So into this joint right now.
Check out the outposts in the Priests media empire:
Fantastic Tales of Late Capitalism || Don't Sweat the Technique || Words on Deck (print articles) || Chef Moves || Holla atcha boy
Fantastic Tales of Late Capitalism || Don't Sweat the Technique || Words on Deck (print articles) || Chef Moves || Holla atcha boy
April 25, 2012
April 24, 2012
The fabled KQTU2.
April 24, 2012
Keepin’ it green.
April 5, 2012
What I didn’t get to include in my piece on ALEC and public schools in Georgia and which some would argue is central and not peripheral/dispensable to the matter: that knowledge is power. Not in the cliched sense of knowledge being capital, knowledge = power, each new piece of knowledge being acquired power. All that’s debatable.
No, what I only briefly touched on was that education is a scene of control, the arena in which power relations are demonstrated, initialized. It is not what you know or don’t know, but what one is permitted to know versus normalized standards. The contemporary education regime, especially during the waning NCLB era, is one of ever increasing standardization. Standards are for determining who is excluded.
So, when I discussed the Jim Crow-era origins of school vouchers and widespread privatization, I should have included it more fully as a part of the longstanding mode of control vis a vis Black Americans: enforced illiteracy of slaves, pre-Brown education and the privatization following Brown, Green, Swann. And of course that which is taught about the Black experience, or not taught. White power was and is—in addition to its economic, political and corporeal manifestations—the ability to dictate what knowledge is, which knowledge is appropriate.
April 5, 2012
March 24, 2012
And while we’re at it, The Hunger Games presents a dystopian maximization of walled control. The most threatening activity (to the Capitol) occurs in the liminal space outside the walls—of District 12, of the arena, etc.
Left out of the movie is the scene of the Capitol’s attack on the Avoxes outside the walls of District 12. Avoxes (those deprived of the right to speak—roughly from in Latin: a (without) + vox (voice)) are those who exist outside the walls of the Capitol and the districts. The walls even contain speech.
Again, recalling Marcos’ “each nation into many” warning, here’s a reader’s formulation of Panem’s post-United States design:
March 24, 2012
Oh yeah, and add prisons to the list in the previous post. The single most effective sorting of the population in the US, especially along racial lines.
March 24, 2012
The focus on race has rightly consumed our attention with the Trayvon Martin murder, but there’s something to be said about the fact that Zimmerman imagined himself a cop—and became one, in a way—who patrolled the tiny purview of his gated community.
The gated community imagines itself as a tiny nation, a settlement in the neoliberal wild whose walls are monuments to suspicion and fear. Ownership replaces citizenship in the new republic of property. Subcommandante Marcos notes that as global capitalism proceeds, the new transnational order “doesn’t turn many countries into one country; it turns one country into many countries,” and that countries, having undergone neoliberal reforms, will have to “multiply their internal borders.”
Walls proliferate, both to keep in and keep out. Trayvon Martin was killed because he was Black, a racial outsider; but he was also killed because he was perceived to be an actual outsider, an interloper in the sovereign state of The Retreat at Twin Lakes. The new mark of suburban and exurban social exclusivity is now actual, physical exclusion. The 20 miles between your home and the phantom dangers of the city is now not enough; you must erect walls and guarded entrances, with an internal quasi-police operation. In the most fully formed iterations, gated communities house shopping and schools, parks and “public” spaces, offering the utopian hope of never having to leave, never being in danger.
Meanwhile, barriers dissect the city centers, with walls around public housing and highways binding poor and minority communities. The Israeli project in Gaza and the West Bank perhaps offers a blueprint, with highways, walls and checkpoints managing the Palestinian population like so many cattle. In preparation for the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian state erected walls to enclose the favelas. US rightists yearn for a wall lining the entire Southern border. At the frontier of global capitalism in China, new walls have replaced the Great one as functioning barriers, as the Chinese state has begun “gating and locking some of its lower-income neighborhoods overnight, with police or security checking identification papers around the clock.”
A global archipelago. Only capital travels freely. And only the worst cultural biases and modes of control transcend the barriers in order to enforce them.
February 23, 2012
This shit right here.
Yasiin Bey (FKA Mos Def) - Niggas in Poorest from Highsnobiety on Vimeo.
February 23, 2012
Trying to write about the most enigmatic couplet in Jay-Z’s entire oeuvre:
Up against the wall, tryin’ to pass through ghost-like,
Hear the cries from the tortured souls most nights.
February 23, 2012
So people are saying now, “You better have your retirement game on point because when you get older there won’t be any Social Security.” Your 401K or whatever. Because the entire Social Security Administration will be kaput, is what they say.
As if the dissolution of Social Security wouldn’t be the primary symptom of an effective collapse of the modern state. Like a 401K is going to make things alright when tens of millions of the elderly are on the edge (or past the edge) of starvation. Their families in utter desperation and danger. And the resulting instability and conflict marking everyday life. The idea seems to be that things will look just the same as they do now, just that Social Security will be gone.
How high will the walls of the compounds need to be, and with how many gun turrets, when we find ourselves in a safety-net-less capitalist wilderness of pockets of wealth—those with robust retirement stores (and food in the present)—and staggering poverty and desperation? What will a retirement account be worth when the social contract is effectively gone and danger and desperation define our experience?
It’s a strange way to plan.
February 4, 2012
January 7, 2012
Kool A.D. - Dum Diary
The fuck? This joint longer than Fidel’s reign n shit.
December 23, 2011
December 21, 2011
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
PRODUCED BY MIKE FINITO… #NEHRUJACKETS
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