no job but all this work š
Examining what the "polyworking" trend really means and positing a new way of thinking about utopias.
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Putin lowers the threshold for using nukes
Russia fires intercontinental ballistic missile
This isā¦concerning. Who else read Nuclear War? Because we know how that plays out š¬
Mike Johnson institutes bathroom ban
Marks of deeply mean, mean times. Rude! And stupid. Despite many takes, the biggest takeaway is that these (identity politics) are distractions not about Sarah McBride but the institutional trickle down that will affect normal people and propel assault. The point is to exhaust you ā then steal everything as you cry. (I do think this approach is on borrowed time as the GOP readies to devour itself.)
Neo-Nazi Marchers Shock Ohioās Capital
Nazi flags at 'The Diary of Anne Frank' production
Related. It brings me no joy to share these. (See also: the increasingly emboldened Christian right.)
āMorning Joeā Hosts Meet With Trump
The NFL renews its dance with Trump
Trump Argument on Removing DA Canceled
I think the āobey in advanceā thing is corny but this is what it actually looks like.
Let Athletes Do the āTrump Danceā in Peace
Barron saying āI Like My Suitcaseā
ET revisits rare moments with young Barron
Sure, do what you want, but this is soft empowerment, or the Elizasue sis of the Streisand Effect.
House Bill to Declare Nonprofits As Terrorists
āthe non-profit killerā
Concerned about this!
Why They Voted for Trump
One of the more illuminating reads, regarding young men and Trump support. Itās really not what you think! That is to say: we created a beautiful weapon of identity, which we gifted to the world to repeatedly stab us with. Related are the very confusing final exit polls.
How Kamala Harris Burned Through $1.5B
Does the spending of a billion dollars really matter when the other side had the richest man in the world at bat? As someone said on Twitter, thatās like having 44 George Soros.
Pollster Ann Selzer ending election polling
All of them should do this.
Super typhoon makes landfall in Philippines
Six. In less than a month. (Also in the same place: their VP threatened to kill the president āĀ and both are children of local political dynasties.)
Climate deal too little too late, poorer nations say
Climate-vulnerable nations walk out
COP needs to end. What a useless, self-serving mess.
Bird flu case has experts worried
Great! Something for Trump and RFK Jr. to handle š¤
Pentagon reveals hundreds of UFO sightings
Unfortunately ā again āĀ no one cares.
People keep talking about āpolyworkingā and itās making me wild. Not because I donāt believe the premise ā that more people are working multiple, concurrent jobs, largely in freelance capacities ā but to me this is a very clear sign of the end times for workers. In the 2000s, when I first started working, you could just have one job and survive. In the 2010s, you could have one job and a fun, goal-related little something on the side that you hoped became the thing. Now? You have a job and a side-hustle but also another job and none of those ladder into your goals so you still have to keep doing them all despite none of them really being fulfilling. Did I mention youāre doing this while freelance, without set health care or other corporate amenities like holidays?
Thatās whatās being sold in the āpolyworkingā media blitz, in the stories of Gen Z wanting to āgo freelanceā: this is bait ā and I urge you not take it. The thing about working freelance āĀ as a freelancer now, who doesnāt love it and who has been in and out of freelance work over the past fifteen or so years ā is it often can hold you close to precarity as youāre on the bottom of everyoneās to-do list unless youāre āpermalance,ā folded into a steady workflow. As a freelancer, youāre outside of the system, begging for work and for your pay, without any of the benefits that a company affords workers. The āFreelancers rule the world!ā story of the 2020s isnāt some sunny business fairytale resulting in a more independent workforce but instead is bitter retribution for the āNo one wants to workā and Great Resignation phenomenon of the early 2020s: this is the business world weaponizing stability, to attack you with economic instability while threatening to hire robots instead of people like you. Yes, people leave jobs because they arenāt paid enough and feel like their job doesnāt care about them āĀ but where does that leave us? In a deepening pool of underemployed āpolyworkers,āĀ as more and more businesses lay people off, as fewer places are hiring and as jobs are now flooded with thousands upon thousands of applications. Meanwhile, business pat your ass out the door as they opt to not backfill your role, saving them money while fucking over former coworkers. They win, workers lose. Now you spin plates and hope a meal will fall on one of them. Need more proof of this? See also: white collar recession, the ties between greedflation and the rich gloating about Trump, unemployment bloat due to "Department of Government Efficiency" culture, pretending "NEETs" are a good trend and not the result of a failing economy.
