Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee

  “The thing about dreams—and, coincidentally, this applies to work as well—is that once the dream ends you can no longer recollect what happened” (97). This truism is from Molly McGhee’s Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, a novel that explores the nature of dreams within late-stage capitalism. Dreams and work, the narrator writes, are unmemorable, though afterward “You feel that something has happened. A vague memory remains. The exhaustion is there. You are changed” (97). Clearly, both dreams and work hold deep significance for us—the dual-meaning of dreams is resonant here—and “the nature of both dreaming and working is infinite, and thus incomprehensible. We can try our best to explain it, to understand it, to conceptualize it, compartmentalize it, or track it, but the act of dreaming time is stolen and made unreal” (97). Work and dreams are incomprehensible.

So let’s try to comprehend them.

The titular character of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is distinctly unremarkable. He’s a young man, mid-twenties, with an exorbitant amount of debt, very few redeeming qualities, and a total lack of self-awareness. After a long stint of unemployment, he picks up a job at a hotdog stand in the mall—and also a more insidious secret career as a dream auditor. As a dream auditor, his job is to enter people’s nightmares and report on the elements that are most disturbing. He reports these to his superiors, who come and “sanitize” the dreams of the company’s clients. Picture this: you are having a nightmare that involves a mysterious shadow, a grizzly bear, and a bunch of children playing in the park. The auditor comes in and monitors, assessing the psychology of the dream and reports the grizzly bear. The higher-ups come in and suck up the grizzly bear in a vacuum-like hose. The auditor is swept into another dream, another janitorial site.

It gets more complicated. It turns out that the people whose dreams are being sanitized are employees of a company who is paying for the service with the nefarious idea that, by removing their dreams, the employees will be more efficient at work. Late in the book there’s the even darker revelation that all of the sucked-up elements of nightmares are in nightmare boxes in an archive and are being sold off as a second revenue stream for the Kafkaesque company that’s conducting the whole operation.

The premise of the book is pretty engaging, but I wish it went a little further. There are a lot of elements at play, some of which are really engaging, but I was expecting a little more variation. For instance, Abernathy’s direct supervisor, Kai, keeps appearing to sanitize the dreams and expels Abernathy from the site. Their relationship has some tenderness built in, but there are too many scenes where Abernathy says something stupid or insensitive, Kai expels him from the dream, and Abernathy longs to talk it out with her. Once or twice is fine, but I was expecting some more development there—even the revelations of Kai’s true backstory left things a little bit lacking. Similarly, Abernathy enters the same dreams repeatedly. There’s a narrative purpose for that, but with the premise of being a dream investigator has so much potential—you can do anything, so having recycled elements seems a bit flat. I kept waiting for an escalation that didn’t quite deliver. In one part, Abernathy works his way into middle management and discovers the conspiratorial nature of the organization from his boss, whom he knows in real life as a total prick. The revelation of what they’re doing is haunting, and the consequences are worse than Abernathy could have imagined. I’m being intentionally vague. But, even at the climax of the book, the conflicts seem to get resolved with, essentially, not a hitch. I was waiting for a big burst, but it didn’t really play out.

The book, at its core, is also a kind of love story. Abernathy is falls in love with his neighbour Rhoda, who is an older single mom with a daughter named Timmy. Both Abernathy and Rhoda are awkward with one another and can’t quite bring themselves together. One night, though, they bond and

He looks into his wineglass (a coffee mug) for a moment. He is suddenly overcome by a sweeping wave of feeling that he can’t quite put his finger on. Like he is going to cry out  of sadness, but not really out of sadness, actually, more like out of the inconceivability of life. Like life is an infinity of beauty, and he is only just now realizing it. Except, in realizing it, the beauty and the happiness are suddenly hurting him.
This is the first time Abernathy has ever been happy in love, which means that he is realizing, for the first time, that this type of happiness must end. It is a bittersweet feeling, holding both truths at once. (159)

It’s a simple exploration of a feeling but I think it really works. The balance of sadness and elation rings true—I, too, sometimes think about how the world is full of such infinite beauty that you can’t help but be crushed by it.

