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So in the era of the audacity of hope, I made a case for the audacity of despair.
Complaining, to me, always seemed like a gift and an obligation, a path to prospective change that one should never take for granted.
There is no America that is “real” or “fake.” This insistence that we have an inherent divide has in some respects become a self-fulfilling prophecy. At this contentious point in our history, these divergent Americas are unified most, unfortunately, by a collective sense of pain. America is purple—purple like a bruise.
“New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling,” she said. “New York City has been taken away from you.”
At play, notes Byrne, was more than a rise in the cost of living. It was a shift in the perceived value of creativity, backed by an assumption that it must derive from and be tied to wealth. “A culture of arrogance, hubris and winner-take-all was established,” he recalls. “It wasn’t cool to be poor or struggling. The bully was celebrated and cheered.”
“the vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself.”
creativity as commodification: a taught skill that bolsters business prowess for tiny corporate heirs.
“This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it.”
She cites academic studies indicating that people are biased against creative minds. They crave the success of the result, but shun the process that produces it: the experimentation that may yield to failure, the rejection of social norms that breeds rejection of the artist herself.
Today, creative industries are structured to minimize the diversity of their participants—economically...
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Credentialism, not creativity, is the pas...
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Unpaid internships and unpaid labor are rampant, blocking off industry access for those who cannot work without pay in the world’s most expensive cities.
As digital media made it possible for anyone, anywhere, to share their ideas and work, barriers to professional entry tightened and geographical proximity became valued.
The possibility of success is used to call the majority of people failures.”
In expensive cities, the career ladder comes with a drop-off to hell, where the fiscal punishment for risk gone wrong is more than the average person can endure. As a result, innovation is stifled, conformity encouraged. The creative class becomes the leisure class—or they work to serve the latter’s needs, or they abandon their fields entirely.
creative people should not fear failure. Creative people should fear the prescribed path to success—its narrowness, its specificity, its reliance on wealth and elite approval. When success is a stranglehold, true freedom is failure. The freedom to fail is the freedom to innovate, to experiment, to challenge.
To “succeed” is to embody the definition of contemporary success: sanctioned, sanitized, solvent.
by geographical proxy comes with a price: purchased freedom for the rich, serving the rich for the rest.
Perhaps it is time to reject the “gated citadels”—the cities powered by the exploitation of ambition, the cities where so much rides on so little opportunity. Reject their prescribed and purchased paths, as Smith implored, for cheaper and more fertile terrain. Reject the places where you cannot speak out, and create, and think, and fail. Open your eyes to where you are, and see where you can go.
Urban decay becomes a set piece to be remodeled or romanticized. This is hipster economics.
Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.
Proponents of gentrification will vouch for its benevolence by noting it “cleaned up the neighborhood.” This is often code for a literal whitewashing. The problems that existed in the neighborhood—poverty, lack of opportunity, struggling populations denied city services—did not go away. They were simply priced out to a new location.
The neighborhood is “cleaned up” through the removal of its residents. Gentrifiers can then bask in “urban life”—the storied history, the selective nostalgia, the carefully sprinkled grit—while avoiding responsibility to those they displaced.
Hipsters want rubble with guarantee of renewal.
Adam Hudson notes that “gentrification is trickle-down economics applied to urban development:
“vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself.”
these slow-changing cities have a chance to make better choices—choices that value the lives of people over the aesthetics of place.
“I’ve heard several young hipsters tell me they’re socially-liberal and economic-conservative, a popular trend in American politics,” he writes. “Well, I hate to break it to you, buddy, but it’s economics and the role of the state that defines politics. If you’re an economic conservative, despite how ironic and sarcastic you may be or how tight your jeans are, you, my friend, are a conservative…”
All employers who launch businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods should have a workforce that is at least 50 percent minorities, 50 percent people from the local neighborhood, and 20 percent ex-offenders. The employees should be paid at least $15 per hour.
When neighborhoods experience business development, priority in hiring should go to locals who have long struggled to find nearby jobs that pay a decent wage.
Now we are zombies with nothing to eat.
Advice by algorithm, delivery by drone: this is what a dehumanized landscape looks like.
The rise in online shopping has been blamed for the demise of the mall. But some economic analysts see a more basic problem. “What’s going on is the customers don’t have the […] money,” notes longtime retail consultant Howard Davidowitz.
But the fall of the mall is a bigger problem for low-skill workers. Materialism may remain rampant, but now its spaces are secret. Retail work has been replaced with jobs in online shopping warehouses where “pickers” labor unseen in brutal conditions.
Do not rejoice at the fall of the mall. The setting may have been artificial, but the people in it were real.
The reality is that, in the “jobless recovery,” nearly every sector of the economy has been decimated. Companies have turned permanent jobs into contingency labor, and entry-level positions into unpaid internships.
Changing your major will not change a broken economy.
It is not skills or majors that are being devalued. It is people.
76 percent of professors work without job security, usually for poverty wages.
If you are thirty-five or younger—and quite often, older—the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people. Profits are still high. The money is still there. But not for you. You will work without a pay raise, benefits, or job security. Survival is now a laudable aspiration.
What must be made clear is that this is not a crisis of individual choices. It is a systemic failure—within higher education and beyond. It is a crisis of managed expectations—expectations of what kind of job is “normal,” what kind of treatment is to be tolerated, and what level of sacrifice is reasonable.
When survival is touted as an aspiration, sacrifice becomes a virtue. But a hero is not a person who suffers. A suffering person is a person who suffers.
If you suffer in the proper way—silently, or with proclaimed fealty to institutions—then you are a hard worker “paying your dues.” If you suffer in a way that shows your pain, that breaks your silence, then yo...
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To compound the suffering of material deprivation with rationalizations for its warrant is not only cruel to the individual but gi...
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One would suspect that a college student who can pay $22,000 to work twenty-five hours a week for free in one of the most expensive cities in the world needs little help making connections. But that misconstrues the goal of unpaid internships: transforming personal wealth into professional credentials.
“Given the high cost of living in key UN cities, such as New York and Geneva, undertaking a UN internship is an experience that few can afford, especially those from the very developing countries the organization strives to serve,”
“For an organization that prides itself on inclusion, diversity, and equality, the UN’s refusal to compensate its interns has created a system that counters those very
Young people who care about international justice—including those who witness firsthand its erosion in poor, repressive states—cannot afford to work jobs structured on noblesse oblige.
Unpaid internships lock out millions of talented young people based on class alone. They send the message that work is not labor to be compensated with a living wage, but an act of charity to the powerful, who reward the unpaid worker with “exposure” and “experience.” The promotion of unpaid labor has already eroded opportunity—and quality—in fields like journalism and politics. A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity.
Worst of all, unpaid internships in policy and human rights send the message that fighting poverty, inequality, and other issues of injustice is something that only rich people should do.