Given corporate defensiveness and polyworker growth, a fascinating culture is emerging which adds a shitty gloss to what was once hustle culture: the rise of the Creator As Expertā¢, people who are experts in a field who gain popularity because of their qualified opinions. What was once only creators like Mark Rober and Dr. Mike has turned into a crowded landscape of figures like Dr. Youn and Alex Peters and Jamelle Bouie and Katryn Anne Edwards and Javon Ford and Dr. Katelyn Jetelina. From the āI have a masterās degree!ā antics of Bee Better to the RFK-pilled āYour food is poison!ā ranting of Vani Hari to the āIām a child attorney and my dad is Lev Parnas!ā rise of Aaron Parnas, weāre in the age of qualification, that such an open playing field of underemployed, over-talented people in a declining media landscape means over-qualified people are filling their free time with efforts to assert authority, both making noise online while working to differentiate themselves. This isnāt a ānewā thing but it is a hot topic of the week as talk of ānews influencersā are having a moment given 40% of young Americans are getting news from creators in this genre.
This brings us back to you, the unemployed, the wannabe freelancer, the dissatisfied worker āĀ people like me: the catch of āpolyworking,ā in your having to work multiple jobs while flexing your credibility online, means that everyone online is now a resumĆ©. For years, the career advice I gave young workers was that your Instagram, TikTok, etc. is just as important as your work history in that it shows who you are as a real person, going behind corporate chatter to show who someone would be working with. This also means: for every you there is a me, someone submitting a resumĆ© and a project like The Trend Reportā¢ as proof of their work. But the deeper catch? Thereās a bigger fish than me also submitting, also cold calling, who is also swimming in the job pool, navigating the non-hiring businesses, the group firings, the general crumbling of the economy as capitalism wheezes on with a smile. We work multiple jobs to survive ā but no one is going to save us, despite our singing and dancing online. The media and you and me can give it whatever cute name we want but itās all sugar atop the poison of (global) economic precarity.
Anyone in this position knows this isnāt anything new just that the noise, like everything else, is getting louder. Whether reassuring or not, Iāll leave you with the fact that this is a decades-old phenomena getting another reskin. You can get a taste of this from a 1996 essay by Simon Reynolds in The Wire, who came upon this conclusion while considering jungle music in the context of rave and mass culture.
In hiphop, ārealā has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry and soften its message for crossover. āRealā also signifies that the music reflects a ārealityā constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalised racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the police. āRealā means the death of the social: it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but by what the Americans call downsizing (the laying-off the permanent workforce in order to create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security).
Jaguar debuts its new branding
āyou hate our rebrandā
ācopy nothingā
"vibrator vape"
"revisit the 1935 logo"
One of the biggest conversations of the week was just how dog shit awful the jagUar rebrand was. Branding aside ā which, again, is dog shit awful and is baking a review ā people are using it as an excuse to go all in on being anti-woke, anti-diversity. Get ready for this to be āthe new normal.ā
Snow White star apologises
Rebecca Hall: āDonāt Regret Working Withā Woody
"Zaslav talking up Trumpās win"
ācelebrities in the mines of our societyā
See above: weāve quickly entered the era of Hollywood marching center right, to become more appealing as a death rattle cash grab. Get ready for more Heaven Is Real and Sound of Freedom propaganda slop along with hyper-safe shit like the How To Train Your Pet Dragon live adaptation, which reskins the original movie without changing the dragons.
āItās tired.ā
"Depression era coded"
Iām not going to write an essay on ācharacter dressingā and lookalike contests but, as these posts prove, these phenoms reflect too much-ness culture, the lack of real culture (or fandoms and social metrics cannibalizing, say, action), and the forced labor of everyone to be marketers. By the way: we have another year of Wicked marketing as the sequel comes out next year. I can take another year of Ariana and Cynthia.
Ronan Farrow Warns: High Risk of Being Hacked
As if we arenāt already steeped in paranoia culture!
PokƩmon Go Players Unwittingly Trained AI
A surveillance state twist that I shouldnāt be surprised by but I am.
āJamesā Wins National Book Award
Anyway, some good news.
Kraft Mac & Cheese Sales Fall
No shit. This is what the rain shadow effect of La Croixās rise looks like.