McGhee makes use of an allegorical, sometimes aphoristic style. She writes, almost, “from the beyond.” The omniscience of the narrator tells us early on that Abernathy only has a few years to live, for instance. There’s a playful style that points to the disconnect of characters’ experiences and their realities, there are interjections that read kind of like Ron Howard’s narrations in Arrested Development: Abernathy was about to have the best day of his life “...but really he wasn’t.” The book is framed on the cover as “riotously funny,” and I think I have a misplaced sense of sympathy because I mostly just feel bad for the characters. It’s like a dull ache watching their lives so drained of energy and life.

One of the most impactful moments for me was when Rhoda reveals the truth that governs her nightmares. She has a recurring dream of crawling across her driveway, not being able to reach her door, and her ex-husband arrives in his truck. I can imagine the dream pretty vividly and the terror it would inspire. Partway through the book, Rhoda reveals that she had two children. She describes how her father always used to say that deaths come in three. She tells Abernathy about deaths she witnessed and then the tragic story of her son eating mushrooms in the yard, being allergic, and dying while she was caring for her younger child. She narrates as follows, and the conclusion is such a great tragic intrusive thought almost as impactful as the mid-point of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust:

“When I walked into the yard,” she says, “and I saw him I called the ambulance. I called Derek and I said come home. Come home now. But it was too late. I knew it was too late. His face wasn’t — wasn’t moving. I went to go get, I went to go get Timmy. And we all sat together to wait. I held him in my lap. His perfect face. All three of us together. We were all together. All three of us were together but all I could hear in my head was my dad. He was just saying it over and over again. ‘What did you expect? At least now we’re free of it.’ I thought that. At least now we’re free of it. I thought that about my own son.” (200).

Following this harrowing account of her experiences, Abernathy, the coward, abandons Rhoda. At the height of Abernathy’s cynicism, he starts sanitizing all elements of dreams, sucking up the dreams wholesale. As it turns out, people’s memories are tied to their dreams and he starts creating zombies with no connections to the real world: just what companies wanted to achieve. He realizes too late how the banality of evil has crept into his life and makes a last desperate attempt to repair his relationship with Rhoda, which has a tender, if heartbreaking, turn.

Overall, the novel has a number of things going for it. It’s good, but not great. As I mentioned, I just wanted it to have some more escalation. I needed McGhee to give it a bigger push, to take some more wild risks, in order to give the book some more rich layering. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind has a lot of things going for it in terms of premise and social critique. If you’re into a magical realism Kafka / David Foster Wallace, it’s worth picking up. If you want an all-out dreamscape, you might turn your attention elsewhere—or fall asleep.

Happy reading!

Work Won't Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe

  Sarah Jaffe’s title should serve as both a grim reminder and a rallying cry for living differently: Work Won’t Love You Back. You can likely infer Jaffe’s central conceit already: we invest love into our jobs, which are increasingly exploitative. The introduction to the book and its conclusion offer its framework, which is somewhat complex. Essentially, capitalism degrades human interaction (consider how many times, for example, you have not seen family or friends because you have too much work to do or because you’re too exhausted from the week, etc. or how many times you’re meeting with a friend in a brief, transactional way localized around a coffee shop.) In response, we’re encouraged to find meaning in our work, rather than seeing it as purely transactional. This creates a context in which we must love our work, and that love paves the way for our own exploitation: we are willing to sacrifice our well-being because we misplace our love.

The argument felt resonant and reminded me of a line from Charles Bukowski’s 1975 novel Factotum that has lingered with me since I read it: “it wasn’t enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.” It’s a miserable double bind: either hate your job and live miserably most of the time or love your job and sacrifice your other loves to it, pursuing what you find meaningful. Jaffe is looking for an alternative.

I have to admit that I felt a little let down by Work Won’t Love You Back and that it’s almost definitely my fault. I built it up in my head that the book would teach me how to solve my unhealthy relationship with work, but the book is less of a self-help manual and more of a catalogue of how different types of workers are exploited. To Jaffe’s credit, there are a lot of well-researched case studies that trace a clear historical throughline. She offers incisive commentary on a range of industries and documents the labour movements that tried to change things.

