erikmbaker.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Uhhh dawg? Your gyre is widening

submitted 14 hours ago • 6 comments

🤷‍♂️ www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/o...

submitted 15 hours ago • 0 comments

I appreciate how thoughtfully people are engaging with my new Baffler essay. The most compelling critique I've seen is essentially that I emphasize ideology over propaganda, to which I must plead guilty as charged, for reasons I explored in this piece. www.thedriftmag.com/propaganda-d...

submitted 21 hours ago • 1 comment

I wrote for @defector.bsky.social about the NIH cuts, the war on higher ed, and what it means for all of us. The takeaway: let's not just defend a failing status quo againt Trump and Musk, but follow labor in fighting for a transformed higher ed landscape. defector.com/the-nih-cuts...

submitted 22 hours ago • 2 comments

Who's elite? Whose elite? On the bizarre mangling of class and privilege in America's urban-rural divide: thebaffler.com/latest/one-e...

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

A closely but deeply divided electorate has become the defining feature of contemporary national politics. @erikmbaker.bsky.social examines the complete decoupling of urban and rural America.

submitted 1 day ago • 4 comments

One of the factors in the dynamic Erik describes is who gets to define work and productivity. Musk considers his every move and meme to constitute valuable “work” while he dismisses the labor of federal employees as nothing but “waste.” Because of his wealth, his definition is widely taken as truth.

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

Excellent from @erikmbaker.bsky.social, makes me think of how speed reading becomes a subject of study in the 1890s, intending to empower superhuman productivity—but speed reading just produces more errors. And similar to the subject of the article, the scientists who studied it were eugenicists.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

"For Mr. Musk and his associates, a herculean enthusiasm for work isn’t merely a way to get things done; it’s also a mark of innate superiority, a 'superpower' that confers the right to impose their vision on the world" www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/o...

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

"If the United States feels increasingly like a country ruled by two petulant kings, perhaps it’s because the government is finally being run like a business." www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/o...

submitted 1 day ago • 26 comments

“It’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for two days!” Mr. Musk recently remarked. “Working the weekend is a superpower.” Cartoon villain.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Without a doubt, “sending a message to the elites” is what many Trump voters were trying to do last November. But why are liberal urban elites the only focus of their rage?

submitted 1 day ago • 5 comments

Best thing I've read yet on the electoral shifts in the 2024 US election thebaffler.com/latest/one-e...

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Genuinely astonishing how much illiteracy there is on this website !

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

“the rich of our new Gilded Age have conspicuous work. We see them working constantly while we hunt for extra shifts or struggle to string part-time jobs together, and we marvel at how special they must be.”

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

"As Peter Thiel once observed, “A startup is basically structured as a monarchy.” And as in a monarchy, the core purpose of many startups is to flatter the egos of their leaders rather than to make ordinary people’s lives better." www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/o...

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

“Mr. Musk and his DOGE henchmen are making the kinds of sloppy mistakes one might expect from people toiling around the clock, subsisting, as they reportedly are, on ‘a steady stream of delivery pizzas, Red Bull and Doritos’ and resting only intermittently in office ‘sleep pods.’”

submitted 1 day ago • 22 comments

On the sloppy "work ethic" of the technocracy, and how it condemns the rest of us to constant scrambling for gigs. Yep, it's about Musk: www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/o...

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Read Erik in the New York Times and then, if you're in Winnipeg, see Erik give a talk, "Entrepreneurship vs. Democracy" at the University of Manitoba on Friday at 2:30pm in Tier 409. @seancarleton.bsky.social @ryankturnbull.bsky.social @jtichon.bsky.social

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

Musk is proving before our eyes, working 120 hours a week is not the same thing as doing a good job.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

"For Mr. #Musk and his associates, a herculean enthusiasm for work isn’t merely a way to get things done; it’s also a mark of innate superiority, a ‘superpower’ that confers the right to impose your vision on the world" www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/o...

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Fantastic essay by @erikmbaker.bsky.social, an essential companion to Brenner & Riley (2022).

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

I am in the New York Times today writing on the disastrous consequences of Elon Musk's entrepreneurial work ethic www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/o...

submitted 2 days ago • 17 comments

This is excellent, on the material basis of the urban-rural divide:

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

great read on "the elites": "A lot of people are still just fine with wide swaths of the ruling class, and even more troublingly, with their reactionary cultural values—which are not merely odious in principle but in many cases an obstacle to true class solidarity" thebaffler.com/latest/one-e...

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

don't have to lie on any of this

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

My article "A New Satanic Panic," forthcoming in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism is now up on SSRN! A brief thread papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

my superpower for predicting things? paying attention to what people with power say and do

submitted 2 days ago • 338 comments

"To get to a place where a politically unified working class is striving against the capitalist class, properly understood in its totality, would be an extraordinary achievement. It will take both practical and ideological work. The first step is to realize exactly how far away we are starting."

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

This is a remarkably salient bit bit of analysis by Erik Baker, which wrestles admirably with the stratification of American life along the urban/rural divide, the different experience of America's (plural) elites those positions engender, and the complexities this creates for leftist politics

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments