A headline’s been making the rounds the last couple days, “US corporate profits surge to record as worker payouts wilt.” Not that it's news, certainly not in the last fifty years. Really, you could go back to the beginning, the British East India Company, and depending on
This is well worth watching. Yasha had this guy on back in the beginning of the year – Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. This is a good talk about the growing politics of technology. Merchant does a good job explaining
"Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology." – Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity, 1973 I’ve been slowly working two longer pieces on energy and money, looking at both in regards to information. However, my screen keeps incessantly being filled with
Everybody's desperate trying to make ends meet Work all day still can't pay the price of gasoline and heat Alas, their lives are incomplete Don't it make you want to rock and roll all night long Mohammed's Radio It’s hard to
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
“The underlying social reality is one not generally kept firmly in mind as an operative dynamic of modern society – namely, mass democratic movements are overarchingly difficult for human beings to generate. ...coordinated insurgent actions by hundreds of thousands or millions of people represent a political, an organizational, and above all,
I’ve always been a science fiction fan. Though not reading many books, I watched plenty of movies. 70 years ago, Hannah Arendt noted the then still new genre had not been taken seriously enough in regards to revealing mass aspirations. Last year, I realized popular science fiction is increasingly
Where are you going, my beautiful friend? Is this the road that we take 'til the end? And if we break down are we left behind? Is this the highway of all mankind? Get up and clean your teeth and have a shave It's 1 am let&
For two reasons I write little about electoral politics in America. First, without a massive rethinking about all sorts of things, it’s no solution for much of anything. Secondly, I’m not paid to write about it. If you’re not making a lot of money in this election
We are the Greeks. We are the Romans. We are the continuation of Western Civilization that began three thousand years ago. The Iliad and The Odyssey are a good, if somewhat random, marking of its start. Not totally surprising the contemporary West’s giant Hollywood entertainment machine released a massive
This is one of those if you live long enough, an Ivy Boomer Lady actually holding Obama accountable for his role in helping create the mess we’re in. Obama is entirely culpable for the crime of pardoning our big bank, Wall Street financial system, creating an even greater concentration
It’s a fool’s quest to call the top of financial hysterias, not that randomly, or in this quantum age call it a certain probability, some will get it right. The thing about hysterias is whenever you think there’s a top, they can always rave higher. Nonetheless, a