- From February 5, 2025: Want more analysis like this? Join mind reader (free) to never miss a dispatch. Start right now.
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Extremely temporary hiatus
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If you're reading this, you may be an extremely avid reader. I am currently taking 7 days of mental health rest from the news in order to steel myself to the onslaught of fascism in the US. Everyone needs a rest some times, take care of yourselves comrades. See you before you even know it.
- From January 27, 2025: Like what you’re reading? Join mind reader (free) to get fresh critical analysis delivered directly to you. Start right now.
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Navigating plurality in non-dynamic systems (or, ‘dynamism’ and human suffering)
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We are bound in frames of colonial capitalism with systems of static purpose and design. Unless you live on the periphery, it is highly likely that at least some aspect of your existence fits within the western economic system. And unless you are centralised in a small handful of European nations (with, admittedly, high populations), you are probably contributing to those European nations prosperity, rather than your own. Naturally, with American imperialism this began to shift, and the global flows of resources and moneys are so deeply complex and intently mystified that tracing from primordial origins no longer serves meaningful purpose, but let’s do a little now anyway. Capitalism emerged through violent processes of transformation beginning in 15th century Europe, where leaders leveraged desires for wealth and power to drive colonial expansion across the globe. This involved a dual process of material and ideologica...
- From January 18, 2025: Like what you’re reading? Join mind reader (free) to get fresh critical analysis delivered directly to you. Start right now.
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Plurality Plurality Plurality Plurality REC
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Let’s come to terms with some terms. Sorry, I’m not trying to be cute (that’s just effortless). I think it’s important we, as I constantly raise, share a literacy for engagement with big ideas. Sadly, much of the time those big ideas are also terrible ideas — things that dominate our lives, change our ways of being, and interrupt what we might (at least individually) deem antithetical to our being. Ideas, however, are critical and require serious and robust examination as we continually sit in a world dominated by bad ones, and bad faith actors whose entire existence is designed to peddle those ideas. But we also need a binding approach, something that brings us together with hope and possibility – not just doom and gloom about the state of things (which is, admittedly, pretty shit). A few things have pushed this desire to write this morning, some good, some bad. Let’s jump into them. I went for a walk with Harriet Taylo...
- From January 10, 2025: Like what you’re reading? Join mind reader (free) to get fresh critical analysis delivered directly to you. Start right now.
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The labour process, atomisation and social media
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As I grow increasingly concerned about the level of influence Zucc has with his near monopoly on social media, I concomitantly grow concerned about the atomisation of workers and mystification of the labour process. Today, I’d like to spend a bit of time talking about social bonds, and the “cohesion” of society. In particular, I think we need to spend some time truly attending to how the common sense has shifted to a worship of individual billionaires, giving way to a rise of front-seat oligarchs directly in control of abstracting worker connection to production, and to direct control of the machinery of government [1]. Naturally, I’m also concerned with how this will play out in Australia given the commencement of Albanese’s campaigning, but let’s take it one step at a time [2]. The atomisation of workers in contemporary times is extreme. Capitalism benefits when solidarity is eroded, and it has played the long game to...
- From January 8, 2025: Like what you’re reading? Join mind reader (free) to get fresh critical analysis delivered directly to you. Start right now.
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On class
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Let’s take a voyage together through three understandings of class. This concept is becoming increasingly interesting to me, particularly in relationship to transformative movements. Across history a great many Marxists, and others who on occasion appropriated from Marx and Marxists (looking at you Bourdieu), have debated class as a (social/political/economic/determining) construct. The brackets, here, are worth some discussion but let’s first think about defining some key terms that will be useful for us as we progress through this discussion. At the source class can be understood in terms of a person’s relative relationship to the means of production. The means of production ranges from: (1) the physical spaces where work happens (factories, farms, offices), (2) the tools and machinery used in production (from hammers to industrial equipment), (3) the raw materials that are used to make things (iron ore, cotton, oil —...
- From January 2, 2025: Be part of the conversation. Join mind reader’s free community of readers analysing capitalism, technology and social change. Start right now.
