Capitalism pushes us towards private affluence. We aspire to acquire our own things. Shared things are seen as second best, something of an inconvenience.

[outputting consistently] takes away from the heart of it if all you’re doing is focusing on that consistency.

The exterior urban environment has unintentionally decoupled from the economy, and to spend time outdoors in these conditions is to re-establish a more direct relationship to space that normally extracts value from us at every turn.

… “surreal.” It’s a word Americans often reach for when something destabilizes the ongoing-ness of daily life, when life seems “not itself.” This “life” almost always means “one’s role within the economy.” To be pushed into surreality in America is to suddenly notice the strangeness of one’s relationship to producing and consuming. One of surrealism’s clichés is that it is “the art of the dream.” It seems, now, as if a long dream has ended. Rather than pushed into the surreal, we have been for the first time in decades dislodged from the surreal.

There’s a lot of talent pooled in Silicon Valley, and it’s hard not to look around at a lot of the companies here and feel that it’s a bit of a shame, a waste of potential. ​ There’s some conflation happening there, of moral value with economic value,

She looks like an Instagram – which is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the marketplace, which is how an ordinary woman evolves into an ideal. ​ Figuring out how to “get better” at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project – a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity. Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach. ​ The ritualization and neatness of this process (and the fact that Sweetgreen is pretty good) obscure the intense, circular artifice that defines the type of life it’s meant to fit into. The ideal chopped-salad customer needs to eat his $12 salad in 10 minutes because he needs the extra time to keep functioning within the job that allows him to afford a regular $12 salad in the first place. He feels a physical need for this $12 salad, as it’s the most reliable and convenient way to build up a vitamin barrier against the general malfunction that comes with his salad-requiring-and-enabling job. As Matt Buchanan wrote at the Awl in 2015, the chopped salad is engineered to “free one’s hand and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious attention can be directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data: work email or Amazon’s nearly infinite catalog or Facebook’s actually infinite News Feed, where, as one shops for diapers or engages with the native advertising sprinkled between the not-hoaxes and baby photos, one is being productive by generating revenue for a large internet company, which is obviously good for the economy, or at least it is certainly better than spending lunch reading a book from the library, because who is making money from that?” ​ It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time. ​ Barre was much too expensive for my grad school budget, but I kept paying for it. It seemed like an investment in a more functional life.

Mass privacy is the freedom to act without being watched and thus, in a sense, to be who we really are — not who we want others to think we are.

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves. ​ Her purpose in this project is to bring to the attention of the whole community, art that exists in its own context, ​ The artist creates a structure — whether that’s a map or a cordoned-off area — that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit and familiarity that constantly threaten to close it. ​ Actually, I’ve always found it weird that it’s called birdwatching, because half if not more of birdwatching is actually birdlistening. I personally think they should just rename it birdnoticing. ​ That ended up being two years. I recently asked him how he spent that time, and his answer was that he read a lot, rode his bike, studied math ​ In nature, things that grow unchecked are often parasitic or cancerous. And yet, we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Indeed our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

Stoller’s basic thesis is that private equity transforms corporations from institutions that make things and employ people into vehicles for extracting value, shifting that value toward a company’s owners, and then discarding whatever’s left. ​ In this climate, value of any kind is hard to confine to bounded places, even though much of the infrastructure of our society is still set up to operate under that assumption.

Fast forward to 2019. My lunch routine is a rotating cast of fast casual concepts, with lost vowel names ​ When I do go to a nearby deli, it’s impossible to ignore just how stark the socioeconomic contrast is to the Sweetgreen line. While the latter appears filled with people who stepped away from their WeWork desks, the former feels packed with the contractors underpaid to maintain that same WeWork. ​ We're no longer constrained to the Banana Republic-Gap-Old Navy trichotomy. Every facet of our daily consumer lives can now be hyper-segmented. ​ It's yet another area where technological know-how amplifies existing behaviors and practices. We've always signaled status with things like the little horse on your shirt or the expensive watch on your wrist (can you tell I worked in finance?) or the bag you carry or the shoes you wear. Those were social signaling table stakes. But now it's our lunch too. ​ Just next time you get lunch, take a good look around you. We are losing the spaces we share across socioeconomic strata. Slowly, but surely, we are building the means for an everyday urbanite to exist solely in their physical and digital class lanes. It used to be the rich, and then everyone else. Now in every realm of daily consumer life, we are able to efficiently separate ourselves into a publicly visible delineation of who belongs where. ​ But like in so many other areas of consumer life, we're slowly learning that mutually beneficial success at the micro-level just might have adverse effects in the macro.

