mind reader

Dear friends,

We’re doing a tech one today – why not. My tech journey over the last year has seen me rapidly disentangle myself from Apple’s locked-in ecosystem. Not because the tools weren’t doing the job, but because of Apple’s increasingly anti-consumer and pro-big-tech moves that tar them with a worse brush than Microsoft. All the while the corporate orifice proclaims saving humanity through privacy measures and Apple Intelligence. An oxymoron to be sure, and privacy “for who?” as your data are sucked up and used to train Apple’s AI models. What could possibly be a concern there?

Like other big tech, Apple is interested in vacuuming the internet for content, then integrating deeply into the OS-level to pull out your data to feed its “AI” producing a tool which at best produces something troubling like: “Your mum attempted suicide, but recovered and hiked in Redlands and Palm Springs”. The nefarious nature of this vacuuming of human data is what you don’t see. Yes, Apple routinely promises on-device processing, data security, and more – but with no way to validate these promises, except through researchers Apple has an existing contractual relationship with... this stretches the trust even thinner. And for a company who has routinely exploited creative sorts, knowledge workers, and intellectuals in order to fund limitless sales while strip mining the periphery … I just wasn’t having it any more. Apple’s “values on the tin” were once creativity, difference, possibility, intellect. Now, like every other big tech company they centre exploitation and expropriation of users for the shareholder and Tim’s bonus. Disappointing to say the least, and yes I’m aware it’s been like this for years.

As I grew interested in making a switch there were a range of things to extricate myself from in Apple’s ecosystem. This ecosystem offers, above all else, convenience – pay Apple (twice) and everything is right there, iCloud drive, keychain, mail, contacts and calendars, the works. This suite of privacy essentials is quite similar to what Proton offer as a paid service, indeed Proton seems to be a reasonable direct competitor to iCloud but I wanted to avoid further lock-in by substituting one corp with another [1]. Instead, I’ve moved from iCloud drive to Nextcloud (currently running on my Synology) so that I control my data, rsync.net for backups of working documents, and Backblaze’s B2 for long-term backups of the NAS. My email has long sat with Fastmail, though Migadu and Proton are both interesting options when annual renewal rolls around. I also moved to Bitwarden for passwords and passkeys - which was painless thanks to migration tools, even moving my 2FA and passkeys in a single export-import gesture.

With my extrication from Apple’s first-party only tools, I was ready to begin a more robust open source transition. My desktop PC, which I’ve written about here before [2], has run Linux since I built in in 2020. My web services (including this one, hello) are running on Linux. And I’ve used Linux on-again-off-again since Red Hat 7. Not RHEL 7, the old Red Hat – and to date still loving Gnome, despite passing interest in Mandrake with KDE back in the day. My desktops and servers have always been Linux first, and while the Mac offered a great deal of productive space for my thinking and work, particularly with its ability to run Office (ugh) and have a productive developer command line through its BSD-like shell, there’s never been anything truly stopping a full-time transition to Linux.

Heck, even my institution offers a Linux VPN client (of dubious quality) and with the improvement to both Office on the Web (which seems like where Microsoft is actually heading with the product roadmap) and VirtualBox’s solid performance on x86 hosts virtualising Windows to get desktop office, when needed, doesn’t feel like a hassle. No, it’s not as nice as first party desktop applications and if there’s one hole in my current work its not having desktop Office for for file interoperability with colleagues – for all Libreoffice’s trying, it’s not keeping up with Microsoft’s arcane off-spec Office file changes. Most of my computing life is done in a web browser (anyone not doing this?), occasional programming in C, Ruby, and dabbling with Rust, and Office for work. With Zen replacing Safari, and its brilliant features based atop Firefox, having a very good web browsing experience in Linux is no longer any kind of worry. The only remaining puzzle pieces are a replacement to Final Cut Pro (probably Davinci Resolve) and the Affinity suite (please Canva, give us web versions or a native Linux build) and I’m home and hosed.

