The Stylistics are always a good-to-great show. I wish my shots from this show had done them better justice, but the one above appeals to me even though the fourth singer is out of the frame.
Speaking of justice: researchers are turning up more information about long Covid every month. Neuroscience News reported October 11 on a Brazilian study2 pinpointing what areas in the brain can be infected by Covid, and what the impact can be.
“We observed atrophy in areas associated, for example with anxiety, one of the most frequent symptoms in the study group,” Yasuda said. “Considering that the prevalence of anxiety disorders in the Brazilian population is 9%, the 28% we found is an alarmingly high number. We didn’t expect these results in patients who had had the mild form of the disease.”
In neuropsychological tests designed to evaluate cognitive functioning, the volunteers also underperformed in some tasks compared with the national average. The results were adjusted for age, sex and educational attainment, as well as the degree of fatigue reported by each participant.
“The question we’re left with is this: Are these symptoms temporary or permanent? So far, we’ve found that some subjects improve, but unfortunately many continue to experience alterations,” Yasuda said.
“What’s surprising is that many people have been reinfected by novel variants, and some report worse symptoms than they had since the first infection.
Some of the most persistent long-term cognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms manifest in people who had had mild infections. My long Covid symptoms, which followed a relatively nasty original infection, were entirely physical other than the impact constant pain has on one’s ability to focus on much other than the pain, but others are simply unable to function on the same cognitive level as before they got ill.
With new Covid variants showing the ability to evade vaccines to some extent, and drugs used to treat the disease, we may see an especially nasty Covid winter which would inevitably generate a flood of long Covid sufferers if these variants take hold.3
[A]s colder weather sets in, public health experts are keeping a close eye on COVID-19 variants that could spell doom and gloom this winter, just like omicron did last year. Yet these nascent variants that are rapidly spreading abroad have an evil twist that omicron lacked: an ability to evade the drugs that humans have developed to fight the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The two subvariants of particular concern are known as BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, both off-shoots of the omicron variant BA.5 (but with several key changes.) Indeed, they seem able to evade many of the tools we have to defend against it, which could trigger a wave of hospitalizations, disabling victims with long COVID or death.
(Death would certainly be disabling. Oxford commas rule.)
The new variants may not dominate the winter the way omicron did last year and into this, but as well they may. Given the degree to which the guard has been dismissed here, the latter seems more likely.
People make the world go round, and they are not well served by those who want to declare the pandemic over, with all responsibilities for Covid-related public health measures devolved to the individual.
Covid is responsible for an escalation of worker surveillance courtesy of employers uneasy at the thought of employees newly freed to work at home taking advantage of opportunities to dance unseen from room to room, stealing time and productivity from the boss.4
The second big turning point in electronic performance-monitoring is happening right now. It’s driven by wearable tech, artificial intelligence, and Covid. Corporations’ use of surveillance software increased by 50 percent in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, according to some estimates, and has continued to grow.
This new tracking technology is ubiquitous and intrusive. Companies track for security, for efficiency, and because they can. They inspect and preserve and analyze movements, conversations, social connections, and affect. If the first surveillance expansion was a territorial grab, asserting authority over the whole person at work, the second is like fracking the land. It is changing the structural composition of how humans relate to one another and to themselves.
That’s Zephyr Teachout writing in the New York Review of Books. Among her points is that pervasive surveillance, both at work and away from it, isolates and alienates workers from one another, making unionization or even collegiality more difficult.
Workplace snitches have always been with us, chilling water cooler conversations and chatter in break rooms or on factory lines, but in heavily surveilled workplaces and even in homes, everybody has been involuntarily turned into a potential snitch on themselves and others.
Teachout pays particular attention to Amazon, which has patented “a wristband that would … emit ultrasonic sound pulses and radio transmissions to track where an employee’s hands were in relation to inventory bins” and then vibrate to steer the worker toward the correct bin. A “SmartCap” used in trucking monitors brainwaves for weariness.”
Amazon more than most companies is attempting to turn humans into robots, without the capital investment that robots require. When a human begins to fail at their designated warehouse tasks, the company discards them and hires another one.
