Street Roots • June 8-14, 2018
KENDZIOR, from page 5
represent it. Those are all brand new
problems and they create brand new types of
autocracies. And I think that’s something the
whole world is collectively struggling to deal
with. And I don’t see any place that’s
immune to that.
J.Z.. And they discredit even valid news by
saying everything is fake.
S.K.: And that s an old tactic. That’s a
Hitler tactic. Die Lugenpresse-. the lying press.
That’s something that he did. It’s just so
much easier to do now.
I think the next frontier in this is going to
be doctored video and audio. As the
technology becomes more sophisticated and
becomes accessible to governments and
their operatives, I think we’re in for really
horrible video impersonations. We’ll see
them without knowing we are seeing them,
and then afterwards be like, oh my God!
Kind of the same way people reacted after
the bots in the election cycle. I’m dreading
that. It’s not like all is
lost, we just need to have
a sense of what are our
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what we see. Double
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1 tXiinh the g o a l should be t®
skeptical without being
he be tte r th a n w hat we are,
completely paranoid. It’s
and to try to co n fro n t the
sort of a fine line to walk
p ro b le m s a t h a n d r a t h e r t h a n but it’s necessary at least
h a v in g n o sta lg ia fo r w hat
that we try.
came before.
J.Z.: You say in one of
your columns that poverty
is lost potential. That the
proliferation of low-wage
and even no-wage positions, shuts out voices
from poor communities by denying them the
opportunity to work. You say that mistaking
wealth for virtue is a cruelty of our time, with
implications for individuals but also society as
a whole. Please talk a little about that.
S.K.: Most people acknowledge the
inherent unfairness of unpaid work. There’s
been a resurgence of the labor movement
and people starkly looking at the fact that if
people are working 40 hours a week you
should be paying for their work. If people
can’t afford to get their foot in the door,
that’s an unequal hiring practice.
What people don’t consider is what kind of
world we’re missing, what kind of world
would we have had these practices not
existed to begin with. And all the talent and
all the potential that’s being missed because
of the requirements for unpaid labor and for
expensive degrees and for credentialism, too.
This is a new phenomenon; that you need to
pay tens of thousands of dollars for a piece
of paper in certain industries that didn’t
require it a generation before. It’s limiting
the talent pool, which limits the transmission
of ideas. It limits the people who have
structural power from hearing other people’s
ideas.
It keeps us in this rut. You see so much
conformity. I think that’s one of the biggest
problems with our media. We have a media
that’s overwhelmingly male, and in terms of
political coverage especially, that’s
overwhelmingly white, that’s mostly based in
Conversation
four cities. That didn’t used to be the case at
all before the gutting of local news. All those
cities are really expensive. And it just
contributes to a weird and biased view of
what American life is. It fuels a lot of the
resentment that Trump and others were able
to tap into. If you come from a family of
wealth and you’re working as a journalist in
New York City, where land is in demand and
jobs are plentiful, you’re going to have a very
different perspective than if you’re like me
living in St. Louis driving by abandoned malls
and empty lots and crumbling buildings
every day, and seeing a lot of the lack of
opportunity and a lot of open suffering. It
changes your perspective. I wish we had a
more inclusive economy, especially for
people working in policy or media that have
influence over the lives of millions of people.
J.Z.: What lessons do cities like St. Louis,
and on the other end of the spectrum, New York
and San Francisco, have to offer a city like
Portland? We’re dealing with our own
gentrification issues, the lack of affordability
and the departure of the “creative class. ”
S.K.: We have these very stark contrasts,
between cities like New York or San
Francisco, which are very prosperous but
also very expensive. They’re incredibly
difficult to live in unless you have a very high
paying job, which most people don’t, so most
people move there with money saved in
advance.
And then cities like St. Louis, where it is
possible to buy a house and get by, but the
opportunities are few. There are all these
places going out of business. The sheer
number of people who have gone through
long-term unemployment - it’s very different
than other cities in the U.S. Looking at it
you see the apathy. You see that problems
will not get fixed. City officials will let
neighborhoods rot, deprive people of
resources. Of course that happens in places
like San Francisco too, or in New York. You
have homeless populations, people suffering
in poverty there. It’s a shared problem.
But there is this inequality stretched out
on this geographic scale that didn’t used to
exist. From the time I was born, in the late
’70s and early ’80s, people in St. Louis and
New York made pretty much the same
amount of money. There wasn’t this giant
discrepancy. And now there is, and the
reason why this matters isn’t just that this
city is richer than the other cities, it’s that
the cities that are rich tend to have hubs of
industry that can transform American life,
like technology or policy or media. They’re
conglomerated in these rich cities, where as
St. Louis doesn’t have that. And they often
exclude people like me. I’m often the token
person from the red state.
J.Z.: You say expensive cities are killing
creativity, and that it’s not just the presence of
artistic endeavors, but something more social
and cultural, and creates an environment
where failure is catastrophic, which reduces risk
takers. What’s the peril to a city when that
happens?
S.K.: That’s a huge problem, and it’s
something that I see paralyzing young
people in particular, who are starting out,
wanting to make sure that they keep their
job, keep their benefits. They’ll be in a
creative field or an intellectual field, and
they’ll conform to whatever the standard is.
Page 7
They’ll do whatever gets the most clicks, or
the most cash, or put themselves in an
exploitative situation where they’re churning
out a product rather than a work of creative
purpose. I think if you are there, what choice
do you have? Unless you have independent
wealth. You’re locked in the system.
I’m not criticizing people who end up in
those sorts of jobs, but it is damaging. It’s
damaging for innovation in general, for
creativity in general. It’s an extension of
what I was saying before, of people getting
locked out of opportunities. Whereas in like
St. Louis and cities similar to St. Louis - I’ve
heard this from people in Cleveland and
Buffalo and Pittsburgh, where the cost of
living is lower - there is a creative
intellectual community. There’s always
somehow this idea that’s impossible. But we
exist. We’re here. It’s not that only
prestigious cities should have a monopoly on
progressive thought. I think it is good to be
in a place where if you fail, it’s not the end of
the world. The flip side of that is it’s harder
to get started, to form all these networks to
get started in your profession.
J.Z.: So what do we do? What are the lessons
from all this? We can’t trust media,
corporations own everything, billionaires pull
all the strings, and science is discredited by the
powers that be. The tenets of common sense are
thrown out the window. What’s the point in
complaining about all this?
S.K.: When you complain, you bring the
problems to light, and if you don’t complain,
then people often don’t know the problems
exist.
There are people throwing these
principles out the window, whether it’s
Constitutional rights, or concessions of
justice, or acknowledgement of science, or
basic human kindness. There are people who
are attacking that. There are also people
fighting back. Focus on the fight. Study the
power structure. Try to think like the more
evil hearted people and anticipate the tactics
in advance. It’s pretty easy to predict how
they’re going to behave. They’re doing
textbook kleptocratic and autocratic tactics.
They’re going to look for weaknesses.
They’re going to try to exploit them, so
patch up those weaknesses. Whether it’s
institutional like our justice system, or just
how we treat each other. You can’t exploit a
problem when the problem isn’t that bad.
We need to take a moral stance, to
acknowledge what our flaws are, and then we
need to try to fix them, and that plays out
differently locally, nationally or trans
nationally.
People often ask, “What do I do?” And
that depends. Where do you live? What are
the problems where you live? What are you
good at? What do you have to offer people?
What makes our world good and interesting
is that we are all different and that we all
have something to offer and that together it
is possible to turn this around. It will take a
lot of work, but the first step is to say, how
can I help who is suffering. How can I
remedy that and go from there?
joanne@streetroots. org
@jozuhl