Mayfly Eleven
Happy Mayday ~ Entre-preneurs and the sneaky shift ~ What to do about the work of sex pests? ~ Incarcerated biomass ~ Shorts & followups ~ Amusement arcade
Happy Mayday Mayfliers
Cherish what is hard won for some, and not available to all.
Entre-preneurs and the sneaky shift
There’s an apocryphal story a friend is fond of telling. George Bush junior, decrying the French economy, said “their problem is they don’t have a word for entrepreneur”.
The problem with the English is we don’t think about what the word entrepreneur really means. I think in French the meaning is closer to the English word contractor. If entre is between, and preneur is taker, then ‘between taker’ sounds like something else again. It sounds like a middle man. Another kind of rentier seeking platform pravileges. Of course if you want to make money, that’s the only kind of business to start.
As French words in English so often do, entrepreneur has an allure; it sounds desirable. People like to describe themselves as entrepreneurs. They work for no man. They’re in charge of their own destiny. There’s an implication of success.
Often this is illusory. The glamourisation of the entrepreneur is part of a sneaky shift that takes the risk and burden away from companies and puts it onto working people. The self-styled entrepreneur is the one without sick leave, without paid holidays, without a contract, who delivers your parcels and takeaway, drives your minicab, and completes piecework in advance of payment. Or, maybe, the entrepreneur is at the bottom of a pyramid scheme selling ‘natural’ skin care with CBD, thermomixes on tick, or juicing diet plans. Or, as another friend pointed out, maybe they’re a drug dealer living with their mum.
This is the same sneaky shift that makes penniless job seekers pay hundreds of pounds for licenses before they can become a security guard. It’s the same sneaky shift that puts students thousands of pounds into debt while major employers shape the curriculum of universities without having to pay to train their entry level staff. It’s the same sneaky shift fueling the rise of the gig economy which can work for some — like me — but leaves many as members of the growing precariat.
Go out and create something that didn’t exist before. Go out and win your rewards. Be enterprising. That’s amazing. But it’s no longer what I think of when I hear the word entrepreneur. An entrepreneur conjures images of optimists trying to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps in a bent casino, and for every apparent success there will be thousands who never get anywhere.
What to do about the work of sex pests?
ITV did not show the final episode of its show, Viewpoint, following allegations of sexual harrassment against the star, Noel Clarke.
The publisher WW Norton announced it is pulping a new biography of Philip Roth following sexual assault allegations against its author, Blake Bailey.
The Guardian article exposing Clarke certainly makes him seem like a prick, but the police are not investigating him and he has not been charged with anything, let alone been convicted. Bailey faces serious allegations, but again he has not been convicted of anything.
It is difficult for victims of abuse to come forward, and they should be treated with discretion and respect. However I don’t believe we should #believewomen any more than we should #believemen — gender has nothing to do with how credible someone is. While the fact that someone has been accused is newsworthy, I think we would be better off if it was kept private until at least charges were made. Innocent until proven guilty still seems a worthwhile maxim.
Perhaps more intriguing is the idea that a piece of creative work carries the sin of its creator; that it can be, or perhaps even should be, censored as a result. And that the judge of the creator’s moral laxity is not even the victim, not even the court, but just the untested opinion of someone who has heard the allegations.
Do we really only want to read, watch, and listen to the work of people who pass a test of ethical standards. And, if so, whose standards? Mary Whitehouse’s? A publishers’? A broadcasters’? Mine?
If we can’t watch Viewpoint, or read Philip Roth: The Biography, should we be able to listen to MJ? And why is Mein Kampf still in publication? I heard the author of that was a right bastard.
Incarcerated biomass
Bensozia introduced me to a paper that estimates the biomass of life on earth. I was shocked to discover the biomass of domesticated mammals (mainly pigs and cows) is more than ten times that of ALL wild mammals; and domesticated poultry (mostly chickens) is about two to three times that of ALL wild birds. I’m no vegan, but those are remarkable rates, especially if you change the word domesticated to incarcerated, enslaved, or soon-to-be-slaughtered.
Shorts & followups
Free will
A couple of kind readers pointed me to a long article in the Guardian by Oliver Burkeman on free will that came out the same day as the last Mayfly. It’s a great introduction to the question and its main arguments. I may create a TLDR summary here soon.
UK housing is fucked, born short one house
I came across the idea that each of us is born short one house, or at least you are when you leave your parents. Rent is then thought of as the amount you pay to maintain your short position in the market.
The bent casino, cont.
There have been a few tweets lately that in just a few words encapsulate the bent casino.
The 8th busiest burger van in Dundee
Trollies at Sainsbury’s on a Monday night.
