What I Read or Listened to This Week


Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:

  • The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It - “While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.”

  • The Silicon Valley Economy Is Here. And It’s a Nightmare.

    • “There’s also evidence that Lyft and Uber, the two most popular ridesharing companies, contribute to a decline in public transit ridership. City governments thus have less incentive to invest in more infrastructure, creating still more negative repercussions for poorer communities and communities of color.”
    • “One study published in August in an environmental journal, Environmental Research Letters, posited that whatever emissions electric scooters saved were offset by the greenhouse gas that gig workers expended chasing after scooters to perform maintenance and charging duties. The companies also say that e-scooters encourage a more diverse ridership, but San Francisco authorities reportedly found that e-scooter ridership tended to skew male, wealthy, and Caucasian.”
  • Bullshit Jobs - The book breaks down bullshit jobs into five categories - flunkies (jobs to make someone else look or feel important), goons (exist only because other people employ them and largely have a negative impact on society), duct tapers (solve a problem that should not exist in the first place), box tickers (allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something it probably isn’t doing) and taskmasters (two types, Type 1 are unnecessary superiors, the opposite of flunkies, Type 2 create bullshit tasks for others). It is more of a qualitative and anecdotal look at useless jobs with lots of personal stories from readers about their bullshit jobs. The psychological effects of a job we think is useless are damaging. People want to contribute something meaningful to society, and this could be why meaningful jobs tend to be low paying jobs.

    • “a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of the employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”
    • “If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of financial capital, it’s hard to see how he or she could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized stratum of the universally reviled unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.) - and particularly it financial avatars - but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.”
    • “While neoliberal rhetoric was always all about the unleashing of the magic of the marketplace and placing economic efficiency over all other values, the overall effect of the free market policies has been that rates of economic growth have slowed pretty much everywhere except India and Chine; scientific and technological advance has stagnated; and in most wealthy nations, the younger generations can, for the first time in centuries, expect to lead less prosperous lives than their parents did. Yet on observing these effects, proponents of market ideology always reply with calls for even stronger doses of the same medicine, and politicians duly enact them.”
    • “Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. Those who work shit jobs tend to be the object of indignities; they not only work hard but they are also held in the lowest esteem for that very reason…. Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers… Yet secretly they are aware they have achieved nothing”
    • “When managers began trying to come up with scientific studies of the most time- and energy-efficient ways to deploy human labor, they never applied those same techniques to themselves - or if they did, the effect appears to have been the opposite of what they intended.”
    • “And being forced to pretend to work, we discovered, was the most absolute indignity - because it was impossible to pretend it was anything but what it was: pure degradation, a sheer exercise of the boss’s power for its own sake.”
    • “If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn’t capitalism”
    • “if the market can get things so wrong in the one area the worker knows best, then surely she can not just blandly assume the market can be trusted to asses the true value of goods and services in those areas where she lacks firsthand information.”
    • “To some degree, the skill at actually reading others’ emotions is just an effect of what working-class work actually consists of: rich people don’t have to learn how to do interpretive labor nearly as well because they can hire other people to do it for them. Those hirelings, on the other hand, who have to develop a habit of understanding other’s points of views, will also tend to care about them.”
    • “Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large part because of the peculiar nature of managerial feudalism that has come to dominate wealthy economies - but to an increasing degrees, all economies. They cause misery because human happiness is always caught up in a sense of having effects on the world; a feeling which most people, when they speak of their work, express through a language of social value. Yet at the same time they are aware that the greater social value produced by a job, the less one is likely to be paid to do it.”
    • “A case could be made that the great historical difference between what we call the Left and the Right largely turns on the relation between value and values. The Left has always been about trying to collapse the gulf between the domain dominated by pure self-interest and the domain traditionally dominated by high-minded principles; the Right has always been about prising them even farther apart, and then claiming ownership of both. They stand for both greed and charity. Hence, the otherwise inexplicable alliance in the Republican Party between the free market libertarians and the ‘values voters’ of the Christian Right. What this comes down to in practice has usually been the political equivalent of a strategy of good-cop-bad-cop: first unleash the chaos of the market to destabilize lives and all existing verities alike; then, offer yourself up as the last bastion of the authority of church and fatherhood against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed.”
    • “It’s hard to imagine a surer sign that one is dealing with an irrational economic system than the fact that the prospect of eliminating drudgery is considered to be a problem.” (ie. millions of medical insurance jobs lost if the US switches from private to public healthcare)
    • “much of the reason for the expansion of the bullshit sector more generally, is a direct result of the desire to quantify the unquantifiable. To put it bluntly, automation makes certain tasks more efficient, but at the same time, it makes other tasks less efficient. This is because it requires enormous amounts of human labor to render the processes, tasks, and outcomes that surround anything of caring value into a form that computers can even recognize.”
    • “The reason the current allocation of labor looks the way it does, then, has nothing to do with economics or even human nature. It’s ultimately political.”
    • “Finance works its way into everything, from car loans to credit cards, but it’s significant that the principle cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt, and the principle force drawing young people into bullshit jobs is the need to pay student loans.”
    • “Basic Income might seem like a vast expansion of state power,… but, in fact, it’s the exactly the reverse. Huge sections of government - and precisely, the most intrusive and obnoxious ones, since they are most deeply involved in the moral surveillance of ordinary citizens - would instantly be made unnecessary and could simply be closed down.”
    • “Universal Basic Income would mean millions of people who recognize the absurdity of this situation will have the time to engage in political organizing to change it, since they will no longer be forced to highlight forms for eight hours a day, or scramble around for an equivalent amount of time trying to figure out a way to pay the bills.”
  • How YouTube shields advertisers (not viewers) from harmful videos - “Jammi, from Sleeping Giants, says YouTube’s different policies for advertisers versus viewers suggest that the company is perfectly able to add more warnings to harmful content, but chooses not to. ‘By keeping this content alive on YouTube and pushing it on users, they can continue to maximize for their core metric, which is engagement,’ she says. ‘As customers of YouTube, advertisers have the leverage and right to demand that their ads are placed on brand-safe content. As users, we don’t have that same leverage. We don’t have the same right to ask that YouTube protect us.’”

  • Scott Galloway on Antitrust, election interference, the future of Amazon and more [Video] - “A key step to tyranny [has been] the government being co-opted as opposed to being a countervailing force to corporate power.”

See also