i love your writing ed, it’s given me such a nuanced understanding of how these industries are actively creating a dystopian model for work and labor generally. prior to encountering your writing (and subsequently following all the scholarship you draw from most especially veena dubal) i had read Steve Viscelli’s The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream. while primarily ethnography, it also traces a history of how deregulation in the trucking industry in the 1970s and 1980s (another carter initiative like prudent man that flies under the radar). i find the parallels between the uber model and what happened to the trucking industry in pre digital tech times striking. what was once one of the best blue collar jobs is now one of the worst and the rhetoric of entrepreneur and small business owner is ascendent while the working conditions are objectively worse (cost outsourcing, piece labor, debt cycles, precarity) - all the same setup is there
A great piece, and I love especially that you illustrate it with William Blake, one of Ginsberg's crazy shepherds of rebellion in whose lineage you very much are.
This piece, and your work in general, makes me think of one of my favorite Blakean lines, from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell": "The poets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them.... And Isaiah answered and said, 'I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception, but my senses discovered the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared no longer for consequences, but wrote."
Perhaps the nicest comment I’ve ever gotten about my writing, if only because Blake (especially the prophetic works) has a massive influence on the sort of work I WANT to do with science fiction and tech criticism in the coming years. This comment has made my day, week, and month, thank you!
i love your writing ed, it’s given me such a nuanced understanding of how these industries are actively creating a dystopian model for work and labor generally. prior to encountering your writing (and subsequently following all the scholarship you draw from most especially veena dubal) i had read Steve Viscelli’s The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream. while primarily ethnography, it also traces a history of how deregulation in the trucking industry in the 1970s and 1980s (another carter initiative like prudent man that flies under the radar). i find the parallels between the uber model and what happened to the trucking industry in pre digital tech times striking. what was once one of the best blue collar jobs is now one of the worst and the rhetoric of entrepreneur and small business owner is ascendent while the working conditions are objectively worse (cost outsourcing, piece labor, debt cycles, precarity) - all the same setup is there
A great piece, and I love especially that you illustrate it with William Blake, one of Ginsberg's crazy shepherds of rebellion in whose lineage you very much are.
This piece, and your work in general, makes me think of one of my favorite Blakean lines, from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell": "The poets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them.... And Isaiah answered and said, 'I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception, but my senses discovered the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared no longer for consequences, but wrote."
Perhaps the nicest comment I’ve ever gotten about my writing, if only because Blake (especially the prophetic works) has a massive influence on the sort of work I WANT to do with science fiction and tech criticism in the coming years. This comment has made my day, week, and month, thank you!