Shielded, therefore, by an illusory opposition between the market and bureaucracy, the new university management imposes systems of audit, evaluation, assessment and accreditation in the name of increased value for money. Yet this is deeply ironic, because the infinite regress of online forms and email chains leads academics directly away from productivity. In a related, widely read article for Strike! magazine titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, Graeber asks why it is that in advanced Western economies, saturated in the rhetoric of austerity, and supposedly reaping the rewards of modern technology, administrative labour has proliferated. “In a world ever more in thrall to the imperatives of profit, competition and market-driven efficiency,” Graeber observes, “it is bizarre for employers in the public and private sector alike to be behaving like the bureaucracies of the old Soviet Union, shelling out wages to workers they do not appear to need.” Graeber’s explanation is that long-hours pen-pushing – or mouse-clicking – is imposed on employees as a form of social control: it’s a way of ensuring that we are too monitored, busy and tired to raise questions or revolt.

The “moral and spiritual damage” resulting from the fact that “huge swathes of people…spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed” is, Graeber claims, “a scar across our collective soul”. Likewise, bureaucracy has become a ubiquitous cliché of modern academia, and to call it out seems naive, as if not accepting the “real world”. Yet it produces a disjunctive sense of playing along with a fiction.

07/08/18

The issue I have with articles, and generally liberal/non-leftist mindsets, like this is the idea that this illegal settler state can be fixed at all. That it’s worth saving. And the idea that it wouldn’t always end up like this. From an indigenous perspective, this seems like the only logical conclusion to an illegal settler state built on extreme violence, murder, rape, genocide, theft, and assimilation, right? What else could it possibly be? What conclusion could one have envisioned? But non-native people are deeply invested in the state, emotionally tied to it. In their minds, the thought of the state not existing at all = death, and Turtle Island repatriated to its indigenous population and lead and cared for by its indigenous people (aka the only real justice for us as native people) is unfathomable. Incomprehensible. And to be honest I think most non-native people would willingly choose violent facist rule and violent collapse over Turtle Island being given back to us and lead by traditional indigenous governance and kinship. To them, without the promise of property, power, privilege, and middle management, violent war is probably preferable to them. But that’s what colonial privilege does to you, I guess, it warps your sense of entitlement and reason. The illegal settler state you fantasize about will never happen, because it never can.

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https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/…/21/coming-collapse

06/29/18

I am not flint or diamond or any of that great hard stuff. If I am stone, I am some kind of shoddy crumbly stuff like sandstone or serpentine, or maybe schist. Or not even stone but clay, or not even clay but mud. And I wish that those who take me for granite would once in a while treat me like mud.

05/18/18

It’s dangerous to stop making things.

05/17/18