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Plantation management—and the relations of domination that structured the plantation—was anchored in a view of Black people as commodities, as something-not-quite-human. And the conditions of bondage on the plantation defined the category of “unfreedom” against which white workers could be classified as “free.”
Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control
Logic(s) Magazine
There appears to be a law that when creatures have reached the level of consciousness, as men have, they must become conscious of the creation; they must learn how they fit into it and what its needs are and what it requires of them, or else pay a terrible penalty: the spirit of the creation will go out of them, and they will become destructive; the very earth will depart from them and go where they cannot follow.
The World-Ending Fire
Wendell Berry
Automation ultimately isn’t steered by the aim of making things work better or easier for the people they are imposed on; it is meant to divert resources according to the operative distributions of power. It certainly doesn’t redistribute power downward. Rather it systematically puts people in their place. The equilibrium that automated systems settle into isn’t about efficiency so much as ideology: the optimal level of frustration that people can be made to bear without sparking any meaningful resistance. They train us in accepting ambient contempt with a sense of apathy.
Two Riders Were Approaching
Rob Horning
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