#vicky osterweil

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

The industrialists and billionaires and tech gurus and all their bootlickers are pathetic; They are out of ideas. The reason so many are inspired by AI isn't only marketing and sunk-cost fallacy, it isn't only the promise of laying off those pesky humans or a lack of information or knowledge. It's because AI produces new images, more images, it creates more and more and more and they are overawed because they have forgotten how to create anything at all. They are fully lost. They have no territory worth fighting over: we don't want their exurban mcmansions or their identikit condo skyscrapers, their massive lifted Dodge Rams or their rent-by-the-minute e-scooters. Don't get me wrong, we'll take them when it's convenient, but the world worth fighting for doesn't look anything like theirs. Your bosses are already trying to replace the job you hate with an AI bot screaming "Yasss Qween". You could unionize or you could burn down a data center, but you won't be able to convince them that it's a bad, stupid idea by simply pointing to it. It looks like the future to them, and that's enough.

Vicky Osterweil, I Was Promised a More Aesthetically Pleasing Cyberpunk Dystopia

[anarchistin]

White people deploy the idea of looting in a way that implies people of color are greedy and lazy, but it is just the opposite: looting is a hard-won and dangerous act with potentially terrible consequences, and looters are only stealing from the rich owners’ profit margins.

Those owners, meanwhile, especially if they own a chain like QuikTrip, steal forty hours every week from thousands of employees who in return get the privilege of not dying for another seven days.

— Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting

[comicdissectionpod]

If riots are seen as inchoate, senseless outpourings of anger and resentment, it is also a commonplace that famous historical riots "give birth" to movements. The Stonewall riots gave birth to the gay liberation movement; the storming of the Bastille gave birth to the French Revolution; the Boston Tea Party, the American Revolution. This, of course, is just meant as a simple claim of cause and effect, a rhetorical fourish. But birth is in fact an excellent metaphor for rioting and its relation to social movement and revolution…. But in humans, birth is violent and dangerous, life-threatening to both gestator and fetus. With that understanding in mind, we can begin to analyze riots as births. Riots are violent, extreme, and femme as fuck: they rip, tear, burn, and destroy to give birth to a new world. -In Defense of Looting, Vicky Osterweil.

This might by my favorite page that I’ve ever read.

[sharpened--edges]

The tension between liberal declarations of victory over racism and the real lived experience of Black people in America exploded into full contradiction with the [1965] Watts Uprising in LA. […] What followed was six days of “insurrection against all authority,” as the local CBS radio station reported it. “If it had gone much further,” the news report said, “it would have become civil war.” More than 950 buildings were damaged, and 260 were totally destroyed. Looting and property destruction amounted to over $40 million in damages — nearly $330 million today adjusted for inflation. But the destruction was hardly wanton or senseless. Almost no homes, schools, libraries, churches, or public buildings were even partially damaged. The use of arson was strategic and controlled. The majority of Black-owned businesses were not looted, nor were those businesses that were seen as dealing fairly with the community. Signs went up saying “Black-owned” or “soul brother” and the like, which would (usually) protect a shop from rioters. On the other hand, businesses that had traditionally exploited people, in particular pawnshops, check-cashing stores, and department stores that operated aggressively on credit, went up in flames. Credit records were usually destroyed before anything else took place. Brave rioters even made attacks on police stations; one was set alight. The tactics were simple but effective, as Gerald Horne records in his important history of the Watts Uprising, Fire This Time. One common tactic saw a group of rioters, usually young men, drive up to a business, hop out, break out the windows, then drive away. Then cars of looters, a much more mixed group, split between men and women, young and old, would arrive and work to empty the store. The store would only be set alight once credit records had been destroyed and goods had been fully looted. Rioters usually remained nearby to make sure the building burned, attacking firemen with bricks and bottles if they tried to put out the flames before the fire had fully consumed the hated business. Tactics reflected effective communication and mobility among the rebels. Rioters transmitted information over the radio waves, used payphones to spread intel, and listened in to police broadcasts to see where cops would be deployed. False reports were called in to send police scrambling, at which point areas they’d just “pacified” could be re-taken. In areas they didn’t entirely control, rioters focused on hit-and-run strikes, then dispersing quickly to reappear elsewhere. All of these tactics would be adopted and practiced, with local modifications, in other riots throughout the period. The media described these as guerilla tactics, and police and reactionaries compared the situation in Watts to fighting the Viet Cong or the Mau Mau of Kenya. Rioters often appreciated the comparison: many, encouraged by the thought of Malcolm X, Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), Robert F. Williams, and local militants, understood their actions as guerilla warfare, too. Other rioters tied their actions to anticolonial struggle via resistance to imperialist war. Many men of draft age interviewed afterward said something very similar to what one rioter told SNCC newspaper The Movement: “I’d rather die here than in Vietnam.”

Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action (Bold Type, 2020), pp. 196–8.

[thelonguepuree]

As a mode of struggle, riots are marked by many characteristics traditionally defined as feminine: not driven by rational argumentation or 'proper' political dialogue, they are instead driven by desire, affect, rage, and pain. They are disordered, emotional, and chaotic. Importantly, too, riots struggle within the sphere of social reproduction: looting makes day-to-day life easier by changing the price of goods to zero, relieves pressure by spreading wealth within the community, and reinforces bonds of solidarity and kinship through mutual struggle and action. It is important to remember that, for the most part, riots are experienced as celebration, as joyous and cathartic releases of emotion: police and politicians who enter riot zones often cite this atmosphere as the thing that terrifies them the most. But riots are also driven by anger and loss. They emerge as an alternative form of care and remembrance for those the state's patriarchal violence has destroyed: rising up in mourning for lost children and in outrage at the domination of daily life. They can be ugly, bloody, and frightening. They are often protective, defensive struggles, but they are always about reproducing a community; as the study of riots in the United States makes clear, one of the main aftereffects of riots is a sense of unity, togetherness, and joy not normally experienced in the urban neighborhood, a unity that leads to the blossoming of dozens of political, social, and economic projects. Riots are communicative, but unlike protest, they do not aim their speech at those in power, at leaders or the state; instead, they are a form of direct communication and knowledge transfer among those outside the tradition avenues of power. As Black Panther Party minister of defense Huey P. Newton put it, 'In Watts the economy and property of the oppressor was destroyed to such an extent that no matter how the oppressor tried in his press to whitewash the activities of the Black brothers, the real nature and cause of the activity was communicated to every Black community.'

Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting

[smol-catholic-bean]

One Author's Argument 'In Defense Of Looting'

In her new book, writer Vicky Osterweil argues that looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.

Author Vicky Osterweil: “When I use the word looting, I mean the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot. That's the thing I'm defending. I'm not defending any situation in which property is stolen by force."

So she's defending mass shoplifting and looting, but she's "not defending any situation in which property is stolen by force."

Stolen by force. So... Shoplifting and looting?

[01sentencereviews]

Mary Poppins (1964, Robert Stevenson)

https://reallifemag.com/well-played-passive-attack/

[brotheralyosha]

Well Played: Passive Attack — Real Life

The interactivity of games impoverishes our concept of activity and participation

“It is ironic that video games, this most cybernetic and digital form of entertainment, is reified by a vulgar over-evaluation of its physical, manual attributes. Having a pre-designed material effect by pressing a button or pulling a lever is no more a form of creativity and interactivity than quiet internal contemplation: just ask any factory worker who presses a series of buttons over and over again whether they prefer to escape into their daydreams.

Video games are not more interactive or creative than previous medium; if anything, they are arguably less. Each video game involves a mastery of a series of digital gestures, controls, contextual clues, or modes of seeing and knowing. Playing a video game is largely about learning how to play by its systems and rules, how to get organized and efficient. And while the best games offer space for improvisation, reflection, storytelling, and of course fun, the relation between gamer and game is most commonly one of disciplining the gamer to a set of systematized interactions.

This disciplining, this rule following, as with all ideological inversions, is called interaction, even play.

Such interaction is crucial to our ability to work under the contradictory conditions of precarity: we spend our days in ever-shifting workplaces, where we must repetitively learn new skill sets, new technologies, new rules. Service workers in just-in-time stores must constantly adjust to new inventories, startup employees hop from tech to tech, health-care workers are constantly forced to adjust to shifts in insurance compensation and regulatory processes, educators to new testing paradigms and technological ‘disruptions.’ The work itself is repetitive, its conditions constantly shifting, needing to be relearned, retrained.

We play the same way. We learn the modes, gestures, and rules of a new game — if we like it, we spend perhaps dozens of hours doing so, until we achieve mastery and beat the game. Then we move onto the next, hopefully finding its rules and gestures that much easier and faster to learn, to master, allowing us to play with and within even more intricate systems, gestures, abilities, complexities.

In an unstable, shifting workplace, we must be accustomed to learning arbitrary nonsense and finding it fun and interactive. Video games show us how.”