#tech culture
Oh summer, you went by too fast.
Appropriation and Animal Rights: The Intersectional Activist by Christopher-Sebastian McJetters
A very valid concern that arises among intersectional animal rights activists is how to be sensitive to the needs of multiple groups without dismissing or appropriating their struggles.
Restrict your role to being the messenger. The best way to avoid appropriating a group’s struggle is to not do it at all. Really, you don’t need to; instead, amplify the voices of people from that marginalized community who are raising awareness about speciesism themselves. Preaching from a place of privilege about things you don’t understand is wrong. Instead, share what you learned from discussions started by people who have had those experiences. For example, I’m not a woman; but I frequently research the voices of vegan feminists who recognize why issues like female reproductive rights make speciesism a feminist issue.
Own mistakes. If you f*ck up, you f*ck up. We’ve all done it—and we’re all going to continue to do it. As much as I use my privilege to support women, I’m still a man who benefits from male privilege. As often as I speak up for people with disabilities, I still recognize that I regularly perpetuate ableism unconsciously. Just OWN it when you do. Accountability goes a long way to legitimizing your authenticity. Apologize. Learn from your mistake, and move on. You’re not perfect, and pretending to be will only get you into bigger trouble.
I’ve been noticing a lot of talk around this topic lately, and Christopher-Sebastian’s post sums up everything nicely. A lot of animal rights activists see connections between oppressions and make comparisons (e.g. the way we treat animals is comparable to slavery, the Holocaust, genocide, etc.) However, this is totally offensive to a lot of people. The “animalization” of minorities is something that has been perpetrated by the majority in the past (i.e. viewing minorities as “subhuman”); therefore, it’s seen as an affront to be compared to animals once more.
It’s important to realize that people who believe in animal liberation have a completely different mindset than those outside of the movement – we don’t believe that animals are “subhuman”, which drastically changes the dynamic. When we talk about the animalization of other minorities, we view it as evidence to how both human and non-human animals are oppressed. Non-AR people view this as dehumanization. Like in the blog post, I think it’s important to realize these differences in thinking and be conscious of how hurtful it can be to some people when their experiences of oppression are compared to those of non-human animals.
Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday? by Nathan Schneider
The United States now leads the pack of the wealthiest countries in annual working hours. US workers put in as many as 300 more hours a year than their counterparts in Western Europe, largely thanks to the lack of paid leave.
A new American dream has gradually replaced the old one. Instead of leisure, or thrift, consumption has become a patriotic duty. Corporations can justify anything—from environmental destruction to prison construction—for the sake of inventing more work to do. A liberal arts education, originally meant to prepare people to use their free time wisely, has been repackaged as an expensive and inefficient job-training program. We have stopped imagining, as Keynes thought it so reasonable to do, that our grandchildren might have it easier than ourselves. We hope that they’ll have jobs, maybe even jobs that they like.
The new dream of overwork has taken hold with remarkable tenacity. Hardly anyone talks about expecting or even deserving shorter workdays anymore; the best we can hope for is the perfect job, one that also happens to be our passion. In the dogged, lonely pursuit of it, we don’t bother organizing with our co-workers. We’re made to think so badly of ourselves as to assume that if we had more free time, we’d squander it.
Congressman Paul Ryan quickly expressed fears that, with affordable [health] coverage, “the incentive to work declines.” Just the thought of the non-rich working less than all the time, and still having health insurance, was an affront to his idea of the American way. He actually said, “It’s adding insult to injury.”
The time-saving gizmos that Benjamin Franklin hoped for are here. But rather than liberating anyone, they’ve become a clever disguise for corporate greed to sneak ever more into our days and nights. Few subcultures revel in staying at the office after hours so much as Silicon Valley engineers. But who really benefits from their late nights of coding?
This reminds me of an article in Jacobin a few weeks ago, Forced to Love the Grind. “Passion as measured by hours has put the workweek on a course of runaway inflation, to the point at which people are actually shortening their lives and endangering others — sometimes in sudden, tragic form — in pursuit of an ever-elusive ideal of capitalistic individualism.” We’re indoctrinated in “The American Dream”, this concept that hard work and sacrifice is the key to everything (success, wealth, basically all material pleasures).
Schoolgirls for Sale in Japan by Simon Ostrovsky and Jake Adelstein
Japan’s obsession with cutesy culture has taken a dark turn, with schoolgirls now offering themselves for “walking dates” with adult men.
Last year the US State Department, in its annual report on human trafficking, flagged so-called joshi-kosei osanpo dates (that’s Japanese for “high school walking”) as fronts for commercial sex run by sophisticated criminal networks.
In our exclusive investigation, VICE News host Simon Ostrovsky will bring you to one of Tokyo’s busiest neighborhoods, where girls solicit clients in their school uniforms, to a concert performed by a band of schoolgirls attended by adult men, and into a café, where teenage girls are available to hire by the hour. But the true revelations come behind closed doors, when schoolgirls involved in the rent-a-date industry reveal how they’ve been coerced into prostitution.
I’m not sure how I feel about white men going in and “exposing” terrible things that are happening in other countries and cultures. I liked how they showed the work of one Japanese woman in helping girls that have been exploited, but their comments on how odd and wrong the culture is made me feel weird. Sure, at the end of the video they stick in a note on how Western culture isn’t perfect: “It would be easy and unfair to single Japan out as the only culture to sexualize young girls. Tens of millions of dollars have been made on American pop culture, exploiting the luring gaze of adults on underage girls.” And then they go on to say, “But there’s something unique and especially unsettling about the fact that, right out in the open, schoolgirls are available for rent by the hour in one of Tokyo’s busiest neighborhoods.”
How can someone who watched the video help the girls and women they talked to? They didn’t post any links to organizations in Japan addressing the problem. What was the point of the video? To raise awareness? Or is this another example of white people going, look at this weird thing happening in this other culture, we need to save them from themselves?
