required to kiss the asses of the self-righteous customers are privy to the bullshit behind the smoke and mirrors. Yes, some customers of the stores where I worked were regulars and we were genuinely happy to see them. Many more were decent, nice people. The rest were not nearly as contemptuous of us as we were of them, the outward appearance of our interactions notwithstanding. [When a coworker, the buyer for the museum bookstore, asked me a really stupid question about something we sold in the gift shop (she wanted to know a price, when the price was clearly marked on the thing), her reaction at her own idiocy was to slap herself on the forehead and exclaim, “Just like a customer!”]
It’s not primarily the thoughtlessness, rudeness or the imperiousness, common enough attributes in people who routinely buy expensive things, that makes customers unpalatable to retail workers. It’s the nakedness of their vanity. The actual belief that what one buys is a testament to who one is, when in fact the real purpose of making a given purchase, which the shopper does not admit even to himself, is to attract envy. As the one who is selling the customer this hollow affirmation of himself, the same affirmation that you, the worker, sell dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day, each time to someone who is convinced of her unique appreciation of its specialness, you are testimony to its corrosive emptiness. Shopping for “unique” objects, which are actually mass marketed by the tens of thousands, is a very pale and soul-sucking substitution for building genuine individuality and sense of self.
------------------------
It may be slightly off-topic, but I can’t resist quoting The Pist on the plight of the retail worker:
THE CUSTOMER (is always right)
We’re being treated like shit
I don’t think that we deserve this
This goes out to everyone
Who works in public service
We battle the masses
On the front lines every day
Good morning, may I help you?
Now fucking GO AWAY!
The customer’s always right
And Santa Claus is real
Jesus died for your sins
So you better fucking kneel
The customer’s always right
The tooth fairy’s no lie
If you believe all that
I’ve got some bridges you can buy
Never once say please
Never once say thank you
You’re an inconsiderate moron
With no manners, so fuck you
It’s obvious your parents
Didn’t raise you too well
Have a nice day ma’am
Now you can BURN IN HELL!
[Richard]
Currently, I’m reading an excellent book by David Harvey, The Urban Experience, which is actually a combination of two books that Harvey wrote in the mid 1980s, Consciousness and the Urban Experience and The Urbanization of Capital. Harvey is a geographer who often focuses on political economy or, as he is commonly called, an economic geographer (or maybe that should be a geographic economist). Economically, he is basically a Marxist, so he well understands the potential in the struggle between contradictory elements, and how that struggle and those contradictions can lead toward the creation of something progressive, a new social development or stage. (I’m not that schooled in this area, but I believe that this is what is meant by "dialectics.") So, Harvey understands that while the big city is based on large-scale capitalist development, which is something we want to fight against ("we" being progressives, leftists, anti-capitalists, those who want to oppose economic oppression, etc.), it also creates opportunities for the development of new freedoms and liberating kinds of social expression or interaction that might actually subvert the capitalist agenda. Although, then again, the "alternative" community can present problems of its own...
Harvey sums up these ideas particularly well in the following paragraphs, from Chapter 8, "The Urbanization of Consciousness":
Alternative communities find it hard, if not impossible, to survive as autonomous entities. They cannot seal themselves off from the rest of the world (though some try by moving to remote regions). It is hard to keep the “dissolving effects” of monetarization at bay. The community domination of a particular place often entails the imposition of a repressive rigidity in the functioning of social relations and moral codes. There is, therefore, much that is repressive about this sort of community. New England townships may have been models of community, but they were also bastions of intolerance. Compared to that, the dissolving effects of money and anonymity of urban life may appear as a welcome relief, and the incoherencies of entrepreneurial capitalism, positively stimulating.
The construction of community within the frame of capitalist urbanization contains a tension. Movements against the power of concrete abstractions like money, capital, space and time may spiral into fierce struggles to create an alternative kind of community. But there are also processes of community construction and community empowerment that integrate only too well into the dynamics of capital accumulation through the production of space. How the tension between these two dimensions of community formation is resolved cannot be exactly predicted in advance, but the historical record indicates how frequently they intersect. The capitalist setting of community as an opportunity for self-realization sparks alternative movements, while the latter can be coopted for the selling of community and proximity to nature as consumption goods. All kinds of intermediate mixes are possible. A community may be organized as a sophisticated coping mechanism that wards off the worst aspects of class domination and alienated individualism but in so doing merely makes the domination of money and capital more acceptable. But capitalists, in seeking to promote community for exactly such reasons, can also help create centers of guerilla warfare against their own interests. Community, therefore, has always to be interpreted as a specific resolution of this underlying tension worked out in the context of relations of family, the individual, class, and the state, under specific conditions of urbanization.
Some people would find some of this language to be a bit theoretical (I know I did at first). But I’ve found a lot in the above passage -- and in the book in general -- that I can relate to on a personal level. For me, the two paragraphs above help to explain a lot of the contradictory feelings that I continue to get trying to cope with living in the big city, though I’ve lived in the big city my whole life. In virtually the same breath that Harvey explains the strange advantages of the big, anonymous community over the routinely idealized small village or town, he also explains how/why the urban pocket of alternative community -- the kind of refuge from mainstream culture and politics that I, myself, have looked to repeatedly for a little a slice of utopia -- too often becomes more limiting and oppressive than the stuff we’re fighting against.
Then Harvey touches upon the disillusioning process of cooptation: The city offers so many opportunities to find and do something different, but, wait a minute, those different things that you are doing one year are next year’s hot commodity! But usually, there is something else to find when your last refuge has been corrupted (or has proven unpalatable) -- which may also prove to be a more effective spot from which to subvert the dominant capitalist agenda through cultural "guerilla war." And, there is always the hope that you/we can eventually succeed at achieving a more permanent kind of alternative or even a better society, although that might happen in unexpected ways, starting from places that are more integrated into the general urban experience than from pockets of too-self-consciously alternative lifestyle and politics. Of course, to work toward these kinds of goals, each one of us needs to get out there and mingle sufficiently...
But, personally speaking, I also have the problem of letting the pressures of urban existence wear me down to the point where I’m sometimes happy to hide in my room and not mingle with anyone. This can be a particular danger for us introverts, especially now that we have Cyberspace. In the big city, we can often avoid human contact altogether, except for mostly impersonal situations that we are driven to strictly out of the need to survive. Then, we might have to deal with a boss (which doesn't have to involve a whole lot of conversation, especially if you're a temp worker), a storekeeper (or supermarket cashier, or Chinese takeout person), a landlord (only minimally, if we're lucky), the complete strangers sitting near us on the train, bus, or ferry, and maybe some strangely talkative coworker once in a while. While Harvey touches on the potential appeal of urban anonymity, and while he does conversely mention "alienated individualism," he doesn’t discuss the fact that the big city might, ironically, encourage or foster reclusiveness almost as effectively as a cabin in the woods. Now, I’m trying to figure out where to go for good works about that problem. Maybe I’ll have to leave the sociology section and go into the psychology aisle.
[Richard]
My roommate’s coming back into town in a few hours. Although, maybe I should say my sort-of roommate... He’s been gone for something like four months -- he tends to migrate away from here for the winter -- and when he's here, I often hardly notice, because we’ve got very separate quarters, and we’re both big recluses who stay in our own rooms a lot. In these ways, it’s an ideal roommate situation. It’s too bad that our housing is in jeopardy, with the landlord putting the house up for sale as well as arguing with us – especially me – and threatening to raise the rent a lot even before selling the place (maybe I’ll get to all that another time). Finding a new place in New York isn’t so easy if you have no stable income and shitty credit to boot. But I’m not going to let that bother me now; I’ll concern myself with more immediate things – like the fact that I better return all of my roommate's old Crass and Chumbawamba records.
The records were packed away in a box that I discovered when I was (and shouldn’t have been) snooping around. He did give me permission to access his room to deal with the thermostat and even sleep on the once-comfortable air mattress once in a while. (I say "once-comfortable" because something happened to it; it doesn’t stay inflated for very long now.) So, I guess it’s not the worst thing in the world that I discovered this little treasure buried in a box, a treasure that he doesn’t use because he doesn’t have a turntable hooked up to his stereo anymore.
I think he also has moved on to other sounds a lot. He used to be a squatter punk, but I guess he’s well outgrown that, though he’s 10 years younger than me. He’s delved into a lot of ‘60s music more recently; he plays Phil Ochs constantly, which I find hard to take. (I’m sorry, but I find the sound of Phil Ochs to be incredibly depressing -- though I know that might sound funny coming from an old Goth...) In any event, in case I haven’t made this clear, I like the Crass albums much more.