When I consider some of the highlight chapters, of course I was geared up for the one about teaching. I was hoping for some more guidance on how to navigate the exploitation of teachers, although the chapter seemed to reignite some of my frustrations rather than offer me a clear solution. I should mention, at least, that the point is not to aim for individual action and to further burden strained employees—only collective action can help to restructure the conditions that exploit us. Perhaps because I have less experience in the field, I was more interested in the parallel chapter about academia. Considering the wages, publication “opportunities”, and unpaid labour that goes into research and higher level teaching, that chapter seemed a natural outgrowth of the teaching one and I found it pretty illuminating.

Another chapter that really spoke to me is the one about art. Arguably, artists are some of the most exploited workers out there. Everyone assumes that artists create out of love (indeed, all artwork is deep down a desire to express and connect with others). Since we all hold the fundamental belief that creating art is enriching to the human spirit, we typically do not see art as being something deserving of financial recompense. Think of all the times artists are paid “in exposure.” The chapter does wonders to expose how much labour goes into creating artwork and how little recompense it receives.

Work Won’t Love You Back leads to two chapters that are more explicitly focused on work-as-play. There is a chapter about the tech industry, where employees at video game companies are expected to put up with insane crunch hours because they have ‘fun’ jobs. Video game testers are sometimes paid by-the-bug, meaning that they might play games for hours with no remuneration. Jaffe mentions, also, the rampant sexism and racism in the gaming industry (as with other fields of work, and with women in particular bearing the brunt of sexist wages). Similarly, the final chapter discusses the unpaid work of athletes—with women athletes in particular maybe earning 20-30k while their male counterparts get high six figure salaries. She discusses the lack of pay—and often lack of education—for college athletes while their owners degrade and profit from them (at least one Black player drawing the parallel to the slave trade). All the while, sports workers trying to advocate for better treatment are routinely punished by management.

All this to say, Jaffe offers a clear overview of how different industries rely on our love of work to exploit us and how that love ought to be redirected to more meaningful forms of connection—-to our actual families, our actual friends. When we have a lack of love, we are more susceptible to the wiles of capitalism—more likely to spend, to accept worse for ourselves, and so on. When our main source of love is our own love of work, we will continue to let work crush us.

So: Work Won’t Love You Back. It’s time to take a step back and find love for ourselves.

Happy reading!

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

  The irony of posting this online and advertising it via Facebook is already a significant problem—and I’m concerned that I’m succumbing to the “inevitabilism” of simply accepting exploitation at the hands of corporations, recognizing that they’ll use my information as they see fit. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, she explores how corporate interests have established a system to exploit us for information. There’s the phrase that “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product,” but Zuboff suggests that surveillance capitalism goes even further: not only does it render us and our information products, but it uses our information to modify our behaviours and enact corporate interests on the world.

The three guiding questions of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism are: who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides? Those three questions are a mantra that repeats throughout the book. In every situation, we need to think about what information is out there, who decides how that information is collected and distributed, and who decides who decides to entrust with our data. It’s surveillance, data-driven capitalism all the way to the top and Zuboff outlines the different layers of how we are consistently categorized.

In the book, there is a broad overview of data surveillance and, I’d say, it reads as a little repetitive. The big picture is not exactly revolutionary: we all know that we’re being spied on constantly. What I would like to hear more about is how to resist. What are the precedents we have to look to for how to prevent exploitation by corporations and resist their manipulation.

Where The Age of Surveillance Capitalism shines is in the examination of specific egregious actions by corporations. If you ever needed a reason to hate Google, one of the most resonant anecdotes from the book is about Google Earth. When Google Earth and Street View were taking off, there were a number of controversies, including them being blamed for aiding in a deadly terrorist attack in Mumbai. The Google representative “cleverly equated any resistance to Google’s incursions with the anti-freedom of expression interests of authoritarian governments and their closed information societies.” Resistance, though, persisted. The citizens of Broughton, a small village in England, blocked a street view car that tried to breach the village perimeter. It was an “unwelcome intrusion. Privacy International then submitted a complaint to the U.K. authority, “citing more than 200 reports from people who were identifiable on street view images and demanded that the service be suspended.” The Google rep defended the use of Google’s street view and said that their information was good for the economy and good for people as individuals. He voiced the classic defence that “it’s about giving people about powerful information so that they can make better choices.” 

