I think I already overshared about 2023 on a previous text, but let’s have a overview of the year here as well.
Career
This year I left my first international job, at WEX, which was not an easy decision, since it is a great company, where I had all the support, but I didn’t want to work solely with UiPath anymore and more opportunities for Python freelancing arose – which ends up the flexibility was also a best fit for my personal life at the moment.
The freelancing world came with big challenges, for the first time, I managed to build a Python automation framework from scratch without a senior supervisor. This was incredibly enriching.
Also, 2023 makes five years that I’ve been officially on the IT job market! By the second half of 2019, I got a job as a trainee for Deloitte, where they sent me to the automations area and I’ve been in the field ever since.
Continuous Learning
Urban Planning Bachelor’s degree:
There is only the Macro and Meso Regional Planning Workshop, the Metropolitan Planning and Governance Workshop, and the Undergraduate Thesis left to complete for my diploma. However, due to challenging personal life changes this year, I haven’t made progress on these. The only task I managed to complete was delivering my research.
It focused on the Extraction of built area in satellite image time series Landsat of the city of Santarém – PA – 2012 -2002. The outcome wasn’t as good as I expected, since I decided to explore not with QGIS as we learned in class, but with javascript on google earth platform. Despite this, I learned a lot.
I also managed to attend two conferences with the research team, SBSR (Brazilian Symposium on Remote Sensing) and ENANPUR (The National Meetings of the National Postgraduate and Research in Urban and Regional Planning) – traveling is great, but doing so with academic purpose and cool people is even more fun.
Yoga Teacher Training 500hours:
I’m still surfing Yogic Studies world, 50% on my way to complete the Yogic Studies Advanced Certificate Program (YSACP).
My favorite module this year was the one about The Amṛtasiddhi, Haṭha Yoga’s First Text with professor James Mallinson, rich on medieval alchemy and the basis of yoga powerful bandhas.
Also the one about Women and Gender in Hindu Tantra with professor Sravana Borkataky-Varma from Harvard Divinity School opened my mind to a whole new world about transgenders and religion in India.
Life
I’ve shared this before, but in a nutshell, I became “unpartnered.” How do we navigate discussions about modern couples who cohabit after 30, without the traditional marriage ceremony, yet face a complex web of shared responsibilities, from bill payments to dividing house plants and kitchenware upon separation?
In the midst of this, I relocated to a new neighborhood, my psychologist went on maternity leave, I renovated my new apartment, a tragic death occurred in my family, also a cancer removal on another family member and another loved one came close to death but is now in a rehabilitation clinic. On top of this, after nearly a decade of living independently, I moved to a location right next to my blood relatives.
To say 2023 has been a challenging year would be an understatement.
On the other hand, living close to my family again has been an enlightening experience. It has offered me a deeper understanding of my roots and myself. While it presents its own set of challenges, I find great joy in spending time with my elderly relatives. My regular visits to my nearly 90-year-old grandmother, filled with card games and her life stories, have been particularly rewarding.
About my new neighborhood, it offers a stark contrast to downtown São Paulo. The sense of safety is palpable, allowing me to stroll at night with my phone in hand, a luxury I could not afford before. Yet, I find myself yearning for the familiar hipster vibes, the freedom of cycling at Minhocão, and the weekend breakfasts at TAKKO coffee shop, surrounded by fellow tattooed people.
Nowadays, my daily view is filled with wealthy individuals in gym clothes. The coffee shops, once my go-to spots for a change of scenery while working, are now mostly frequented by retired flâneurs. So, I prefer to stay at home, which led me to overthink my setup, so I bought myself a standing desk—fancy.
On the flip side, I’m a mere 10-minute walk from the indoor climbing gym and a 20-minute stroll from São Paulo’s “Central Park,” Ibirapuera Park. This proximity has significantly boosted my climbing skills and provided me with much-needed nature time.
After the initial tumult of the first semester, I’ve been channeling my energy into establishing new routines, strengthening my social and familial ties, and seeking stability. As I look ahead, I’m optimistic that 2024 will be a year of fewer disruptions and more tranquility.
GYM
I lost 7 kilos total and gained 3 kilos of muscle mass this year! Climbing definitely helped, but I’m also consistently going to the gym and applied Huberman’s Lab 3-5 protocol, which I found gave me the most strength I have ever had so far.