Now let’s talk exciting parts, OS essentials, and hardware. If you’ve read my first post here on Linux you’ll know I’ve dabbled with Lenovo machines because of their support for Linux – even if in Australia, you cannot, as a retail or education customer, configure Linux from the factory – and had great success both with old and new ThinkPads. My current daily-driver, though, is almost a deliberate retaliation to Apple’s vision of computing: buy an iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac, Apple TV, blah blah blah. Rather, I have a 2-in-1 Yoga. The Yoga line is interestingly segmented – and like most of Lenovo’s products, deeply confusing. There’s the 7i, 9i, 7x, 9x, 7 Pro, 9 Pro, Legion 7, and so on. Is a 7 the entry product then the 9 the mid range? Then what’s the 7 Pro? It’s worse than Sculley’s Apple. In essence the models have no actual relationship. The “Pro” machine will tend to have a discrete GPU, the x usually refers to the Snapdragon CPU, and the i/non-i version is about 2-in-1 configuration. With that deviation here’s my machine: The Lenovo Yoga 7 2-in-1 14IML9. Mine is configured to the highest settings available: 32 GB of DDR5, 2TB of SSD, WiFi 7, a Core Ultra 155H and Arc graphics, and an absolutely wonderful 2.8k (perfect retina 2x) OLED display with HDR500. Two of those specs are post-market upgrades, what a concept – upgrading your own device.

When I got this machine I ran Windows 11 on it for a few days – using the wonderful tools on the internet to upgrade from Windows Home to Windows Pro (because who is paying Microsoft $100 for that garbage?). It sucked. I gave it my all, I sync’d all my files, setup my accounts, even used Outlook for a bit. The persistently user-hostile experience, even in Windows Pro of having ads in the start menu, not being able to quickly search files without getting Bing-first results, having absolutely no developer tooling (please don’t suggest VS Code and PowersHELL is developer tooling)… It is a quantitatively worse experience than MacOS on every front, and one equally imbued with privacy invasion, “copilot” (which I cannot seem to see adding any value, and the copilot key on my laptop is irritatingly mapped to “left shift” under Linux??) and proliferation of absolutely unintelligible UI choices made Windows feel actively hostile. I didn’t get into this to go from privacy invasion + usability to privacy invasion + hostility. And I didn’t really want to use Windows anyway, it was just an early experiment to see how things had changed – my last time with Windows seriously as a daily driver was Windows XP so it was worth a brief experiment, right? ... no.

On my eBay ThinkPad, I’d been using Debian – the same OS I used on my servers and desktop. I’d used Ubuntu briefly simply because it offered an out-of-tree kernel module that laptop needed for its webcam, but that broke with software updates (not even major version upgrades) and so I went back to ole reliable. But, and I later learned this was my fault anyway, when using Debian Sid I had dug myself into dependency hell in apt, and all I did was install an Australian English dictionary for Libreoffice. Turns out you shouldn’t use a third party mirror if you’re planning to use Sid – the packagelists don’t sync over fast enough and then apt is told by the server to install packages that are outdated, and the trouble only gets worse from there. Naturally, Debian isn’t really designed to be bleeding edge, except for those actually developing the operating system. So I went in search of something that enabled those (more) bleeding edge features, i.e., support for the Core Ultra CPU line in my new machine, and played with Arch – I can see why people like it, but the dearth of bundled packaging made me irritated not thankful, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed – which had some weird install and post-boot issues which I’m sure were my fault, and finally Fedora. Fedora 40, initially, on my ThinkPad provided both the right drivers, and a clean painless install through anaconda (and I can’t say there’s not a hint of Red Hat 7 nostalgia there). So, when my Yoga came (I still enjoy that my computer and I do Yoga together) I installed Fedora 41 (beta).

Fedora 41 has since “come out” and the upgrade out of the beta into the release version was utterly painless. I’m still adjusting to package naming conventions (particularly -devel) but my brain has adapted to “apt on Debian, dnf on Fedora”. The actual OOBE was perfect with Fedora. I had to do a BIOS update on the Yoga before it would let me boot Linux – this was a bug in Lenovo’s firmware from the factory that had something to do with secure boot (even when disabling/resetting secure boot for a new install it refused to disengage properly so I just saw a blinking underscore trying to get into grub). After the update, the install was utterly seamless - except for the mandatory mashing of fn+f1 to escape the extremely quick boot sequence. WiFi, audio, power management, display, touch, keyboard and trackpad, it all just worked. Fedora lets you choose file system in the disk partitioner, which advanced mode Debian installers will scoff at, but the ability in the “basic” installer to select btrfs instead of ext4 is wonderful. Just like that I have a working Linux-powered Yoga!