This tide of packages is unlikely to recede. ​ If the arrival of automated delivery robots could lower the effort to sell or return goods to the minimal amount it now takes to buy them, users might exchange products through a new kind of logistical network that would make the process of acquiring and trading physical objects as frictionless as that of downloading and deleting digital files. Users might trade products among themselves through new kinds of logistical networks — a kind of peer-to-peer sharing for physical objects. ​ Minor physical annoyances that might have once subtly discouraged excess spending — such as the burden of carrying multiple items through stores — have been replaced with an interface that feels the same regardless of the quantities you buy.

please make more creative tools that 1) are not controlled by a publicly traded entity, 2) can be owned and used indefinitely instead of rented. artists having to rent their tools concentrates capital and ensures only certain people can create, concentrating *cultural* capital.

Sunday nights are all these confrontations, these dug-out trenches, and Sunday nights are prestige television. ​ and we watched the second season once a week every Sunday night, along with the rest of the world, unable to access the relief of that long lightless escape, but showing up every Sunday for a fractional hit of it, to sniff at the memory of the one time it had worked. ​ Game of Thrones has been a placeholder, an empty center. Its point has been to talk about it, to feel about it, to focus a Sunday around it. The noise and ritual around the show has been large enough that it was not necessary for the show to be good, and hardly necessary for it to exist at all.

Laziness is the taboo of our generation. I hope future cultures will look back and see that we were obsessed with working all the time. Anyone who wasn’t working enough felt ashamed. Be more productive! Your worth as a person is only as good as your job title / how much money you make / however you fit in to the production-consumption system. ​ If you think this would be a better way for all of us to live, I think the key to realizing it is finding an alternative value system other than identifying our human worth based on the work we do. This is difficult. Most people have no idea how to understand their place in the world except in relation to their job. Who am I? I’m a role at institution.

Being willing to ignore the weird appearance of AirPods makes a statement: if you’re okay with overlooking how strange-looking they are, then you must be somewhat proud to be wearing them. ​ Commodities like AirPods are social products. AirPods display the social message of wealth because AirPods derive their value from the invisible, social chain of production that’s necessary to make them in the first place. Thus, AirPods strategically glue together an ecosystem of luxury products. They are only so “convenient” because, by eliminating the headphone jack, Apple made the iPhone less user-friendly. ​ AirPods are disposable products that are also impossible to throw away. ​ On a global scale, our economic system is predicated on a disregard for longevity, because it’s more profitable for companies to make products that die than it is to make products that last. ​ They’re physical manifestations of a global economic system that allows some people to buy and easily lose $160 headphones, and leaves other people at risk of death to produce those products. If AirPods are anything, they’re future fossils of capitalism.

Whenever I speak with anyone new to a medium and insecure about their work, I think about this passage from David Byrne's "How Music Works," about how capitalism devalues amateur expression to encourage consumption. pic.twitter.com/B5fr3jNMS5— Kevin Snow (@bravemule) March 6, 2019

The depth of architectural thinking at work here makes a kiddie-pool seem oceanic. ​ It really is the perfect name, however, not least because it implies a certain emptiness. ​ It is a Vessel for a so-called neighborhood that poorly masks its intention to build luxury assets for the criminally wealthy under the guise of investing in the city and “public space.” ​ Unlike a real neighborhood, which implies some kind of social collaboration or collective expression of belonging, Hudson Yards is a contrived place that was never meant for us. ​ The presence of the elevator implies a pressure for the abled-bodied to not use it, since by doing so one bypasses “the experience” of the Vessel, an experience of menial physical labor that aims to achieve the nebulous goal of attaining slightly different views of the city.

That’s what we think the world should be like, but we all know it isn’t. You can’t make a living making music. Or art. You can’t even make a living taking care of children. I think this underlies many of this moment’s critiques of capitalism: there’s too many things that are important, even needed, or that fulfill us more than any profitable item, and yet are economically unsustainable.

The night of the election, at 3am, New York was the quietest I had ever heard it, absolutely silent, but it didn’t feel at all like being alone. The silence was stuffed to bursting with presence, built out of all the other people awake and not making noise, people standing in the nowhere of a moment further into the future than they thought they’d ever have to get, the sound of thousands of champagne corks stuffed firm in their bottles, un-propelled. Pulling yourself out of the maelstrom and observing, for once a spectator rather than an actor, briefly relieved of consequence, as though you could pass ghostlike through the mass and volume of bodies and no one would feel a thing. No one could embrace you and walls couldn’t hold you. A pet is the image of a more merciful world, a life made only of tenderness. I always tell him, because another one of the reasons to have a cat, to care for an animal, is to get to say things that sappy and awful, to be allowed to be un-nuanced and unsophisticated, to love in an absolutely uncritical and un-rigorous way.