people are getting older and older and staying healthier longer and longer. there are spry 90 year olds. medical research and technology is improving at a bafflingly fast pace. your life is not over at age 30 or 40 or 50 or 60. or 70. or 80. or 90. or 100. fuck dude, with the way shit is going we may well live indefinitely
Fun fact! Having a job every day is actually a fairly new thing.
In olden times, people had daily chores and other things to do but their workload/ daily working hours was actually much lower than it is today. Even in farming communities.
The concept of working super hard every day actually comes from capitalism, which in turn comes from Puritanical ideology.
The Puritans believed in salvation through work and in no play.
Early capitalists adopted this ideology because it meant higher productivity and therefore more money if their factories were running near constantly.
The idea of needing to be continuously productive in order to be useful/ allowed things like food and shelter, is actually quite an insidious ideal that is deeply rooted in the American culture.
4 day work weeks have actually proven to be more productive than the 5 day week. But corporations won’t adopt it willingly because it means less of a stranglehold on their workers.
in the latest cyber-news: the internet archive has lost their case against 4 major publishing houses(verge article).they’re going to appeal, but this is still a bad outcome. the fate of the internet is currently hanging in the balance because 4 multibillionare publishing groups missed out on like $15 of combined revenue during the pandemic because of the archive’s online library service. it’s so fucking stupid.
for those who don’t know what the internet archive is, it’s a virtual library full of media. books, magazines, recordings, visuals, flash games, websites - a lot of these things either don’t exist anymore or cannot be found & bought. heard of the wayback machine? that’s part of the internet archive. it is the most important website to exist, and i don’t say that lightly. if the internet archive goes down, the cultural loss will be immeasurable.
so how can you help?
boycott the publishing companies involved in this. they’re absolute ghouls, frankly, and don’t deserve a penny. the companies involved are harpercollins (imprints), wiley (imprints), penguin random house llc (imprints), and hachette book group (imprints). make sure the websites are set to your location as it may differ worldwide.
learn to torrent. download a torrent client (i recommend transmission), a vpn (i recommend protonvpn - sign up and choose the area that’s closest to your continent/country), and hit up /r/piracy on reddit for websites. with torrenting, you can get (almost) any media you want for free in high quality, with add-ons such as subtitles, and with no risks of loss. i would also recommend getting into the habit of watching stuff online for free. the less you can pay to a giant corporation, the better.
get into the habit of downloading and archiving materials. find a TB external hard drive, ideally the higher the better. it’ll probably cost around $60 for 1TB and continue to go up, but they’re so so useful. if you can’t afford a drive, look for any GB harddrives or memory sticks you have lying around and just fill them up. videos, pdfs, magazines, songs, movies, games - anything you can rip and download and fit on there, do it, because nothing is permanent.
donate to the internet archive. this is the most important option on the list. the IA relies entirely on funding, and it’s going to need more to fight this case. whatever you can donate, do it. i promise it’s helpful.
and finally…
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cannot stress enough that donating to the internet archive to help them appeal this without going broke is the most important thing you can do right now. my day job revolves around fulfilling digital article and book scan requests at an academic library and a huge part of that is borrowing from other libraries that do controlled digital lending (incl. the internet archive!). copyright law is already hugely restrictive on what we can and can’t lend, and we absolutely don’t have the option to pirate anything for our patrons due to being a large academic institution. it’s difficult to overstate just how bad this ruling could end up being for libraries that have digital lending programs, esp ones that rely on CDR for old/archival/hard-to-find texts.
I’m incredibly fucking disappointed at the bootlickers in the comments claiming that the IA steals from small creators. Eliminating a valuable research, academic and cultural resource because you’ve bought into the fiction that “potential sales” are lost sales is exactly what these big corporations want. You aren’t saving small creators by swatting down a non-profit, you’re allowing ginormous publishing monopolies to consolidate even further while they smile a snake’s smile over independent creators.
The Internet Archive is absolutely vital for my work and research. Without it, a good chunk of Welsh LGBTQ+ history would be inaccessible. The Welsh books hosted on IA are indexed and searchable, meaning any Welsh LGBTQ+ terminology can be searched for. Otherwise, me sitting down to read every. single. Welsh book ever published *just in case* it contains one of the terms in my data is an impossible task (Welsh books have been published since 1546) . In fact, this is something I refer to in my methodology for this very reason.
I’m also broke as hell rn but when I get the chance I’m gonna donate. Without IA, you can kiss goodbye to a *massive* chunk of academia. My lecturers use IA. So not just like, undergrads and PhD students, but seasoned academics will lose access to a major resource if IA stopped existing.
The argument of “potential sales lost” also makes no sense from an author’s perspective. Published authors are usually paid an advance before publication. After that point, they would have to sell an obscene amount of books to qualify for extra pay from those sales, so many authors are unbothered by someone reading their book for free. Libraries allow people to read books for free and IA is essentially one giant library. It even has a feature where if you’re reading a book and “check it out” for an hour, no-one else can read the book your reading until the time runs out. Just like a normal library. Potential sales lost to the company is just like when companies claim to have lost millions at a start of the year when they haven’t actually lost any money at all. They just didn’t earn as much money as they were predicting.
IA provides a vital service and we should be fighting to ensure it isn’t lost.
Seconding all of the above – Since the IA lost its case, I’ve noticed a number of books have rapidly become inaccessible for me. The negative impact this has had on my work can’t be understated, as I’ve been left without a crucial resource for my research. I. don’t believe there’s a single article I’ve written that hasn’t been impacted by this, with me often having to scrambling to get access to sources that are rare and/or our of print. I have the advantage of a well-stocked uni library that is good at ILLs, but this is a taste of what’s going to come if this isn’t resolved in the Archive’s favor.
i just remembered a story my first plug told me. she’s butch and gets mistaken for a man a lot. one time she was walking home when a guy pulled a knife on her and asked for everything in her pockets. panicking, she said “ok” and the guy hearing her voice was like “oh shit, are you a girl?” and she was like “yeah” and he put the knife away and said something like “sorry. i can’t do this to a woman” and left. feminist ally.
it’s a tragedy i couldn’t find this post in time for international women’s day. happy belated women’s day to this guy.
there is no neutrality politics - as long as you’re a human being with emotions and a brain you’ll feel one way or another whether or not you realize it. try talking to a self identified centrist about anything and you’ll see how fast skew right wing. read “both sides” media coverage and you’ll notice that one side is lacking more context and information or even simply worded to sound more negative. actually think and read before taking claims of fairness and neutrality at face value
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