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You better free your mind instead
Feb. 12th, 2011 01:21 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: -5. It's been rising more or less steadily from -17 this morning. Seems like we left deep winter today.
On the bus on the way up to York one morning last week, it struck me that it's too bad everyone got so hung up on how many centimetres of snow failed to fall as predicted on Groundhog Day, because it really was a nice snowfall. We had an even nicer snowfall last Saturday, light and drifty, and it has been blowing around all week. It has been a nice, winter-y winter, especially lately, when the sun has come out. The rising sun on the snow isn't the setting sun on the trees, but it'll do for the time being. Looking out the window of the subway the other morning on the wasteland at Allen Road and the 401, I was thinking how the light of the sun low in the sky can redeem just about anything.
The other day, getting off the subway with a couple of little kids pushing in while I was getting off, it occurred to me that the adults who do that--it happens all the time, most annoyingly when the subway is at the end of the line and won't be going anywhere for a few minutes--start off as these little kids who do it, and end up as adults who do it because they don't have any adults to tell them to wait until people have gotten off. These little kids, taking the subway home from school, don't have any adults with them to tell them they should wait. And that reminded me of something I haven't thought of or heard about since I was close to their age: "latchkey kids". I sometimes think with amusement how "premarital sex" was one of the burning social issues of the day when I was a schoolkid (or so we were led to believe, at least); "latchkey kids"--those poor kids left to be raised by television, by mothers who neglected them by having jobs--were another. I guess pretty much all kids are latchkey kids now. (But they do have a Wikipedia article.)
Over the last year, I've become aware that a lot of entry-level jobs in libraries now seem to be volunteer positions. Last month, I came across this piece by Philip Pullman on cuts to libraries in the UK generally, but also on the push to have libraries run on volunteer labour. In today's Globe, there's an article about David Cameron's "Great Society" program, which that push for volunteer-run libraries is connected with--the basic idea of it is to have civil society take over various functions hitherto carried out by the state. Meanwhile, yesterday's Star had a column pleading with people not to go to Haiti to do volunteer work, because voluntourists are taking paid work away from Haitians who need it. And today's Star has a column on the sale of the Huffington Post to AOL, focussing on the fact that the Huffington Post largely lives (and lives large) off of volunteer writing.
All of this speaks to something that I've been less and less abstractly thinking about over the past few years: it seems like the value of all kinds of labour is shrinking away to nothing. I've been primarily thinking about this in relation to writing--which reminds me of this article from last week's Globe about how publishers have cut their editing staffs, so that authors are now required to hire their own free-lance editors. The article points out that while there is less work for editors, there are more people looking for editing work. This seems to be the way of the small world I live in. I was reading something else yesterday about income inequality somewhere or other--Toronto, maybe--that said something identifying the wealthy with those hooked up to "the knowledge economy". I guess that has to be true when you're talking about certain kinds of specialized technical know-how (law, medicine, real estate, finance, ... ?), but it still sounds strange from the perspective of someone whose forté is something along the lines of, you know, knowing stuff--which is, inevitably, associated with the very general technical know-how related to writing. But there are so many such people now, so many of whom are happy to volunteer their labour in their spare time, and--probably most importantly--the distinctions in the quality of their products is so little recognizable to anyone beyond those capable of producing at the highest level of quality, that you'd have to project the value of their labour, at some point in the future, at close to zero. (I went to a panel thing at York last month giving advice to students looking to get into careers in writing and publishing, in the faint hope that it might point me toward a life-raft in case my ship sinks. The panelists' two favourite words were--well, you know that one was "network". The other was "hustle". I like to think that these kids, who I like to think were mostly there (like I would have been at their age) because they like books and their highschool teachers flattered the short stories they wrote, were sitting there in shocked mortification that in order to avoid working at ... um ... where? ... can you just get a job at Starbucks these days, or do you have to, I dunno, hustle your way into a six-month unpaid internship first? ... they would have to network and hustle their way into unpaid internships that might, someday, lead to paid employment. I was, at least, not expecting to hear anything different.)
It's surprisingly easy to forget (though I frequently remind myself), in my current career situation, how much formerly paid academic labour is now being done for free by people like me, largely in the hopes that it might help in getting a job, sometime, that would pay them to do that labour--but why would people pay for it, when there are so many people like me willing to do it for free? The thought crosses my mind from time to time that in doing things like organizing conferences (not to mention giving conference papers and publishing--but those are things that you're required to do for free in order to get a job that pays you to do it), without a tenure-stream position paying for me to do it, I'm actually kind of like a scab--maybe I actually have an ethical duty not to do it.