The old Chumbawamba is good stuff, too -- I found Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records and Never Mind the Ballots in that box. But the Crass stuff is really incredible.
Among all the bands that I can think of, Crass were the most thoroughly anarchist -- there’s no question about that. They were also total pacifists (even though they usually sounded enraged), so I wouldn’t exactly agree with their ideology completely, and I think they got off a bit too much on trashing Marx. But they had a thorough ideological critique, which developed over time, but which had been magnificently anti-authoritarian from the start. And they stuck to that critique in their music, their lyrics, and the way they did everything.
Crass in many ways were (to use the old cliché) well ahead of their time. The first album, Feeding of the 5000, was very punkish, but it was still pretty innovative, and it packed a relentless punch. Through their subsequent albums, Crass experimented a lot more, always frantically pushing the envelope between punk and noise, and sometimes getting very much into poetry and aural theatrics as well (which were matched onstage, so I hear, by a lot of great performance and graphics -- i.e., backdrops, films, etc.). Their delivery was as angry and oft-times hilarious as almost anyone’s, and some of the singing (Eve Libertine’s more than Steve Ignorant’s) was very good, in its own weird way. Their lyrics were generally remarkable -- I’d quote from them if I had more time, but right now I just don’t have time to dig up the better quotes. (Some people I know -- probably Erik, and definitely Mike -- could quote most Crass songs from memory, right off the top of their heads, but I’m not as good at that.) Let’s just say that Crass were the most uncompromising anarcho-punks, as well as possibly being the first.
It’s funny that most of the anarcho-punk kids who you’ll see walking around these days with Crass-logo patches weren’t even born yet when Crass had its peak in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s; in fact, many of them weren’t even born yet when the Crass band broke up, in 1985. (I say "the Crass band," because Crass also maintained a musical label that included other bands, and they had all sorts of other functions as a collective, which I think they maintained in some guises after the breakup of the band. But it’s all very complicated; getting the story straight would take a lot more research than I have time for right now.)
The first time I even saw the image (and actual logo/symbol) of Crass explode as a symbol for the anarchist kids here in the U.S. was probably in the mid 1990s -- although I'm not sure if that's really the first time this happened, or it's just that I hadn't had so much contact with anarcho-punks. Whatever the case, by this time, Crass the band had already been broken up for more than ten years. But I’m not going to slight the anarcho-punks for treating Crass as something new; I’m glad they’ve been inspired by this band, even if some of them act as though this music somehow (ironically) belongs to their own youth.
Actually, this is the music of my youth, and though there isn’t much about my generation that I’m proud of, I am very proud of its original punk rock. Strictly in terms of the sound, Crass weren’t as thrilling right at the beginning as, say, the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks, the early Ramones or X-Ray Spex, nor were they as musically groundbreaking as, say, Wire. But by the early ‘80s, they really did innovate a lot, and they were lyrically/ideologically definitely in a class (so to speak) all their own.
It’s hard to say which Crass albums were my favorite. Feeding of the 5000 was always up there, as was their radical feminist release, Penis Envy. But listening to my roommate’s albums, I’ve developed an even greater appreciation for some of the more obscure material found on Stations of the Crass. And I also have gotten to appreciate their entirely different sounding "swan song," the jazzy-abstract 10 Notes on a Summer's Day.
My neighbors are probably awfully pissed off at me. They were bugging me the other day because they were disturbed by some heavy dub that I was playing; what will they make of this? (Though at least the bass in this music doesn’t rattle all the windows in the house.) My roommate still plays some of this music sometimes -- the stuff that he has on CD -- but he’s all the way in the front of the house, where he won’t bother the neighbors as much. Once again, I’ve done something to damage my reputation as a resident and neighbor, increasing the pressing necessity that I’m feeling to get the hell out of here fairly soon. But my (final) Crass binge tonight was only a drop in the bucket and well worth it, considering the pleasure that it gave me.
Crass lives. Long live Crass!
