The blues (straight to you)
I graduated from journalism school in 2008. Since then I’ve seen and heard much lamentation about the death of various media entities. First it was print, then alt-weeklies, then text-based writing and new media altogether. Things were always dying and new things were always springing up; there was always somewhere else to look to, away from the dying. Venture capitalists swooped in with money, and Uber-style growth metrics become the node of operations. Journalism is work on behalf of the public, which does not serve private capital. Thinkpieces proliferated. People got jobs as a result. People lost jobs as a result. I got jobs. I lost jobs.
To be a worker today is to be superfluous. Media workers are not exempt. “You don’t live in the discourse. You live in the world.” That’s what Lux Magazine’s Cheryl Rivera said when we spoke last year as I was writing an essay about the life/death cycle of media.
I’m not here to offer industry analysis. I’m too far removed and, tbh, no longer invested in maintaining institutions or creating new ones. Instead I’ll take a cue from Adrienne Rich’s feminist investigation of “the moral ecology of this nonaccountable economy, this old order calling itself new” and ask the questions I was circling around last year, and can see and articulate more clearly now. Re-vision, right? At a time when all institutions have officially abandoned morality and state-sanctioned death is the weather, everywhere: What connections can be made, what alternate forms emerge, what power can we generate when we are liberated from work?