Capitalism is getting very much more dystopian very quickly
It’s a matter of time before companies start their own Pod-communities and ‘strongly encourage’ workers to live there and set up rules like no alcohol and no defamation of the company in the Pods.
As nightmarish as this is (and it is), this is only new for documented white people. From seasonal archiculture workers to construction workers to sweatshops, ‘sleep where you work and live your whole life controlled by your boss and coworkers pressured to spy on you’, has been very much a thing for a looooooooong time.
This is one of many things capitalism has always done to workers and now they’re going “hhmmmm.. if I can do this to some workers, why not all of them? if I present it as a hip new way of urban living people for the ‘freelancers’ that I exploit, I might even be able to do it without the armed guards that run my sweatshops and plantations.”
I don’t really get the issue with the “sex is banned” part tho
I don’t want to hyperfocus on that part because ‘live without privacy, convert your bed into a desk by day and just work work work’ is distopian enough as it is and I don’t really want to distract from a conversation about the new fuedalism to just talk about sex.
But can you not understand how that monotomous soulless life defined by work becomes even more soulless when you are not permitted to engage in (what is for most allosexuals) one of the most intimate moments of recreational joy and interpersonal connection? & how much it says about our lack of power when we live in places that control our sexual and reproductive lives?
well yeah, but it’s communal living. I mean you’re spot on with the rest but idk, a ban on sex when you share your living quarters with like two dozen other people? it doesn’t seem that deep tbh.
You know, I’ve spend time in socialist and anarchist self-organized communal living spaces where lots of people shared bedrooms because they liked it and all these spaces had a place for sex. They all acknowledged that that was a thing many humans loved and valued and so they organized to make that good thing possible. Some had a spare room with a lock on the inside that couples could use, others had dorms where sex was okay and dorms where it was not so people could choose where to sleep. It is not difficult to have communal living for those that like sharing bedrooms and also organize a place for sex.
This, however, is not communal living. This is crammed, dehumanized corporate living. This is squeezing as many people as possible into a space defined by work. The inhabitants own nothing in this space and have no control over their environment, they can’t even paint the walls let along organize the space to meet their needs. In such a space, sex is made impossible on purpose:
“We built the pods facing each other so the community polices itself”
The people that made this could have organized privacy and opportunities for sex. They deliberately did not do this, they dilerabetely designed the space for minimum privacy. The purposeful banning of sex from this space is just one part, but one very obvious part, of the way these spaces are not build for humans, they are build for employees whose whole identity should be limited to their productivity.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, mining communities and factory towns encouraged workers to join their ranks by offering company housing and company stores, where workers and their families wouldn’t have to worry about money, because their rent and whatever they wanted from the store would simply be deducted from their paychecks.
Didn’t take long for workers to realize they were spending over 100% of their paychecks, and would have to work the rest of their lives in soul-crushing poverty to pay the company back.
“I sold my soul to the company store” isn’t just a line in a song, it’s about Miner’s Scrip. When coal mines forced their employees to live in company housing, paid them in company credit usable only in the literal company store, and they charged astronomical rates for rent and food.
Most miners ended up in multi-generational debt because their wages were so low they could not afford the basic necessities of food, clothing and shelter and ended up owing so much to the company store their grandchildren would essentially be enslaved to the company to pay off the debt.
This becomes especially chilling when you realize Cheeto Supremo ran on a policy of “bring back coal jobs”.
This is just deadass feudalism 2 Electric Boogaloo
Waiting for Google and Facebook to implement this crap.
You assume it ever went away. What do you think employer-mandated health care is if not an incentive to never rock the boat or criticize management?
Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers.
…
After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology.
They had come with questions of their own.They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”
rich people are fucking terrifying
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.
In 1969, a group of children sat down to a free breakfast
before school. On the menu: chocolate milk, eggs, meat, cereal and fresh
oranges. The scene wouldn’t be out of place in a school cafeteria these
days—but the federal government wasn’t providing the food. Instead,
breakfast was served thanks to the Black Panther Party.
At the time, the militant black nationalist party was
vilified in the news media and feared by those intimidated by its
message of black power and its commitment to ending police brutality and
the subjugation of black Americans. But for students eating breakfast,
the Black Panthers’ politics were less interesting than the meals they
were providing.