Obviously all this technological supervision has an impact on the psyche, and it can damage physical health as well.
Electronic surveillance puts the body of the tracked person in a state of perpetual hypervigilance, which is particularly bad for health—and worse when accompanied by powerlessness. Employees who know they are being monitored can become anxious, worn down, extremely tense, and angry. Monitoring causes a release of stress chemicals and keeps them flowing, which can aggravate heart problems. It can lead to mood disturbances, hyperventilation, and depression. Business professors from Cornell and McMaster Universities recently conducted a survey of electronic monitoring in call centers and showed that the stress it caused was as great as the stress caused by abusive customers.
Employers are trying to scrub personhood from persons, leaving only fear intact.
A relentlessly bleak story about employee surveillance in China from the Financial Times last year included a section about a company training employees to smile.5
A Chinese subsidiary of Japanese camera maker Canon, Canon Information Technology, last year unveiled a new workspace management system that only allows smiling employees to enter the office and book conference rooms. Using so-called “smile recognition” technology, Canon said the system was intended to bring more cheerfulness to the office in the post-pandemic era.
The software is in use in its Beijing office and is also being marketed at companies in Singapore. However, many workers found the use of such technology intrusive. “So now the companies are not only manipulating our time, but also our emotions,” one user said on Weibo.
A spokesperson for Canon China, however, told Nikkei that the software was intended to help create a positive atmosphere. “We have been wanting to encourage employees to create a positive atmosphere by utilising this system with the smile detection setting ‘on’,” the spokesperson said. “Mostly, people are just too shy to smile, but once they get used to smiles in the office, they just keep their smiles without the system which created a positive and lively atmosphere.”
The FT notes that surveillance methods popular in China are also used in the U.S. and elsewhere, with only the European Union requiring worker consent. Their site has a paywall which you can avoid a limited number of times monthly with a free registration, and this story is worth that effort and of course the tracking that comes with it.
Teachout cites an excerpt from New York Times reporter Mike Isaac’s book about the demonic salad days of Travis Kalanick at Uber, a company which deserves the death penalty.
The book opens with Kalanick responding to regulatory resistance by hiring “ex-CIA, NSA, and FBI employees” to build a “high-functioning corporate espionage force” that “spied on government officials, looked deep into their personal lives, and at times followed them to their houses.” Once the corporate spies identified regulators who were trying to build a case that Uber was breaking local laws, Uber built code to make sure the regulators never actually matched with Uber drivers, and therefore could not investigate violations of local for-hire laws. Instead, Uber would serve up a mock model of the application with fake cars. The regulator would appear to match with a driver, but the driver would never appear. Uber called the program “Greyball.”
You may remember “Greyball” from Isaac’s Times scoop about it — which he broke well in advance of his book, not sitting on it as recent custom has been — or from news coverage of his story elsewhere. People make the world go round, but some of them are truly awful people trying to rob the rest of us of the autonomy that allows us all to propel the world in our own individual or collective fashions.
And speaking of “collective,” can I interest in you in a subscription to Jacobin or Dissent? 67
If you'd rather not subscribe without knowing a bit more about the magazines (the sensible approach) visit their mission pages,89 which may offer a sense of what’s behind my urging you toward socialism.
“It’ll never work!” some say, to which I respond, “well not with that attitude.”
Mbongwana Star inaugurated this exercise with “From Kinshasa.” Soundz Of The South with “Freedom Warriors Volume 4,” Camera Obscura with “Underachievers Please Try Harder,” and The Besnard Lakes with “The Besnard Lakes Are The Last Of The Great Thunderstorm Warnings” are responsible for the central portion of it, if you don’t like it. Otherwise it’s all me.
I listened to another release, “The Besnard Lakes Are The Prayer For The Death Of Fame,” from the latter group, who I suspect are cross-pollinated in purpose if not in person with another Canadian group, God Speed You! Black Emperor, so I listened to that group’s 2015 release, “Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress.” GSYBE specializes in anxiety-inducing music, so I’m listening to it on low as I finish this up.
That, comrades, is all I got. Be well, stay well.