It is only now, a decade after the financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction—of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relationships. The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.
They promised the open web, we got walled gardens. They promised individual liberty, then broke democracy—and now they’ve appointed themselves the right men to fix it.
But did the digital revolution have to end in an oligopoly? In our fog of resentment, three recent books argue that the current state of rising inequality was not a technological inevitability. Rather the narrative of disruption duped us into thinking this was a new kind of capitalism. The authors argue that tech companies conquered the world not with software, but via the usual route to power: ducking regulation, squeezing workers, strangling competitors, consolidating power, raising rents, and riding the wave of an economic shift already well underway.
In a winners-take-all economy, it’s hard to prove the rulers wrong. But if the tech backlash wants to become more than just the next chapter in their myth, we have to question the fitness of the companies that survived.
What historians do more than anything else is we teach a radical form of empathy, a radical way of understanding people as different as possible from the sort of society that we were raised in.
Shame is toxic. It is the difference between “sorry I did” and “sorry I am.”
Source: Shame is not a Weapon. – Love Learning….
Guilt is feeling bad about something you did, something you can fix. Shame is feeling bad about who you are.
Source: Ben Foss on Dyslexia and Shame
The closet can only stop you from being seen. It is not shame-proof.
And that is what happens when you soak one child in shame and give permission to another to hate.
Source: Hannah Gadsby: Nanette – Netflix
Via: Hannah Gadsby on Shame, Power, and Comedy
We should spend more time talking about how we change the environment that surrounds people and not the people themselves.
Source: The Gift: LD/ADHD Reframed
Michael’s big moral surveillance apparatus is a correction, or perhaps update, of Sartre: hell isn’t other people, it’s neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the practice of transforming everything, even traditionally non-economic phenomena like friendship or learning, into deregulated, financialized markets. Financialized markets are ones built on investment rather than commodity exchange; deregulated markets nominally allow for any and all behavior, but tightly control background conditions so that only a limited range of behavior is possible. Privatizing formerly public things such as infrastructure or schools or prisons is a common method of transforming things into markets. Setting up the season 1 neighborhood so that the quartet of dead people torture each other, Michael is a technocrat who effectively privatizes hell by contracting the work of abuse out to independent, uncompensated laborers. (After all, his whole approach is to disrupt eternal damnation by superficially flipping the good/bad script…It’s Uber, but for hell.)
Source: The Other Secret Twist: On the Political Philosophy of The Good Place – Los Angeles Review of Books
I updated “The Spectacle of Cruel Laughter” with selections from ““Nanette,” Reviewed: Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix Standup Special Forces Comedy to Confront the #MeToo Era | The New Yorker”.
But in the course of the hour-long set, which was filmed at the Sydney Opera House (Gadsby has also been performing at the SoHo Playhouse, in New York), “Nanette” transforms into a commentary on comedy itself-on what it conceals, and on how it can force the marginalized to partake in their own humiliation. Gadsby, who once considered Bill Cosby her favorite comedian, now plans to quit comedy altogether, she says, because she can’t bring herself to participate in that humiliation anymore. Onstage, Gadsby typically speaks in a shy, almost surprised tone, playing jokes off of an unassuming, nebbishy demeanor. She clutches the mic with two fists and speaks softly, forcing audiences to listen closely to hear her. In “Nanette,” she seems to slowly shed that persona, becoming increasingly assertive and, at times, deadly serious. Her set builds to include more and more disturbing accounts of her own experiences with homophobia and sexual assault, and broader themes of violence against women and male impunity. But for every moment of tension, Gadsby gives her crowd release in a punch line-until she doesn’t. When the jokes stop, the audience is forced to linger in its unease. “This tension? It’s yours,” she says at one particularly upsetting moment, toward the end of the show. “I am not helping you anymore.”
Watching Gadsby, it was impossible not to think of the many women who’ve come forward in recent months with stories of abuse that were years or even decades old. You could consider the #MeToo moment itself as a kind of callback, a collective return to stories that women have been telling one way-to others, to themselves-with a new, emboldened understanding that those past tellings had been inadequate.
