Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

Turns out - my spirit animal is a cartoon possum.

Edit:
And you can get it as a sticker:
https://mastodon.art/@grumpygryphon/114546848614164280

#ShamelesslyStolenFromSomewhereElseOnTheInternetHonestlyICantKeepTrackOfThisStuffAnymore

one day, shortly before I was fired, the 2008 crisis had hit full force, the Phoenix office that managed us closed, and while cost-cutting Google fired 70% of the Latinoamerican precariat, in one fell swoop. then, during one of my last TGIFs, I accidentally listened to two high-level managers talk about it, two male gringos in expensive business-casual, and they commented on how the company was still doing perfectly fine without all that weight.

and that's not what stuck with me, the arguments, no. I understood the incentives to do layoffs, and the human need to rationalise them. what stuck with me was their happy smiling faces. their *laugh*.

yes they laughed about it. out loud.

I had a full understanding of what it meant for Third World people to be fired under the crisis, what it was about to be like for the Argentinians, for our families, but *so did they*, they were down here, they knew the reality. they talked to us every day, they were eating the food that the contractors prepared. and here were these people, in tailored clothes that cost more than a cafeteria lady's monthly wage, partying without even bothering to pretend to be sad. not caring enough about us to even bullshit. any sympathies I might have had over the simplistic logic of free-market liberalism evaporated under that laugh.

as a kid I used to despise the devilish villains of cartoons like Captain Planet, who destroyed the world with manic laughs for nothing but the thrill of power, polluting for the sake of polluting. I thought that was unrealistic. I cherished nuanced villains like Lady Eboshi from Mononoke-hime, the leader of Irontown who was destroying the ancient forest, but with the goal of liberating women from violent patriarchy and poverty; Irontown was a refuge of outcasts, and Lady Eboshi would give her own life for her girls. complexity! humanity!

it was at Google that I learned that no, capitalists are actually literally the same as in Captain Planet. we are not blessed enough to live in Ghibli reality, capital owners built us a USA cartoon reality. what is crypto mining if not a Captain Planet villain scheme—to kill and raze and destroy for nothing but imaginary tokens proving that you did it? what is GenAI if not stealing power and water and even art itself to feed into a grinder, producing no benefit but hoarding more money away from the poors—when you already have more money than a human being could possibly ever spend? what is this addiction to "number go up" if not Sly Sludge going "Aloha suckers! I'll miss this profit paradise but I have a souvenir to remember it by", picking a briefcase of cash while the island explodes?

this drove me to want to understand capitalism, and I would eventually find in Malatesta the answer as to why capital owners cannot help but be cruel, revel in cruelty, performatively broadcast cruelty. why the cruelty is indeed almost an aside, a corollary to what it means to *do* capitalism: every action you take has consequences not just for the world but for your psyche; you cannot make people work for you and hoard all the profits while they are stuck with fixed salaries, without in the process developing strong feelings on why you're entitled to do that and they deserve it actually.

but before I got into political theory, it was Google who *showed* me what capitalism is, firsthand up close. I wouldn't say that was worth working there, but I benefited from the lived experience; from that part of it, and nothing else.

Maybe you’ve heard: every font is free! Since fonts aren’t subject to copyright, you can legally ‘pirate’ them if you use a specific loophole!

...except that’s not really true. I’ve seen this claim repeated quite a lot recently, and it’s missing some pretty important nuance.

A thread 🧵

North Americans should romanticize our squirrels more. They're at least as cool as a kookaburra if you pay them enough attention. Why don't we use their calls in our media?