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Autocorrect
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Has anyone else noticed that Apple’s iOS keyboard/autocorrect recommendations in the latest iOS no longer autocorrect the word fascism? They’ve literally given it the same treatment as low level swears. Fascinating what this very small move signals about corporate views of fascism in the US. We’re living it — and we’re moving towards not being allowed to talk about it. Too few own the means of knowledge sharing and critique. Meta and Twitter are not public goods.
- From January 1, 2025: Join mind reader’s free community of radical thinkers analysing capitalism’s contradictions and imagining better futures. Start right now.
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Happy new year from mind reader
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Thank you, reader, for your ongoing support. We’ve read more than 500 bookmarks and 30 dispatches together over 2024. We need strong analysis of the political landscape shaping our very thought, and your participation in this space contributes to that necessary thinking. Greatly look forward to continuing the radical dissemination project here across 2025 with you. Here’s to another year of anti-capitalist thought! Perhaps this will be the year of revolution.
- From December 30, 2024: Be part of the conversation. Join mind reader’s free community of readers analysing capitalism, technology and social change. Start right now.
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Musk and the death of democracy
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I am constantly forced to think about Elon Musk and his egomaniacal, loud, and unearned positioning in society and emerging formal role in government in the US. Today I want to talk about consent, particularly in how consent has forged Musk as either a “super genius” or “capitalist success story”. He seems to have been depicted, at least in Australia, as an underdog innovator whose singular fortitude has allowed him to rise to power — this, at least, is Rupert Murdoch’s position on things, and you can bet that he wishes he was Musky, too. Obviously, this is a manufacturing of consent to Musk’s businesses — none of which he has meaningfully contributed anything to — and a demonstration of how consent is built. From “humble beginnings” Musk has “changed the world”, they say, which is a significantly empathetic narrative verging on outright lies. The reality, of course, is that “daddy got rich killing people” and he bought s...
- From December 25, 2024: Want more analysis like this? Join mind reader (free) to never miss a dispatch. Start right now.
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Oligopoly capitalism: angry men, idiots, and fascism
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With the increase in Musky headlines, I cant help but offer a christmas posting on oligopoly capitalism. This, I argue, is the next phase in the torturous helltrip that is our contemporary political economy, particularly if we see that the USA is the blueprint for modern economies all around the globe — particularly in the margins as they control the status quo for trade and economics from their substantial imperial torment. What we are seeing in the USA, to be clear, is an undeniable turn to fascism, which I need to repeat some of here so people understand the full scale and gravity of what Trump and Musk, amongst billionaire cronies are bringing to their people [1] [2]: - » Gutting abortion access - » Mass deportations - » Abusing warrantless surveillance - » Unleashing force on protestors - » Severely limiting voting access - » Censoring critical discussions in classrooms - » Attacking trans people and regressing fou...
- From December 21, 2024: Support independent radical thought. Join mind reader’s growing community of readers thinking deeply about social transformation. Start right now.
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Theorising the revolution: formulas, lexical gaps, and feminism
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I have been thinking about labour and the nature of exploitation. Not the political party, though they could easily fit under a similar topic sentence. I’m also quite sure you’re thinking “you, thinking about labour? ha!” as though you don’t know precisely what you’re in for reading these dispatches. But I have a configuration of theoretical terrain which I think might be useful to sketch out, and I’m yet to find time to do this in an academic text, so we’re doing it here! You may have heard of essentialising, and the sin of oversimplification. Well let’s do our absolute best to oversimplify the basic equation of the basis of the “economy”. This is a fun one, because who you ask will depend on what part, here, is considered the economy, but enough disclaimers... ```Productive labour``` > Labour Power + Means of Production = Total Value Created > Wages < Total Value Created > Where the difference (Total Valu...
- From December 19, 2024: Support independent radical thought. Join mind reader’s growing community of readers thinking deeply about social transformation. Start right now.
