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SXSW is the 21st-century equivalent of a medieval market town, just with more horseshit. It’s an orgy of capitalism, an unrestrained, unselfconscious celebration of sales, marketing, branding, and “gamification.” Even the dumbest of memes have been recruited in the service of sales. Grumpy Cat is here, and she wants you to buy Friskies. For a gathering so driven by the pursuit of money, the question of who has it—and who doesn’t—goes almost completely unmentioned. There are talks about social and civil rights issues—feminism, race, female genital cutting—but words like “inequality” literally aren’t on the schedule. (A search for “taxes” returns a session that mentions how awesome it would be to have a robot who could do them.) Maybe that’s because everyone knows that almost everyone here coughed up several hundreds of dollars for a conference pass, and hundreds more for lodging. Conversations about inequality are awkward. Conversations about futurism, tech triumphalism, entrepreneurship, and the “intersections” thereof reign supreme. There’s almost no talk of religion, electoral politics, or labor unions—anything that smacks of old-school collective action. This is a place of unfettered technological optimism, where coders and entrepreneurs can solve any societal problem. SXSW has a politics, but it’s one that mirrors the technolibertarianism of the Reddit generation: civil liberties (read: free speech, Larry Lessig, and Aaron Swartz), entrepreneurship, and individualism.
Maybe it’s unfair to expect a conference that’s essentially a glorified trade show to concern itself with a broader sort of politics. But SXSW is a big deal: Hundreds of media outlets cover it, and its overall tone sends a message to attendees and the broader culture.
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@2 months ago with 59 notes
#downtown project #sxsw #culture #politics #inequality
Israel introduces 'Palestinian only' bus lines, following complaints from Jewish settlers Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper 
This is how it starts. This is how the Holocaust started. They need to quit this shit now. It seems “not that bad” to the Palestinians but incrementalism takes over and it all of a sudden people are living in entirely different communties segregated… (ghettos). And then to camps. This scares me a lot.
@2 months ago with 2 notes
#world news #politics #israel #palestine #haaretz #transportation #holocaust #segregation
Fun fact: elected officials do NOT take into account your individual Facebook status when making decisions in the legislature.
@2 months ago
#government #congress #politics #reddit #meme #activism #organizing
I can’t even begin to describe how beautiful the Capitol Building is. #washingtondc #history #america #politics #usa #pic2013 #barackalums (at United States Capitol Building)
@4 months ago
#pic2013 #usa #washingtondc #barackalums #politics #america #history
"‘I was just the guy with the smoke-screenish yet still legal title of CEO and managing director who was paid at least $100,000 a year to do what according to me, Mitt Romney, was nothing! And that’s the kind of business experience I hope to bring to the White House.’"
JON STEWART, on Mitt Romney’s claim that, while he was listed as CEO, president and managing director at Bain Capital through 2002, he “did not manage Bain” and actually “retired retroactively” to 1999, on The Daily Show.
Mitt Romneycan’t even do semantics right.
(via inothernews)
@10 months ago with 507 notes
#politics
