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inkskinned · 7 months

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the thing about art is that it was always supposed to be about us, about the human-ness of us, the impossible and beautiful reality that we (for centuries) have stood still, transfixed by music. that we can close our eyes and cry about the same book passage; the events of which aren't real and never happened. theatre in shakespeare's time was as real as it is now; we all laugh at the same cue (pursued by bear), separated hundreds of years apart.

three years ago my housemates were jamming outdoors, just messing around with their instruments, mostly just making noise. our neighbors - shy, cautious, a little sheepish - sat down and started playing. i don't really know how it happened; i was somehow in charge of dancing, barefoot and laughing - but i looked up, and our yard was full of people. kids stacked on the shoulders of parents. old couples holding hands. someone had brought sidewalk chalk; our front walk became a riot of color. someone ran in with a flute and played the most astounding solo i've ever heard in my life, upright and wiggling, skipping as she did so. she only paused because the violin player was kicking his heels up and she was laughing too hard to continue.

two weeks ago my friend and i met in the basement of her apartment complex so she could work out a piece of choreography. we have a language barrier - i'm not as good at ASL as i'd like to be (i'm still learning!) so we communicate mostly through the notes app and this strange secret language of dancers - we have the same movement vocabulary. the two of us cracking jokes at each other, giggling. there were kids in the basement too, who had been playing soccer until we took up the far corner of the room. one by one they made their slow way over like feral cats - they laid down, belly-flat against the floor, just watching. my friend and i were not in tutus - we were in slouchy shirts and leggings and socks. nothing fancy. but when i asked the kids would you like to dance too? they were immediately on their feet and spinning. i love when people dance with abandon, the wild and leggy fervor of childhood. i think it is gorgeous.

their adults showed up eventually, and a few of them said hey, let's not bother the nice ladies. but they weren't bothering us, they were just having fun - so. a few of the adults started dancing awkwardly along, and then most of the adults. someone brought down a better sound system. someone opened a watermelon and started handing out slices. it was 8 PM on a tuesday and nothing about that day was particularly special; we might as well party.

one time i hosted a free "paint along party" and about 20 adults worked quietly while i taught them how to paint nessie. one time i taught community dance classes and so many people showed up we had to move the whole thing outside. we used chairs and coatracks to balance. one time i showed up to a random band playing in a random location, and the whole thing got packed so quickly we had to open every door and window in the place.

i don't think i can tell you how much people want to be making art and engaging with art. they want to, desperately. so many people would be stunning artists, but they are lied to and told from a very young age that art only matters if it is planned, purposeful, beautiful. that if you have an idea, you need to be able to express it perfectly. this is not true. you don't get only 1 chance to communicate. you can spend a lifetime trying to display exactly 1 thing you can never quite language. you can just express the "!!??!!!"-ing-ness of being alive; that is something none of us really have a full grasp on creating. and even when we can't make what we want - god, it feels fucking good to try. and even just enjoying other artists - art inherently rewards the act of participating.

i wasn't raised wealthy. whenever i make a post about art, someone inevitably says something along the lines of well some of us aren't that lucky. i am not lucky; i am dedicated. i have a chronic condition, my hands are constantly in pain. i am not neurotypical, nor was i raised safe. i worked 5-7 jobs while some of these memories happened. i chose art because it mattered to me more than anything on this fucking planet - i would work 80 hours a week just so i could afford to write in 3 of them.

and i am still telling you - if you are called to make art, you are called to the part of you that is human. you do not have to be good at it. you do not have to have enormous amounts of privilege. you can just... give yourself permission. you can just say i'm going to make something now and then - go out and make it. raquel it won't be good though that is okay, i don't make good things every time either. besides. who decides what good even is?

you weren't called to make something because you wanted it to be good, you were called to make something because it is a basic instinct. you were taught to judge its worth and over-value perfection. you are doing something impossible. a god's ability: from nothing springs creation.

a few months ago i found a piece of sidewalk chalk and started drawing. within an hour i had somehow collected a small classroom of young children. their adults often brought their own chalk. i looked up and about fifteen families had joined me from around the block. we drew scrangly unicorns and messed up flowers and one girl asked me to draw charizard. i am not good at drawing. i basically drew an orb with wings. you would have thought i drew her the mona lisa. she dragged her mother over and pointed and said look! look what she drew for me and, in the moment, i admit i flinched (sorry, i don't -). but the mother just grinned at me. he's beautiful. and then she sat down and started drawing.

someone took a picture of it. it was in the local newspaper. the summary underneath said joyful and spontaneous artwork from local artists springs up in public gallery. in the picture, a little girl covered in chalk dust has her head thrown back, delighted. laughing.