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The postal service
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In an almost bourgeois fugue state today I felt rising rage at the para-privatisation of the postal service in this country. Yeah, oddly specific trigger for today’s writing, ey. This, in particular, after being scorned dozens of times for deliveries by “express post” that almost feel like spite come 3-4 business days later than their estimate with an accompanying gaslighting green sign saying “Updated”. Ugh. Okay, but let’s think about the motivations of the company behind all this, because as we know, Australia Post is technically a government body, but with absolutely none of the benefits of nationalisation – just like almost all our other services which have been sold to the lowest bidder to extract maximum profit for shareholders and screw consumers everywhere. Australia Post operates, fairly uniquely, as a corporate entity. However, unlike privatised utilities, such as water and electricity, which are run for a pr...
- From December 16, 2024: Like what you’re reading? Join mind reader (free) to get fresh critical analysis delivered directly to you. Start right now.
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Wealth vs solidarity, and the need for compassion
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I have been thinking about the how the corporate class, the bootlickers, the “upper middle class” and others utterly slavish to the capitalist simultaneously dehumanise themselves and others. A phenomenal piece of mental trickery: contortion, gaslighting and betrayal. Those who fancy themselves stable and wealthy (an ever treacherous position to claim), and often profess it so by engaging in “high culture” activities (themselves equal parts immoral and despicable) which range incredibly broadly from horse racing, to stock market investing, or apparently lately cryptocurrency market gambling. This, to me, is a fundamentally interesting group of “people”. Let’s think on it. In the imperial core — conceptually a useful imaginary space for us to consider in theorisation about “wealth” and culture — there are opportunities for multi-generational “middle classes” to establish themselves. However, there are no “middle classes”...
- From December 14, 2024: Join mind reader’s free community of radical thinkers analysing capitalism’s contradictions and imagining better futures. Start right now.
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Optimism as antidote to despair
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I have been thinking about optimism and despair. Actually, I’ve been reading on optimism over despair [1] and thinking about an analytical pattern that might help us mobilise this kind of thought in the way we discuss contemporaneous issues on ``mind reader``. So, yes, this post is a meta post about being meta, what else have you come to expect from me? I’m going to talk in abstract about both the reason for optimism, and for despair, and how we might mobilise these against the way they are mobilised by the capitalist class. Because what’s better than human emotion, passion, feeling and process against something so fundamentally inhuman, nonhuman, non-human as capitalism. Let’s get into it... Chomsky uses a pattern of explanatory critique that comprises his own unique theoretical positioning. I suspect, to label him as a “Marxist theorist” is to do him disservice given the expansive cannon of his texts over the decades....
- From December 10, 2024: Want more analysis like this? Join mind reader (free) to never miss a dispatch. Start right now.
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Feature experiments
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I’m trying something a little different on the web view of
mind reader
. I’ve introduced (manual) ML based AI summaries for some articles shared. This way you’re saved from engaging with full text if you have limited time, but can otherwise choose to ignore “AI” and carry on with your day. For logged in people (hello, yes, sign up if you haven’t) I’ve added a switch to enable/disable these summaries. Just to be clear, these summaries are generated by Kagi’s Universal Summarizer product, they’re generated on the server side and you are never exposed to any “AI” mumbo jumbo on the client side — rest assured there’s no gross tracking, AI slop, or other nastiness here. Also this post type is new, so you’re on the bleeding edge! - From December 7, 2024: Like what you’re reading? Join mind reader (free) to get fresh critical analysis delivered directly to you. Start right now.
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CEOs and death
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Overnight in the US a person killed a private health care company’s CEO [1]. The suspicion, of course, is that this company denied the person’s (or their family/friends) health care claim. I commented on mind reader that this could well be the start of rolling out the guillotines to end billionaires. Let’s see how good our odds are looking of an anti-capitalist revolution through our theoretical lenses, before we start partying on dead CEO’s graves. Hang about though because there is some cause for a party right out the gate: healthcare companies in the US have been allowing claims at a much higher rate today, they’ve removed information about their boards and directors, and are obscuring details about their CEOs. Okay, so one of those is a good thing. But it is interesting how scared the capitalist class is today. This is a deeply theoretically interesting time – if morally challenging. While, of course, one cannot ad...