The late roundup with mothwrites
Today's links feel a bit like I've made your breakfast with economic theory.
I always feel like I have two sides warring for dominion over my stupid thoughts. One is serious, voiced by the Batman. One is silly but charming, voiced by Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale. He’s still kind of the joker, but he’s not. What does this even mean? It means that I feel like everything in today’s newsletter is a bit serious, so I’m putting the silly stuff up the top.
A long read
1. Heteropessimism
I loved this article. I think the content is so interesting and I come up against this sort of pessimism all the time. I’ve seen it analysed in other situations, like white guilt, but I haven’t seen it done with “straight guilt”.
I feel like it probably links to my favourite discussion about labels and categorisation as well, because when we feel defined and caught up in the cultural labels, it becomes this individual thing that only we can deal with, and we can only deal with it by admonishing its very existence within us if we fit that label.
I only like this discussion when it happens AFTER we’ve acknowledged the problems though. There’s no skipping the critique that needs to happen of whatever label we are using. I think that defense gets used too much and by people who are being willfully ignorant.
On Heteropessimism: Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem.
Particularly for women, radically transforming heterosexuality might begin with honest accounts of which elements of heterosexuality are actually appealing—the house is clearly on fire, but is there anything worth saving? Such accounts are totally foreclosed by heteropessimism, and must therefore be drawn from conversations and narratives that—even if only momentarily—transcend a heteropessimist register.
For a long time, heterosexuality’s normalization allowed it to endlessly repeat, immune from any substantial change. Today, heteropessimism might actually obscure the extent to which heterosexuality is changing—even as it is also causing it. Without an immutable object of critique, the logic of heteropessimism falls apart. Perversely, this has created a renewed investment in the consistency of heterosexuality, a reinscription of heterosexuality’s tired features, even as this investment takes the disguised form of negative feeling. In this light, heteropessimism reveals something about the way we can remain secretly attached to the continuity of the very things we (sincerely) decry as toxic, boring, broken. Faced with the possibility of disappointment, anesthesia can feel like a balm.
A thread
2. Click thread, wait for your computer to artificially load something, read thread.
A movement
3. Imagine if someone was all like
I can excuse being a Raider, but being gay is where I draw the line.
A medium read
4. Two related ideas
A long read
5. Rocks have always been technology
One time at a bar my whole family thought there was a security camera in a chair. Turns out it was just a drawer. But I still think about that chair.
If you’re interested in the intersections between the textile and design industry, smart appliances, and Marxist theory (I know, it is such a large niche to exist is), then you’ll love this real life mag article called Cozy Tech.
The smart home, the authors write, “is an ingenious way of installing the infrastructure of digital capitalism in the private places that are hardest to reach.” It follows that the formal ambiguity of the smart home speaker is a useful adaptation, allowing its appearance to blend into the furnishings, to go unseen.
The consequent reduction in the amount of skilled labor required to produce textiles didn’t go unnoticed by workers, many of whom were bitterly opposed to the technology and “who saw in this migration of control a piece of their bodies literally being transferred to the machine,” as Manuel De Landa writes in War In The Age Of Intelligent Machines. From the beginning, computing was used to create fabric, discipline labor, and manage populations — textiles and biopolitics, bodies clothed and bodies counted.
Even before punch cards entered the picture, fabric was an ur-site for abstraction and alienation. “20 yards of linen = one coat” writes Marx, in a thousand different formulations, throughout Capital volume one. Human labor power “becomes value only in its congealed state, when embodied in the form of some object,” and for Marx, linen is an archetypal commodity and ideal example with which to lay out his concept of the value form. While most contemporary tailors would argue that 20 yards of linen is likely more than enough for five coats, the point remains. The transformation of flax into fiber into textile into commodity is a disappearing act, with the variability of plant matter and hard labor transmuted into something consistent, tradable, and covetable.