#writeblr #warm up #this is longer than i wanted i really considered removing that part about myself and what i went thru #but i think it really fucking bothers me that EVERY time i talk about being an artist #ppl assume i just like. had the skill and ability to drop everything and pay for grad school.#like sir i grew up poor. my house wasn't a safe space. i gave up a FREE RIDE TO LAW SCHOOL. for THIS. bc i chose it.#was it fucking hard? was i choosing the hard thing?? yes.#but we need to stop seeing artists as lazy layabouts that can ''afford'' to just ''sit around and create''#when MANY - if not MOST - of us are NOT like that. we have to work our fucking ASSES off. hard work. long and hard work #part of valuing artists is recognizing the amount we sacrifice to make our art. bc it doesn't just #like HAPPEN to us. also btw it rarely has anything to do with true talent.#speaking as someone with a chronic condition i hate when ppl are like u have it easy. like actively as i'm writing this my hands r #ACTIVELY hurting me. i haven't been posting bc my left hand was curled in a claw for the last week #this isn't fucking luck. after a certain point it's not even TALENT. it's dedication & sacrifice.#''u get to flounce around and do nothing with ur life'' is a narrative that is a direct result of capitalism #imagine if we said that about literally any other profession.#''oh so u give up 10 yrs of ur life to be a doctor? u sacrifice having a social life and u get SUPER in debt?#u need to work countless hours and it will often be thankless? well i wish i was that lucky''#we should be applying that logic to landlords ONLY #''oh ur mom and dad gave u the money to buy a house? and all u did was paint it white and rent it? huh.''

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jayujus · 2 months

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rent a boyfriend! - lhs smau

PAIRING rich girl!y/n x broke college student!heeseung

SYNOPSIS in which jeon y/n is desperate to find a boyfriend ASAP because she needs a date for her family's mixer. her best friend, ningning, introduces her to a website perfect for this situation!

OR.....

drunk heeseung unknowingly signs up for a website on the dark web.

FEATURING miso of dreamnote as y/n, aespa, nana, enha hyung line + other idols occasionally

GENRE(S) fluff, crack, angst, love triangle, rent a boyfriend trope

WARNING(S) suggestive, kys/kms jokes, friends are mean to each other (lightheartedly), bit of parental neglect (daddy issues), y/n's indecisive af n accidentally hurts ppl 🧍‍♀️

STATUS ongoing

STARTED february 26 2024

COMPLETED -

KAIA'S NOTE taglist is closed, ignore timestamps... i am really looking forward to this smau! i will try to be consistent this time but i won't make a schedule since i never follow them....

PROFILES kwangya quest | super flops | y/n's fam

PROLOGUE technical difficulties

01 needy y/n

02 WOAH hes fine.....

03 cheating on you

04 cocktail party!!! 💬 1.0k + smau

05 roses are red

06 belieber vs jungkooker

07 cardboard jungkook

08 #JeonYnIsOverParty

09 jhené aiko is goated

10 who the hell is chaewon?!

11 lover boy

12 sea in the fish

13 eternal sunshine

14 mary cooper

15 girls is players too

16 when 2 people love each other....

17 i know

18 bitchless no more!

19 get help

20 2 man trumpet???

21 go easy on me baby

22 blues

23 tba

24 tba

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months

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Yanis Varoufakis’s “Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism?”

Monday (October 2), I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

Socialists have been hotly anticipating the end of capitalism since at least 1848, when Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto - but the Manifesto also reminds us that capitalism is only too happy to reinvent itself during its crises, coming back in new forms, over and over again:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

Now, in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis - the "libertarian Marxist" former finance minister of Greece - makes an excellent case that capitalism died a decade ago, turning into a new form of feudalism: technofeudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

To understand where Varoufakis is coming from, you need to go beyond the colloquial meanings of "capitalism" and "feudalism." Capitalism isn't just "a system where we buy and sell things." It's a system where capital rules the roost: the richest, most powerful people are those who coerce workers into using their capital (factories, tools, vehicles, etc) to create income in the form of profits.

By contrast, a feudal society is one organized around people who own things, charging others to use them to produce goods and services. In a feudal society, the most important form of income isn't profit, it's rent. To quote Varoufakis: "rent flows from privileged access to things in fixed supply" (land, fossil fuels, etc). Profit comes from "entrepreneurial people who have invested in things that wouldn't have otherwise existed."

This distinction is subtle, but important: "Profit is vulnerable to market competition, rent is not." If you have a coffee shop, then every other coffee shop that opens on your block is a competitive threat that could erode your margins. But if you own the building the coffee shop owner rents, then every other coffee shop that opens on the block raises the property values and the amount of rent you can charge.

