Mary

“I think, though, that a natural reaction to black people being murdered on camera is the notion that living black joy becomes a commodity--something that everyone feels like they should be able to consume as a type of relief point.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays

“In any case a civilization which insists upon compulsory education must logically insist upon compulsory health of the children it educates.”
― S. Josephine Baker, Fighting for Life

“The writer Rob Horning once argued in his newsletter that datafication, or the process of rendering our lives as data, is "first and foremost, a kind of surveillance designed to impose classifications and norms on the surveilled while devaluing whatever ways they understand themselves. It's a way to encourage artists to minimize their own conception of their work and maximize its machine legibility." This is partly what's unfolding when Spotify encourages musicians to understand themselves in terms of their data.”
― Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

“We are enjoined to thank veterans, and them alone, for the supposed ease of American life, as though the Voting Rights Act, or the eight-hour day, or the minimum wage, had been wrested from a foreign power by movie-handsome SEALS in the Pacific. The American civilian is made to feel a signatory to two social contracts: the democratic one we learn about in school, and the imperial one, in which our enlightened, humane way of life is an unsustainable bubble in a dark world, maintained by an organization that terrorizes its employees, crushes dissent, scorns vulnerability, intermittently practices torture, resents the Geneva Convention.”
― Phil Christman, Midwest Futures