James > James's Quotes

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
― Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

“In many ways, the left has never recovered from being wrong-footed by Capital's mobilization and metabolization of the desire for emancipation from Fordist routine. Especially in the UK, the traditional representatives of the working class - union and labor leaders - found Fordism rather too congenial; its stability of antagonism gave them a guaranteed role. But this meant that it was easy for the advocates of post-Fordist Capital to present themselves as the opponents of the status quo, bravely resisting an inertial organized labor 'pointlessly' invested in fruitless ideological antagonism which served the ends of union leaders and politicians, but did little to advance the hopes of the class they purportedly represented. Antagonism is not now located externally, in the face-off between class blocs, but internally, in the psychology of the worker, who, as a worker, is interested in old-style class conflict, but, as someone with a pension fund, is also interested in maximizing the yield from his or her investments.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The general framework of formally recognised free competition remains, and the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.”
― Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition

“When automated decision-making tools are not built to explicitly dismantle structural inequities, their speed and scale intensify them.”
― Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Here we see that models, despite their reputation for impartiality, reflect goals and ideology. When I removed the possibility of eating Pop-Tarts at every meal, I was imposing my ideology on the meals model. It’s something we do without a second thought. Our own values and desires influence our choices, from the data we choose to collect to the questions we ask. Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“For Baudrillard, phenomena such as fly on the wall documentaries and political opinion polls - both of which claimed to present reality in an unmediated way - would always pose an insoluble dilemma. Did the presence of the cameras affect the behavior of those being filmed? Would the publication of poll results affect the future behavior of voters? Such questions were undecidable, and therefore 'reality' would always be elusive: at the very moment when it seemed that it was being grasped into the raw, reality transformed into what Baudrillard, in a much misunderstood neologism, called 'hyperreality'.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“It is not he who makes no mistakes that is intelligent. There are no such men, nor can there be. It is he whose errors are not very grave and who is able to rectify them easily and quickly that is intelligent.”
― Vladimir Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder: A Popular Essay in Marxian Strategy and Tactics

“Her extremely posh eight year-old asks her a question about the economy (!), and before she answers it, she asks her extremely posh five year-old "Do you know what the economy is, darling?"

"Yes mummy, it's the part of the plane that's terrible".

This is how revolutions start.”
― Adam Kay, This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor