https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n03/rebecca-solnit/in-the-shadow-of-silicon-valley

Vol. 46 No. 3 · 8 February 2024
In the Shadow of Silicon Valley
Rebecca #Solnit

..."Americans face a social pandemic of loneliness and isolation. The US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, has declared it a crisis. His reports identify causes including the internet, smartphones and social media. None of these was created with this agenda, but all of them have advanced it. Some of the ‘examples of harm’ listed by Murthy include ‘technology that displaces in-person engagement, monopolises our attention, reduces the quality of our interactions and even diminishes our self-esteem’.

The Covid-19 pandemic worsened isolation, but tech had already made redundant many of the ways we used to congregate and mingle, while often portraying those ventures into the world as dangerous, unpleasant, inefficient and inconvenient. There is an underlying assumption that each of us aspires to be as productive as possible, and that stripping away everything seen to interfere with productivity is a good thing. This was the pitch made by many new companies in the 1990s, when online shopping and other digital financial transactions first became a big deal. The shift has reshaped cityscapes as well as psyches. The American Booksellers Association reported that in 2021 alone, ‘the movement of dollars to Amazon and away from retailers displaced 136,000 shops occupying 1.1 billion square feet of traditional commercial space.’ That’s a lot of local jobs and relationships both to places and people.

The small independent businesses that we’re losing sold goods, but they also gave away for free all sorts of things that are less tangible. There might be cheaper ways to buy shampoo or a better selection of envelopes online, but at an in-person store you can have a social interaction, even build a relationship with the proprietor and chat with other customers, or run into a friend or neighbour. That may happen in big chains such as Starbucks – but the employees aren’t likely to be around for long, the profit doesn’t go back into the community and the design of the place is generic, not reflecting its environment.
...
In my own 44 years here, travelling on foot far more than most, I have never been menaced by a homeless person. Though a highly visible minority are mentally ill or suffering from substance abuse, many unhoused people are employed, are parents, are seniors, are students (including 2370 of the children enrolled in San Francisco public schools in 2022) or otherwise quotidian citizens. Illness and addiction are often the consequences, rather than the causes, of the devastating precarity, shame and stress of being unhoused. Market-rate housing is out of reach for a great many people, working or not, which has made finding employees for lower-wage jobs in retail, restaurants and vital services difficult for local employers.
...
You can’t really be in favour of both democracy and billionaires, because democracy requires equal opportunity in order to participate, and extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little accountability. I’ve long believed that democracy depends in part on co-existing with strangers and people unlike you, on feeling that you have something in common with them. The internet has helped people withdraw from diverse communities and shared experiences to huddle in like-minded groups, including groups focused on hating those they see as unlike them, while encouraging the disinhibition of anonymity."...

US mass shootings will continue until the majority can overrule the minority

By Rebecca Solnit (Reprinted from Facebook)

"Guns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power."

Mon 30 May 2022 09.03 EDT

The dots are easy to connect, because they’re so close together, and because they’re the entry and exit wounds inflicted on US society by the subculture whose sacrament is the gun. Texas, while tightening restrictions on abortion, has steadily loosened them on guns. These weapons are symbols of a peculiar version of masculinity made up of unlimited freedom, power, domination, of a soldier identity in which every gunslinger is the commander and anyone is a potential target, in which fear drives belligerence, and the gun owner’s rights extend so far no one has the right to be safe from him. Right now it’s part of a white-supremacist war cult.

Anyplace its weapons are wielded is a war zone, and so this can be racked up as another way the United States is in the grip of a war that hardly deserves to be called civil. The rest of us are supposed to accommodate more and more high-powered weapons of war never intended for civilian use but used over and over against civilians in mass shootings across the country, including earlier this week when 19 fourth-graders and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, were murdered by someone whose 18th birthday made him eligible to buy the semiautomatic and hundreds of rounds of ammunition he used

At the time the second amendment was added to the constitution, reload time for the guns was about a minute and all of them were single-shot weapons. By contrast, the Las Vegas killer in 2017 sprayed more than a thousand bullets out his hotel window to kill 60 people in a 10-minute period. The teenager in Buffalo who killed 10 Black shoppers and an armed security guard was not a well-regulated militia, and neither was the anti-semite who killed 11 in the synagogue in Pittsburgh, or the homophobe who killed 49 and wounded 53 in an Orlando nightclub, or the anti-immigration butcher in El Paso who killed 23 and wounded 23 or the child-killer who took 26 lives in Newtown, Connecticut, 20 of them six and seven-year-old children.

To accommodate the cult of guns and the series of massacres, teachers and children practice school drills that remind them over and over that they could be murdered. To accommodate them, schools spend hundreds of millions of dollars on security, building reinforcements, trainings and drills, and the federal government spends more millions for campus officers. To accommodate them, municipalities across the country spend a fortune on police and equipment, in a sort of arms race that has also justified militarizing the police. To little avail, and in Uvalde the heavily armed and armored police seem to have essentially protected the shooter, by doing crowd control of parents as their children died, rather than rushing in as they had trained and rehearsed and been paid and equipped to do. All this is a sort of tax on the rest of us, in money and wellbeing, so that the gunslingers can sling their guns.

One of the staggeringly disturbing things about the American right wing is that it is a cult manipulated by corporations and vested interests profiting mightily off its obsessions. In no respect is this more true than of guns. Less than two decades ago, the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers decided to shift from promoting the culture and equipment of hunting and rural life to hawking high-powered weapons of war and the armor and outfits that go with it, turning conservative white men into amateur commandos cosplaying war wherever they liked and the US into a war zone. Fear and hatred increase the profits, and so both crops are cultivated avidly, by the gun industry, the rightwing news organizations, the various pundits and demagogues and militia leaders and neo-Nazis.

As former gun executive turned critic Ryan Busse wrote in the Guardian, “As the increasing vitriol of the National Rifle Association (NRA) proved politically effective, some in the gun business realized this messaging could be adopted by the firearms industry to sell more guns. All that was required for success was a dedication to frighteningly dangerous rhetoric and increasingly powerful weaponry.” Republican politicians gobbled up the industry donations and passed laws making gun sales boom, profits skyrocket, and guns start to show up in new ways. The rage that led to the guns was whetted with racism, anti-immigration hatred, misogyny, war imagery, neo-Confederate fantasies, and cartoonishly vile versions of masculinity, and the guns made it all dangerous. Minority rule perpetrates it, because just as the majority of Americans want abortion rights to stand, so do they want limits on access to guns.

Gun culture reminds me of rape culture, specifically the conventions that hold the victims rather than the perpetrators responsible for limiting the violence. For women this means being told to radically rearrange our lives to avoid sexual assault rather than to expect that society will protect our rights and freedoms. We are told to limit where we go and when, to be careful about solitude, crowds, bars, drinks, drugs, naps, parties, public spaces, public transit, strangers, cities, wilderness, to see our clothing and even our appearance as potential provocation, a sort of asking for it. To wither away our freedom and confidence to accommodate a culture of violence. In the same way, we are now supposed to adapt to a culture of guns.

The idea of unlimited rights is meant to apply to a limited number of us. Open-carry laws, it’s often noted, wouldn’t allow Black people to wander through the supermarket with huge guns slung over them and the confidence they could impose on others this way; Philando Castile was shot point-blank just for telling a policeman he had a gun in the car in 2016; 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot for holding a toy rifle in Cleveland in 2014. And the spate of new abortion laws being passed and the likely overrule of Roe v Wade means that those who can get pregnant are being denied even jurisdiction over their own bodies while gun owners assert their rights over the bodies of others.

In Oklahoma, anyone who gets pregnant has fewer rights than a cluster of a few cells visible only under a microscope. Any pregnant woman may face prosecution as a murderer if she doesn’t bring a baby to term. They also face grotesque intrusiveness – criminal investigation for a miscarriage, having to try to prove to an unsympathetic legal system that a pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, the sense that their pregnancy is supervised and they are potential suspects. There’s a gruesome symmetry to this expansion of patriarchal violence and withering away of reproductive rights.

Guns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power through the stripping away of voting rights and persecution of women, immigrants, Black people, queer people, trans people – all of whom have been targeted by mass shootings in recent years. This is the same party that sought to overturn an election through violence whipped up from on high, by the cult leaders, including the former president and various pundits and demagogues. “Trial by combat,” wheezed Rudy Giuliani as he incited the crowd to rampage through Congress. If guns are icons it’s because violence is a sacrament defended as a right and an identity.

Semiautomatic weapons are instruments of death perpetrated by a death cult. And the carnage will continue until the majority can overrule the minority in power that profits from and perpetrates it.

#guns #republicans #violence #politics #Texas #Oklahoma #Solnit #NRA #rightwing #Uvalde #unlimitedrights #toxicmasculinity #rapeculture #trauma