I’ll never forget seeing a girl in a cafe highlight, line by line, nearly an entire page of a textbook. Watching the page curl from the wetness, almost as if writhing in pain.
I'll (lightheartedly) come to their defense to say that this is how I and a lot of my peers made it through med school. The wetness of the page indeed unlocked some supressed memories.
I think it's a combination of a ritual and some sort of somewhat-more-elevated engagement (or wishing thereof) with the material. Somewhere between meditative ritual and attention aid.
I doubt it helped much, if at all - except for Stabilo; they were the true winners.
I remember as an undergrad watching some philosophy majors do this with their reading and their explanation was that it helps them track reading progress. And to your point, that tactile act probably helps a lot with engagement!
The unfortunate part is that you can't then unhighlight a passage.
Yeah... There was no "reading" in our ancestral environment, it's rather unnatural for a human brain to focus on the page where nothing happens. Some people can adapt to that, other people need stimulation of some kind.
And it's not like some ADHD thing which is new. E.g. Stanisław Lem as a kid: "But because the act of reading was too passive, too simple, I would rest a chair leg on my calf or knee or foot and with little movements keep the chair at the very brink of falling."
It's a Skinner box of productivity. Of course it's polarizing.
My own enthusiasm varies wildly day to day. I've been sick of squinting at punctuation marks and opening sequences of of tabs to trace through annoying abstraction layers for a long time; so I'm really excited to see those activities effectively automated away. But the same tools enable some really bad behavior (in myself and others), which really gets me down.
Kudos to the lucky few artisans that the modern economy will support, but becoming a stocker at Ikea will probably be more lucrative than picking up a saw and plane.
The demand sets the market. There simply isn't enough demand at that price.
Even though the concept of doing what you love has only really existed for a few decades, a lot of people take it for granted. That's just how fast humans get used to things, and AI is no different. It takes a decade or two for a new generation to grow up with the new normal, and then it's just waiting a few generations for the old farts to die off.
I disagree- when I googled this knot I came immediately to https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknothistory.htm where this “Ian” fellow goes to great lengths to establish himself as the inventor. Screenshot of a davinciesque yellowed inventor’s notebook and so forth.
Facebook is widely thought to cause significant societal damage; anyone who thinks so, would probably consider employees of Meta to be the ones lacking empathy.
I believe Meta and most social medias cause significant societal damage. I also think that humans as a baseline are deserving of sympathy. Lets take the straw man Meta employee who causes damage and lacks empathy. Personally I'd think it's sad that that employee doesn't experience the emotion of empathy. I wonder how that impacts their personal life, why don't they experience that empathy?
I don't think it's a good idea to use someone else's perceived lack of empathy as an excuse to not be sympathetic.
So Facebook products are definitely not good for humans to use, sort of like cane sugar is not good for humans to use, but I wonder if you also think this about, I dunno, banks? They do vastly more predatory stuff with much bigger impacts. Nobody’s Facebook usage is affecting how much housing costs, for example. But for some reason there seems to be more outrage at social media companies. Odd!
So lets bomb some sucker nation or assassinate folks we summarily don't like, without due process. F'k it, if they do it, then we can also do it.
How does that make anything better? It results in a degradation of societal values where morals and positive norms are assigned to the pages of history.
There was a time when positive examples, folks standing up and resisting was seen as a something good. Nowadays everyone just does it because the others are even worse. So who should start making the world a better place? The others.
The reason Marx developed the more advanced category of commodity fetishism was, in a way, to expose the real alienation in the fantasy that one could opt out of "alienation" by becoming a baker, bike repairman, etc. The heart of a heartless world, indeed.
I've heard people describe commodity fetishism as replacing social relationships with relationships to things you own (e.g. your car, your iPhone etc). Is this accurate?
The issue is not primarily psychological attachment to objects, but that private labor (labor carried out independently by separate producers, whose social validity is only realized through exchange) takes on the appearance of its opposite: labor in a directly social form through exchange. Through exchange, the values of commodities appear to individuals not as a relation between producers, but as a property inherent in things themselves. Use-value appears as value, concrete labor appears as abstract labor, private labor appears as social labor.
This has a ton of effects. Some of the most important: it obscures exploitation (profit appears to derive from capital/risk/trade/etc., i.e. anything but labor), it naturalizes capitalism (markets, competition, money, and wage labor seem transhistorical), it disempowers producers (alienation), and it produces ideological mystification in general (people attribute to greed, unfair exchange, moral failure, production scale, division of labor, or technologies what should be attributed to the specific historical form of labor).
So your example is probably a third-order effect of commodity fetishism.