Educators, using images as text in your documents is an a11y road block. Use iOS “Speak Screen” (Settings > General > Accessibility > Speech > Speak Screen) on your docs. Is all content spoken? Is all text selectable? Unselectable text is usually inaccessible text.
I updated “Wanted: hospitals and doctors’ offices that…” with selections on access intimacy from “The Doctor and Nurse Who “Got It” | Health as a Human Right” and “Access Intimacy: The Missing Link | Leaving Evidence”.
I also added the selection from “The Doctor and Nurse Who “Got It” | Health as a Human Right” to “Accessibility, Access Intimacy, and Forced Intimacy”.
This is the story about a doctor and nurse I once had and how they “got it.”
“Getting it” isn’t necessarily something that you can define. It’s ineffable. It’s more of a feeling than a specific action. For me, it’s a connection that runs deeper than the diagnosis, the medical terminology, the treatments proposed. It’s a sense of being listened to and really heard. It’s feeling of being truly cared for. It’s a sense of empathy or at least a willingness to immerse oneself in my world as a patient, to feel and see what I face. When I think of my doctor and nurse who “got it”, I remember the sense of safety and calm they offered me and knowing that I would be okay. To each patient surely it may mean something different. But for me “getting it” gives me the ability as a patient to breathe, and perchance even to live.
Source: The Doctor and Nurse Who “Got It” | Health as a Human Right
Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level. Sometimes it can happen with complete strangers, disabled or not, or sometimes it can be built over years. It could also be the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met. It is not dependent on someone having a political understanding of disability, ableism or access. Some of the people I have experienced the deepest access intimacy with (especially able bodied people) have had no education or exposure to a political understanding of disability.
Access intimacy is also the intimacy I feel with many other disabled and sick people who have an automatic understanding of access needs out of our shared similar lived experience of the many different ways ableism manifests in our lives. Together, we share a kind of access intimacy that is ground-level, with no need for explanations. Instantly, we can hold the weight, emotion, logistics, isolation, trauma, fear, anxiety and pain of access. I don’t have to justify and we are able to start from a place of steel vulnerability. It doesn’t mean that our access looks the same, or that we even know what each other’s access needs are. It has taken the form of long talks into the night upon our first meeting; knowing glances shared across a room or in a group of able bodied people; or the feeling of instant familiarity to be able to ask for help or support.
Source: Access Intimacy: The Missing Link | Leaving Evidence
Interpretive phenomenological analysis of the data revealed four core themes in participants’ theory of mind experiences and strategies, all of which highlighted how a more accurate representation of autistic theory of mind is one of difference rather than deficit. For instance, data showed that autistic heightened perceptual abilities may contribute to mentalizing strengths and that honesty in autism may be less dependent on systemizing rather than personal experience and choice. Such findings suggest that future research should reexamine autistic characteristics in light of their ability to enhance theory of mind processing. Understanding how an autistic theory of mind is uniquely functional is an imperative step toward both destigmatizing the condition and advocating for neurodiversity.
Via:
In the future, we will not publish Letters in which authors argue that an individual accused or found guilty of harassment is likely innocent because others have interacted with that person without incident; this argument is logically flawed. In addition, although some information about a person’s scientific achievements is at times necessary to establish context, we will not publish Letters in which authors argue that professional achievements have any bearing at all on the likelihood that the individual engaged in harassment.
Source: Editor’s note: Harassment policy | Science
The look what good they’ve done argument, on the other hand, is “bad logic” and too common, says Robin Leeds, who specializes in crisis communication and founded a political consulting firm, Winning Strategies LLC. “It’s really a distraction strategy,” she says, “that essentially demonstrates non-belief in the victim.”
“I remember once in college, the pride I felt about being able to write an entire research paper with stuff from my own anti-library.”
Help students build their anti-libraries.
Have you really read all these?: Anti-libraries and Knowledge
rnbn 