In our current mess of a world, one of capitalism’s illusions is the promise of #frictionlessness, that everything should just work, that all interactions should be smooth, efficient, and untroubled. In tech this is the logic of the #dotcons, keeping the “users” engaged, never give them time to think, and above all don’t let the real world get in the way of the pipeline between their attention and your profit.

This has infected the #geekproblem deeply. In software culture, especially, […]

There’s a lot of #fluffy around these days. Take books like Abundance – dressed up as bold new visions, but really just more of the same old liberal centrism with a shiny, tech-friendly finish. It flirts with Marx at the end, but only to dress up in borrowed credibility. At heart, it’s not socialist, it’s a manifesto to reassure the #mainstreaming chattering class that everything will be OK if we innovate harder and manage smarter. This is blinded feel-good “supply-side liberalism” […]

There’s a lot of #fluffy around these days. Take books like Abundance – dressed up as bold new visions, but really just more of the same old liberal centrism with a shiny, tech-friendly finish. It flirts with Marx at the end, but only to dress up in borrowed credibility. At heart, it’s not socialist, it’s a manifesto to reassure the #mainstreaming chattering class that everything will be OK if we innovate harder and manage smarter. This is blinded feel-good “supply-side liberalism” […]

In this accelerating collapse – where #climatechaos spirals and #neoliberalism guts the very idea of society – we urgently need to confront a painful truth: it’s simple, the #nastyfew are a parasite class. And that this class feeds on the very foundations of well-being, survival, and joy that the majority of the global population desperately needs. They are the ones who keep the engines of destruction humming, not out of necessity, but out of greed and fear of irrelevance. These people and […]

In this accelerating collapse – where #climatechaos spirals and #neoliberalism guts the very idea of society – we urgently need to confront a painful truth: it’s simple, the #nastyfew are a parasite class. And that this class feeds on the very foundations of well-being, survival, and joy that the majority of the global population desperately needs. They are the ones who keep the engines of destruction humming, not out of necessity, but out of greed and fear of irrelevance. These people and […]

In our current mess of a world, one of capitalism’s illusions is the promise of #frictionlessness, that everything should just work, that all interactions should be smooth, efficient, and untroubled. In tech this is the logic of the #dotcons, keeping the “users” engaged, never give them time to think, and above all don’t let the real world get in the way of the pipeline between their attention and your profit.

This has infected the #geekproblem deeply. In software culture, especially, […]

A few recent conversations remind me: we’ve already done the work of building alternatives. Twenty years of grassroots tech, radical process, and messy social organizing. The trouble is, that soil has been hollowed out, scattered, exhausted, and composted into the #dotconsOur current mission isn’t to “start from scratch,” but to rebuild bridges, spread compost, and replenish the soil. That’s why I keep coming back to this moment, the bridging of the #openweb back into #mainstream […]

A few recent conversations remind me: we’ve already done the work of building alternatives. Twenty years of grassroots tech, radical process, and messy social organizing. The trouble is, that soil has been hollowed out, scattered, exhausted, and composted into the #dotconsOur current mission isn’t to “start from scratch,” but to rebuild bridges, spread compost, and replenish the soil. That’s why I keep coming back to this moment, the bridging of the #openweb back into #mainstream […]

This week, Dr. Emily M. Bender (University of Washington), co-author of The AI Con, delivered a much-needed reality check in Oxford, cutting through the fog of #AI PR myths and techno-dystopian smoke. In The Q&A by Professor Catherine Pope (Nuffield Dept. of Primary Care), the conversation explored how AI is being used not to elevate us, but to devalue human creativity, justify surveillance, and concentrate wealth and power in the bands of the #nastyfew

This wasn’t the normal breathless […]

This week, Dr. Emily M. Bender (University of Washington), co-author of The AI Con, delivered a much-needed reality check in Oxford, cutting through the fog of #AI PR myths and techno-dystopian smoke. In The Q&A by Professor Catherine Pope (Nuffield Dept. of Primary Care), the conversation explored how AI is being used not to elevate us, but to devalue human creativity, justify surveillance, and concentrate wealth and power in the bands of the #nastyfew

This wasn’t the normal breathless […]

The thing most liberals forget is that Americans are a notoriously politically violent bunch. From the Boston Tea Party to armed labour uprisings, from the Black Panthers to white vigilantes, from state crackdowns to citizen riots – the American story has always been soaked in political violence, the “land of the free” has enforced its freedom with fists, guns, and fire.

But over the last 40–50 years, all that was deliberately erased, rewritten, smoothed over, sold back as […]

The thing most liberals forget is that Americans are a notoriously politically violent bunch. From the Boston Tea Party to armed labour uprisings, from the Black Panthers to white vigilantes, from state crackdowns to citizen riots – the American story has always been soaked in political violence, the “land of the free” has enforced its freedom with fists, guns, and fire.

But over the last 40–50 years, all that was deliberately erased, rewritten, smoothed over, sold back as […]

The big question need to be highlighted: where will pressure for meaningful regulation of #dotcons algorithmic monopolies actually come from?

Right now, it’s hard to see. Lawmakers generally have a poor grasp of the real problems, decades behind on both the tech and its corrosive social consequences. Most legislation we get is either pre-packaged by lobbyists from the #nastyfew controlled platforms causing the harm, or superficial and narrow, #fashionista focus on headline optics like […]

We have strong passive #blocking forces stopping the real change and challenge we need before we have any hope of changing the world, thus we as a community have to change our stance towards this blocking. And the first step – the most important one – is painfully simple: Stop being a prat.

That means:

Stop pretending you don’t understand the stakes.

Stop making perfect the enemy of good.

Stop whining about how broken things are while refusing to touch the tools that exist.

Stop […]

Our current #mainstreaming path of paywalls stacked on paywalls isn’t life, it’s a trap, we need a way out. In our everyday lives, we’ve come to accept the absurd:

You pay to eat food grown on land you don’t own,

Pay to sleep under a roof that someone profits from,

Pay to drink water privatized by corporations,

Pay to breathe, because the air is poisoned by industries that sell you both the problem and the solution.

And if you miss a payment? Game over. That’s not a […]