In a time when ‘to other’ has become a condemnatory verb, randos are the other. If the mores in a given ZIP code preclude snarling at people for their race, sex, creed or sexual orientation, those uncertain of their own grip on the social center can always dump on randos. It is a nice, clean slur, free of identifying social characteristics. It refers to the extras, the spear-carriers in the background, the people who apparently have only themselves to blame for their exclusion, those you’ll forget all about when you move away. Their being tagged with that handle may indeed derive, at bottom, from their race, sex, creed, sexual orientation, body shape, economic misfortune or anything else, but users always have convenient deniability at their service. After all, there are so many people around nowadays, perhaps more than all the collected dead of ages past — who can keep track? We rest secure in the knowledge that while those people over there represent arbitrary collisions of data, we ourselves are a result of long and careful planning.
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The eros of weakness and power that fuels public shaming shows up in one last uncanny and sickening detail of Sacco’s case: the delight her shamers took in the fact that, for 11 hours after she’d sent her fateful tweet, Justine Sacco was in the air, off Twitter, devoid of agency, both deaf and mute, basically unconscious. She was the very image of passivity and proneness and ruin. Her shame-mob, which convened and grew around this image in the hours before she woke to take it in herself, found it highly arousing.
prunvs: Flowering Desert, Chile The flowering desert is a...
Flowering Desert, Chile
The flowering desert is a climatic phenomenon that occurs in the Atacama Desert, known as the driest place in the world. The phenomenon consists of the blossoming of a wide variety of flowers between the months of September and November in years when rainfall is unusually high. The flowering desert involves more than 200 species of flower most of them endemic to the Atacama region.
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[gallery] prunvs:
Flowering Desert, ChileThe flowering desert is a climatic phenomenon that occurs in the Atacama Desert, known as the driest place in the world. The phenomenon consists of the blossoming of a wide variety of flowers between the months of September and November in years when rainfall is unusually high. The flowering desert involves more than 200 species of flower most of them endemic to the Atacama region.
Some time ago, identity and a sense of self-worth got hitched to labor and productivity. Consequently, each new technological displacement of human work appears to those being displaced as an affront to the their dignity as human beings. Those advancing new technologies that displace human labor do so by demeaning existing work as below our humanity and promising more humane work as a consequence of technological change. While this is sometimes true–some work that human beings have been forced to perform has been inhuman–deployed as a universal truth, it is little more than rhetorical cover for a significantly more complex and ambivalent reality.