[asfo_del]
I’ve been offline now for a little over a month. I’m mailing this journal entry to Richard by postal mail, as I did the last two. There’s something wrong with my computer, and I haven’t been able to puzzle it out yet. Ever since we moved, the modem no longer functions. It will only stay connected to the Internet for a couple of seconds at a time. I now have an external modem, but the computer is unable to detect it for some reason.
It’s an interesting dilemma for me. On the one hand, I consider the computer to be an expensive luxury. Even the ten dollars a month I spend on an Internet provider strikes me as extravagant. [And the price of inkjet printer ink is highway robbery.] And if I have to get this most recent problem fixed by a professional, that’s more cash hemorrhaging from my meager budget. In addition, I have not missed being online at all, as blasphemous as it may sound to anyone who is sufficiently Internet-immersed to be reading this. Fumbling around with the unpredictable vagaries of the Internet is more of an exercise in steeling myself with unlimited patience at the constant malfunctions than anything else.
On the other hand, I would like to keep up with this project and our other one, the Collective Book. I would like to continue selling paintings on ebay. I do sometimes want to look up some fact or address or some other information that is most readily obtained online. And of course I would like to be able to continue reading the blogs and newswires that I had become accustomed to. And Mike would like to be able to send and receive e-mail. It is his computer, after all, not mine.
I’m not really sure, given the expense involved and the constant headaches, that the pros of being online outweigh the cons. I’ve always been very ambivalent about the Internet in general. There’s a certain quality about it that is like rummaging through a bargain bin for some scrap that you might be able to use among the flotsam. To find something useful, it seems that you have to be a dedicated, persistent, and infinitely patient rummager. Sure, once you find a few gems, you can keep going back to them, but whenever you choose to embark on some new quest, the teeth grinding begins all over again.
I’m currently reading an exhaustive book, The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved by Todd Oppenheimer. Its topic is how poorly computers are fairing as education tools in schools. Many of the points made by the author ring true when it comes to the unfulfilled promises of efficiency, immediacy, and thoughtfulness of computers and the Internet.
The author visited, in one of many examples, an eleventh grade class preparing reports on the powers of Congress on computers, in the form of "Power Point presentations," and found the graphics and flow of the students’ work striking, but the content comparable to the work of seventh and eighth graders using pencil and paper. He asked a student how long he had spent on the project, and the student answered that he had worked for seven hours on the content and ten hours on the graphics. This finding seems fairly typical of the author’s experiences visiting schools across the country.
What computers seem to be best at delivering is slick presentation. How many Web sites look like fancy brochures and have as little content? I think there are two reasons for this. First, most of us would not include lengthy written tomes on a Web site because we know no one would read them. I know I wouldn’t. Not only does being online make me feel fretful and impatient, so that I am unlikely to linger too long on one Web page, feeling that I am somehow missing out on all the other links I could be clicking on, but, additionally, reading off a computer screen is, for me, an uncomfortable experience in squinting and straining. I can sit and read a book for about six hours with very little interruption. I can read off a flickering screen for 20 minutes tops. Secondly, the effect that fancy graphics and newfangled gadgets have on most of us is a distracting fascination; as a result, any of us can become satisfied by the glitz and give short shrift to the substance.
Oppenheimer believes that the argument so often heard, that "classroom computer experience is crucial for success in tomorrow’s high-tech workplace…misreads history, misunderstands the demands of the workplace,…[and] gravely shortchanges students. The skills and characteristics that students do need in order to prosper over the long term…include a rich inner life, strong values and work habits, broad knowledge, the capacity to observe and think critically, a fertile and active imagination, and some feel for the art of discussion. Paradoxically, many of today’s education trends have been moving students in quite the opposite direction."
[Richard]
I just found a blog that is knocking my socks off: Political Graffiti. Here are a couple of choice quotes, just from the latest page:
[From January 31:]
We are all human capital. The society we have been born into has afforded us rights and benefits only as investments in our capacity as producers and consumers of human energy and creativity that is bought low and sold high by capitalists. Why? It can do nothing else. Try stepping out of this role and see how deep you roll in the land of the free (tm).
My people we grew up and were told to go to school so we could get a good job. What's important is a good salary so we can get cars, settle down in a house with a mate, furnish it and ourselves with various bells and whistles, have children, hand them over to the compulsory education system and the television execs to expose them to the same cycle of leisurely consumption and life-long labor. Sit in our mass-produced, corporately clean cookie cuttered cages in the burbs, our luxury one hundred story filing cabinents in the city, our cubicle farms... get fat, get milked. This is freedom(tm).
