Sunday, March 20, 2022

On Writing Well



THE POETICS OF HISTORY FROM BELOW This Kentucky coal miner was a larger-than-life figure in my youth. I fondly remember sitting with him at the kitchen table. In one hard hand he held a Lucky Strike. In the other hand he held a saucer of his beloved Maxwell House coffee, which he sipped that way even when it was no longer hot. In this posture he told endless stories to a boy who sat enthralled amid the pathos, humor, and quiet heroism of working-class life. His mood changed with the story. He laughed with his whole body, like the then-popular comedian Red Skelton, at his own funny parts. His visage grew dark and scary at moments of danger or injustice. His eyes danced with the drama of his words. I knew something big was coming when he paused, put the cigarette in the ashtray, and set aside the saucer, freeing his hands for emphasis. His stories were vivid, complex, passionate, and somehow always practical. They featured apocalyptic Biblical language (a lot of hell-fire), long silences (with fateful stares), and curse words that were normally forbidden in our house (son-of-a-bitchin’ this and that). He always managed to tell a big story within a little story. ........ What I remember most of all was how his telling of the story made clear how wrong the hanging was, and how a real-life lynching looked nothing like what we had all seen on television. He described a frantic, terrifying struggle, with legs flailing, ugly cheers from the crowd, and in the end a limp body with dangling eyeballs and wet pants. The storyteller’s sympathy was firmly with the victim, whose deadly ordeal he had made terribly, hauntingly real. .......... Poetry written by workers may be rare, but poetry to be found in action, in resistance by workers, is plentiful; it can be found most everywhere. My grandfather taught me to look for it. To give an example: I discovered a profound one-word poem in a memoir written by Silas Told, a sailor turned Methodist minister who described a drama aboard the slave ship Loyal George in 1727. An enslaved man had decided to die by hunger strike. Captain Timothy Tucker tried to force him to eat. He horse-whipped him to a raw and bloody pulp. He threatened to kill him. The nameless man uttered one word: adomma, so be it. Captain Tucker placed a loaded pistol to his forehead and repeated the demand to eat. Again: adomma. The captain fired and the blood gushed but the man stared him directly in the face and refused to fall. The captain cursed, called for another pistol, and shot the man in the head a second time. Again he would not drop, to the astonishment of all who looked on. A third shot killed the man but by this time an insurrection had exploded among the enslaved, who were inspired by the man’s resistance and outraged by his treatment. .........

One of the big questions in the Kentucky coal fields in the 1930s was, which side are you on?

....... I try to develop an ethical relationship with the oppressed and exploited people I study. The relationship is imaginary but no less important for that. ..... In the end I strive to write history that is vivid, complex, passionate, and practical.

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Li Jin

She’s the Investor Guru for Online Creators Li Jin, 31, began backing creators years ago. She has raised her own fund to invest in influencer-related start-ups. ...... If there is such a thing as an It Girl in venture capital these days, Ms. Jin, 31, would fill the bill. ....... A Harvard graduate who was inspired by the ideas of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Ms. Jin is also aggressively pro-worker. She has made it clear in podcasts and her Substack newsletter that creators should get the same rights as other workers. Among the ideas she has championed is a “universal creative income,” which would guarantee creators a base amount of money to live on. ........ Marina Mogilko, 31, a YouTube creator in Los Altos, Calif., said Ms. Jin “started the whole creator economy movement in Silicon Valley.” ........ “She was talking about the creator economy years and years and years before anyone else was,” said Jack Conte, a co-founder and the chief executive of Patreon, a crowdfunding site for content creators. “She really sees the future before other people do.” .......... Ms. Jin posts frequently on her Substack newsletter, leads an online course teaching creators how to invest in start-ups and has created Side Hustle Stack, a free resource to help influencers find and evaluate platforms to leverage........ Ms. Jin, who was born in Beijing, immigrated at age 6 with her family to the United States, where her father pursued a doctorate in economics at the University of Pittsburgh. Their early years in the country were lean, she said, until her father left school and got a job. ....... At Harvard, she studied English and continued her creative pursuits. But at the urging of her family, who she said “wanted financial security for me,” Ms. Jin switched her major to statistics and did banking and corporate marketing internships. After briefly working for Capital One after college, she moved to Silicon Valley at age 23 to work at Shopkick, a shopping rewards app, as a product manager. ....... In 2016, Ms. Jin landed at the Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. At the time, the firm was focused heavily on investing in marketplaces like Airbnb and Rappi, the Instacart of Latin America. ...... Ms. Jin became fascinated with how different marketplaces worked and wrote prolifically about them for the Andreessen Horowitz blog. She also began thinking about how different marketplace systems could evolve to help people build businesses on the internet. ....... “Her being at that big storied firm and saying these things felt like, ahh, finally someone’s saying it,” said Mr. Green, the YouTube star. ........ “I realized I had an opportunity to start an entirely new fund that was devoted to this thesis and that would be on the forefront of evolving the nature of labor and work on the internet.” ........ In May 2020, she quit Andreessen Horowitz and started Atelier Ventures. She has since invested in creator-related start-ups such as PearPop, which lets influencers profit off their social interactions, and Stir, which helps creators manage their finances.

She is one of the few investors whom large influencers know by name.

......... Ms. Jin has also publicly criticized the funds that YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat offer influencers to make content for their platforms. She has implored the tech industry to “stop celebrating” the funds, calling them “bread and circuses,” and argued that creators needed ownership over the platforms that made money off them. ......... She has named a podcast that she co-hosts “Means of Creation,” a play on Marx’s means of production. ...... Her views have made her a subject of fascination in the tech industry and in leftist political spaces. ........ “There’s been a simmering awareness for my entire life,” she said, “that the world is unfair and we need to push it in the direction of justice and fairness.” ......... Since starting Atelier Ventures, Ms. Jin has moved away from Silicon Valley and run her fund out of her childhood bedroom in Pittsburgh. This summer, she was nomadic, traveling around the world surrounded by a changing cast of internet stars, artists, Gen Z tech founders and crypto pioneers.





The Passion Economy and the Future of Work . It’s akin to the dynamic between Amazon—the standardized, mass-produced monolith—and the indie-focused Shopify, which allows users to form direct relationships with customers. That shift is already evident in marketplaces for physical products; it’s now extending into services.........

New digital platforms enable forms of work we’ve never seen before

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