Hardcore for Nerds

on the genealogy of dependence

The dependency of the native and the slave, like that of the pauper, was elaborated largely in the moral/psychological register. The character traits adduced to justify imperialism and slavery, however, arose less from individual temperament than from the supposed nature of human groups. Racialist thought was the linchpin for this reasoning. By licensing a view of “the Negro” as fundamentally other, this way of thinking provided the extraordinary justificatory power required to rationalize subjection at a time when liberty and equality were being proclaimed inalienable “rights of man” —for example, in that classic rejection of colonial status, the United States’s “Declaration of Independence.” Thus racism helped transform dependency as political subjection into dependency as psychology and forged enduring links between the discourse of dependency and racial oppression.

Nancy Fraser, ‘Fortunes of Feminism’

Happy 4th of July, America!

Ultimately, the pressures of employability are bringing to fruition Max Horkheimer’s lamentation on the ‘loss of interiority’ in advanced capitalist societies: societies in which ‘the wings of the imagination have been clipped too soon’, as individuals are increasingly forced to adopt a more practical and instrumental orientation to the world and others (Horkheimer, 1974: 25). A side effect of this loss of interiority is that we, as a society, may be losing our grip on the criteria to judge an activity to be worthwhile and meaningful, even if it does not contribute directly to the project of employability or the needs of the economy. Gorz poses the question: ‘When am I truly myself, that is, not a tool or a product of outside powers and influences, but rather the originator of my acts, thoughts, feelings, values?’ (Gorz, 1986). In a society where non-work is often merely an extension of work - time for recuperating, consuming anaesthetising products and entertainment, or sensibly cultivating one’s employability - I contend that this question has become worryingly difficult to answer.

David Frayne, The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work, ‘The Colonising Power of Work’  

Playlist culture is introducing an unprecedented dependence on data. We hear about the stacked human playlisting teams, with “genre leads” and “junior and senior curators” building thousands and thousands of playlists. (Though we never see their faces or names on the platforms—Spotify’s way of building trust in the mystified Oz-like “magic” of Spotify, rather than human intelligence needed to program playlists.) These human curators are responding to data to such an extent that they’re practically just facilitating the machine process.

 Liz Pelly - The Secret Lives of Playlists - CASH Music

Good article about the business and background of streaming playlists (I touched on this before writing about Alan Vega’s ‘Jukebox Babe’, which I now have on vinyl)