āaway from thinnessā
Maybe I spoke about this, maybe I havenāt, but Iāve been thinking about for some time that weāre entering a moment where being not-thin will truly become countercultural and a mark of being more human, above āthe trends.ā Siri, play Emma Specterās More, Please.
DJā-āKicks: Steven Julien
Marie Davidson - Sexy Clown
C.R.U.S.H. | Bambounou & Priori
The music that got me through the past few days, as Stevenās DJ-Kicks mix is a (Shocking!) best-of-series/best-of-year entry while Marie remains the undisputed poetess of techno while Bambounou and Priori offered effervescent love techno. Also of note: the rerelease of Studioās (!!!!!) 2006 West Coast.
Why arenāt we writing utopias? This was a riddle I found myself tangled in a few years ago, while in a queer speculative fiction cohort of Lambda Literary fellows. We had shared work interrogating the worldās problems through science fiction landscapes, moody period pieces, five-minutes-in-the-future reflections of now āĀ and none of them centered happiness, leading with the āgood,ā to create places for people like us to be safe, loved, and accepted. Why werenāt we designing utopias? Why were our imaginations failing? What barriers existed between us and better worlds? Or were we just reflecting the impossibilities of our reality?
The answer was obvious, as I recall our faculty member (the icon) Larissa Lai explaining: is the reason why we abandon utopias because these are spaces without drama? Is there enough tension in perfection to maintain interest, to keep a story moving forward? This is a fair point and, try as we might, no story about utopia ever is āabout utopiaā but instead about the inability of a utopia to exist: they are the flaws in communal homogeny (The Giver), covers for corporate power (WALL-E), schemes to uphold the rich (Land of Milk and Honey), a surveillance entertainment ruse (The Truman Show), a stratified racial fantasy (Pleasantville), abuses of power and dogmas (The Sacrament), or literal hell (The Good Place). Utopia stories are never happy and, despite many giddy works about happiness and the pursuit of (Big Girl, Happy Go Lucky, Big Swiss, Less), utopias are almost by nature unhappy spaces of discontentment. Which is to say: one personās utopia is another personās dystopia, oneās heaven is anotherās hell. (An exception: I Who Have Never Known Men, a singular non-utopia utopia book about world making on your own terms, which ā as the book shows āĀ isnāt without pain, without issue, but the bookās envisions a world where perfection is being able to simply survive.)
While slightly antithetical, it can help to reflect on the works of Octavia E. Butler whose works are distinctly non-uptoic āĀ but thatās exactly what positions them as utopic. As political scientist Claire P. Curtis wrote for Utopian Studies in 2008, offering a survey of the speculative writerās work, Butler is a master of ārealist utopias,ā in stories of people who are not superheroes but instead the traditionally oppressed (female, minority, poor), people āwho see the worlds in which they live and aim to make those worlds visible to others,ā to help square the reality of all worldwide. āThe state of nature is not something from which we can escape and that the establishment of civil society is no guarantee of security,ā Curtis writes, going on to explain that having a utopia now (or in our fictions, fantasies) requires agreement, goal sharing, and bridge building. āOnly in this negotiation can we find security, live together, and gingerly work towards a better future.ā
Iāve been juggling these ideas for years now, in my own personal fiction (How do dreams become nightmares?) and in trying to navigate this world weāre in via weekly dispatches that not only recap āwhat you missedā but help to better see how to pass through the world together. Iād been meaning to muse on this subject for months and years but, as mentioned, why dwell on utopias if their perfection sums up their fragility? Or rather: one personās sublimity is another personās oppression. Crafting a utopia is to settle into dream states instead of working to make real world change.
But utopian realism: there is a need for that, particularly now, as we discussed in the comments last week thanks to reader Zoeās prodding. Like Butler, this can come not only from working together but from seeing each other as equals, willing to understand what makes you you and how to mutually offer protection. This is a cultural word problem we must solve and, at the moment, weāre not getting passing marks as weāre far from equilibrium. But the answer āĀ as is said week after week ā is not just āin each otherā but created through life together in a way that requires our being non-consumers and non-individuals. A pendulum is swinging, where well meaning, far left approaches and language have become cultureās greatest jokes based in nannying others, which has propelled a rise in (far) right behaviors like casual homophobia, increased use of the r-word, demonizing what you donāt understand, and more traditional āhateā: this is learned backwardness based in the individual body seen as an end instead the beginning. Regardless of how we arrived at this point (Loss of religion? Education?) doesnāt matter but the end result is a deeply self-centered Western (American) culture where you count cheese slices because you canāt cook for others, where you complain about social services for others even if you benefit from them too. Thereās a deep lack of empathy or goodwill for our fellow citizens and humans, resulting in Gen Z believing half a million dollars is what financial stability means, a parroting of aesthetic beliefs that prioritizes personal gain instead of collective advancement, the championing the whole instead of the individual.
