Jeff Hunt

“Interviewing one of Uber’s earliest executives, who demonstrated the company’s route-finding algorithms with the unbridled enthusiasm of a small child at Christmas, I couldn’t help but think what this company had really innovated was not some brilliant new solution to the traveling salesman problem, but the establishment of a new, lower norm of employee treatment. Success, growth, profit came from taking what might at one time have been decent, stable jobs and rebranding them as side hustles. The brilliant business idea was persuading people to expect less. I recall the same sensation the day a business magazine I used to freelance for named its CEO of the year: an airline executive whose hallmark achievement was figuring out a way to offload his workers’ pension and health benefits, thereby doing something truly spectacular to the company’s financial fortunes.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“There is something stomach-churning about watching a parade of Biden administration press secretaries offer insincere expressions of concern for Palestinians as the same administration bankrolls their butcher. It is a reminder that the Democratic Party’s relationship with progressivism so often ends at the lawn sign: Proclaim support for this minority group or that. Hang a rainbow flag one month a year from some White House window. Most important, remind everyone at every turn of how much worse the alternative would be.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“I understood why people would topple statues of long-dead slave traders whilst filming the whole thing on smartphones made by actual”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“Harris and Raskin present the meeting of human minds and AI neural networks as akin to contact with alien life. This meeting”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity