Jake

“In Xi Jinping's China, it's uncomfortable for two strangers to go too deep into the subject of politics. There are no clear cut consequences for discussing politics. After all, this is preceisely how the system of censorship works, with a shadowy unease that looms over public conversations. Censorship is not made explicit, you just censor yourself. No one knows the consequences of critique, but no one wants to find out.”
― Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

“I don't know what's wrong with me, says Marianne. I don't know why I can't be like normal people.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“This is the intrinsic flaw, the infuriating circular logic. We operate under game theory conditions, under market forces, under the belief that we will lie to each other because someone else has more, and we have more to gain. And so we create solutions that further exacerbate this inequality. This is what happens when resources like food are treated as commodities to be bought and sold, to make money from, instead of a basic human right.”
― Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

“To borrow a formulation from Stuart Hall, race and gender are modalities through which class is lived. In the case of the tech worker movement, they are modalities through which tech workers of the middle layers live the proletarian elements of their contradictory class location.”
― Ben Tarnoff, The Making of the Tech Worker Movement