This is to say: the greatest barrier to a realist utopia isnāt our selfishness but the myth of individualism, that a society thrives from your being a machine, a business, a consumer who can ascend to affluence. Simping to be rich is a trojan horse for forcing you to pay to do anything, that āfreedom of choiceā is your to-be billionaire entry point. We talk about this every other month but it has to be said again: ābuyingā new things is the opposite of a solution, the opposite of individualism since you cannot buy happiness, nor can you buy your way to heaven. This takes us to another realism and the must-read homework of our lifetime: the late Mark Fisherās seminal Capitalism Realism from 2009, which originated the thought that itās āeasier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.ā āCapitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsedā¦and all that is left is the consumer-spectator,ā Fisher writes. This idea of consumer-as-spectator confuses action with simply sitting, where checking boxes is doing something: a life measured in Change.org petitions is not a life. This also supposes that we, a debit card holding audience, will fix our shit through āself-regulationā ā but this also presupposes that we as the audience are all learned, all pursuing greater intelligence. As weāre experiencing, this is a mythic prospect that opens the door for authoritarianism, a savior to save us because weāre too saddled with work and self-interests to take action. Fisherās solution is ācollective management,ā by post-consumer action that forms coalitions instead of individualist pods. Hell is other people, sure, but so is heaven. Our cultureās selling us bright and shiny solipsism is the noose with which weāre hanging ourselves as a society.
Perhaps this is why finding a utopia is so impossible because it involves thinking beyond our own bodies, our own screens, neighborhoods, cities: you have to do something to get over the rainbow. āGroup projects suck,ā we complain. āCanāt someone else do it?ā we whine. āBirth is a curse and existence is a prison,ā we repeat. Thatās the honey trap of a dystopic reality ā and we must work to free ourselves from it. āWe do not move forward by denying that we live in the state of nature,ā Curtis writes. āThe only way really to be able to move forward is through honest and open communication about the conditions under which we live.ā
āIāll never understandā
ādad doesnāt talkā
"The incoming Education Secretary"
āone pill makes youā
āthe FBI was able to use your shoesā
āthis poor ladyā
āwhite women whenā
Politics!!!!!!
@world.wide_wisdom
I love this account on TikTok that uses shitposting to give you really, really wild geography facts.
āWelcome to Babagoobeyā
This is funny, but I donāt understand how or why Alex Consani has gotten to get away with her bizarre, zip-a-dee-doo-dah blaccent after all this time. It drives me insane.
āfunniest videoā
The anti-Halloween Christians are going to freak from Wicked. (Satire btw.)
āMillennial mean girl energyā
This is making me sick to my stomach.
ālol mamaā
Tina Knowles is everyoneās mother.
āeating poopā
Can weā¦make some foods look pretty? Please, UK?
āThatās what itās called?ā
Open the schools ā but also the editing on this video? Perfect.
"Person of The Year"
She really got me through this year. (Also: Elon is 100% going to win this award. Sigh.)
āon muscle gaysā
This made me feel better about my body image (not a joke).
āIf I was herā
"The pillow behind the headboard"
Two of the best queer posts of the year, the second one like a White Lotus storyline.
And, finally, a look at how Bobby and I spend our free time in Barcelona.
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brilliant work yet again
Thanks for the little shout-out, Kyle and amazing writing this week, as usual! Loved your insights on the utopia; there were always inconsistencies I felt about the concept but not could express until I read your piece. There IS a need for utopian realism, and I'm glad you pointed that out, especially because it gives the idea of crafting utopia that makes it just a bit more, well, realistic (lol), and I mean less-fantastical, so hopefully more achievable in our minds (which, like I said last week, is too imagination-poor rn).
Personally I think Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed should be considered a work of utopian realism, and I'm glad I now have a clearer way of describing it to friends when they ask for a book reco! š š š