Squats: 40kg – 50kg
Rowing: 30kg – 40kg
Shoulder Press: 10kg
Chest: 15kg
Unilateral deadlift: 14kg
Bulgarian split squat: 16kg
You know, people say after 40’s we lose 1% of muscle mass per year by default, so I have 7 years ahead to build more consistent muscles, or “a health savings”
In conclusion
2023 has been the most challenging year of my life, yet it was also a time of great energy and new opportunities. I had the chance to meet new people and acquire a wealth of knowledge.
My life now feels like it’s in a transitional phase, laying the groundwork for something new. This period of change is refreshing and filled with potential, despite the sense of loss and the numerous changes I’ve faced this year. Here’s to a fantastic 2024 for us all. See you around!
Quitting everything and going to meditate seems like something a slacker would do. To go on a meditation retreat, we have to justify ourselves by saying it’s self-care, and we have to use words carefully so people don’t think you just dove into this because you were at your worst.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly alone in a room*” I really like this phrase, supposedly said by the mathematician, Pascal.
I don’t agree that we will have all of humanity’s problems resolved. I don’t believe in world peace, complete happiness, let alone reversing global warming. However, I believe that, even doomed to defeat, we can indeed imagine these utopias and choose at least one or another unattainable collective goal to put into practice.
I don’t fight to win, I know I will lose. If I don’t fail in this system, it’s because I’ve adhered to it. – Padre Julio Lancellotti, o melhor que temos.
My most ancient personal-collective-utopian battle is meditation. Actually, last month I went to a silent retreat. I confess that I had a pretty shitty year, but that’s not why I went, this is something I’ve been doing for several years, in good times and bad times.
However, I think when Pascal said that phrase, he wasn’t exactly suggesting “to sit quietly and alone” sitting on the ground, meditating more than 5 hours a day, for 10 consecutive days, eating only 2 meals a day, without being able to read, write or even exercise. But that’s exactly what the retreat I went to at the end of the year proposes.
If you want to avoid falling into this trap, the name of the retreat is Vipassana. If you are precisely looking for this type of self-flagellation, the name of the retreat is Vipassana too. According to the nightly classes of the retreat, this is a meditation technique that Buddha himself practiced to enlighten himself, but who can guarantee? Indians love using this marketing technique of “it’s traditional”, “it’s ancient” to shove their ideologies down the world’s throat.
Let’s lower all this possible fiction behind what actually exists:
A free retreat, which has been happening exactly in the same model, for decades, in various countries around the world. And thousands, if not millions of people, have already participated in it.
cabem 8mil pessoas no maior centro de vipassana do mundo (pensa nessa galera toda em silêncio)
If you go to the Dhamma site, you can find dates to submit to live this experience. There is a center in Santana de Parnaíba, close to São Paulo, but the one I went to is in Miguel Pereira, in the interior of Rio de Janeiro. The rooms are comfortable, the food is tasty, and the shower is hot. The system is very organized and exactly the same, without adding or subtracting: absolute silence, a bit of fasting, and meditation for hours on end.
Despite the fugere urben and basic comforts, it doesn’t seem relaxing, right? In general, it’s not. But it’s worth it.
Facing responsibilities head on
I confess that I am unemployed, I pick up a freelance job here and there, but I no longer have time to manage, nor pair code reviews to do. However, I work in IT, the freelances pay well and I have some flexibility of time and money, but it didn’t seem bad at all to spend 10 days without having to cook, without spending anything and without looking at a screen.
The issue of cooking didn’t weigh so heavily, this year I prepared so many little lunches that I got used to it. I lost 7 kilos and gained 3 kilos of muscle! I also thought long-term in several other areas of life: I saved money, I challenged myself in my career, I was present in social circles even when I wanted to be crying in a corner, I didn’t take it out on food or alcohol… but of course, this mechanical self-care is just damage control, the problem is much deeper.
I did the whole damn thing, meditated, yet in 2023 I maintained a constant feeling of anguish and helplessness in the face of personal and global problems.
In the world, as you already know, end of the year with this global warming banging in our heads, environmental disasters here and there, another war broke out, inflation high up there, artificial intelligence expanding its skills more and more, an uncertain job market for most professions, extreme right-wing caricature political leaders taking power, Lula not delivering much…
On a personal level, I separated, changed houses and neighborhoods, my psychologist went on maternity leave, I renovated, an aunt died tragically, another loved one almost passed away but ended up in a rehabilitation clinic, my mother had cancer removed… besides that, after almost 10 years living away, I moved wall-to-wall with my blood relatives.
Even so, I didn’t run away from any trouble. Quite the contrary, I was patient and fulfilled my obligations, something that seems minimal, but we know it’s not. Maybe I made things a bit harder for myself with this “long-term thinking” attitude, but this year would have been sad anyway, it turned out I just embraced the hardship and maintained a boring and pondered life.
The size of my problems doesn’t matter, what really matters is the size of my butt. The size of my butt eases my problems – for times i embraced Bruna Rotta’s life philosophy to survive.
There are days, weeks, months, and years in life that are like this: made up of hard facts, decisions that require constant discipline. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not morally superior to sustain constant euphoria, but I found it hard to support this against-our-culture position of always dancing, regardless of. In 2024 I’ll dance more.
Anyway, I paid the bills in advance, sent a message to some contacts so they wouldn’t think I blocked them, and headed to Vipassana in Miguel Pereira –
I went without expecting much.
Disconnect from the world
Even though I went without expectations of becoming happier, finding answers, or becoming another person after the retreat, in other words, without seeking a specific result, I went with the hope that during the retreat I could disconnect a bit from the world.
I spent the year fueled by caffeine and wanted to go to a place where I didn’t need fuel to exist, plan, solve, or direct anything. With this in mind, I went on a delivery to what Mr. Goenka – the man who spread the practice around the world – says is like a mind surgery. Still in his words:
“Vipassana is a science of mind and matterHow the mind is influencing the bodyAnd later, how the body is influencing the mind”
Vipassana is the science of mind and matter. How the mind influences the body and, later, how the body influences the mind. This little snippet of teaching I got from the song “Vipassana”, which has a wonderful lyrics:
I found this song when I came back from my first vipassana retreat, I was 19 and I just wanted more a place away from social pressures to think better about my life choices, kinda like Arnold says
“When you set aside time to be alone with your thoughts, you can discover who you want to be; not who your parents want you to be, not who your friends want you to be, and definitely not who some Instagram or TikTok scammer wants you to be.“
If in 2010, without a smartphone and tiktok, it was already hard to disconnect from the world, imagine today. There’s so much information, we have less and less space just to breathe – but maybe we increasingly forget that this is possible, or see any value in doing it.
Not seeking to be “a better person”
Having said that I didn’t get into a silence retreat to escape from some summons telegram, I also want to say that I didn’t go to enlighten myself.
My family is made up of esoteric, syncretic and mystic people.
One grandfather materialized crystals with the White Brotherhood of Archangel Michael, the other followed a macrobiotic diet since the 80s and my grandmother had yoga classes with De Rose when he didn’t have a sect yet, he just taught asanas in a garage.
My mother thinks reading Sonia Café’s little angel book is essential for day-to-day life and my father spends hours a week at Mahikari, purifying and passing positive light to people, a type of Reiki – my stepmother even went to Japan to do a higher seminar of this religion.
Thanks to all of them I am quite skeptical – and I will not dwell on this, as almost everything revolves around it. If you want to know more, lose the sparkle in your eyes, and then get it back, subscribe to this newsletter and stay longer.
So I didn’t go to enlighten myself, find an answer, let alone become a better person.
If by any chance you feel inadequate all the time in pursuit of an unreachable better person, I want to remind you that it’s okay, you’re not missing anything.
You are probably just increasingly undermined by the excess of colonial-digital-capitalist stimuli and, when you want to get rid of it, you seek Eastern philosophies that preach such enlightenment, which is also unattainable and, within the context we are already living in, it is just the same kind of demand under a new guise.
Opening mental spaces
There’s no need to put a mystique into things for them to have some value.
Another good way to justify think about meditation or withdrawal into retreat comes in the form of scientific discourse, which is how I discovered Vipassana, through Sam Harris, a neuroscientist who at the time was somewhat a fugitive, lived in hiding, because he wrote (concise) books against the world’s major religions, such as Christianity, Islam, and American scientific academia.
Today, the handsome one overcame this phase, came back with us here in the ritualistic round dance of capital – get paid instead of getting mad – made a podcast that blew up and recently was in the hand-in-hand circle with his hot famous professional colleague, Huberman:
The interview topics are the same that he has been working on since he was persecuted, but he had a makeover in his speech. For example, he still talks about meditation, but no longer mentions that he sat in various vipassana retreats. If you want the correct scientific explanation about meditation-mind, watch the video. My lame summary is more or less this:
When we always do the same things, the neurons of those functions connect stronger and faster, the synapses of these things get stronger, our hormones start to be governed by an entire chain of the same stimuli.
It’s like re-educating my body and mind not to react to any thought, not to click a button whenever I want to research something, not to call someone whenever I want to talk to her and so many other little things, from the simplest to the most complex ones.
Being in isolation increases this self-training, to stay seated in a room, without being able to read, write or even watch anything, is to let the body naturally regulate the hormones related to stress and reeducate the brain to function in a different way.
Going to a retreat weakens the brain’s synapses. Staying silent, with closed eyes, for hours and days on end, is to drastically reduce the dopaminergic stimuli in the brain. A vipassana retreat is like a dopamine reset.
Perhaps by sitting in Vipassana I would throw out the bathwater with the baby inside, that is, I would also return with my good habits weakened, but I thought it would be worth it.
And, to tell the truth, I am somewhat lazy.
I wanted a bit of fugere urben yes, to see the mountains of Miguel Pereira again, I missed it. The Fran Lebowitzes of life will disagree with me, but getting out of the city chaos is always a blessing.
This is the view – image taken from Google Maps – to untouched mountains that are not a forest reserve, just a farm, really. (hello agrarian reform)
And that’s where all my criticism to Mr. Goenka begins.
O casal monogamico não é necessariamente definido pela exclusividade sexual, muitos continuam juntos apesar de traições… o mais importante é a hierarquia entre o casal e os outros amantes (amizades, familia etc): apenas uma pessoa é considerada legitima. Há constante competição para alcançar e conservar o “núcleo casal”.
No entanto, mesmo com a pretensão da segurança e eternidade desses relacionamentos, hoje temos monogamias consecutivas (namoros e casamentos curtos) que deixam pra trás muitos cadáveres afetivos e quebra total de relacionamentos em rede.
Assim como outros sistemas de controle, a monogamia tambem costuma ser justificada como “natural”, mesmo quando no resto do reino animal não exista como categorizar seres sempre estritamente monogamicos.
A questão do genero binario vem junto no pacote, mas temos diversos casos, como dos amerindios (EUA) em que as comunidades validavam, pelo menos, 5 tipos de generos diferentes em seu grupo. Brigitte também comenta que muitas especies tem individuos que trocam de sexualidade de acordo com a necessidade social do bando.
O sistema monogamico foi se formando juntamente com o cercamento de terras, controle populacional… a igreja, que já teve ritos iniciaticos de sexo grupal para gerar maior coesão de grupo, passa a perseguir essas práticas e usar seu poder para fortificar o imaginário da família heterosexual patriarcal.
✨ No seculo XX já não temos memória de outras possibilidades.
Hoje a positivação da exclusividade esta relacionada com os mecanismos do consumo e da publicidade: Produtos exclusivos, férias exclusivas, clubes exclusivos, diplomas exclusivos, bairros exclusivos, assentos exclusivos… o que não passa de propagandas para produtos efêmeros, como também acabam sendo os relacionamentos.
O tabú da fidelidade, encobre algo maior e mais importante que são a responsabilidade ou a co-responsabilidade, o compromisso ou a interdependência em comunidade… O medo da solidão atual não é apenas sobre não ter redes, há pessoas que estão sós no abismo de nossas vidas contemporâneas, não porque não tem companhia, mas porque ninguém se preocupa com elas.
Brigitte acredita que é possível fazer da nossa experiência amorosa coletiva uma ferramenta de transformação política, que distribui os direitos e deveres de forma mais equitativa do que a formação jurídica e reprodutiva da “família tradicional”, essa que não necessariamente forma vínculos de comunidade, mas sim torna facilmente identificável quem pertence a quem, inclusive no quesito de privilégios hereditários ou no que diz respeito às nacionalidades…
Ela alerta, porém, que romper esse vínculo sexo-afetivo sem abrir outras perspectivas comunitárias também é aventurar-se a solidão que é real no território de desemparo que habitamos de indiferença generalizada…
Na relação poliamorosa, todas as partes se conhecem, sabem da existência umas das outras, por outro lado as redes afetivas não se conformam com o conhecer mas em construir reconhecimento, coletivizando os prazeres e também as dores, tendo o reconhecimento como base da possibilidade de existência comum. Afinal, quando um dos afetos conhece a outra parte, mas não reconhece sua implicação na rede, a rede não existe, só existem fragmentos..
Por outro lado, ela reconhece que estamos caminhando para uma sociedade cada vez mais individualizada e ainda androcentrica (pautada no patriarcado, como no caso da ficção das fotos e vídeos de mulheres feitas para “servir” O prazer de “um” só homem) pautada no desenvolvimento de tecnologias que tornam até mesmo o prazer em algo virtual, nos afastando cada vez mais da real intimidade e vulnerabilidade do afeto, nos aproximando cada vez mais de um sistema altamente controlador, cada vez mais preditivo e opressor, transformando até mesmo nosso prazer em algo limitado e mecânico.
Brigitte Vasallo é uma escritora espanhola conhecida especialmente por sua crítica da islamofobia de género, a denúncia do purplewashinge o homonacionalismo, bem como por sua defesa do poliamor nas relações afetivas. (fonte: wikipedia)
Rich neighborhoods very well delimited and far from the poorest, several subcenters that don’t talk to each other, have you ever had the impression that visiting São Paulo is like visiting many different cities?
The city has a disjointed and segregated formation, mainly the result of the adoption of foreign urban public policies, instead of having created our own policies based on our existing reality.
These policies were driven by foreign capital and were practices that created the financialization of land in other countries, forming a more complex real estate market.
As the policies prioritized the profit of some agents and not the better socialization of the population, as a consequence, there was the breakdown of community life, the super individualization of lives, the difficulty for all classes to connect, among other hallmarks of the capitalist system and hyperconsumption.
Even knowing that these policies generated social problems, the Basic Urban Plan (PUB), prepared in 1969 by a consortium between two Brazilian and two North American companies, included among its elements the same American practices that were sold as innovative measures to stimulate the urban development through subcenters.
Instead of enriching and strengthening the existing infrastructure in the city, new centers were artificially created, not because the population indicated this need, but to create spaces where new investors, mainly foreigners, could operate.
One of the emblematic cases was the corporate and financial center, which was previously located on Avenida Paulista and was driven by developers to be dispersed and built from scratch on the banks of the Pinheiros River. In her Ph. adequate housing and relocation for these people.
This process is very similar to the zoning that expelled the poor from New York City in the 1920s: when the number of people in the city increased significantly, it forced different social classes to live very close to each other. Middle-class people, who had access to industrialized consumer goods, now no longer wanted contact with millions of poor and indigent people.
This started the process of gentrification or ennoblement of urban areas, done through higher taxation or definition of uses for each area, among other zoning tools that make it illegal or very expensive for the poor to be in certain districts of the city, these mechanisms bureaucratic led to the expropriation of the tenements and the poor were induced or forced to leave the centers and live in distant housing complexes or found other ways of (over)living by themselves, sometimes with access to mass transportation, the subway.
Left: “Should we save New York?” Announcement, New York Times, March 5, 1916 Right: Final Report, June 2, 1916, Commission on Building Districts and Restrictions (fonte)
These urban decentralizing tendencies are considered by the sociologist Bauman — precursor of the concept of liquid modernity and who also thinks about urbanity in this key — as strategies that aim, purposefully, at the segregation and disintegration of community life, since coexistence in the city starts to depend on the Mobility and Time, two luxuries.
Thus, the city entered the 20th century. With the increase in wealth, there was a search for the materialization of comfort in the territory through demolitions, requalifications, landscaping and adequacy of spaces for transport.
On the other hand, part of the wealthy portion decided to move away from the centers and it is also at this time that the suburbs appeared: neighborhoods further away from the city center, but for richer people, generally composed of houses with a garden.
the suburb
In the United States, the pioneering city in this model was Los Angeles, described by Peter Hall as “the city by the side of the highway”, because the suburban neighborhoods were built where the ranches by the side of the road used to be. Those cheap, devalued lands were bought at a bargain price, separated into lots and sold as special, peaceful spaces for family homes.
That is, ranches adjacent to the city were intentionally purchased for real estate speculation. This decentralization model became a great opportunity for developers, it was a life project to be sold to the middle class public.
Around here, more than 50 years later, we copied the model: the Alphaville region was formerly land of traditional and wealthy families in São Paulo, but inhabited by a hundred small producers, the region began to be expropriated and divided into lots from the 1960s onwards. 50 and was launched as a product, a new concept in housing, in the early 70’s.
It didn’t happen that the rich naturally went there, the plan was ingenious to build a new independent urban core: there was a plan to induce people to actually live in these neighborhoods, the condominiums imposed strict rules for building permanent residences to prevent subdivisions become just vacation homes.
To attract these residents, advertisements made appeals such as “Verteville 4 — in Alphaville -, real solutions to current problems” or, as the psychoanalyst Dunker brings in his book on Alphaville “Mal-Estar, Suffering and Symptom: A psychopathology of Brazil between walls”, condominium advertisements are even more explicit: “Vila das Mercês. The right not to be disturbed”.
At the time, articles for the newspaper Estadão, Alphaville is stated as a neighborhood that overcomes the “embarrassment” of the chaos of the city, among other speeches similar to those of the promises in Los Angeles in the 20s-30s, condominiums that would be the “construction of authentic communities”, an oasis of collaboration, protected by private security.
It is not known, however, where such high expectations of advertisements came from, as the housing model in suburbs had not worked in Los Angeles, which suffered impacts as early as 1920.
In his book “City of Quartz”, Mike Davis discusses the decline of the city with the decline of commerce in pre-highway areas, the segregation of recreational facilities, the closing of community centers and the increase in street violence.
Here in Alphaville, the consequences can be clearly seen in the documentary “from the inside of the wall”:
In his book “Confidence and fear in the city”, Bauman defends the need for an urbanization that creates communities without walls, even though it is known that this urban integration is a permanent clash, an eternal struggle of interests.
Didn’t the propaganda say the poor were going to stay away?
In the decades following these decentralization movements in the city of São Paulo, social differentiation in became increasingly evident due to the location where people transit, mainly due to the relationship with individual purchasing power, which brought striking consequences for Brazilian society.
In 2001, Alphaville received an additional barrier with the inauguration of the first toll booth in the region, located on the Castelo Branco Highway, a few kilometers from the neighborhood.
This measure was met with criticism, because residents of neighboring cities had waited a long time for a faster route to go to São Paulo and, now that it was available, they could not use it due to the high abusive amount charged in tolls, which only thought of profiting from on top of the rich in Alphaville or, in a double movement, push the poor from that neighborhood even further away.
In São Paulo, we saw social segregation intensify, as with private security, walls and electric fences monitored by cameras and other new technologies.
In 2008 the mechanisms were even more subtle and far-fetched, when, at the inauguration of Shopping Cidade Jardim, the city was faced with a novelty: there was no entrance for pedestrians, to avoid those who did not have cars and, moreover, there was no square food at the mall.
Two years later, between 2010 and 2011, residents of the wealthy Higienópolis neighborhood, with less than 5,000 inhabitants, opposed the construction of the subway line in the region, as they believed that this would bring “unwanted people”.
A resident of the neighborhood said, in an interview, that they were “different people”. The dispute for the territories materializes a few weeks later, in response, hundreds of people came together via the internet to hold a barbecue as a protest against the segregationist stance of some residents of the neighborhood, known as “Churrasco da Gente Diferenciada”.
In 2014, the issue related to the low-income population’s access to shopping centers was again highlighted in the media with the well-known “rolezinhos”. In them, low-income young people agreed to go in groups to the most expensive malls in the city, where before they were usually expelled when they went alone, separately. At the time, a well-known columnist ended up highlighting even more the prejudices rooted in society, saying that these young people were “incapable of recognizing their limitation and were jealous of wealthy youth, wealth and educated people”.
In 2019, another criticism surfaced when a famous person said that the airport was becoming a bus station, shamelessly exposing that he considered the clothes and mannerisms of the poorest people inappropriate for environments that until then were only frequented by the richest, like the airport.
Cologne 2.0
It is clear that many of these class conflicts are just a continuation of a society with a history of slavery, where the separation between the main house and the slave quarters becomes even more refined. Added to this, we have a scenario of globalization that induces the continuation of Brazilian submission to stronger economies, keeping the country in a position of colony, but with more refined economic-cultural-political mechanisms as well.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Brazil quickly entered the industrialized international market. However, during the second industrial revolution, countries like the United States and Germany invested heavily in research that generated new, more refined production technologies, increasing international competitiveness. Economist Wilson Cano argues that, at that time, the investment needed for Brazil to reach international levels in new technologies and scale of production was greater than what the Brazilian state could organize.
Foreign capital then enters under the pretext of modernizing what already existed and industrial policies are open to this, leading to the dismantling of various sectors, opening up even more space for foreign capital to denationalize the financial system. This scenario made it impossible for Brazil to become an independent neoliberal country.
In this scenario, São Paulo, the corporate capital of the country, seeks to become a modern and attractive city for investments by foreign companies, which come to “replace” the now obsolete and outdated Brazilian industry.
For this, it adopts public urban planning policies in the United States, such as “cities for cars” and “zoning plan”. This dynamizes capital and complicates the real estate market, still incipient in the city.
As a consequence, we observe an increase in the physical distance between those who can and cannot buy, live and visit areas of the city. The land, the territory and the city, now, are no longer places for coexistence, but products to be bought and financed by foreign capital.
None of this came as a surprise, as the US land planning models implemented did not promote socializing and community, but opened up a huge market for real estate developers. By bringing these models to Brazil, the side effects of such policies had been known for decades, but the weak economy made the dispute between foreign capital and state power unfair.
Com tanto tampo em casa, acho que ler, programar, fazer yoga e estreitar laços no relacionamento com o P. foram minhas atividades principais. Até terminei o finalzin de Sapiens depois de miliano e deixei outros tantos, muito bons, pra terminar nos anos que estão por vir… aqui vão os livros que li por inteiro em 2020, os grifados foram meus preferidos:
Quadrinhos
Persepolis
O árabe do futuro 1, 2, 3e 4 (o primeiro foi hilário e os outros não decepcionaram)
Pyogyang: uma jornada a coreia do norte (o último que tinha lido sobre essa temática foi em 2017)
O homem que caminha
Na prisão
Os demais
Spinster -Making a Life of One’s Own: Spinster é o termo em inglês que poderíamos traduzir como “tia dos gatos”, e esse é um livro sobre como é viver uma vida solteira com 20, 30, 40 anos e assim por diante. Fiquei super fascinada por ele e acho que toda mulher deveria ler mais sobre esse tópico, ter um parceiro e ser mãe não são obrigações de ninguém, o que pode parecer óbvio, mas pouco se fala sobre mulheres soteiras sem ser de forma prejorativa.
No seu pescoço: Ganhei de natal de um colega de trabalho, ainda não tinha lido nenhum trabalho da Chimananda, muito boa escrita.
A vegetariana: acho que esse post diz melhor sobre o livro do que eu poderia.
Este livro não vai te deixar rico – tudo o que ninguém te contou sobre empreendedorismo: Escrito pela pessoa que faz um perfil que gosto muito, o @startupdareal
Reinvenção da intimidade: Políticas do sofrimento cotidiano
Adventures in opting out – Um guia de campo para viver uma vida intencional: Já que esse é um blog sobre minimalismo, preciso fazer um review melhor dos livros da Cait, pretendo fazer agora nas férias de janeiro.
Como ser anticapitalista no século XXI
Desobedecer
Necropolítica: escrevi um pouquinho sobre lá no meio de 2020
Na hora da decisão – somos sujeitos conscientes ou máquinas biológicas?: Um livro estilo jornalismo científico escrito por um italiano, bem poética a forma de escrita, interessante.
Não tenho cacife para escrever um post sobre racismo estrutural, mas queria deixar aqui um destaque sobre esse livro:
Imagine a cena: você leva sua filha de 10 anos ao médico e, no final da consulta, a doutora pergunta se sua filha não gostaria de trabalhar na faxina da casa de férias dela, enquanto as aulas não voltam. O detalhe na história parece fazer toda a diferença: a médica é branca; a mãe e a filha são negras. Grada Kilomba traz esse e muitos outros relatos em “Memórias da plantação, episódios do racismo cotidiano”, livro-resultado de sua tese de doutorado.
A autora, que é uma psicóloga portuguesa, começa o livro na versão em português, atentando e pontuando o quão excludente esse idioma pode ser para endossar o racismo, o machismo e outros preconceitos. O livro também começa com algumas conceitualizações sobre o poder que preserva a supremacia branca e mantém posições hierárquicas. Essas ideias são apresentadas em diálogo com Foucault, Mbembe, e Fanon. Seria incrível se esse livro fosse uma das primeiras leituras obrigatórias em qualquer curso superior, ele diz muito sobre nosso fazer científico e sobre o mundo acadêmico em si.
