The Antisocial Socialist

 Happy May Day!

Well, not really happy. I have to work under an antidemocratic neoliberal regime hellbent on crushing workers—and everyone who isn't a developer—under its heel. Everyone I know is overworked or unemployed or precarious. 

But you know. Maybe we can fight back about it. Somehow.

I don't really have a proper post because right now, the class war looks like the blood splashed over the region of Peel. Because May Day was virtual and the last thing I want to do is celebrate on Zoom. Because there is no longer joy or dignity in my own labour.

I reposted three classic images from better times to the Other Place, and I'll share them here for posterity.






(actual photo of me at my first May Day parade, colourized)

ETA: Sorry, I may have been a little deadpan in my humour. This is not a literal picture of me. It's from May Day in Ukraine in 1968. It just really captured my mood.

There's so much stupid out there, and it's hard to know when to start when savagely mocking things, even without the US elections stealing a problematic plot point from an episode of Doctor Who. But here are three things that made me roll my eyes so hard that simply a link and a snarky remark on FB was not enough.

1. Facebook, as you probably heard, took down a post from a Norwegian daily featuring the famous photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, best known as the "napalm girl," but be a decent person and call her by her name, okay?  Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief of Aftenposten, retaliated brilliantly, as you can read here, and eventually Facebook did relent. However, their justification—that is is just too much effort to distinguish between one of the most famous photographs of all time depicting a massive political turning point and child pornography—is what's hella stupid.

Fortunately, I don't need to do a takedown of the whole thing, because Dan Hon did it rather beautifully here, and do take some time to read that post, because it's great and includes one of the most awesome trigger warnings I've ever seen on an online article. But the key takeaway is encapsulated quite nicely here:

Facebook - and, more or less, Silicon Valley, in terms of the way that the Valley talks about itself, presents itself and so-on - is built on and prides itself in solving Difficult Problems. At least, they are now. Facebook is a multi-billion dollar public company where *some* things are difficult and worth doing (e.g. Internet access to 1bn people using custom-built drones, but other things are, by implication, *TOO HARD* and don't warrant the effort.

I was going on at great length yesterday to a friend about my hatred of Facebook's sorting algorithm, and how it can cause some friends to disappear and some to become disproportionately prominent, and make you feel as though no one is listening to you and you're shouting into a void when it decides it doesn't like one of your posts. (It's bad enough when it happens on FB; worse when it happens in cases like hiring practices or policing techniques; we are increasingly delegating large parts of our lives to supposedly objective technology that's created by subjective, and generally speaking, racist, humans.) LJ solved this particular problem in a very simple way, by showing you every post by every friend in the order that they posted it, without continuous scrolling. Now, obviously, this doesn't fit with FB's business model at all, or the way that most people use it, but it does show that the problem can be solved.

Historically, we have not asked big monstrous corporations to solve all of the world's problems, but Silicon Valley seems determined to solve all the world's problems, or at least "disrupt" and create problems where there weren't any problems before. And we seem willing to surrender the questions of what problems exist, and which are worth solving, to them, which is why the US seems to have delegated creating its educational policy to Bill Gates, of all people. Which brings me to a tangential point raised by someone in the BoingBoing forums: At what point do we make a distinction between the traditional definition of free speech being freedom from government repression, and start being honest about the control over the discourse that corporations get. At what point is Facebook equivalent to or more powerful than a state actor? I think we're there; Facebook is the primary news source for a huge chunk of the population, and at some point we need to force it to act responsibly or force it to abdicate this role.

Anyway, fucking stupid. Hire some humans who can distinguish between a black-and-white news photo of a naked child on fire and actual porn, and pay them a living wage.

2. SPEAKING OF A LIVING WAGE...Okay, I've mocked this to shit already today but I'm not done mocking, no I am not.  Via Everyday Feminism, currently vying with Upworthy for the Worst Place On the Internet: 20 Ways to Help Your Employees Struggling with Food Insecurity and Hunger.