Most of the cats I know are coming out of the first 20 something years that have been planned for them by someone else, and are like what the fuck? All my talents and "education" and I have to work retail or wait tables?
[And, this is from February 16:]
Clinton and Gore killed how many with sanctions? Papa and Baby Bush have killed how many with depleted uranium, five hundred ton bombs, cluster bombs, and whatever other weapons in the arsenal of the military built up by (... hmm? ...) both democrats and republicans?
Death by disease and starvation or death by bombs and radiation. You vote, the choice is yours. You don't? The choice is theirs.
This guy's pretty good at pointing out the duplicitous and authoritarian nature of the system that rules over us and, especially, at showing when the choice that we're given is really no choice at all. I guess it's pretty fitting that he calls himself Eric Blair and has a picture of the original Eric Blair (aka Orwell) lurking behind every post.
[Richard]
No coherent article this morning; I'll just use the journal to relate some stuff...
In case some of you are wondering why asfodel hasn't responded to comments to her posts, it's because she's still not online. She's been sending me posts by snail mail and I've been retyping them. (I suppose that it theoretically would be easier to send them on a disk, but we've also had computer-to-computer conversion problems. Aren't computers wonderful?) Anyway, I do type about 80 words a minute (which would have gotten me a job 20 years ago), so it's not that big a deal to me. But it would be nice if we could both be back online again. I brought back the modem that Mike had lent me, but to no avail this time. Asfodel thinks there's something wrong with the "Hardware Conversion" software. I think she should just pay somebody to fix the damn thing already, but she feels that would be an unnecessary expense. So, she'll be "restoring" and trying a few other things soon. Hopefully, we can both be online and working on these projects in computer time soon enough.
Today, I cast my first vote in a primary in ages. I guess I should reveal the secret that I am still a registered Democrat from something like 20 years ago. I almost changed to Green once, to Independent once, etc., but I got lazy about it. Besides, I still think it's good to have that Democratic registration for strategic reasons once in a while, though I hate supporting the Democratic Party and don't intend to vote for them in the General Election. I guess this all makes me something of a heretic in anarchist circles, but I think sometimes anarchists tend to make too much of a big deal about not voting. But once again, this is not something I care to debate about and philosophize about right now.
So, anyway, I went and cast my vote for Dennis Kucinich. Everybody I've spoken to here in New York City who voted (i.e., several people), voted for either Kucinich or Sharpton...and there were even some other people I know who would have voted for Kucinich had they been able to register or had they registered in time. (This was the first time I'd ever seen anarchists express a desire to vote for someone in the Democratic Primary, and those anarchists wanted to vote for Kucinich.) Now, I have no idea where all those Kerry votes came from, but this wouldn't be the first time that I've been mystified about this sort of stuff.
Over in the anarchist scene, I learned of the death of an old organizer who'd made a significant contribution for a number of years. Sidney Solomon, who died on Monday, was very instrumental in putting together the Atlantic Anarchist Circle in the mid to late 1990s. The AAC was the group that brought me into the anarchist scene on a full-time basis, in the spring of 1997 (for better or for worse). The AAC was also the group through which I met Mike back in about '98. Mike has been helping Sidney out now and then and saw him just a short while before he died. Asfodel informed me of Sidney's death over the phone last night, and I sent out some information to several people, including ChucKO, who posted it to Infoshop right away. I hadn't intended to broadcast this to a wide public, but I think Chuck did a good thing. Sidney deserves a tribute in a large forum in the anarchist scene.
As some people around here know, Sidney and I had some arguments a few years back. (Unfortunately, I've had arguments with a few people in this scene, as had Sidney, so I guess it makes sense that we argued with each other at some point.) In the general scheme of things, the arguments didn't amount to much as far as I'm concerned. In general, I am pretty sad to see him go. It's not that much of a surprise, actually, since he was 92 years old when he died, but I think a few of us expected him to last into his hundreds.
I've got to give Sidney credit for doing as much as he did well into old age. I really do respect him for that and have for a while. He probably didn't know that and he never will now, but I guess things happen that way.
