Rabbit Holes 🕳 #29
Rabbit Holes 🕳 #29
From decommodifying trauma culture, to participatory AI design, and community land trusts
Rabbit Holes 🕳
Here we go, three perspective-shifting ideas that I’ve come across lately:
#1 😶🌫️ The Problem With Trauma Culture
“Today, the way that psychological trauma is performed and privileged in public discourse — which I will refer to as trauma culture — promotes an ideology of individual suffering that is remarkably well adapted to the spectacle-induced amnesia of late capitalism. Trauma culture destroys the political and historical ground on which to form a critique of capitalism.”
“Trauma culture takes suffering at the individual level as a privileged site of political struggle, inheriting its mandate from the 1960s cliche: The personal is the political. In doing so, however, it standardizes and mass markets individual suffering, through what sociologist Eva Illouz defined as a tightly scripted “trauma narrative” — an innocent protagonist, fractured and destroyed, then redeemed and remade whole as a survivor — that endows individual stories with immediately recognizable meanings.”
“By confusing the personal with the political, trauma culture actively prevents us from seeing the material conditions of wage labor as the proper site of political struggle. Ever since the dawn of industrial capitalism, the working class finds itself pitted against the capitalist, who seeks to surveil, exploit and extract every bit of labor power from her workers. The greater the suffering of the working class, the greater the profits for the capitalist. By focusing on all forms of trauma except exploitation, trauma culture has helped to disguise the economic violence at the heart of neoliberal macroeconomic policies.”
“Now, in the 21st century, the trauma narrative has been instrumentalized to commodify mental health as a realm of experience that can be shared and processed collectively online. […] As private suffering and distress shape our activity online, we’re providing valuable information to social media platforms, allowing them to serve us ads that exploit our vulnerabilities, economic and psychic.”
“Nothing less than the decommodification of mental health is needed to provide a socially responsible form of public and collective reckoning with trauma and human suffering. […] Popular culture, social media and academic theories can do nothing to heal us. We must wage a political struggle to protect private experiences of suffering and trauma from the promises of the market and the algorithms of surveillance capitalism.”
» NOEMA | The Problem With Trauma Culture by Catherine Liu
# 2 🚏 Generative AI + Participatory Design + Car-Free Cities
#3 🏘️ Community Land Trusts
“Storms are nature’s way of causing gentrification […].”
“It’s a phenomenon that researchers have tracked across the country: Disasters reduce communities’ housing stocks and drive up rent. When developers rebuild, they are typically incentivized to build more expensive housing than what had previously been there.
As climate change makes disasters like hurricanes, floods and wildfires become more frequent, severe and expensive, residents and policymakers are increasingly turning toward community land trusts (CLTs) — nonprofits that buy land to ensure community control, stave off displacement and ensure long-term affordability.”
“Like many land trusts, FKCLT rents its land trust units to families who earn 80% or less of the local adjusted median income (AMI), which in Florida’s Monroe County is around $73,000 for a two-person household. But in most cases, CLTs sell homes and rent the land to residents in a 99-year lease. Families only buy the home, not the land, and agree to resell the homes at restricted prices to keep them affordable.”
“The number of CLTs doubled between 2003 and 2017, totaling more than 225 in the U.S., according to a count by Grounded Solutions Network (GSN).”
“The Houston Community Land Trust (HCLT) doesn’t just want to house people, says executive director Ashley Allen. It wants to make sure they live somewhere safe from the elements. Too often, she says, developers build cheap housing in dangerous areas, which risks displacing vulnerable people who can’t afford to rebuild if their house is destroyed.”
“‘Part of affordability is creating quality and resilient homes so you’re not having to replace them,’ Allen says. ‘And if we don’t address climate change, if we don’t address resiliency, we’re just going to keep creating affordability issues.’”
“Last year, one in 10 homes in the U.S. were impacted by natural disasters, according to CoreLogic. But Linn says that while she wants to believe CLTs can play a role in preparing for or tackling climate change, the investments have to match the scope of the problem. ‘The CLT movement certainly has served a lot of families over the course of time nationwide,’ Linn says. ‘But not nearly enough. And not nearly what could really make a difference.’”
» Next City | Community Land Trusts Are Building Disaster-Resilient Neighborhoods by Alexandra Applegate
🐦 Seen On Twitter
That’s it for this week!
Thomas