3 ms·

Rainbow capitalism has repeatedly failed my people -- from Dylan Mulvaney through to the workers of Grindr. Large tech companies (especially west-coast tech co

Rainbow capitalism has repeatedly failed my people -- from Dylan Mulvaney through to the workers of Grindr. Large tech companies (especially west-coast tech companies) have taken to using LGBTQ+ people as a sort of ornament, or worse, moral offset -- sure, BigCorp might be a ruthless monopolist, but oh gee look how many _N_ they hired, for several different values of _N_. Sure, we might be throwing whole sectors of the economy into monopolized penury, but OMG we have RAINBOWS and we are NOT AFRAID TO FLY THEM. The backlash against queers has as much to do with the use of my people as props by the ruling class as it does with the (still significant) freestanding prejudice against us. We will not get free until #GirlBosses are treated just the same as regular bosses: socioeconomic 'guards' in a globe-wide Stanford Prison Experiment. Separately, but not unrelatedly, the leveraging of Buddhist and other appropriated Eastern spiritual cant and tropes as tools of psychological discipline (Mindfulness for layoff anxiety! Yoga for shipping pressure!) is of grave concern as well. The future that center-left liberals want is a nonbinary gig worker meditating on a rainbow yoga mat on an AI-led mindfulness retreat. As a leftist, and a Buddhist, and a queer, I say: we have as much to fear from this 'near enemy' as from our far enemies. https://mindfulness-alliance.org/2019/02/09/near-enemies-of-mindfulness/ https://mindfulness-alliance.org/2019/02/09/near-enemies-of-...

eli_gottlieb 3y ago
Huh, nice to see Hacker News catching up to The Baffler. I used to work a couple floors down from them, before they moved to a nicer space.
- 1attice 3y ago
  I've been a reader and subscriber of _The Baffler_ since the '00s and I'm glad it shows :)
  - vGPU 3y ago
    I just went and checked it out. The first story: No Overtime at the Boner Factory Interestingly enough, it’s not even about the OP. They do seem to love their clickbait, attention-grabbing sound bites though. >Worst of all, a former employee had come forward with claims that Charney “kept her as his personal ‘sex slave’ for a period of eight months.” > A journalist visited, and he jerked off in front of her—“eight or so times.” Employees accused him of sexual assault. Flannery recalls an astonishing staff meeting at which Charney dropped his pants and railed against “PC bullshit” in a pair of pink briefs. As in - eight strokes? Or this happened on eight different occasions? And why pink underwear? Honestly, this entire story seems greatly exaggerated, and it appears to be their “style”.
    - 1attice 3y ago
      It's intellectual candy, certainly, but it's made with real fruit juice
vGPU 3y ago
“BigCorp might be a ruthless monopolist, but oh gee look how many _N_ they hired, for several different values of _N_. Sure, we might be throwing whole sectors of the economy into monopolized penury, but OMG we have RAINBOWS and we are NOT AFRAID TO FLY THEM.” Diversity hiring and carbon credits, for example, are both very similar in this case. “Sure, we’ve polluted the air you breathe and released chemicals of unknown toxicity into your water (we suspect they will give you cancer but hope to have moved our headquarters into a country that will give us immunity from the lawsuit in 20-30 years). But we’re carbon neutral because we sent some poor African country a couple thousand bucks!”
- Clamchop 3y ago
  That's not how carbon credits are supposed to work, but I can totally believe they got corrupted somewhere.
  - vGPU 3y ago
    It gets much worse. Read up on the Vera scandal, for example.
veave 3y ago
The fact that everybody either uses you or despises you should tell you something about yourself.
- 1attice 3y ago
  I'm not sure I understand how you could read either claim from the above - I make no universalizing claim. Yet some corporations do use us; and some people do despise us, and this is the reasonable claim clearly made above. This smacks of a straw man, on your part, therefore. It should tell you something about yourself that you perform such sloppy reading whenever the topic is one that makes you uncomfortable.
gmerc 3y ago
Please, kicking down on minority groups has been around forever. Let’s not make up excuses here. It’s just that society declared gay people in, so now it’s trans people that have to be out even more. Need an out group, otherwise someone will get ideas about wealth distribution
- 1attice 3y ago
  No one is making up excuses, gmerc. Please do not confuse explanations with justifications. And yes, the cycle continuously reproduces outgroups; I am describing the cycle, and how in this instance, corporations help spin the wheel for their own cynical ends.

eli_gottlieb 3y ago

Huh, nice to see Hacker News catching up to The Baffler. I used to work a couple floors down from them, before they moved to a nicer space.

1attice 3y ago
I've been a reader and subscriber of _The Baffler_ since the '00s and I'm glad it shows :)
- vGPU 3y ago
  I just went and checked it out. The first story: No Overtime at the Boner Factory Interestingly enough, it’s not even about the OP. They do seem to love their clickbait, attention-grabbing sound bites though. >Worst of all, a former employee had come forward with claims that Charney “kept her as his personal ‘sex slave’ for a period of eight months.” > A journalist visited, and he jerked off in front of her—“eight or so times.” Employees accused him of sexual assault. Flannery recalls an astonishing staff meeting at which Charney dropped his pants and railed against “PC bullshit” in a pair of pink briefs. As in - eight strokes? Or this happened on eight different occasions? And why pink underwear? Honestly, this entire story seems greatly exaggerated, and it appears to be their “style”.
  - 1attice 3y ago
    It's intellectual candy, certainly, but it's made with real fruit juice

vGPU 3y ago

“BigCorp might be a ruthless monopolist, but oh gee look how many _N_ they hired, for several different values of _N_. Sure, we might be throwing whole sectors of the economy into monopolized penury, but OMG we have RAINBOWS and we are NOT AFRAID TO FLY THEM.” Diversity hiring and carbon credits, for example, are both very similar in this case. “Sure, we’ve polluted the air you breathe and released chemicals of unknown toxicity into your water (we suspect they will give you cancer but hope to have moved our headquarters into a country that will give us immunity from the lawsuit in 20-30 years). But we’re carbon neutral because we sent some poor African country a couple thousand bucks!”

Clamchop 3y ago
That's not how carbon credits are supposed to work, but I can totally believe they got corrupted somewhere.
- vGPU 3y ago
  It gets much worse. Read up on the Vera scandal, for example.

veave 3y ago

The fact that everybody either uses you or despises you should tell you something about yourself.

1attice 3y ago
I'm not sure I understand how you could read either claim from the above - I make no universalizing claim. Yet some corporations do use us; and some people do despise us, and this is the reasonable claim clearly made above. This smacks of a straw man, on your part, therefore. It should tell you something about yourself that you perform such sloppy reading whenever the topic is one that makes you uncomfortable.

gmerc 3y ago

Please, kicking down on minority groups has been around forever. Let’s not make up excuses here. It’s just that society declared gay people in, so now it’s trans people that have to be out even more. Need an out group, otherwise someone will get ideas about wealth distribution

1attice 3y ago
No one is making up excuses, gmerc. Please do not confuse explanations with justifications. And yes, the cycle continuously reproduces outgroups; I am describing the cycle, and how in this instance, corporations help spin the wheel for their own cynical ends.