Group items tagged

Contracting, like other gig economy jobs, increase insecurity and lower growth. I hate to belabor the obvious, but people who don’t have a steady paycheck are less likely to make major financial commitments, like getting married and setting up a new household, having kids, or even buying consumer durables. However, one industry likely makes out handsomely: Big Pharma, which no doubt winds up selling more brain-chemistry-altering products for the resulting situationally-induced anxiety and/or depression. The short-sightedness of this development on a societal level is breath-taking, yet overwhelmingly pundits celebrate it and political leaders stay mum.

As Foucault said of Bachelard a few years later, his characteristic approach was to avoid all defined hierarchies, any universal judgments: ‘He plays against his own culture with his own culture.’ He stood apart, separating himself from the mainstream, finding cracks, dissonances, minor phenomena that he could make his own. Poetry of every description was his raw material.

Indoors, in The Poetics of Space, the journey into intimacy is neatly evoked by drawers, cupboards, wardrobes and above all locks, although he warns, somewhat testily, against their use as gratuitous metaphors (and he is strongly averse to the idea of habit).

The wellbeing of the warm animal (or human) protected in its nest or cocoon or cottage from the bad weather raging outside is a primitive sense of refuge that we can all share, adult or child. The appeal of a safe haven translates into domestic architecture with such features as the accommodating Arts and Crafts inglenook, seats close by the fire, Frank Lloyd Wright’s enduring penchant for an immense fireplace buried at the core of a house, or even, a favourite 1960s touch, the conversation pit – with or without its trademark shagpile carpet.

We inhabit a world of niche interests and platforms and distractions, where everyone is supposedly paying attention to their own thing. Unlike the mass-audience days of I Love Lucy—a show that commanded a remarkable 71 percent of television eyeballs in 1953—today you can happily silo yourself from signals that you don’t care about. Our attention spans are shrinking. Axios reported this week that more than 70 percent of the American population regularly uses another digital device while watching TV. It’s incredibly hard to seize attention in 2018; there’s too much to read and watch, too much to look at.

As Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu writes in his book The Attention Merchants, Trump “cannot be avoided or ignored and his ideas are never hard to understand. He offers simple slogans, repeated a thousandfold, and he always speaks as a commander rather than a petitioner, satisfying those who dislike nuance. With his continuous access to the minds of the public, the president has made almost all political thought either a reflection, rejection, or at least a reaction to his ideas. That is what power looks like.”

“The way to disempower Trump is to ignore him, but it’s too hard even for his opponents to do it,” Wu told me over the phone recently. “It has to be a pure attention battle. If you were another network and Trump was I Love Lucy, what do you do? You can’t necessarily spend all your time criticizing I Love Lucy because that will just build it up. You need your own programming and to develop your own characters and celebrities who have to be as interesting and compelling. You need to have your own show. And I don’t think Democrats have their own show other than the ‘I Hate Trump’ show.”