|
JoeBrunerFirstEssay 2 - 11 Mar 2017 - Main.JoeBruner
|
|
>
> | Revision 2 is unreadable | |
<
< |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
Redneck Hacking
-- By JoeBruner - 10 Mar 2017
A False Narrative
Redneck men frequently hack women into pieces and rarely hack computer hardware or software. This makes it difficult for redneck men to live well and stop hurting other people. It is also surprising. Redneck apologists like J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, emphasize redneck character traits, such as respect for women and a desire to take apart and understand one’s own machines, which suggest it ought to be the other way around. Not so. Traditional redneck culture led to the present; until substantial parts of it die, the problems of the status quo will persist. These problems are readily apparent to anyone who cares about white people overdosing on opiates or voting in candidates who will do incalculable harm to refugees, undocumented migrants women, African-Americans, and many others.
J.D. Vance is not creative or original in asserting the declining emphasis upon hard work has created problems for redneck communities. Southern Baptists have, for centuries, encouraged young men to value hard work and be providers for their families in line with tradition. However, it is exactly the tradition of valuing hard work which has been so maladaptive in the post-industrial era. This is because, in redneck culture, hard work is closely associated with physical labor or the oversight of it, reckoning back to the time when most rednecks were either individual farmers or overseers on plantations. Learning and intellectual labor were and are seen as, at best, necessary evils one must pursue in order to get remuneration for concrete physical work. It is acceptable to be wealthy in an industry people understand, but it is strange and alien to be a professional who lives the life of the mind. This is largely the solution to the paradox of why a rich man like Donald Trump is more comprehensible and relatable to rednecks than lawyers and doctors who come from their own communities.
A Family History
My grandfather impregnated my grandmother in his early 20s and felt socially compelled to marry her and work to support her and her children. Because of this, he never became an engineer and harbored an eternal resentment, even though he became wealthier than most engineers by owning machine shops and an industrial supply company. His male children created similar fates for themselves - both uncles wanted to be engineers, but always hated schooling and never became them. When one of my cousins was eight, I was teaching him how to use a computer his family recently purchased. After a few hours, his father, my uncle, said “Stop playing on that damn thing like a faggot. It’s summer. Go outside. Look at the women!” He was a child with no sex drive who had nothing other than a desire to learn and play. When this cousin graduated high school, he initially attended a local university with a desire to become an engineer. He dropped out and was considering being a highway patrolman, last I heard, because at least he’d get to be outside.
This emphasis on hard physical labor as the making of a man is why, while my childhood interests of computers, books, and video games were socially acceptable interests most of my peers were interested in, they are interests that would lead to one being labeled a faggot if I had lived one hour’s drive to the west or east of my hometown. A corollary of this is particularly odd: Rednecks typically love taking apart the things they own and fixing them. For a redneck to call a plumber or an auto mechanic is historically a mark of femininity and shame. However, even though most rednecks now own computers and smartphones, they do not relate to them in this same way. They do not perceive it as natural to them to take apart, fix, and reprogram these devices in the same way they have traditionally demanded knowledge of and sovereignty over their other technology. Even being a do-it-yourself auto mechanic is far harder now because of the implementation of complex computer systems and proprietary software in automobiles. This has meant that the traditional redneck path of entrepreneurship through understanding the physical world around oneself has been cut off, in large part due to a culture that takes a narrow view of what it means to work and what constitute appropriate and masculine objects of one’s understanding.
A Failed Explanation
Eben says the reason rednecks cannot take apart and fix these things is because it is too difficult and too expensive to mess around with them, but I do not think that is the whole answer. They do not want to understand them in the same way they want to understand automobiles at all. Why is understanding a computer homosexual, effeminate, and undesirable in comparison to understanding a toilet, a pickup truck, or an engine lathe? It is not as if rednecks have been late adopters or had a lack of curiosity regarding all technology. Modifying cars for racing and high speed in the United States originated in large part because rednecks handcrafted especially fast cars for the purpose of smuggling bootleg alcohol around the country during prohibition. It is not merely that the hardware and software they acquired was not intended to be free or openly accessible when they first received it - they were by no means invited to hack the computers they purchased, nor told they could construct anything original with them, but they also did not seek to do so.
Children in the Sudarshan Layout, dalits in the slums of India, became free when given computing technology because society had placed no expectations upon them. The lack of free access to hardware or software when such things came to redneck areas contributes to the problem of redneck men not applying their characteristic sovereignty over objects to these things - they lacked the knowledge and access to even begin, and they had no institutional or family knowledge of such things to pass down. However, I think the social expectations are even more devastating.