I had been meaning to tell you some more about Intelligent Design--next time, sometime....
On the bus on the way up to York one morning last week, it struck me that it's too bad everyone got so hung up on how many centimetres of snow failed to fall as predicted on Groundhog Day, because it really was a nice snowfall. We had an even nicer snowfall last Saturday, light and drifty, and it has been blowing around all week. It has been a nice, winter-y winter, especially lately, when the sun has come out. The rising sun on the snow isn't the setting sun on the trees, but it'll do for the time being. Looking out the window of the subway the other morning on the wasteland at Allen Road and the 401, I was thinking how the light of the sun low in the sky can redeem just about anything.
The other day, getting off the subway with a couple of little kids pushing in while I was getting off, it occurred to me that the adults who do that--it happens all the time, most annoyingly when the subway is at the end of the line and won't be going anywhere for a few minutes--start off as these little kids who do it, and end up as adults who do it because they don't have any adults to tell them to wait until people have gotten off. These little kids, taking the subway home from school, don't have any adults with them to tell them they should wait. And that reminded me of something I haven't thought of or heard about since I was close to their age: "latchkey kids". I sometimes think with amusement how "premarital sex" was one of the burning social issues of the day when I was a schoolkid (or so we were led to believe, at least); "latchkey kids"--those poor kids left to be raised by television, by mothers who neglected them by having jobs--were another. I guess pretty much all kids are latchkey kids now. (But they do have a Wikipedia article.)
Over the last year, I've become aware that a lot of entry-level jobs in libraries now seem to be volunteer positions. Last month, I came across this piece by Philip Pullman on cuts to libraries in the UK generally, but also on the push to have libraries run on volunteer labour. In today's Globe, there's an article about David Cameron's "Great Society" program, which that push for volunteer-run libraries is connected with--the basic idea of it is to have civil society take over various functions hitherto carried out by the state. Meanwhile, yesterday's Star had a column pleading with people not to go to Haiti to do volunteer work, because voluntourists are taking paid work away from Haitians who need it. And today's Star has a column on the sale of the Huffington Post to AOL, focussing on the fact that the Huffington Post largely lives (and lives large) off of volunteer writing.
All of this speaks to something that I've been less and less abstractly thinking about over the past few years: it seems like the value of all kinds of labour is shrinking away to nothing. I've been primarily thinking about this in relation to writing--which reminds me of this article from last week's Globe about how publishers have cut their editing staffs, so that authors are now required to hire their own free-lance editors. The article points out that while there is less work for editors, there are more people looking for editing work. This seems to be the way of the small world I live in. I was reading something else yesterday about income inequality somewhere or other--Toronto, maybe--that said something identifying the wealthy with those hooked up to "the knowledge economy". I guess that has to be true when you're talking about certain kinds of specialized technical know-how (law, medicine, real estate, finance, ... ?), but it still sounds strange from the perspective of someone whose forté is something along the lines of, you know, knowing stuff--which is, inevitably, associated with the very general technical know-how related to writing. But there are so many such people now, so many of whom are happy to volunteer their labour in their spare time, and--probably most importantly--the distinctions in the quality of their products is so little recognizable to anyone beyond those capable of producing at the highest level of quality, that you'd have to project the value of their labour, at some point in the future, at close to zero. (I went to a panel thing at York last month giving advice to students looking to get into careers in writing and publishing, in the faint hope that it might point me toward a life-raft in case my ship sinks. The panelists' two favourite words were--well, you know that one was "network". The other was "hustle". I like to think that these kids, who I like to think were mostly there (like I would have been at their age) because they like books and their highschool teachers flattered the short stories they wrote, were sitting there in shocked mortification that in order to avoid working at ... um ... where? ... can you just get a job at Starbucks these days, or do you have to, I dunno, hustle your way into a six-month unpaid internship first? ... they would have to network and hustle their way into unpaid internships that might, someday, lead to paid employment. I was, at least, not expecting to hear anything different.)
It's surprisingly easy to forget (though I frequently remind myself), in my current career situation, how much formerly paid academic labour is now being done for free by people like me, largely in the hopes that it might help in getting a job, sometime, that would pay them to do that labour--but why would people pay for it, when there are so many people like me willing to do it for free? The thought crosses my mind from time to time that in doing things like organizing conferences (not to mention giving conference papers and publishing--but those are things that you're required to do for free in order to get a job that pays you to do it), without a tenure-stream position paying for me to do it, I'm actually kind of like a scab--maybe I actually have an ethical duty not to do it.
I had been meaning to tell you some more about Intelligent Design--next time, sometime....
