on sacrificing equity + peace
diagnosing late-stage capitalism through reading + reflection
So I’m reading the book called Abolish Silicon Valley & the way the author describes her disillusionment with the tech industry reminds me so much of the disillusionment I eventually arrived at with the fashion industry.
The excessive waste. The racism. The exclusion of anyone who wasn’t rich. The exploitation at every level. There was no way to escape it - somehow, somewhere, someone was getting screwed for the sake of maintaining stolen wealth and class systems.
Capital manipulates the labor
Make a bag, it feels like it'll save you
The money never acts against its nature
Fuck the cops, the banks, the legislature
Murderers, presidents, and mayors
Status quo: capital or life
Don't let them choose, they won’t think twice…
-Sen Morimoto, Diagnosis
I had become a fashion blogger at the right time. I was one of 100 bloggers invited to New York by Teen Vogue for a conference and networking event. Not long after, I applied to and was accepted by The New School in New York. Even when I proved to be good enough for these institutions to invite me someplace where I could “work my way up” and eventually sell my labor in return for status and upward mobility, there was always something that kept me from being able to take advantage of the offers - call it divine intervention. This frustrated me, but it also showed me how fucked up the systems that were supposed to onboard and nurture talent were. You had to fight so hard just to be exploited.
In the beginning, my goals were to move to New York and work at a glossy as an editor or become a stylist for celebrities. It became clear to me, no matter how good of I writer I was, no matter how much I appreciated the artistry of fashion, that wasn’t going to happen. As I continued to blog and discuss fashion on my own, it eventually led me to focus on how stale legacy publications were, how racialized the industry was, how pervasive the issues with labor practices were across the globe, and how terrible the fashion industry was for the environment. I stopped caring about the art of fashion because I was enraged at how much suffering was happening ultimately so that the rich could get richer.
Years later when Andre Leon Talley talked openly about what he went through at Vogue and how people in the industry he thought were his friends tried to kick him out of his house, none of it surprised me. As I left fashion behind and started focusing on writing and photography, even those things had to become related to spirituality in some way and it’s clear to me why that was. As Wendy Liu says in this book, she “needed to believe her work ethic flowed from a higher truth” and she “needed the money [she was being offered by these tech companies] to mean more than money”.
This illustrates so clearly that capitalism is the issue. When art, technology, or anything in any industry is only about amassing more capital, unnecessary suffering is the price. The working class will never have fair equity in what their labor produces, nor will they have peace within themselves. Inner peace, equity, the holistic well-being of the laborer, and what is best for the collective are sacrificed for the greed of a few.
