Thread by @AlexandraErin

Whatever bar you think you can set where even the racists will have to admit they're racist, it doesn't exist. Someone will set off to kill "invaders" for "destroying our way of life", and then end with "but don't listen to the fake news, I'm not a white supremacist."

You know, once upon a time, we imagined that automation would liberate us. If a machine could do the work of a person, it would create the same amount of wealth with less labor. If it could do the work of ten people...

Early 20th century futurists imagined a world of leisure.

In the future of automation as our ancestors envisioned it, people might work a few hours doing maintenance, line-checking, and the handling with care, but we would also work for our personal enjoyment, self-improvement. With machines as the bulk of the labor pool, we'd have time

We saw this parodied in the Jetsons, where George worked an eight hour shift at a factory, which was portrayed as being grueling drudgery, but his whole job was turning it on and off.

What happened? Our culture happened. We permit people who kept the value of manual labor to reap the full benefit of mechanical labor. Nothing about this is natural or automatic! It's a choice that was made, a choice that keeps being made!

In any reasonably ordered society, "not enough jobs to go around" would never be a problem. We just all work less! Barring a total economic collapse (which isn't what's happening, though it might cause one down the line), there's enough resources to go around, or there'd be jobs.

It's simple supply and demand. If we were short on something labor can produce, there would be demand that would create jobs to produce the supply. If jobs are being lost to automation... nothing is lost. We're just getting better at making things.

Oh, so very much so. Mr. Spacely would even call him up to yell at him for sleeping, even though he had no other duties. It was simply against cultural norms to pay him a day's wages if he wasn't there on premises for a workday, awake and alert.

https://twitter.com/OneTruePoster/status/1157746010447327234

So, anyway. We have a spree killer, the latest gun murderer to make the news, who confronted with the two ideas that automation stole his job and future and that immigrants stole it... decides to go to a public place and try to kill people who don't look like they belong, to him.

And he wants you to believe this is not racist, even though he identifies corporations as his oppressor and the root of the evil and yet chooses to murder people he identifies, visually, as being "invaders".

Last time I talked about the solution to being automation is we rethink what a "workday" is, I had people telling me "But if we're not working 40 hours a week, how do we get benefits?" Which just shows how ingrained this is.

On the progressive side of the aisle, what "I'm not racist but" frequently looks like is an assertion that race is just a distraction from class. A person who believes that would point to a white supremacist spree killer who attacks immigrants as an example of divide and conquer.

And if the killer left a manifesto that blamed corporations and automation, they would no doubt feel super justified in doing so.

But racism matters. If he was distracted from class consciousness, if his ire was diverted, it happened because his racism made him vulnerable to it.

He killed because he wanted to kill. He picked his site and his targets because he was a racist white supremacist.

His purported manifesto was in my DMs when I got back to the house, but I am not sharing it. Experts aren't sharing it. I trust their judgment. Men who do this are hoping to spark a fire. It's not just philosophical justification. What they want people to see is a blueprint.

Manifestos aren't just statements of intent; they are propaganda pieces. It tells you what the perpetrator wants you to think of him. It helps shape the narrative around his actions. It sends messages that will resonate deeply with people they are targeted to, and pass others by.