Are you really able to resist Taylor Swift? I'm impressed.
The topic of walking plugged-in brings to mind a neat book (Personal Stereo) by a college friend who also went to my high school, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow. She wrote about the history of the Sony Walkman, and all the complex issues and debates stirred up by this seemingly trivial technological innovation that we now regard as a nostalgia piece. https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/personal-stereo-9781501322839/
It's interesting that the alarmist concerns about its pernicious effects have so little to do with the kind of tradeoffs you're describing here! I feel like you'd appreciate that book though (and Becca's thoughtful, very sociological style).
But also, your quote: "by the late twentieth century, mainstream economics had reduced the focus to just two: labour and capital—and if ever land did get a mention, it was just another form of capital, interchangeable with all the rest."
This reminded me of an book-in-progress I've been meaning to tell you about, which would be tying together some of these questions around land, capital and political economy: Free Gifts by Alyssa Battistoni, a political theorist. Her premise is almost the opposite: that there's always been this weird disconnect in the capitalist system between how we value most commodities, and how we exploit nature as a "free gift." But that there also a paradox in the very idea of "free gift" that turns some of the capitalist logic on its head. It also brings in critical work she's done on the free care work economy.
Her angle is much more academic and Marxist - and I don't think she focuses much on land itself - but I see so many points of connection between what you write about here and how she's described that project.
I fear there's an inevitable tension between recognizing how much has been lost and how that leads us to "question the basic underlying structures of almost every part of the culture I live under," and the challenge (implausibility?) of being able to question our most basic underlying structures all at the same time, convincingly enough that a critical mass of the population will embrace an utterly new paradigm upending everything they've known all their lives, at great (perceived) personal risk, sometimes against their own prevailing values and ideologies. Maybe we have to start with questioning just one basic underlying structure. Could land ownership be that Trojan horse?
Some friends who I thought insane for listening to podcasts at 2x speed cajoled me into giving it a try. At first it was stressful, but over time, but pushing a little faster for a few minutes and then dialing back, my mind adjusted to the speed. I listen at 2x to 2.3x most of the time, now. Not if there is good sound design, or if I'm not comprehending due to accents or poor audio, or if I can't hear well due to ambient noise. It's great for long interviews that I never felt like I could get through, but I really only wanted the one or two tidbits out if the whole thing.
Pocketcast has great features to modify listening.
Yay to walking without listening to something besides what’s around you! Walking as an act of presence in the world. Yes yes. Learning and unlearning and forgetting and remembering. Yes.
That quote, I hates it. Exactly my feeling--is there a word that could be more bereft of beauty, nuance, or substance?? Ugh. Fascinating about how the legacies of witchcraft keep popping up in our world, how many things are still tied to these legacies of misogyny, racism, property. That private property is a thing we've come to expect feels like the root of everything that allows exploitation--whether its the world, animals, women, people--if one thing can be seen as belonging to another individual, the whole entire structure of care and well-being for all fails. Cannot believe we are still citing papal bulls and explicit, colonizing imperial documents as part of a legal framework that is supposed to have precedent and therefore is in any way sound. Truly maddening.
Are you really able to resist Taylor Swift? I'm impressed.
The topic of walking plugged-in brings to mind a neat book (Personal Stereo) by a college friend who also went to my high school, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow. She wrote about the history of the Sony Walkman, and all the complex issues and debates stirred up by this seemingly trivial technological innovation that we now regard as a nostalgia piece. https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/personal-stereo-9781501322839/
It's interesting that the alarmist concerns about its pernicious effects have so little to do with the kind of tradeoffs you're describing here! I feel like you'd appreciate that book though (and Becca's thoughtful, very sociological style).
But also, your quote: "by the late twentieth century, mainstream economics had reduced the focus to just two: labour and capital—and if ever land did get a mention, it was just another form of capital, interchangeable with all the rest."
This reminded me of an book-in-progress I've been meaning to tell you about, which would be tying together some of these questions around land, capital and political economy: Free Gifts by Alyssa Battistoni, a political theorist. Her premise is almost the opposite: that there's always been this weird disconnect in the capitalist system between how we value most commodities, and how we exploit nature as a "free gift." But that there also a paradox in the very idea of "free gift" that turns some of the capitalist logic on its head. It also brings in critical work she's done on the free care work economy.
https://www.alyssabattistoni.com/research
https://terrain.substack.com/p/alyssa-battistoni-on-care-work-organizing
Her angle is much more academic and Marxist - and I don't think she focuses much on land itself - but I see so many points of connection between what you write about here and how she's described that project.
I fear there's an inevitable tension between recognizing how much has been lost and how that leads us to "question the basic underlying structures of almost every part of the culture I live under," and the challenge (implausibility?) of being able to question our most basic underlying structures all at the same time, convincingly enough that a critical mass of the population will embrace an utterly new paradigm upending everything they've known all their lives, at great (perceived) personal risk, sometimes against their own prevailing values and ideologies. Maybe we have to start with questioning just one basic underlying structure. Could land ownership be that Trojan horse?
Some friends who I thought insane for listening to podcasts at 2x speed cajoled me into giving it a try. At first it was stressful, but over time, but pushing a little faster for a few minutes and then dialing back, my mind adjusted to the speed. I listen at 2x to 2.3x most of the time, now. Not if there is good sound design, or if I'm not comprehending due to accents or poor audio, or if I can't hear well due to ambient noise. It's great for long interviews that I never felt like I could get through, but I really only wanted the one or two tidbits out if the whole thing.
Pocketcast has great features to modify listening.
Yay to walking without listening to something besides what’s around you! Walking as an act of presence in the world. Yes yes. Learning and unlearning and forgetting and remembering. Yes.
That quote, I hates it. Exactly my feeling--is there a word that could be more bereft of beauty, nuance, or substance?? Ugh. Fascinating about how the legacies of witchcraft keep popping up in our world, how many things are still tied to these legacies of misogyny, racism, property. That private property is a thing we've come to expect feels like the root of everything that allows exploitation--whether its the world, animals, women, people--if one thing can be seen as belonging to another individual, the whole entire structure of care and well-being for all fails. Cannot believe we are still citing papal bulls and explicit, colonizing imperial documents as part of a legal framework that is supposed to have precedent and therefore is in any way sound. Truly maddening.