Progressive culture since 1954
There are humanistic benefits to heritage, but it is also a concept that can be exploited for the purpose of ossification and stasis, and for the maintenance of a type of privilege that should be challenged, not set behind glass. The Eastern Freeway recommendation exemplifies these paradoxes.
I do not wish to defend Australian universities as they exist. But I do wish to defend the principle of public tertiary education as a good – not a product, but a good – that should be available to everyone.
I board the train heading back to my studio, backpack over one shoulder and a drawing I don’t like anymore, stuffed inside.
Apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, OkCupid, Grindr, Scruff and Brenda offer affordances that are built into the way they are designed. These affordances import all the assumptions and norms of both those who make them, and adapt primarily to what sells: they turn daters into consumers of each other, and unwitting producers of data for the monopolistic behemoths of the digital world. Dating apps are actively involved in reproducing the traits of contemporary capitalism, transforming our very desires in ways that reshape and homogeneise how we love each other.
For insecure workers, ‘going back to normal’ is not possible or desired. What the pandemic has shown us is that in order to sustain the rural workforce, we need to improve the material and structural conditions that put precarious workers at risk.