Zuboff offers the counterpoint: “the firm wants to enable people to make better choices, but not if those choices impede Google’s own imperatives.” She continues, “Google’s ideal society is a population of distant users, not a citizenry. It idealizes people who are informed, but only in the ways that the corporation chooses. It means for us to be docile, harmonious, and, above all, grateful.” It’s a poignant phrase that returns to the questions: who knows? who decides? who decides who decides? Essentially, it’s all about what information corporations want us to have—and we see that all across politics. Which platforms offer which information? How do TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, decide what to show you? It’s the classic problem of the subaltern speaking: can we ever actually hear the voice of others? There always seems to be a barrier there.

Zuboff continues on to discuss the idea of Google’s street view as a camouflaged and covert datasweep. The street view cars were secretly collecting personal data from private WiFi networks. Despite Google denying the charges, “insisting that it was gathering only publicly broadcast WiFi network names and the identifying addresses of WiFi routers, not not personal information sent over the network.” However, an independent analysis by German security experts “proved decisively that streetview’s cars were extracting unencrypted personal information from homes” They intercepted and stored payload data: personal information, entire e-mails, URLs, passwords, names, telephone numbers, credit information, chat transcripts, records of online dating, pornography, browsing information, medical data, photos, videos, and audio files. The information could all be stitched together for “an identifiable profile of a person.”

We’ve all had the experience of having a personal conversation and then all of a sudden you start getting ads on your phone for the very thing you were talking about. It’s so difficult to parse how much of those ads are the result of companies spying on us vs. how much of what we talk about is already influenced by the profiles companies have on us. The cycle is such a challenge to unencrypt, as it were.

Overall, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a reasonably good overview of the problem of data collection on consumers. While it’s a bit too broad to feel impactful, the specific moments are worth examining. I’d like to learn more about how to resist, especially because surveillance capitalism is such a rapidly accelerating beast to contend with.

After opening this you’ll probably get all kinds of new ads about books to buy and whatever. You’re welcome.

Happy reading; unhappy Googling!

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky

  There are few political thinkers that have been as prolific and formative as Noam Chomsky. Whether it’s through Manufacturing Consent or audio recordings of his voice thrown into the beginning or end of punk songs, it seemed his influence throughout the 90s and early 2000s was inescapable, and for good reason.

Somewhat surprisingly, though, I have actually read very little of Chomsky’s work. The odd book or anthology here and there, and so forth. When I read his work on media production and analysis, I had the proverbial moment of scales falling from my eyes. I also find that he is consistently worldly, aware of all kinds of social movements around the globe, which is perhaps one of the factors that drew me towards reading his book How the World Works. 

How the World Works is a collection of interviews with David Barsamian and edited for focus and clarity by Arthur Naiman. The interviews discuss U.S. foreign policy and how it has operated in particular areas, like NIcaragua, Guatemala, Panama, Southeast Asia, and beyond. There is also discussion of class confrontations within the U.S. itself, particularly with respect to the drug war, the health care system, and exploitation of workers by corporations. That exploitation then takes a global focus, considering how the global economy and free trade in particular has impacted the “Third-World.” There are also various sections of miscellany in which Chomsky offers some more general ideas about things like postmodernism and popular resistance.