The capitalist revolution - extolled and condemned in the Manifesto - was led by people who valorized profits as the heroic returns for making something new in this world, and who condemned rents as a parasitic drain on the true producers whose entrepreneurial spirits would enrich us all. The "free markets" extolled by Adam Smith weren't free from regulation - they were free from rents:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

But rents, Varoufakis writes, "survived only parasitically on, and in the shadows of, profit." That is, rentiers (people whose wealth comes from rents) were a small rump of the economy, slightly suspect and on the periphery of any consideration of how to organize our society. But all that changed in 2008, when the world's central banks addressed the Great Financial Crisis by bailing out not just the banks, but the bankers, funneling trillions to the people whose reckless behavior brought the world to the brink of economic ruin.

Suddenly, these wealthy people, and their banks, experienced enormous wealth-gains without profits. Their businesses lost billions in profits (the cost of offering the business's products and services vastly exceeded the money people spent on those products and services). But the business still had billions more at the end of the year than they'd had at the start: billions in public money, funneled to them by central banks.

This kicked off the "everything rally" in which every kind of asset - real estate, art, stocks, bonds, even monkey JPEGs - ballooned in value. That's exactly what you'd expect from an economy where rents dominate over profits. Feudal rentiers don't need to invest to keep making money - remember, their wealth comes from owning things that other people invest in to make money.

Rents are not vulnerable to competition, so rentiers don't need to plow their rents into new technology to keep the money coming in. The capitalist that leases the oil field needs to invest in new pumps and refining to stay competitive with other oil companies. But the rentier of the oil field doesn't have to do anything: either the capitalist tenant will invest in more capital and make the field more valuable, or they will lose out to another capitalist who'll replace them. Either way, the rentier gets more rent.

So when capitalists get richer, they spend some of that money on new capital, but when rentiers get richer, them spend money on more assets they can rent to capitalists. The "everything rally" made all kinds of capital more valuable, and companies that were transitioning to a feudal footing turned around and handed that money to their investors in stock buybacks and dividends, rather than spending the money on R&D, or new plants, or new technology.

The tech companies, though, were the exception. They invested in "cloud capital" - the servers, lines, and services that everyone else would have to pay rent on in order to practice capitalism.

Think of Amazon: Varoufakis likens shopping on Amazon to visiting a bustling city center filled with shops run by independent capitalists. However, all of those capitalists are subservient to a feudal lord: Jeff Bezos, who takes 51 cents out of every dollar they bring in, and furthermore gets to decide which products they can sell and how those products must be displayed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

The postcapitalist, technofeudal world isn't a world without capitalism, then. It's a world where capitalists are subservient to feudalists ("cloudalists" in Varoufakis's thesis), as are the rest of us the cloud peons, from the social media users and performers who fill the technofuedalists' siloes with "content" to the regular users whose media diet is dictated by the cloudalists' recommendation systems:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

A defining feature of cloudalism is the ability of the rentier lord to destroy any capitalist vassal's business with the click of a mouse. If Google kicks your business out of the search index, or if Facebook blocks your publication, or if Twitter shadowbans mentions of your product, or if Apple pulls your app from the store, you're toast.

Capitalists "still have the power to command labor from the majority who are reliant on wages," but they are still mere vassals to the cloudalists. Even the most energetic capitalist can't escape paying rent, thanks in large part to "IP," which I claim is best understood as "laws that let a company reach beyond its walls to dictate the conduct of competitors, critics and customers":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Varoufakis points to ways that the cloudalists can cement their gains: for example, "green" energy doesn't rely on land-leases (like fossil fuels), but it does rely on networked grids and data-protocols that can be loaded up with IP, either or both of which can be turned into chokepoints for feudal rent-extraction. To make things worse, Varoufakis argues that cloudalists won't be able to muster the degree of coordination and patience needed to actually resolve the climate emergency - they'll not only extract rent from every source of renewables, but they'll also silo them in ways that make them incapable of doing the things we need them to do.

Energy is just one of the technofeudal implications that Varoufakis explores in this book: there are also lengthy and fascinating sections on geopolitics, monetary policy, and the New Cold War. Technofeudalism - and the struggle to produce a dominant fiefdom - is a very useful lens for understanding US/Chinese tech wars.

Though Varoufakis is laying out a technical and even esoteric argument here, he takes great pains to make it accessible. The book is structured as a long open letter to his father, a chemical engineer and leftist who was a political prisoner during the fascist takeover of Greece. The framing device works very well, especially if you've read Talking To My Daughter About the Economy, Varoufakis's 2018 radical economics primer in the form of a letter to his young daughter:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538491/talkingtomydaughterabouttheeconomy

At the very end of the book, Varoufakis calls for "a cloud rebellion to overthrow technofeudalism." This section is very short - and short on details. That's not a knock against the book: there are plenty of very good books that consist primarily or entirely of analysis of the problems with a system, without having to lay out a detailed program for solving those problems.