“The children, many of whom had never eaten breakfast before the Panthers started their program,” the Sun Reporterwrote, “think the Panthers are ‘groovy’ and ‘very nice’ for doing this for them.”
The program may have been groovy, but its purpose was to
fuel revolution by encouraging black people’s survival. From 1969
through the early 1970s, the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for School
Children Program fed tens of thousands of hungry kids. It was just one
facet of a wealth of social programs created by the party—and it helped
contribute to the existence of federal free breakfast programs today.
When Black Panther Party founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby
Seale founded the party in 1966, their goal was to end police brutality
in Oakland. But a faction of the Civil Rights Movement led by SNCC
member Stokeley Carmichael began calling for the uplift and
self-determination of African-Americans, and soon black power was part
of their platform.
At first, the Black Panther Party primarily organized
neighborhood police patrols that took advantage of open-carry laws, but
over time its mandate expanded to include social programs, too.
Free Breakfast For School Children was one of the most
effective. It began in January 1969 at an Episcopal church in Oakland,
and within weeks it went from feeding a handful of kids to hundreds. The
program was simple: party members and volunteers went to local grocery
stores to solicit donations, consulted with nutritionists on healthful
breakfast options for children, and prepared and served the food free of
charge.
School officials immediately reported results in kids who
had free breakfast before school. “The school principal came down and
told us how different the children were,” Ruth Beckford, a parishioner
who helped with the program, said later. “They weren’t falling asleep in class, they weren’t crying with stomach cramps.”
Soon, the program had been embraced by party outposts
nationwide. At its peak, the Black Panther Party fed thousands of
children per day in at least 45 programs. (Food wasn’t the only part of
the BPP’s social programs; they expanded to cover everything from free medical clinics to community ambulance services and legal clinics.)
For the party, it was an opportunity to counter its
increasingly negative image in the public consciousness—an image of
intimidating Afroed black men holding guns—while addressing a critical
community need. “I mean, nobody can argue with free grits,” said
filmmaker Roger Guenveur Smith in A Huey P. Newton Story, a 2001 film in which he portrays Newton.
Free food seemed relatively innocuous, but not to FBI head
J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed the Black Panther Party and declared war
against them in 1969. He called
the program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities
to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for,” and gave carte
blanche to law enforcement to destroy it.
The results were swift and devastating. FBI agents went
door-to-door in cities like Richmond, Virginia, telling parents that BPP
members would teach their children racism. In San Francisco, writes
historian Franziska Meister, parents were told the food was infected
with venereal disease; sites in Oakland and Baltimore were raided by
officers who harassed BPP members in front of terrified children, and
participating children were photographed by Chicago police.
“The night before [the first breakfast program in Chicago] was supposed to open,” a female Panther told historian Nik Heynan, “the Chicago police broke into the church and mashed up all the food and urinated on it.”
Ultimately, these and other efforts to destroy the Black
Panthers broke up the program. In the end, though, the public visibility
of the Panthers’ breakfast programs put pressure on political leaders
to feed children before school. The result of thousands of American
children becoming accustomed to free breakfast, former party member
Norma Amour Mtume toldEater, was the government expanded its own school food programs.
Though the USDA had piloted free breakfast efforts
since the mid 1960s, the program only took off in the early 1970s—right
around the time the Black Panthers’ programs were dismantled. In 1975,
the School Breakfast Program was permanently authorized. Today, it
helps feed over 14.57 million children before school—and without the radical actions of the Black Panthers, it may never have happened.
The Beast of Bray Road (or the Bray Road Beast) is a creature reported in 1936 on a rural road outside of Elkhorn, Wisconsin. The same label has been applied to other sightings from southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois. Bray Road is a quiet rural road near the community of Elkhorn. The rash of claimed sightings in the late 1980s and early 1990s prompted a local newspaper, the Walworth County Week, to assign reporter Linda Godfrey to cover the story. Godfrey was initially skeptical, but later became convinced of the sincerity of the witnesses. Her series of articles later became a book titled The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf.The Beast of Bray Road is described by purported witnesses in several ways: as a bear-like creature, as a hairy biped resembling Bigfoot, and as an unusually large (2–4 feet tall on all fours, 7 feet tall standing up) intelligent werewolf-like creature able to walk on its hind legs and weighing 400-700 pounds. It also said that its fur is a brown gray color resembling a dog or bear. - Wikipedia sourced.
