Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
These are posts on culture from the blog Base and Superstructure. Mostly the focus is on American culture. But there might be a few posts on broader, international issues.
I’ve put my focus for the year in 2021 on issues in the corporate world. I’ve focused in particular on the role the business world plays in our lives. But, so far, my focus has (mostly) stayed away from education. Let’s change that a bit with a brief discussion of EdTech.
The education system relates to the tech world in lots of ways. I’ll sum this up with a quote from Noam Chomsky.
In the last few years, ‘liberal white women’ emerged as a common point of departure for very different sorts of politics. Some of those politics connect to the far right. But I’ll set those politics aside. Here, in this post, I’m interested in two narratives about liberal white women that appear on the left and center-left.
I’ll argue these two narratives share more in common than many think.
The pundits and ‘wise men’ – especially the ones in tech – tell a tired narrative about jobs and automation. It goes something like this: Automation destroys jobs. As it gets more sophisticated, it will destroy millions of jobs, leaving people destitute and desperate. Andrew Yang built an entire presidential campaign – one he centered on UBI – around this narrative. Tech libertarians love telling this story.
But it’s not just wacky candidates and tech geeks. Classic sci-fi took up the banner all the same, and they did so as far back as the 1950s. From Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano to Isaac Asimov‘s The Caves of Steel, we see it from every direction. These days, popular sci-fi series like The Expanse simply take it for granted and bake it into their plots.
OK, so the narrative isn’t entirely wrong. Yes, automation destroys jobs. Marx pointed out more than a century ago that this happens. At the same time, it redirects and creates jobs. The net impact of automation on overall employment? It’s less clear than one might think. When we look at how work…works, we find that automation poses a bigger threat.
This post is about that threat.
For this post, I have a question for readers: which political magazines do you read?
For my part, back in the day I used to read a wide range of left-wing magazines. That included outlets like Dissent, In These Times, Z Magazine, etc. I’ve also read Jacobin here and there, and I subscribed to Bitch magazine, a feminist pop culture outlet, for several years.
These days, I’ve moved away from all those sources a bit. Here’s a list of current magazines and journals I subscribe to: Catalyst, Current Affairs, and n+1. As far as the niche of those respective outlets, here’s how I’d describe them: leftist and social democratic political strategy (Catalyst), smart and more ecumenical leftist takes on a wide range of social and political phenomena (Current Affairs), New York literary journal with a political essay component (n+1).
How about you?
I’ve written posts about both my first and second shots of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. I’ll follow up on that a bit. Tomorrow’s the big day: two weeks since my second shot!
I’m excited to finally be at what feels like the ‘end’ of at least a major phase in the pandemic. I have a long list of things I’d like to do. But, first, I’m going to visit my parents tomorrow!
How about you?
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