But for what it's worth, I think there is a way to plan and execute a "cloud rebellion" - a way to use laws, technology, reverse-engineering and human rights frameworks to shatter the platforms and seize the means of computation. I lay out that program in The Internet Con: How the Seize the Means of Computation, a book I published with Verso Books a couple weeks ago:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

#pluralistic #yanis varoufakis #socialism #communism #technofeudalism #economics #postcapitalism #political science #rent-seeking #rentiers #books #reviews #gift guide

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jetblacknewyear · 1 year

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Mcr bus will be fun tonite

#Mcr #My chemical romance #Gerard way #frank iero #sorry my brain is like this #Sorry i cant post this on main sorry i cant be her #Resharing it on other social media is ok w the worlds most vague credit to me #Ls dunes #mcr x ls dunes x mp100 in my brain. Rent free #My art #Sadly

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virtchandmoir · 19 days

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tessavirtue17: Happy #NationalPetDay from Zoë and me to you and yours. We always love an excuse to love on our pups a little harder, don’t we?! 💞

#BuickPartner#BuickEncoreGX#PetFriendly

#tessa #zoë virtue #off ice #ambassadorship #buick #ad #photoshoot #social media #rent was due

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defleftist · 9 months

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Today I heard someone saying some stupid shit and then I learned that they’re a landlord and it made sense.

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femme-dor · 2 months

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“SHEIN kills our planet & uses child/migrant labor” she types from her latest iPhone after finalizing her Amazon order & driving her gas powered vehicle to the mall for NIKES.

“Theyre evil and unethical!! THRIFT INSTEAD!!”

A Depop notification pings. Her $200 Kmart Jeans has arrived.

#there is no ethical consumption under capitalism #yall hate on SHEIN and log off to consume unethical items anyway #that or spend half your rent thrifting #because you’ve been guilted by social media to do so #people are either fake or ignorant in ethical consumerism discourse #but usually it’s both & it’s from young girls who watched ‘the true cost’ ONCE #shein #zara #ethical consumerism #queue are so beautiful to me

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nando161mando · 5 months

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launa-moe-art · 1 year

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can't wait to meet these two in Inkopolis Plaza :D

#splatoon #splatoon 3 #spyke #annie #fanart #sketch #i wanna make a comic of these two so bad #or at least write something #knowing how anemones and urchins are natural enemies irl yet these two are business partners to help ease Annie's social anxiety...#it stays in my head rent free

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nico-di-genova · 4 months

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Have the haters tried simply not having Lance Stroll on their mind?

#he lives in their heads rent free #like just admit you’re jealous and move on #goddamn #never seen someone be so hated for quite literally doing NOTHING #his social media presence is nonexistent #his media duties are kept a minimum #he tries so fucking hard to stay away #and yet SOME people (looking at you know who) cannot keep his name out of their fucking mouths #anyway #Lance they could never make me hate u 🥰#lance stroll

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tiger-in-the-flightdeck · 1 year

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DC Social Media Part 5

Rent-A-Bat is online and looking for investors!

Prev | Start | Next

#dc social media au #jayroy #redarse #jason todd #roy harper #red hood and arsenal #rent a bat #yes i freaking duplicated roy's actual pfp for rent a bat for this #which took WAY longer than it should have

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tenaciousgay · 5 months

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Landlord bootlickers think landlords are important to the rental market because when they leave, the properties go off the rental market, as if the properties cease to exist, rather than being shifted to the sellers market and sold. This logic exists in a vacuum. The vacuum of pro landlord brain rot. In reality, landlords have taken property from the private sellers market, which otherwise would have been bought by people to live in, such as couples or familes etc, but instead have become part of an investment portfolio. This is where the propaganda begins. Landlord stans will claim that the landlord putting the property up for rent to be rented by, the family or couple or person who got outbidded on the private market by the landlord, is a good thing because it is providing a market. They will never acknowledge that the property has been horded, stolen right out from under the people who want to buy it to live in. Instead you get this cognitive dissoance about how the landlords are providing a service and we should all be grateful, and to never call out landlords on being scum of the earth when they pull shit such as putting a bed up on the market for rent, in a shared room, in a shared house.

They will never admit that by forcing a landlord to sell up, that it will be a net benefit to the rental market by reducing demand. That's one less family/couple/person looking for a place to rent and will be able to buy. That's a good thing, especially during this housing crises. There are too many people on the private rental market because they have no choice. They need a place to live, and the private rental market really isn't sutiable and the options are slim already. So this pro landlord propaganda rubs me the wrong way. Why should we bend over backwards to cater to them? Their apologists act like when a landlord enters the rental market that the property they are offering just spontaneously pop into existence! And extend that thinking to when landlords sell up, that the property ceases to exist. It's magical thinking, but I don't put that past much people in this country to be perfectly honest.

#greedy landlords #landlords #capitalism #ireland #irish politics #class warfare #propaganda #landlord propaganda #landlords are parasites #irish housing crises #housing crises #social housing #rent culture #housing should not be a speculative investment

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