mind reader click to return to cornelius-bell.com

Healthcare in South Australia is deeply broken. This has lasted through successive governments, and is only getting worse. Commentary from those involved in service delivery, from administrative officers through medical staff, are in a mixed state of frustration and despair, or a dwindling placebo state of euphoric optimism. But there are deep mechanisms driving the divestment from healthcare across the board, and these are supported in a bipartisan fashion by the ALP and LNP both at a state and federal level. A brief detour through the immediate past premiership is required to understand the context of the situation in South Australia, which mirrors, as often the case, a microcosm of the attitude towards health and human services at a national and, frankly, international level. From as early as 2019 there have been obvious and systemic issues in South Australia’s public health system specifically relating to ambulance...

We’re living in a strange world of technological “innovation” on the world wide web. After Web 2.0, the utter garbage fire that is Web 3.0 [1], and successive failed attempts to capitalise on “content creation” we have found ourselves in a race to the bottom with tracking, ads, and “dark patterns” [2]. The latter of these, a dark pattern, is an interface design choice that benefits the company at the expense of the user's experience. Not a surprise, but just another layer in the process of seeking to extract value from internet resources. A fundamental tenet of capitalism is a necessity for the “line to go up” – be this nett profit, stock price, human suffering, it matters not – the reportable metric drives the mode of production in contemporary capital, and the cost to humanity is never more than a brief afterthought. For this one rule to rule them all, “endless profit”, the 99% suffer. This ranges from the minutiae of...

Another day in hell. In the last fortnight we have seen: the ALP eject an elected member over their relatively limp anti-genocide stance [1], the rapid increase in cost of education visas [2], the taxation of higher degrees by research [3], and many policy and party platform transformations to reconfigure the once upon a time centrist party as the firmly right wing player. Where does the fascism start? If we momentarily set aside the deliberately genocidal and narcissistic behaviour of the Australian Government and its ALP rulers, we have just as recently borne witness to the systematic decimation of higher education – in the long run. Education in this country is government controlled. Allegedly public schools and universities are run for the public interest. In reality this has always been the hegemony’s interest. While higher education, in particular, has been seen as a relative bastion of liberal thought, over the pa...

Just what in the fiery circles of hell is happening. The United States’ Supreme Court has effectively ruled (in a grandiose movement) that Republican presidents can do no crime. What a phenomenal world we live in. But what troubles me even more than the deeply upsetting turn this has taken is that working people support this nightmare scenario. There are a litany of articles on “middle America” as a decent, relatively “normal” people who are largely under-educated and service deprived. These are the people who vote republican, or at least the largest voting bloc which empowers people such as Trump [1]. And, yes, they vote against their interests – they vote against the interests of humanity. Explanations for this range from bigotry and misandry through stupidity and a vague sense of retribution. I also want to be clear that the “middle” bloc exists in many countries. This is not a problem unique to the United St...

I can’t evade the growing news of increasing government surveillance of citizens internet usage. In the US, UK, Germany and many others there have been moves towards enabling a ‘man in the middle’ on any encrypted message, website, or other activity online [c.f. 1]. This is also particularly targeted towards citizens, not corporations. The latter are offered more protections as, you guessed it, they are more financially valuable to the legislator’s government. Now in Australia there is a substantial interest in following suit, breaking encryption in the name of “thinking of the children” [2]. Much more technically minded humans than I have written up commentary on why inserting someone between encrypted internet traffic is a terrible idea. But it boils down to “its not encrypted any more”. And to be clear, for any luddites out there, encryption is not what people use to evade the law. It is a necessary part of free, ope...

I have been thinking about negative distraction since our last idea. Essentially stemming from the notion of capital’s necessary divisive nature for its own reproduction, negative distraction – I’m calling it – is another in the many tentacled squid of class divisive praxes instilled by the ruling class. Previously we talked about division across the class line, vis. proles vs capitalists or civil vs ruling, and how intersections create vertices of additional exploitation and expropriation. Negative distraction, in a sense, is a political theatre of this boundary. Let’s take the right’s use of identity as an example here. For political society, in particular, drawing from our comrade Gramsci [1], identity is a performance to an ends. For example, we might consider Bob Katter in Australian politics a performed identity of “country” – an eccentric with radical ideas, conservative ideas, but radical and introduced in the pe...

Participation in civil society demands capitalist participation. Indeed, as I have discussed elsewhere we are ontologically infused with capitalism from birth, at least in the majority of the globe. This infusion, or perhaps infection, limits our epistemology, our thinking, and conditions the way we see the world around us. Scholars argue that since the 1960s we have seen the progressive increase of individualism. Literally people looking out for themselves. Over time, this has become increasingly militant, and as the bourgeois find ways of making this useful for the advance of capital as does our social structure. We live in a system which – ontologically – demands reproduction. This comes in the form of the deep seated demands for the creation of human life, the production of surplus labour, the manufacture of consent, and the replication of systems and processes which reinforce the system itself. It is a kind of ouro...

Some of you will know I am a long time open source software supporter. I have even dabbled in using open source hardware [1]. If you’re scratching your head, don’t worry, I promise this isn’t a technical diatribe. Rather I want to discuss how my mindset has shifted from giving a free pass to proprietary software, towards an open-oriented mindset for the future of technology. I have been a long time Mac user (since early 2004 with an inherited PowerMac G4) and have been an on-again off-again Linux user and server admin since around 2008. With one foot in each camp, and a familiar UNIX-like terminal environment, nothing about either MacOS or Debian feels alien to me. However, for many years the proprietary software available on the Mac has served many of my creative and professional needs much more robustly than FOSS software could. At work, I am still required to use proprietary software, in particular the Office suite...

I have a nugget of thought in my brain which doesn’t want to go away. So here we are the day the day after our last post, having ideas again (that’s two days, if you’re counting). Let me map a little bit of the schema for where I am positioning this first, “yeah, that’ll keep me reading” I hear you say, but hang about, I’ll try and do it in one short paragraph! We live in a globally accelerated capitalist “state” which, under various permutations and denonyms, effectively exploits workers for the concentration of wealth at the “top”. This masquerades as a meritocracy — a fallacy, but hegemonic belief nonetheless. Here we also see a innate hierarchy which supports the continued flows of moneys, labours, and efforts from those at the labour interface to those at the “top”. In the Marxian sense here we have a proletariat and a bourgeoisie. This process of extraction, deliberately deployed differentially at social intersect...

Yesterday I was listening to one, amidst a litany, technology podcast. They were asserting, like the cacophony, that Apple needed to use WWDC to skate to where the puck is, rather than their preferred position of “leading the industry” — not entirely sure where the misguided idea that Apple leads the industry came from in the first place — and now, ‘features’ such as Recall AI would need to be shoehorned into macOS and iOS (derivs). There are several blogs out there about how potentially terrible and privacy invasive idea Recall is. While there are obvious implications in the privacy space, I think there is something missing in theses anaylses, which are inherently pro big-tech and offloading what used to be “personal” computing. Recall is an interesting, and if deployed properly, potentially powerful tool for the way our memory works. Particularly as a neurodivergent human, the potential ability to ask an LLM for help...