Jack Saturday

Monday, April 16, 2012

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 801-803

I recalled the 9-5 office job I had a few years back. I was playing Battlefield Bad Company 2 nightly then, obsessed with mastering large-scale warfare. Every day, I made the mind-numbing commute to my office; every night, the barrel of a gun guided me forward in the arid Atacama desert. Back in the office, the day-to-day always felt meaningless and unfruitful. Cubicles brimming with unfulfilled workers who didn't know what they were doing there, or how they got there at best. At worst, they were there solely because it provided a paycheck. It was well-managed rote, but it was a job.
I’m Sick of the Disturbingly Neat Lives Video Games Expect Us To Enjoy
Patricia Hernandez
Kotaku



Luis Buñuel concurred: "Somewhere between chance and mystery lies the imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom."
S…private enterprise doesn’t cover what Adam Smith cited as essential to the free market: wages that cover the costs of living according to the standards of the day. So, in a real sense, food stamps, unemployment insurance, school lunch programs, the earned income tax credit and other government programs can be seen as subsidizing businesses that can’t afford to pay livable wages instead of being viewed as putting working people “on the dole.”
Letter to the editor
Not Poor, but Relying on the Safety Net

New York Times
CARLYN MEYER
Chicago, Feb. 13, 2012
(emphasis JS)


We all know what the work ethic is (and a roomful of dissolute jazzers, fleeing from jobs, the state and even daylight, into the mystery of their fingertips, will know most acutely of all). But could a 'play ethic' ever become an equally powerful social phenomenon? What would it mean to live your life in the modern world - to be active and purposeful with politics and technology and money - if you believed that play was more important to human beings than work? That the values of playing (improvisation, fantasy, abundance) were more integral, more ennobling - more ethical, in short - than the values of working (routine, self-denial, propriety)? Could a play ethic ever shape the mainstream of a society, rather than just caper at its margins?
Pat Kane, The Play Ethic

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home