And then…the person who saw the most horses 24 years ago gets €5m.
British corruption, to the moon!
Another handy summary of all this larceny.
Emrata’s NFT
Emily Ratajkowski is auctioning an NFT with Christies, called Buying Myself Back: A Model for Redistribution.
On her insagram she says: “The digital terrain should be a place where women can share their likeness as they choose, controlling the usage of their image and receiving whatever potential capital attached. Instead, the internet has more frequently served as a space where others exploit and distribute images of women’s bodies without their consent and for another’s profit. Art has historically functioned similarly: works of unnamed muses sell for millions of dollars and build careers of traditionally male artists, while the subjects of these works receive nothing. I have become all too familiar with this narrative, as chronicled in my 2020 essay for New York Magazine, Buying Myself Back.
NFTs carry the potential to allow women ongoing control over their image and the ability to receive rightful compensation for its usage and distribution”.
I agree with her first paragraph wholeheartedly. The second? Not so sure.
With lockdown relaxed I got my hair cut. My hairdresser’s boyfriend is a fashion photographer. He’s being encouraged to mint his photos as NFTs so that they can’t be misused by others. I was told it would cost him about £80 of crypto to mint each one. He’s tempted because some teenager had been using one of his images to sell products on ebay, and even though she stopped when he asked her, he thinks others might try to use his images too. He had no idea of the massive energy usage involved.
I asked: how will you decide which images to tokenise? How will this stop someone using them without your permission? How is this better for you than simply watermarking anything you put in the public domain? Who benefits from you buying crypto to fund the process?
Emily Ratajkowski’s images are likely to be a bigger deal. But still I don’t see how NFTs will help her. Agreeing ownership and distribution rights of images contractually with photographers before a shoot, and then fighting to defend those contracts when necessary, would seem a better approach to me. She would need to do that anyway if they were tokenised, and I don’t see how tokenisation would give her any additional protection practically.
Maybe there’s an IP specialist out there who can enlighten me.
Amusement arcade
I consume, therefore I am.
Audio
I really enjoyed Gabriel Gatehouse’s radio 4 programme, the Puppetmaster, on Putin’s svengali Vladislav Surkov. I think at least a passing familiarity with Surkov’s approach to the evisceration of truth and to destabilising theatrics — all to the end of maintaining the power of those currently in power — is necessary for any kind of understanding of British and American politics today. In Surkov’s own words, as quoted in the programme: “Foreign politicians complain that Russia is meddling in elections around the world. In actual fact it’s much more serious than that. Russia is meddling in their brains, changing their consciousness, and they have no idea what to do about it”.
Visual
Eric Hobsbawm: The consolations of History — Anthony Wilks’s film for the LRB about the great British historian was suprisingly enjoyable. Not only was it pleasant in itself, I learnt that quite a few of my opinions, especially about nations, may have originated in Hobsbawm’s thought. I also learnt how active MI5 were tracking those who had any kind of communist sympathies. You can watch it here:
I particularly liked Stefan Collini talking about Hobsbawm, because he neatly summarises a way of doing history, and thinking about things, that is quite common, and quite passionately defended, but which should not be sacrosanct.
“[Hobsbawm] believes in rational objective analysis. He’s not very taken by some of the postmodern styles of analysis. But he’s also not altogether in tune with the…counter cultural aspects of the 60s and 70s…He remains loyal to the view that there is objective evidence which, if analysed impersonally enough, objectively enough, can yield a true understanding of the sequence of events. And that’s of course a point of view that’s been challenged from all points of the compass, left and right, and also from different philosophical and theoretical positions, also…with the rise of a stronger sense of identity and maybe identity politics, people challenge that for different reasons again. I think Hobsbawm understood all these things very well, he noted them, he observed them, but observed them a little from outside and I don’t think they fundamentally underminded his confidence that there was a story which rational analysis could uncover and that was what we need to learn about history to understand where we were now”.
The American Friend is a Wim Wenders thriller starring Bruno Ganz and Dennis Potter. I enjoyed it. I’m a sucker for anything from the 70s, really. I just like looking at the scenes, the interiors, the cars and clothes. There were moments in an auction house when this looked just like Minder (a firm favourite of mine), and moments where Hamburg, and New York looked fantastic. Ultimately the plot is a bit flimsy, but it was a pleasant two hours.
Food
A grande salade niçoise, sitting outside. A fishcake of smoked haddock and mac ‘n’ cheese, a trout and leak flan, and potted crab from Whitstable. A wonderful heavy and tart apple pie from a farm shop in Sussex. Superfresh 70p rock oysters in the wind at Mersea.