“innumerable sets of infrastructures in which people coped, played, ate, made friends, and loved have been destroyed,”98 leaving a barren social landscape of “huge zero-sum games, monolithic delivery systems in which every gain for one turns into a loss or burden for another, while true satisfaction is denied to both.” In that moment, I felt not dissimilar to the young gig worker who told sociologists, in a study of why precarious workers didn’t claim unemployment benefits during the pandemic in New York City, “You just sign up, say ‘I don’t have a job,’ and the government gives you money?
...more
