Convenience; ‘Gamer Girls’; Fertility; Neoliberalism (Across the Sundering Seas, #15)
Hello readers!
This weekend was far fuller than usual, with a combination of family activities and a very long day of work on a podcast episode (drafting a complicated New Rustacean episode like the one I’ll release this evening is a lot of work!). I started on, but haven’t finished, a long interaction with Andy Matuschak’s post Why Books Don’t Work. I take issue with the piece on a very deep level, for many reasons, and they all get back at things I’ve been thinking about in this space all year… so next weekend, you should have a long interaction with that in your inbox.
Today, I’m out from work sick, and haven’t nearly the energy to write the normal paragraphs of commentary on each of those I normally offer. Instead, we’ll call this a week of “flow”!
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The Myth of Convenience, L. M. Sacasas, May 2019.
What exactly is the nature of the convenience we prize so highly, and why do we find it so valuable? Perhaps it seems unnecessary to ask such questions, as if the value of convenience were self-evident. But the questions most of us don’t think to ask are often the most important ones we could ask. When we encounter an unasked question we have also found an entry point into the network of assumptions and values that structure our thinking but go largely unnoticed.
(Emphasis mine. More on this point in my forthcoming argument with Matuschak’s piece!)
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For ‘Gamer Girls’ Paid to Play ‘Fortnite,’ Therapy Skills are Almost Required: They’re hired to be solid squadmates — but the hardest part of the job is talking to teenage boys about their feelings, Hussein Kesvani, May 2019. Gig culture and gamer culture and online culture mixing in some fascinating (and, honestly, kind of sad) ways. See also Sacasas’ thoughtful take on Fortnite in an April issue of his newsletter.
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Tradition and Fertility in Eastern Europe, Lyman Stone, May 2019. There’s an ongoing discussion among economists about fertility rates. Lyman Stone and Noah Smith have regular conversations/debates/arguments about the subject on Twitter. In this piece:
But if the only successful turnaround is in Georgia, where the baby boom was explicitly caused by a religiously-motivated pro-natalist campaign, doesn’t that mean that retraditionalization works? Can’t we promote conservative values and get a baby boom? Georgia did it!
Not so fast…
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Technocratic Vistas: The Long Con of Neoliberalism, Jackson Lears, fall 2017. I am not a post-liberal, exactly, but I think there are lots of interesting critiques to be made of the current shape of our liberal order; this piece includes several of them.
Neoliberalism has impoverished fundamental conceptions of freedom by reducing them to market choice. The impoverishment is especially apparent in public discussions of higher education. The idea that a liberal arts education might provide the “priceless” opportunity to pose ultimate questions about oneself and one’s relation to the world is disappearing as college becomes reduced to job training. The “culture wars” that roiled higher education in the 1980s and ’90s have come to seem quaint today. In those days, conservatives and liberals shared a faith in the foundational importance of the humanities tradition; the debate was about how that tradition should be defined and who should be included in it—John Locke or Frantz Fanon, Ernest Hemingway or Toni Morrison (or all of the above). How times have changed. Now the “conservative” governors of Wisconsin and Florida want to abolish or at best marginalize humanities education altogether, while a “liberal” president (Obama—himself the beneficiary of a superb liberal arts education) mocked the uselessness of art history and promoted a database that allows prospective applicants to calculate the monetary value of various college degrees. Both sides, at the highest levels of mainstream partisan debate, now apparently agree that a college degree is little more than a meal ticket.
This narrowing of human horizons has political as well as educational effects. As humans become “human capital”—for themselves, for a firm, for a state—investment value trumps all other values; moral autonomy fades, and with it the very notion of a sovereign individual; citizenship shrivels to the mere ritual of casting a vote. Beneath the all-seeing gaze of the omnipotent market, the sovereignty of the state (like the sovereignty of the individual) shrinks to the vanishing point. Amid chants about freedom, the very basis of freedom (at least in the liberal and republican traditions)—individual and state sovereignty—is undermined and ultimately destroyed.
The consequences for democratic discourse are disastrous…