Obres de Eyal Press
Obres associades
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Data de naixement
- 1970-09-09
- Gènere
- male
- Nacionalitat
- Israel (birth)
- Lloc de naixement
- Jerusalem, Israel
Membres
Ressenyes
Premis
Potser també t'agrada
Autors associats
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 5
- També de
- 1
- Membres
- 392
- Popularitat
- #61,822
- Valoració
- 3.7
- Ressenyes
- 11
- ISBN
- 25
- Llengües
- 3
These jobs tend to evoke disgust and shame, affecting both how others see the workers and often how the workers see themselves—Press discusses the idea of “moral injury,” especially in the context of drone operators. Although you might think they’d treat death like a video game, many of them instead react negatively—and they end up seeing more death and destruction than most Special Forces on the ground. Moral injury is a useful concept, Press argues, because PTSD, while also descriptive, can depoliticize and individualize what is a problem of what the system asked the individual to do. Meanwhile, drone operators aren’t seen as “real” soldiers, a status deriving “from the very thing that made drone warfare appealing to politicians and the public”—it saved money and lives on our side.
Press emphasizes that many of the workers he talks to are not the primary victims of the systems they work in—prisoners, foreigners subject to drone strikes, and maybe animals are--but they are also suffering as they cause suffering, and we should not let individualized blame obscure that they are doing what we as a society want them to do. This is particularly true because these are jobs disproportionately filled by poor people without other opportunities and people of color, walled off from others by geography, fences, and other barriers so we don’t have to think about them. Hedge fund guys, disproportionately white, don’t face the same stigma even as they do lots of damage, and they are rewarded with money and prestige for doing so. So, when the BP oil rig exploded, even the workers’ families understood that images of oil-covered birds would generate more public outrage than pictures of the loved ones they’d lost. But when these workers try to challenge unsafe conditions, they find they’re easily replaced, unlike high-tech workers whose protests are often heeded. (Interesting contrast to Tyler Schultz’s narrative of whistleblowing about Theranos—he definitely suffered, but his suffering had a point, which most of these workers can’t say.) “What do we owe these workers? At a minimum, it seems to me, we owe them the willingness to see them as our agents, doing work that is not disconnected from our own daily lives, and to listen to their stories, however unsettling what they tell us may be.” (Of course, this framing accepts that they aren’t likely to be reading the same books as “we” are.)
You should read it; it’s mostly about the US though there are a few fascinating comparisons, such as to research on the prison system in France, which also found that guards were ashamed of what they did for a living. In Norway, where the prison system is much more rehabilitative, the staff seemed much prouder (though he doesn’t have the same depth of ethnographic data).… (més)