Karen Attiah is done with being anyone's good girl. The journalist from Texas was something of a rising star at the Washington Post, before Jeff Bezos decided to rein in "his" writers. She led the newspaper's Global Opinions section. She wrote her own opinion pieces about race, gender, culture, human rights -- the stuff that disquiets billionaire boys. She was fired for, perhaps among other causes, not being properly respectful about the murder of right wing agitator Charlie Kirk, condemning the crime, but posting on BlueSky: "Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence." Seems merely accurate to me, but apparently too much for her boss. There are lawsuits ...
The Met Gala was one of her beats -- beautiful people performing varieties of beauty for charity and ego gratification. On her Substack, she lets loose on that scene, now sponsored by Bezos.
... Beauty is necessary for evil. Art has always been a way for extraordinary wealth and destructive power to justify their existence.
When we marvel at the riches of Europe, the wealth in its museums, the jewels in castles and the Vatican, that beauty could not have existed without the ruthless exploitation of the poor, and of Europe’s colonies abroad. The beauty of many lifesaving medical treatments and scientific achievements emerged from the exploitation of wars, of grotesque medical experiments on prisoners and colonized peoples.
In many ways, today’s tech titans are no different from the colonial masters of the past. Wealth and power romanticized and fetishized the cultures they have ruthlessly extracted from, while destroying the people.
We’d like to think that the old colonial ways of enslavement and invading territories for natural resources were in the past.
No, the ugliness of extraction has just evolved— under the sparkle of “innovation”. In just 30 or so years, our new tech colonial masters have learned how to mine our desires, personal data, thoughts, messages, and creativity. They are trying their hardest to replace humans with AI or robots, and calling that progress.
Their exploitation has expanded from those we deem to be of the lower class, and has expanded to forcing their soullessness on journalism, on fashion, and on art. Soulless tech money is now not just dirty, robber baron money in no small part because their technology is an existential threat to (relatively) privileged writers and thinkers like me.
But unlike the colonial masters of the past, these tech titans have the power to manipulate our digital realities through elegantly coded changes to the algorithm. American power means we prefer frictionless ease and the convenience of consumption. But ultimately, we are the ones being consumed.What these male tech architects are designing is far more potent than haute couture. They have taken our data, our thoughts, our attention, our creativity, and the most finite of resources, our earthly time. With these precious elements, they are redesigning our habits, our work culture, our relationships, our incomes—and yes, our psychological reality itself.
A future in which many of us become digital sharecroppers is something to fear. There are very few legal mechanisms for accountability for algorithmic harm. There is no universal basic income to support those who are being forced out of work by unimaginative bosses who wish to impose AI to replace jobs.
We are headed to a future in which it will be a privilege to work with humans. ...
Now there's a terrifying picture of the future, one which is not the only way to envision where we are going, but certainly a possible way. I am grateful for Attiah's incisive courage. I am grateful for her rage.
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