Episode 1397
On fatigue / Emily K. Abel
Oct 19 2021
Enshittification is not a theory about you shopping wrong or about fetishizing your consumption choices, nor is it even a theory about how the people who are doing this are bad. It is a theory about what happens when our policy makers create an enshittogenic environment. Whether the product is free or not, you are the product if they can get away with making you the product. A hospital that can't fix its own ventilator did not get a free advertising supported ventilator. The reason they're being charged 200 bucks for a technician to come out and type an unlock code after they make the repair is not because they didn't pay enough for the ventilator. It's because we have a law that makes it illegal for them to bypass that step.
Cory Doctorow returns to This Is Hell! to discuss his new book from Verso, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. "Rotten History" from Renaldo Migaldi and "The Moment of Truth" with Jeff Dorchen follow the interview.
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Oct 11 2021
Oct 4 2021
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth, the thirst that is the drink.
Over twenty years ago, I started a project I’m still working on, documenting the life and work of an artist, Resh Shaprudhi, who used iconography around the god from the purana literature of what is now Hinduism, the god called Ganesh, or Ganapathi, or Vinayaka, or any number of other names, to explore the nature of oppression. Part of Resh Shaprudhi’s mythos is how and why Ganesh enters the events of the European genocide of WWII, often known as the Holocaust, and how through Ganesh’s intervention, the God of the Jews and the gods of the Hindus agree to bestow moksha upon the impoverished and oppressed. Moksha is the release of the soul from the cycle of metempsychosis, or reincarnation. It’s considered a good thing, to be released from that cycle.
If you’re not familiar with Ganesh, he’s the chunky god with the head of an elephant. He’s really easy to pick out of a crowd. A big part Resh Shaprudhi’s work involved syncretically assembling images, language, and symbols from Hinduism, Judaism, and the European genocide in World War II. So a lot of the art created by Shaprudhi involves Ganesh appearing in scenes of Nazi labor and death camps.
Coincidentally, about a decade-and-a-half after I started working on the Resh Shaprudhi project, an Australian play was touring the world called, “Ganesh Versus the Third Reich,” created by Back to Back theater company. The conceit was this: a theater company is in the process of putting together a stage play about Ganesh coming to Earth to recapture the swastika from the Nazis, who’d misappropriated it. I’m not sure if I was ever in a position to see this work. 2013, the year it toured, was also the year I was in India on the set of a movie, and after the shoot traveling through India, Thailand, and Laos.
Recently I decided to go back into the project, and encountered some clippings on the Back to Back play. I was barely familiar with the company’s esthetic, which is political, experimental, and purposely provocative. The theater company to which I claim membership, Theater Oobleck, boasted a similar esthetic back then. It may still, I don’t know. I know we considered art to be less interesting if it didn’t in some way transgress the everyday.
Back to Back is a company the majority of whose membership are disabled,... read more