Now, for a site that claims to be all about accessibility, EF is slightly less accessible than, say, Alex Jones after 72 hours of substituting Red Bull, vodka, and crystal meth cocktails for sleep, which is to say it's one of the worst-written sites I've ever seen. I'm guessing they don't have paid editors. Every article is skimmable at best, and tends to amount to: "Be gentle, check your privilege, and don't forget to self-care with your yogurt." But this is possibly the worst article of every bad article I've ever read there, because not one of these 20 ways is "pay your employees a living wage."

Because, sorry. A minimum wage is supposed to be a living wage, and if your employees are on food stamps, you are not paying them enough. If you "can't afford" to pay them enough, as EF suggested in their equally ludicrous rebuttal to the criticism this article garnered, you are a shitty businessperson and deserve to go bankrupt. And if you have the time and money to learn about your employee's food sensitivities—again, you are not paying them enough, and hardworking taxpayers should not be expected to subsidize your lack of business acumen.

Should you be in the odd position where you cannot control how much you pay your employees (let's say you're the just-above-minimum-wage manager of a McDonald's, though if you were, I'm not sure why food sensitivities would be an issue), plenty of helpful friendly unions would be happy to come and visit your employees and assist them in organizing to get their wages raised.

Also, they include the worst suggestion of all time, which is to load up on meat-lovers pizza. Please do not do this, whether your workers are starving or not. In 100% of catered work events I have attended, the "meat-lovers" go right for the paltry vegetarian options and eat it all up before the vegetarians can get to it.

3. Finally, let's talk about architecture. Check out York U's new building! Now, York U is already the repository for a collection of the worst architectural trends in the last half-century (as is Toronto in general; we spawned Frank Gehry, after all) but this one is just too hilarious to be believed. It's like the Edgy White Liberal of buildings. You can practically see the #hashtags in #every #sentence in that #puffpiece.

Guess what, starchitects. People figured out hundreds of years ago how to make buildings work, and you can't improve on it all that much. Human beings like to feel relatively contained, and more importantly, like their ambient noise to be contained, particularly in places where they're supposed to work or study. That's why universities have quaint, outmoded features like "classrooms" and "lecture halls." Ever tried to work in an open concept office? It's distracting as anything. I'm all for less productivity—productivity is one of the Great Lies of late-stage capitalism—but I would rather be unproductive on my own terms. And common areas for meeting with students? When students want to meet with me outside of class time, it's quite often to tell me that they're struggling with family or workload or mental health issues, so why not just shout that all over the #learningspaces where the whole #engineering program can hear it?

Plus, like every building erected in the last 20 years, it looks like the architect gave up, crumpled the blueprints, and submitted the balled-up paper as the actual design.

Kill it with fucking fire.

This is a long, brutal, beautiful read written by a Jennifer Ng, a woman who worked as a Certified Nursing Assistant in a nursing home. She writes with compassion about the dying, and with righteous outrage about the treatment of the CNAs—who are, for the most part, immigrant women of color—by the home's management. She was an active organizer for what seems like small dignities—the right to have enough workers on shift at a time, the right to have their legally mandated 15 minute break—and faced severe repression for her efforts.

An excerpt:

We run on stolen time in the nursing home. Alind, another CNA, once said to me, “Some of these residents are already dead before they come here.”

By “dead,” he was not referring to the degenerative effects of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease that caused Lara, for instance, to occasionally spit her food out at us in anger and spite, or hit us when we are assisting her. He was not referring to the universal reality of human beings’ temporary abilities and our susceptibility to pain and disease. By “dead,” Alind was referring to the sense of hopelessness and loneliness that many of the residents feel, not just because of physical pain, not just because of old age, but as a result of the isolation they face, the sorrow of abandonment by loved ones, the anger of being caged within the walls of this institution where their escape attempts are restricted by alarms and wiry smiles. This banishment is hardly the ending they had toiled for during their industrious youth.

By death, Alind was also referring to the many times “I’m sorry,” is uttered in embarrassment, and the tearful shrieks of shame that sometimes follow when they soil their clothes. Those outbursts are merely expressions of society’s beliefs, as if old age and dependence are aberrations to life, as if theirs is an undeserved living on borrowed time. The remorse so deep; it kills faster than the body’s aging cells.
This is the dying that we, nursing home workers, bear witness to everyday; the death that we are expected to, through our tired hearts and underpaid souls, reverse.