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list. |
|
|
JoeBrunerFirstEssay 1 - 11 Mar 2017 - Main.JoeBruner
|
|
>
> |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
Redneck Hacking
-- By JoeBruner - 10 Mar 2017
A False Narrative
Redneck men frequently hack women into pieces and rarely hack computer hardware or software. This makes it difficult for redneck men to live well and stop hurting other people. It is also surprising. Redneck apologists like J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, emphasize redneck character traits, such as respect for women and a desire to take apart and understand one’s own machines, which suggest it ought to be the other way around. Not so. Traditional redneck culture led to the present; until substantial parts of it die, the problems of the status quo will persist. These problems are readily apparent to anyone who cares about white people overdosing on opiates or voting in candidates who will do incalculable harm to refugees, undocumented migrants women, African-Americans, and many others.
J.D. Vance is not creative or original in asserting the declining emphasis upon hard work has created problems for redneck communities. Southern Baptists have, for centuries, encouraged young men to value hard work and be providers for their families in line with tradition. However, it is exactly the tradition of valuing hard work which has been so maladaptive in the post-industrial era. This is because, in redneck culture, hard work is closely associated with physical labor or the oversight of it, reckoning back to the time when most rednecks were either individual farmers or overseers on plantations. Learning and intellectual labor were and are seen as, at best, necessary evils one must pursue in order to get remuneration for concrete physical work. It is acceptable to be wealthy in an industry people understand, but it is strange and alien to be a professional who lives the life of the mind. This is largely the solution to the paradox of why a rich man like Donald Trump is more comprehensible and relatable to rednecks than lawyers and doctors who come from their own communities.
A Family History
My grandfather impregnated my grandmother in his early 20s and felt socially compelled to marry her and work to support her and her children. Because of this, he never became an engineer and harbored an eternal resentment, even though he became wealthier than most engineers by owning machine shops and an industrial supply company. His male children created similar fates for themselves - both uncles wanted to be engineers, but always hated schooling and never became them. When one of my cousins was eight, I was teaching him how to use a computer his family recently purchased. After a few hours, his father, my uncle, said “Stop playing on that damn thing like a faggot. It’s summer. Go outside. Look at the women!” He was a child with no sex drive who had nothing other than a desire to learn and play. When this cousin graduated high school, he initially attended a local university with a desire to become an engineer. He dropped out and was considering being a highway patrolman, last I heard, because at least he’d get to be outside.
This emphasis on hard physical labor as the making of a man is why, while my childhood interests of computers, books, and video games were socially acceptable interests most of my peers were interested in, they are interests that would lead to one being labeled a faggot if I had lived one hour’s drive to the west or east of my hometown. A corollary of this is particularly odd: Rednecks typically love taking apart the things they own and fixing them. For a redneck to call a plumber or an auto mechanic is historically a mark of femininity and shame. However, even though most rednecks now own computers and smartphones, they do not relate to them in this same way. They do not perceive it as natural to them to take apart, fix, and reprogram these devices in the same way they have traditionally demanded knowledge of and sovereignty over their other technology. Even being a do-it-yourself auto mechanic is far harder now because of the implementation of complex computer systems and proprietary software in automobiles. This has meant that the traditional redneck path of entrepreneurship through understanding the physical world around oneself has been cut off, in large part due to a culture that takes a narrow view of what it means to work and what constitute appropriate and masculine objects of one’s understanding.
A Failed Explanation
Eben says the reason rednecks cannot take apart and fix these things is because it is too difficult and too expensive to mess around with them, but I do not think that is the whole answer. They do not want to understand them in the same way they want to understand automobiles at all. Why is understanding a computer homosexual, effeminate, and undesirable in comparison to understanding a toilet, a pickup truck, or an engine lathe? It is not as if rednecks have been late adopters or had a lack of curiosity regarding all technology. Modifying cars for racing and high speed in the United States originated in large part because rednecks handcrafted especially fast cars for the purpose of smuggling bootleg alcohol around the country during prohibition. It is not merely that the hardware and software they acquired was not intended to be free or openly accessible when they first received it - they were by no means invited to hack the computers they purchased, nor told they could construct anything original with them, but they also did not seek to do so.
Children in the Sudarshan Layout, dalits in the slums of India, became free when given computing technology because society had placed no expectations upon them. The lack of free access to hardware or software when such things came to redneck areas contributes to the problem of redneck men not applying their characteristic sovereignty over objects to these things - they lacked the knowledge and access to even begin, and they had no institutional or family knowledge of such things to pass down. However, I think the social expectations are even more devastating.
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list. |
|
|