I know how to read, probably
36% complete! christa has read 19 of 52 books.
5 hours ago Public
7 hours ago Public
and here, again:
"Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity—of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence."
and
"Police are bureaucrats with weapons."
7 hours ago Public
Bureaucracies public and private appear—for whatever historical reasons—to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as expected. It's in this sense that I've said one can fairly say that bureaucracies are utopian forms of organization. After all, is this not what we always say of utopians: that they have a naïve faith in the perfectibility of human nature and refuse to deal with humans as they actually are? Which is, are we not also told, what leads them to set impossible standards and then blame the individuals for not living up to them? But in fact all bureaucracies do this, insofar as they set demands they insist are reasonable, and then, on discovering that they are not reasonable (since a significant number of people will always be unable to perform as expected), conclude that the problem is not with the demands themselves but with the individual inadequacy of each particular human being who fails to live up to them.
found this an interesting take on administrative burden, which assumes that policy as written is intended to reflect a societal goal and that policy implementation puts (often intentional) friction preventing people and society from reaching those intended goals.
7 hours ago Public
v long quote about technology following societal values and prioritization vs technological determinism
Just as what came to be called "globalization" was really a creation of new political alignments, policy decisions, and new bureaucracies—which were only later followed by physical technologies like containerized shipping, or the Internet—so the pervasive bureaucratization of everyday life made possible by the computers is not, itself, the result of technological development. Rather it's the other way around. Technological change is simply not an independent variable. Technology will advance, and often in surprising and unexpected ways. But the overall direction it takes also depends on social factors. This is easy to forget because our immediate experience of everyday bureaucratization is entirely caught up in new information technologies: Facebook, smartphone banking, Amazon, PayPal, endless handheld devices that reduce the world around us to maps, forms, codes, and graphs. Still, they key alignments that made all this possible are precisely those that I have been describing in this essay, that first took place in the seventies and eighties, with the alliance of finance and corporate bureaucrats, the new corporate culture that emerged from it, and its ability to invade educational, scientific, and government circles in such a way that public and private bureaucracies finally merged together in a mass of paperwork designed to facilitate the direct extraction of wealth. This was not a product of new technologies. To the contrary, the appropriate technologies took decades to emerge. In the seventies, computers were still something of a joke. Banks and government offices were keen on putting them into service, but for most of those on the receiving end, they were the very definition of bureaucratic idiocy; whenever something was terribly, obviously wrong, the reaction was always to throw up one's eyes and blame "some computer." After forty years and the endless investment of research funding into information technologies, we have gotten to the point where the kinds of computers bankers employ, and provide, are our very definition of infallible, magical efficiency.
7 hours ago Public
The bureaucratization of daily life means the imposition of impersonal rules and regulations; impersonal rules and regulations, in turn, can only operate if they are backed up by the threat of force.
this is a simple thing but kind of an a-ha for me. want to suggest as a pairing for anyone reading Seeing Like a State
Jul 22 Public
In the first study of the far right’s role in the climate crisis, White Skin, Black Fuel presents an eye-opening …
Jul 21 Public
Jul 21 Public
"In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce …
Jul 21 Public
Jul 20 Public
Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools …
a collection of essays weaving together magic, whiteness, indigeneity and colonization, the pacific northwest, domestic violence and living and loving through ptsd, alcohol and sobriety, red dead redemption 2. beautiful, excited to dig into some of the footnotes (esp about indigenous stories and their relationship to natural phenomena, like the Salish stories of historic Seattle earthquakes along a fault caused by serpent a'yahos: www.nature.com/articles/news050711-7)
Jul 20 Public
this book delivers what it promises but was more deeply researched and expansive than I expected—rolls in labor history, ones relationship to work, social programs, etc, to paint a picture of a cultivated and toxic modern relationship to work. was a concrete way to tie in theory, history, and work malaise, though I lost a bit of interest toward the end and petered out about 3/4 of the way through
Jul 20 Public
@ansate I really enjoyed it! now recommending to a lot of folks. I live in SF, so especially loved its relationship to place
Jul 20 Public
Jul 20 Public
When Alan Maimon got the assignment in 2000 to report on life in rural Eastern Kentucky, his editor at the …