In short, the book covers a lot of ground, if shortly. One of the issues of having a selection of interviews is that they are decontextualized from their original source. This volume was published in 2011 and it relies on interviews from even earlier; not that things have changed that much, but the nature of a discussion is that it is ephemeral. As a result, the book does not and cannot offer the most up-to-date discourse on issues like, for instance, the current state of affairs in the Middle East. The other issue is that the conversations often seem to come up short; Chomsky will make an interesting statement and then the section simply ends. If anything, the book has shown me how much more enriching it is for me, personally, when books follow a cohesive structure and really delve into one topic. Chomsky certainly does that elsewhere but the compilation format of text here takes away from the incisiveness of his thought. Also, if somewhat ironically, the observations here offered are not exactly revolutionary. Perhaps at the time Chomsky’s dissidence was unique, but now many of his observations are commonplace—it’s the curse of being a trailblazer, I suppose, that the Left has popularized the ideas to a point where they are no longer, in my eyes, controversial.

That’s not to say he doesn’t offer some excellent commentary rooted in helpful historical frameworks. Something I really appreciate about Chomsky is that he is so informed about popular movements around the world that he never comes across as being a partisan hack. Even on some topics we take for granted—like NAFTA, say—he offers a balanced view that remains critical of corporate power while subverting what we in the general populace have accepted and been sold by corporate-owned media. 

Just a brief tangent here: in one section, Chomsky discusses how in one of his books he was challenged as being a pedant because of his use of footnotes and he pointed to the double-edged sword. If you don’t use footnotes, the right will accuse you of making things up. If you use footnotes and document all of your research, you’re seen as a pedant. Go figure.

Incidentally, one of the things he discusses is that the language of politics is deliberately obscure in order to make it impossible for the masses to talk about them coherently. In turn, we cannot understand what is happening in the world and therefore cannot take action. One example he provides is the discussion of what “socialism” means and the confusion that is strewn about it. He then targets the term “special interest” in common parlance. Chomsky notes that the Republicans in the U.S. have often accused Democrats of being the party of “special interests,” by which they meant “women, labor, the elderly, the young, farmers — in short, the general population.” Chomsky then suggests that there was one area of the population that was never listed as a special interest: corporations and business. It’s funny how political motivations can be masked so easily.

Chomsky takes that discussion further and notes that Democrats then suggested they were not the party of special interests and that they served the national interest, too. What I found particularly surprising is how Chomsky then suggests that the Democrats lack the “single-minded class consciousness of their Republican opponents.” He discusses how the Republicans are aware of their status as owners and managers in class war against the population, implying that they have adopted (bastardized) Marxist rhetoric and concepts and resorting to “jingoist hysteria, fear, and terror, awe of great leaders, and the other standard devices of population control.” Chomsky says that, by comparison, the Democrats are less clear about their motivations and thus lose in the propaganda war. Of course, we couldn’t possibly look to the contemporary United States to find a readymade example in the recent election—surely!

In pointing to the term “conservative,” Chomsky notes they are “advocates of a powerful state that interferes massively in the economy and in social life. They advocate huge state expenditures and a post-war peak of protectionist measures and insurance against market risk, narrowing individual liberties through legislation and court packing, protecting the holy state from unwarranted inspection by the irrelevant citizenry. In short, those programs that are the precise opposite of traditional conservatism.” They are in allegiance to the people that own the country. Personally, I’m more inclined towards Zadie Smith’s definition of conservatives as arsonists, particularly now. Although I’d perhaps add that they are consistently shadows: conservatives pretend to advocate for minimal spending and “axing the tax” and whatnot while secretly spending more than liberal governments at every turn. They may claim desire for a free market while legislating where trade can happen. They may claim to be the popular and populist party but repeal protections on lawful protest. But I digress,

The point is that Chomsky reveals the complexity of language that aims to bar people from political action. Even the supposedly simple categorizations of right and left are not as easily understood. Actually, one of the most poignant discussions in that regard is the discussion of freedom as a concept. The right often makes the claim that the left wants to take away freedoms (while they themselves are literally taking away freedoms…). Chomsky reframes the discussion of freedom and rights, giving several notable examples. We may opt to limit someone’s freedom to smoke in public—sure, it’s a reduction of freedom—but that’s because it impacts others’ right to life and good health. Red lights limit our freedom to drive as we wish to get to work, but protect the rights of the little girl crossing the street. In reframing the discussion, I think it really places good emphasis on what the Left and the Right are after: protection for the vulnerable vs. unmitigated actions.