This condensation of the concept really sucked. I suggest struggling through Capital Vol. I, Ch. 1.
Marx's concept of alienation isn't really about being removed from the product one toils on by abstraction, it was about being removed from the result of one's labour because the end to which that labour is performed is enrichment of the bourgeoisie, not personal or societal enrichment.
I think the two concepts are not easy to disentangle. It isn’t the craftsman who decides the chairs should be built in an assembly line- it’s the owner, who wants to maximize the number or consistency of chairs. And the abstraction of that assembly line is what keeps the craftsman from saying, “that is the chair that I built.”
I get the appeal of his arguments but after reading the book, it just doesn't sit right with me. A lot if it reminds me too much of fascist arguments about how all of those city liberals don't do actual labor and the only "real jobs" are farm jobs or something.
Perhaps they have that in common, but facism pushes out into directions that marxism does not. Esp wrt to class, race, and self-determination.
It helps to ask: how many of the modern fascist leaders are retreating to the farm? I see them developing and deploying tech to inceease their grip on power. I see the "farmsy-folk" as a contingent the facists have persuaded to nip at those in the middle. And the means of the persuasion is, ironically, using the Marxist argunent of alienation.
I often joke that the company I work for did the same job 100 years ago but they only had manual laborers on hundreds of locations. They made the work schedule, they did recruitment. they filled out the contract, every Friday there was an envelope with your salary in it, always the same amount.
Today we have local managers, regional managers, job agencies, cluster coördinators, quality control people, layers of hr people, doctors, instructors and lots of fancy sounding expensive titles that translate poorly. Each with their own fancy car.
So, I ask them what value they add. Makes them furious. I'm not bitter about it, I'm honest about the joke/hypothetical.
The show is much more expensive and we do the manual (actual) work with fewer people. We work much harder and if someone calls in sick all hell breaks lose among the office folk. Zero redundancy.
Some nepotism aside they all think they do important work. Say, the schedule man makes a schedule for 700 people. He works hard but the results are vastly inferior to 8 people working on one location making their own schedule. If you need a day off or want to trade shifts, you just ask a coworker or two. The office worker begs people not to call him. In the future I'm sure he can also make schedules for the office folk(?)
It is that I remember how things use to work. Otherwise i wouldn't even consider if their jobs are useless.
Sitting down for a few minutes to do some administrative tasks is really nice if you are hurling heavy objects and running from left to right all day. Rest improves productivity so it doesn't really cost time. It makes the work less repetitive and if you screw up organizing things yourself you know who to blame.
Here is a simple concept. The job agencies schedules employees, counts hours and pays salaries. After they are done multiple people at the company have to check everything they do. They are doing everything twice! It's very complicated!
With just 8 people on location any idiot can schedule, count hours and multiply by $. It worked fine for 70ish years.
I agree. I think Stardew Valley is an exhibition of pastoral fascism disguised as a liberal cozy game. A highly mystifying piece of art. I would give it more leeway if it weren't the fact that its utopian imagination is so limited; you build relationships by gifting the exact items the townspeople desire, production still market oriented, homelessness is understood as a choice, large corporations are violently negated in favor of petty production, etc.
For what it's worth, even ignoring the fact that "uselessness" is an ideologically mediated concept, and so taking his horizon for granted, Graeber's work is empirically incorrect. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 His was the bullshit job.
I think whether you can say it's empirically incorrect depends on if the researchers measured the right thing. Measuring: “Do you think your job is useful?” was over-simplifying, and could miss the phenomenon that Graeber was actually talking about.
As someone with a EE degree followed by 12 years of SWE work, that pivot is quite daunting. A degree is just a piece of paper to get you an entry level job to do some real learning IMO
In the Windows team (back before the test org was decimated) I saw the described "class divide". Anybody who was good enough would switch from SDET to SDE [disclaimer: obviously there were some isolated exceptions]. The test team produced reams of crappy test frameworks, each of which seemed like a "proving project" for its creators to show they could be competent SDEs. After the Great Decimation my dev team took ownership of many such frameworks and it was a total boondoggle; we wasted years trying (and mostly failing) to sort through the crappy test code.
This was all unfortunate, and I agree in principle with having a separate test org, but in Windows the culture unfortunately seemed to be built around testers as second-class software developers.
I spent most of my time working on Visual Studio (in the Boston time frame) so we got to interact with pretty much every team. I absolutely hated interacting with the Windows team. Everything was a fight for no reason.
As I said above, everyone has their own experiences but the QA folks I worked with at MS were fantastic.
Not sure if you're aware but Dave Plumber now has a really good YT channel [0] where he talks about MS back in those days. It's a fun walk down memory lane.
