Status Updates From Think in Public: A Public B...

"I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. [...] It's hollow."

"segregating bodies shapes how minds work."

"one of Shelter's more provocative features is to align immigrant trauma stories with contemporary debt narratives. If trauma repeats the past, debt makes for a present haunted by the future. [...] to complicate the myth of Asian Americans as a 'model minority,' the appearance of affluence may depend on both psychic and financial forms of specious credit."

"Sentimentality to me simply means a false emotion, whatever it is. It's just sort of the sweet side of cynicism. But it's false, detached."

"Perhaps, he suggests, religious communities are our last resort. Their transnational frameworks offer us potential models for collective political action. [...] it is in fact in the realm of religion that we find an 'acceptance of limits and limitations,' and an embrace of a power beyond ourselves."

pp. 49 - 50

"Companies able to pose as 'technology' companies can also command higher market valuations [...] Technology companies invest lots in up-front research but then scale [...] with relatively little increase in operating costs. [...] Technology companies enjoy soaring market valuations when they make their non-R&D labor force as low-cost and low-risk as possible."

"With workers hidden in the technology, programmers can treat workers like bits of code and continue to think of themselves as builders, not managers. Anthropologist Lucy Suchman has argued that much technology enchants in precisely this way--by masking the labors of production. Technologies like AMT, then, do not make dumber humans but rather channel the human factor into forms pleasurable for programmers."

"Head even argues that the financial crisis is a consequence of CBSs run amok. Banks like Goldman Sachs script their bankers to sell financial products--complex informational commodities--at a speed and scale that prohibits individual, human judgment from interrupting fast capitalism's flow."

"Automation doesn't replace labor. It displaces it. Historian Ruth Schwartz Conan famously showed how the invention of the washing machine mainly increased the standards of cleanliness domestic workers (paid and unpaid) had to meet."