Chomsky also gave some compelling stats in that regard; I’d be curious where the data originated at the time of his citing it and then what the data looks like now. About 90%-95% of people polled suggested that corporations had a responsibility to limit profits and redistribute wealth among their workers. I feel like they’ve been winning the PR battle and people now think that it’s some kind of Commie Plot to think that corporations should be paying their workers more—although, given the response to the recent CEO shooter, perhaps I’m mistaken.

Returning to a few of the more controversial points regarding language and politics, I was interested in Chomsky’s brief comments on postmodernism. Postmodernism is often presented as a leftist philosophy (cf. Jordan Peterson—or better yet don’t.) Chomsky criticizes its jargon and its oblique nature as actually inhibiting popular action and suggests that at least some of the critiques postmodernism has to offer are formed in ignorance. Their critique of systems as nonsense is somewhat valuable, but at the same time allows the logical systems to be owned exclusively by those who benefit from them. What good does it do, for instance, to expose the fallacies of the economic system to those who are continually exploited by it? Similarly, Chomsky resists the phrase “speaking truth to power” on very sensible grounds—power already knows the truth. We must speak truth about power to and with the workers and the underclass in order to better challenge it.

Of course, that’s where everything leads: how do we change the world? Chomsky offers an interesting discussion of how that question gets framed along the lines of privilege. For oppressed people, when he gives talks they say, “Here’s what we’re doing. How do we improve?” For privileged people, when he gives talks they say, “What’s the solution?” Chomsky’s answer is always for people to organize and continue to do the relentless work of challenging power. I have to admit my own privilege here, because it seems very hard. Chomsky himself recognizes that the workers are left with no time to organize—that’s by design. He notes how student organization is at an all-time low. Everyone is struggling, thus they have no time or energy to resist. The question for me then becomes, how do we liberate people enough that they can continue their work fighting for social causes? I appreciate that there are organizations already doing the work and you just have to join them, but then I also worry about how only the relatively privileged are able to take action on behalf of those who are even more pressed—but then we run into a vanguard situation. I don’t know how to resolve that contradiction.

I would also posit my own idea here for why people are not taking action like they used to or why privileged people keep asking, “What can be done?” The reality is this: people want to see the needle move. We may take action over and over and over and volunteer every weekend but the gains are not immediate. It’s hard to envision continuing to do the work if you feel there’s no effect, and until we can see that needle move we will continually have people asking “What is the solution?” I don’t think that’s a bad thing, per se. It’s not an ill-intentioned question; in my mind, it’s one of pragmatism: where can we see the most gains?

Chomsky refers to a group in (I believe) Brazil a few times. He talks about how the outside intelligentsia went in and made a series of commercials that didn’t land with the public. Then, they hired local students to do the filmography and write the scripts and that was far more effective with the population there. It’s a revolutionary act to put media back in the hands of the populace so that they can discuss more thoroughly the impacts that global policies have on them, free from the corporate biases that sneak into popular media. Some of Chomsky’s comments there are highly encouraging and I hope that people have the sense to engage with their more local media. (Although, Jon Oliver has a great and depressing piece about how local media in the United States is owned and is distributed stories by corporate masters…) Chomsky also proves prescient with respect to social media. I’d be very curious to read his thoughts on social media today; I suspect it’s just as corporately owned and antidemocratic as our previous systems, though now we have the illusion of public discourse. That may be a bit harsh, but even my particular bubbles that I approve of serve to reinforce my own beliefs and play into the illusion of choice with the content that I’m consuming.

Overall, Chomsky’s commentary is illuminating, if not all that surprising anymore. I’d say on most issues I’m in fundamental agreement and otherwise it’s only a matter of the particulars. I’ll continue to appreciate the influence Chomsky has had on me, my chosen communities, and the world at large. Really, I can’t express how foundational he has been. So, there are two net steps to keep that legacy alive: 1) read more of his non-anthology books and 2) get organizing.

Happy reading; happy resisting!