Politics Acute Fear of the Gigantic Nameless Thing I recently completed a literary survey of every piece of creative fiction I could find that H. P. Lovecraft wrote or collaborated on. At first, this was motivated by climate grief and my feeling that there is something important for Lovecraft’s work and
Humor How to Finish All the Items on Your To-Do List With the fast pace of modern life and the go-go-go, always-on work culture, it’s easy to get to the end of the day and feel like you didn’t accomplish anything. Heck, sometimes you get to the end of a busy day and
Politics On Half Measures One of the worst parts of this COVID-19 pandemic to me is that we’re seeing in real-time what happens in a capitalist economy when constant consumption and needless production just stop. It’s ugly. I’ve been trying to explain this to people
Politics On the Tyranny of the Herd This morning, while writing in my journal, I found myself wondering if pencil sharpeners are allowed on airplanes. This is precisely the sort of question that the human mind can only ponder because the rules for what one can take onto airplanes are arbitrary
Religion/Spirituality On Religion, Righteous Anger, and Smashing Structures I don’t write about religion and my religious beliefs as much these days because, after my year and a day of study and reflection, I feel like I’ve answered most of the big structural questions in a way that works for me.
Politics On Social Media As Inoculation This is not to say people shouldn’t seek comfort in art, in TV, in movies. It’s the only way to not go mad! But, in our view, do it knowing what you’re doing is fun and aesthetic, not militant and subversive—
Politics Can I Talk To A Manager? “Speaking to the manager” is a sort of tyrannical helplessness; it is the haughty demand for intercession on one’s behalf by an array of greater forces you assume are servile. It is worded like a demand, but it is in fact a plea.
Politics Nothing to Syndicate It should be clear what all these changes in the nature of work mean for syndicalism: It is difficult to organize the workplace if there is no workplace. It is even harder if there are no workers. Of course, there still are workplaces, and
Politics Slacking Off as a Revolutionary Act The worker becomes a revolutionary not by becoming more of a worker but by undoing his “workerness.” And in this he is not alone; the same applies to the farmer,
Politics On Silent Pogroms If a Jew and a Gentile happened to be arrested on the same charge, it was certain that the Gentile would go free while the Jew would be sent to prison and sometimes even shot. They were all the time exposed to insult and
Politics On the Commodification of Everything Beautiful After my first medical appointments of the day, I find myself hanging out at a Panera and dreaming of a world there were public spaces I could sit on a democratically controlled Internet, spaces truly open to all that didn’t require you to
Politics What “The Economy” Means …“the economy,” which was a short-hand term for corporate profit… (A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn) This is a very useful thought technology. We should all implement a substitution in our heads for these two phrases. s/the economy/
Politics On Meritocracy and the Role of Capitalist Inoculation Undoubtedly, ordinary people benefited to some extent from these changes. The system was rich, productive, complex; it could give enough of a share of its riches to enough of the
Politics On Revolution, Reform, and Capitalism’s Terrifying Escape Room The problem of democracy in the post-Revolutionary society was not, however, the Constitutional limitations on voting. It lay deeper, beyond the Constitution, in the division of society into rich and poor. For if some people had great wealth and great influence; if they had
Politics On Ineffectiveness When I walked into Starbucks this morning, I ran into a guy with a shirt not unlike this one. Maybe he hasn't been keeping up with his daily pledges?
Politics On Disruption and Underpaid Labor MoviePass says its model can realize a healthy profit margin, provided it can monetize its user data and sign up enough casual moviegoers. This one sentence says so much about what's wrong with the tech industry from my perspective. Users aren't buyers in a
Politics The Intersection of Exploitation and Privilege During the Cold War, defense companies like Lockheed in the Santa Clara Valley drew scores of ambitious scientists; these workers seemed to share certain personality traits, including social awkwardness, emotional
Politics A Passion for Things At IKEA, I found possibly the best short description of capitalism ever.
Link Article Apologies as Commodities A huge multi-national company like Starbucks is inextricably plugged into the system of global capitalism and, as such, is complicit in all the forms of oppression that this system engenders or heightens. But in the age of branding, corporations aren’t just business entities.
Programming Time After Capitalism A large part of what makes hobbies enjoyable is that, freed from the profit motive, practitioners work at the pace they choose, allowing them to experiment, mess up, quit, and
Politics Land of the Free, My Ass Under the new guidelines, travelers who are selected by its officers for additional screening could be asked to unlock their electronic devices for inspection or provide passcodes. They will be asked to disable the devices’ data transmission, according to a senior CBP official who
Politics God Bless Us Everyone Working seventy hours a week is about close as you can get to being back in the nineteenth century without a time machine. When most people hear about this situation, they immediately think of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the story of the
Politics The Perils of Authoritarian Censorship Lately, there have been a lot of Twitter bannings and flagging of videos on YouTube which discuss why white nationalism is wrong. Sadly, this is something I was afraid would happen. Since the election of Donald Trump, white supremacists and fascists of various stripes
Politics Accumulation Through Dispossession Jones is a reminder that the migration narrative in Britain needs a rethink. Those who came from the colonies were not foreigners. Britain was an empire, not a nation, and every single colonial “subject” contributed just as much as the so-called indigenous population to
Politics Mutual Aid Over the next month, Luis, Christine, and ARECMA, took over the group’s storm-ravaged hilltop center and set up the Proyecto de Apoyo Mutuo (Project for Mutual Aid). I flew back home to New York before I could see it open. They began by
