A talk on a new book by Pepper Culpepper on how corporate scandals could be used to save liberal "democracy". This talk is the familiar fantasy of elitist institutions like the Blavatnik School, Oxford. Culpepper and co author Lee reframe disasters from Enron to Cambridge Analytica not as structural failures of a system built to concentrate power, but as healthy “corrections” that supposedly can be used by people like them to renew democracy.

In this telling, public anger is something to […]

A talk on a new book by Pepper Culpepper on how corporate scandals could be used to save liberal "democracy". This talk is the familiar fantasy of elitist institutions like the Blavatnik School, Oxford. Culpepper and co author Lee reframe disasters from Enron to Cambridge Analytica not as structural failures of a system built to concentrate power, but as healthy “corrections” that supposedly can be used by people like them to renew democracy.

In this telling, public anger is something to […]

A talk on a new book by Pepper Culpepper on how corporate scandals could be used to save liberal "democracy". This talk is the familiar fantasy of elitist institutions like the Blavatnik School, Oxford. Culpepper and co author Lee reframe disasters from Enron to Cambridge Analytica not as structural failures of a system built to concentrate power, but as healthy “corrections” that supposedly can be used by people like them to renew democracy.

In this telling, public anger is something to […]

One story, we have to keep telling is that we can take a different path, that in a #4opens world, exchange is no longer driven primarily by the blunt instrument of money. That doesn’t mean money vanishes overnight, or that material realities are ignored. It means money stops being treated as the only valid way to recognise value, coordinate effort, and motivate participation.

This matters, because money is a very crude tool. Capitalism trained us to believe that if something matters, it […]

One story, we have to keep telling is that we can take a different path, that in a #4opens world, exchange is no longer driven primarily by the blunt instrument of money. That doesn’t mean money vanishes overnight, or that material realities are ignored. It means money stops being treated as the only valid way to recognise value, coordinate effort, and motivate participation.

This matters, because money is a very crude tool. Capitalism trained us to believe that if something matters, it […]

Part of the shitty mess we’re in comes from the failure of #DIY culture and the rise of #stupidindividualism as the common sense path. #stupidindividualism is completely unscalable in social terms. It fragments, isolates, and exhausts. That isn’t accidental, it’s a classic divide-and-control strategy of the #deathcult. And we need to consciously step away, and away, and far away from this.

An example, over the last 20 years, I’ve answered the same questions individually, over and […]

Part of the shitty mess we’re in comes from the failure of #DIY culture and the rise of #stupidindividualism as the common sense path. #stupidindividualism is completely unscalable in social terms. It fragments, isolates, and exhausts. That isn’t accidental, it’s a classic divide-and-control strategy of the #deathcult. And we need to consciously step away, and away, and far away from this.

An example, over the last 20 years, I’ve answered the same questions individually, over and […]

A cohesive manifesto is needed as the world we inherited is fractured. Wealth, power, and knowledge are concentrated in the hands of the #nastyfew: platform owners, data hoarders, and corporate monopolies who extract value from our work, our attention, and our trust. Democracy has been hollowed out, captured and controlled by algorithms that decide what is knowable, profitable, and even true. Ecology, community, and care are sacrificed on the #deathcult altar of growth and consumption.

In […]

A cohesive manifesto is needed as the world we inherited is fractured. Wealth, power, and knowledge are concentrated in the hands of the #nastyfew: platform owners, data hoarders, and corporate monopolies who extract value from our work, our attention, and our trust. Democracy has been hollowed out, captured and controlled by algorithms that decide what is knowable, profitable, and even true. Ecology, community, and care are sacrificed on the #deathcult altar of growth and consumption.

In […]

Despite the constant #mainstreaming hype, the branding, and the trillions of dollars being poured into it, there is a simple reality that needs to be stated plainly: There is no intelligence in current “AI”, and there is no working path from today’s Large Language Models (#LLM) and Machine Learning (#ML) systems to anything resembling real, general intelligence.

What we are living through is not an intelligence revolution, it is a bubble - one we’ve seen many times before. The […]

Despite the constant #mainstreaming hype, the branding, and the trillions of dollars being poured into it, there is a simple reality that needs to be stated plainly: There is no intelligence in current “AI”, and there is no working path from today’s Large Language Models (#LLM) and Machine Learning (#ML) systems to anything resembling real, general intelligence.

What we are living through is not an intelligence revolution, it is a bubble - one we’ve seen many times before. The […]

The culture of hopelessness is a deeply conservative reaction to social change and challenge. It is marked by reflexive opposition and inward-looking tribalism, rather than by hope, solidarity, or progress. Instead of imagining alternatives, it retreats into irony and disengagement.

Meme culture and pervasive sarcasm are good examples of this tendency. They often reinforce a narrow, consumerist worldview that feels clever but lacks the power to engage with or transform wider social […]

Putting content into #dotcons creates a feedback loop with diminishing returns. The impact is marginal - and shrinking - because all you are really doing is training #failbook’s algorithms to better sell you, and everyone who interacts with your content, more “stuff.” This includes not just products, but ideology: the subtle shaping of thought, behaviour, and community through algorithmic social control.

It’s very easy to get pulled into a #flamewar on #failbook, because conflict […]

A path to do this is to step away from the #mainstreming mess. In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. The prize recognised their work on how institutions shape prosperity, most famously through their book Why Nations Fail. The timing matters, it matters a lot.

This award lands at exactly the moment we should be asking why Institutional Economics - the respectable face of #mainstreaming - has spent the last fifteen years […]

In our worship of the #deathcult, if you strip away the robes, chants, and charismatic leaders, what remains is behaviour, not belief. A destructive cult is not defined by how strange it sounds, but by what it does to bodies, lives, and futures. This matters because it breaks a common illusion: cults are judged by outcomes, not vibes.

So the real question for our #mainstreaming culture is simple: does this system produce harm through deliberate collective action? If the answer is yes, then […]

Let’s be honest about something we usually skate around. Many of our #fluffy activist friends are not fighting for change. They are fighting for equality of access to the existing system. That system is the #deathcult - growth, extraction, hierarchy, control - and most progressive mainstream activism is about making that worship fairer, nicer, more inclusive. More seats in the temple, better language on the altar, safer rituals for those already kneeling. This is not transformation, it is […]