So they try, through bowling, through bingo and checkers, through Frank Sinatra sing-a-longs, to resurrect what has been lost to time, migration, and the whimsical trends of capitalism and the capriciousness of life. They substitute hot tea and cookies with strangers for the warmth of genuine relationship bonding with family and friends. Loved ones made distant, occupied by the same patterns of migration, work, ambition, ease their worries and guilt by the pictures captured of their relatives in these settings. We, the CNAs, shuffle in and out of these staged moments, to carry the residents off for toileting. The music playing in the building’s only bright and airy room is not for us, the immigrants, the lower hands, to plan for or share with the residents. Ours is a labor confined to the bathroom, to the involuntary, lower functions of the body. Instead of people of color in uniformed scrubs, nice white ladies with pretty clothes are paid more to care for the leisurely activities of the old white people. The monotony and stress of our tasks are ours to bear alone.

Seriously, go read the whole thing.

You know, in case you were feeling complacent today.

Tony Kushner, one of my favourite playwrights and deserved winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was denied an honourary degree from CUNY for his views on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. I dunno about the whole idea of honourary degrees, to be honest, but if one is going to grant them, nuanced political opinions ought not to be the reason.

From Barbara Ehrenreich:

The CUNY board's decision came after board member Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld objected to Kushner's statements about Israel, excerpts of which Wiesenfeld claims to have gleaned from various websites (Wiesenfeld's citations have been described by blogger Mitchell Plitnick as having been sourced from the notoriously reactionary pro-Israel propaganda purveyer, Camera.org). Wiesenfeld does not claim to have sought out the original sources of the statements he cites, lending credencem to the objection that he willfully has taken Kushner's comments out of context. Wiesenfeld has since argued, in an unrepentent op-ed posted on the Jewish newspaper site Algemeiner.com, that Kushner's views should be labeled anti-Semitic.

Lest you think that the new Conservative majority is going to be remotely moderate, check out this article on their proposed crime bill.

Here’s what the Library of Parliament says about the bill on its website: “Clause 5 of the bill provides that the offences of public incitement of hatred and wilful promotion of hatred may be committed by any means of communication and include making hate material available, by creating a hyperlink that directs web surfers to a website where hate material is posted, for example.”

Okay, so if I link to a site that has hate material on it, I'm guilty of a hate crime? I link to the Toronto SUN and the National Post pretty frequently! I am so screwed.

The latest from Foxconn, the sweatshop where all of your cool gadgets are made: workers must sign a statement promising not to kill themselves and pledging to "treasure their lives". That's because the horrible conditions in the company are so brutal that workers regularly kill themselves rather than put up with 96-hour weeks, overcrowding, and frequent humiliations. (Don't read the comments on the BoingBoing link. There are a lot of libertarian sweatshop apologists on that thread.)

So how was your day?

Via symbioid: A Missouri Republican senator wants to repeal child labour laws.

Really.

* This act modifies the child labor laws.
* It eliminates the prohibition on employment of children under age fourteen.
* Restrictions on the number of hours and restrictions on when a child may work during the day are also removed.
* It also repeals the requirement that a child ages fourteen or fifteen obtain a work certificate or work permit in order to be employed.
* Children under sixteen will also be allowed to work in any capacity in a motel, resort or hotel where sleeping accommodations are furnished.
* It also removes the authority of the director of the Division of Labor Standards to inspect employers who employ children and to require them to keep certain records for children they employ.
* It also repeals the presumption that the presence of a child in a workplace is evidence of employment.

I think this whole steampunk historical fetishism thing has gone too far.

For my fellow graphic design types:

Will you design me a logo and some pie charts for free?

The 6 Most Horrific Bosses of All Time. Excerpt:

How much did the workers hate Pullman? When he died, they had to bury his body in a steel and concrete vault, which was itself buried under a few tons of concrete. Why? Because--and we're not making this up--they were afraid that employees would dig up and beat the shit out of his corpse, otherwise.

Via ginny_t: The Commercial Pattern Archive free trial. Only I can't seem to download the patterns 'cause I haven't had enough coffee yet. HALP?

May Day, you guys!

Here, you can sing along: