This kind of workplace surveillance always starts in what Virginia Eubanks called "low rights environments" up. First it's the unemployed who get mass surveilled. Then it's delivery and warehouse workers. Now it's tech professionals. The problem is that there was too little solidarity from above. 1/
one thing tonight was I shared a poem with friends and we each joyfully explained which parts stood out to us the most. we all had different takes and it made us each rethink the whole. laughter, reflection, respect, learning. sociality around art prefigures communism
The fact that "being taxed on a wealth that would take most people dozens of generations to gather" is "the scariest thing she's ever seen" means the world isn't scaring millionaires and billionaires nearly enough yet.
There is a character in this series that is so Olivia-coded 😂 I think you’ll have a new favorite character/series ❤️
Big recommendation for Adrian Tchaikovsky's fantasy series Tyrant Philosophers, probably my favorite fantasy series of the past decade!
adriantchaikovsky.com/tyrant-philo...
Big news! ARB's first fundraiser is officially live! We're shooting for the very modest goal of $1k, with lots of stretch goals in mind. Your support is of course appreciated, and any help in spreading the word would be wonderful!
Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (only joking in that it’s not something you’d teach in philosophy, though it has plenty of it in there and it’s an incredible work of fiction 😂)
“New York Times headline and subheadline reading: ‘White House Seeks $1.5 Trillion for Defense in New Budget Request. The huge proposed increase would be partly offset by steep cuts to domestic programs, some of which the Trump administration describes as wasteful.’“
Pretty surreal to explain how mass homelessness emerged in the 1980s from the deliberate defunding of housing and the social safety net—and then see this, today, from the White House:
"It's not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things."
"criticizing AI use in journalism or other creative industries is classist" NO IT IS NOT
there is a class that benefits enormously from cognitive surrender, epistemic warfare, and the enclosure of all hitherto produced culture and it is NOT THE WORKING CLASS
REALIS, the science fantasy TTRPG I’ve been working on for the last five years, is now live on Kickstarter!
55 Player Classes
150+ NPC Classes
29 Factions
20 Example Moons of Realis
GMing and Prep Guidance
Over 100 incredible illustrations from 17 artists!
www.kickstarter.com/projects/cru...
this and A Wizard of Earthsea as well
buying my teenage relatives copies of Sabriel on the occasion of each new harry potter release
I blame myself for recommending it to pretty much everybody everywhere 😂
Euegencists collected reams of data, conducted empirical studies, wrote papers, attended conferences, and impacted policy.
Galton was a statistician.
We can condemn the ideas, ideologies, and validity of eugenics without refusing to acknowledge how eugenicists used empiricism to justify their work.
yeah so I don’t think the choice we’re being offered is “pay the police to play Candy Crush or pay them to lock up your neighbors” it’s that this even *being a job* is a choice and we can unmake it at any time
Kickstarter coming soon so that we can continue book coverage that won't make you sick and kill you and even start paying the people doing the writing. No gods, no venture capitalists: www.kickstarter.com/projects/anc...
Climate change is producing a severe crisis of hegemony in the system: The elites cannot picture a coherent way forward, they cannot form stable, coherent, non-pathological alliances that could navigate the future. The demands produced by the results of science confront the demands of the markets..
Things we want people to know. 6 years after the start* of the COVID-19 pandemic. *The day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. This was not the date of the first case.
It’s not just a cold. We wish it were just a cold. We would not keep talking about it if so. Since 2020, doctors, scientists, and millions of people who have had COVID-19 have learned that it can cause permanent damage to multiple organ systems within your body, leave you disabled and unable to do the things you love, and significantly harm your quality of life. A cold cannot disable or kill you the way COVID-19 can.
We know a lot more about prevention than we did back then. We all remember when we thought maybe we’d be ok as long as we were 6 feet away from sick people; that masks worked one way but not the other; and more. But just like with all new viruses and scientific study, we learned more as there was more time to study and observe, and we now know that wearing masks and keeping cleaner air are key to protecting ourselves and others. Now that we know better, we can (and should) better protect ourselves and others.
We understand the frustration about vaccines, but they are still extremely important. We all remember when vaccines were first made available, and it would’ve been great if that was the end of the pandemic. It wasn’t. And a lot of people have gotten frustrated and have given up on vaccination. It’s true, the virus that causes COVID-19 changes (which is why, like the annual flu shot, we need to get updated COVID-19 vaccines each year), and the vaccines we have now will not eliminate COVID-19 on their own. But they are still very effective at preventing serious illness and death, so even though they are not the one quick solution to the pandemic we all wish they were, they are still extremely important, and we should all stay up to date.
This week marked the anniversary of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve summarized our thoughts a bit below, but tl;dr: Unfortunately, COVID-19 is still with us, & although we may be tired of hearing about it, it’s extremely important to continue to take steps to protect ourselves & others.
It’s 7 for me - get to watch Feanor stare knives into Melkor’s back, and can turn around to chat with good guy Beleg - window seat means I also get to see Thorondor carrying Milo along next to us outside ❤️
I always love seeing fragments of Tolkien in Le Guin and Le Guin sometimes expanding on and sometimes arguing with them. This is one of the best examples but by no means the only one.
This reminds me of something Toni Morrison wrote.
Paperback edition of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone
Today the paperback of THERE IS NO PLACE FOR US is out.
It's arriving in a country once again waging war—a country that can spend tens of billions on bombs without blinking, while millions of Americans are one missed paycheck, one rent hike away from homelessness.
Let's take stock of where we are.
“The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.”
"Ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away...if you truly care about other people, you'll put [a mask] on."
We republished illustrator Gillian Levine's comic, "Reasons to mask in 2026" in @thesicktimes.org. Check it out 👀😷
thesicktimes.org/2026/02/27/c...
Sharing some relevant reflections on AI as an attempt to "square the call center", as described by Mark Fisher as the closest one can get to encountering the centerless system of capitalism, from 'Why We Fear AI':
This is what I think about when people say we need to give people "AI literacy". How do you AI literacy out of this exactly? This shows how absurd the concept is, this is what the goal of AI is for every worker.
Rob Arcane posted the opening of David F Noble's In Defense of Luddism (1993) and damn it's like it was written and hour ago.
You, an individual, cannot "fix" the whole world. You can act at the scale of your life. You should act at the scale of your life.
This is the dehumanizing logic of capitalism: To see people as things with costs and uses (just like all the other things that can be bought and sold on the market).
Those who are buyers, not sellers, on the labor market, naturally cannot help but simply see people through the lens of that logic.