I write to you today from this computer, and I’ve been doing work on it for over a month now – like my actual day job, I can do under Linux. But, coming from an Apple Silicon Mac back to Intel I had a few concerns: battery life, GPU performance, heat. On each count the 155H is worse. But not much worse and certainly not a deal-breaker. I can lie to myself and say that its all passable and relatively interchangeable with an M2 Mac, but it’s not (quite). Battery lasts about 7 hours writing, browsing the web, doing “light” tasks - power saver and conservation mode really aid this. Even leaving the machine unplugged overnight the battery doesn’t dip like it did on older Macs. But it’s a far cry from the 13 hours of M2, and let’s not mention M3, M4, Pro or Max. Snapdragon CPUs seem to be the PC worlds answer to these processors, but Linux support is practically nonexistent, and the performance improvement over Intel or AMD is not meaningful to be locked into using Windows (I’d still take MacOS over Windows any day). The machine is always “warm” but it doesn’t get hot, and the fan only ramps when you do things that you would expect to tax the CPU – and even then it’s not that loud, particularly compared to the end-of-era Intel Macs. But with these trade-offs there are a litany of benefits.

Yes, I’m compromising on battery (by about 2-3 hours, but still way more than the 2-3 hours total of years gone – like a meaningful 6-7 hours total), on graphics performance (M2 ekes out about ~7-10fps in most games at around the same resolution scale - but Linux runs way more games), and if I’m honest, probably the trackpad (which is a nice glass-like surface, multi touch, and incredibly responsive, but it’s not haptic). But what I gain is both operating system freedom (yes I know about Asahi), a 2-in-1 design which makes playing Civilization VI in bed an absolute dream (sorry to my Steam Deck), and bona fide upgrade-ability. I have already more than tripled my storage – and with new developments in SSD land I can conceivably go to 8TB in this machine for less than the price of a 256->512 GB bump in Apple land. I also went from a WiFi 6E to WiFi 7 card. I am one of those weirdos with a WiFi 7 router, and the range and speed I get from having WiFi 7 in my laptop is pretty incredible. And this isn’t even the most ugpradeable PC that Lenovo sells. It’s just quantitatively and qualitatively better than Apple – both against price, and honestly performance. If Framework were offering a 2-in-1 I’d be there in a heartbeat. But for now, having an OLED transformable touch screen, a solid 7 hours of battery, a truly wonderful keyboard (except the copilot key, grr), the ability to run any Linux distro under the sun, a decent webcam (don’t use it in low light), infrared face-unlock and/or fingerprint-unlock, and an upgradable customisable experience is basically the polar opposite of where Apple’s been headed for the last 10 years.

So what, I’m a nerd, and I enjoy computing for the sake of curiosity, productivity, and fun – and I’m having fun with computing again under Linux – something I haven’t felt on the Mac for 5 years. If Office on the web becomes the Office, which, again, according to the roadmap it will, then there should be nothing stopping most users from a migration to an OS that gives a shit about you as the user – and doesn’t try to exfiltrate all your data to FAANGM. Did I mention how damn well Gnome does on a touch screen? How wonderfully designed Gnome Circle apps are (feels like old indy Mac apps all over again)? Newsflash being key for running mind reader. Spotify and Steam (and so so many games that don’t even work under Windows work on Linux) work brilliantly out of the box. Zen, Thunderbird, Zed, anything on a command line? It’s all a straightforward, “just works”, and is an accessible Linux install experience away. Who the hell uses Windows in 2024? Let alone in the future.

The Yoga with Fedora is my primary computing device, I have a desktop still running Debian, and a MacBook Air for things that I haven’t yet migrated. I am yet to see any reason to switch back, and things are only getting better. There are so many choices in Linux, and if your distribution of choice does something gross you can just jump over elsewhere. And open-source ethos means you own your data, you can control the code, and you have ultimate flexibility to do what you want with your computing. Not what big tech wants. And that’s an ethos I’m invested in, for good.

Having fun with computers,

Aidan.

[1] I’m aware that Proton is now an NFP, but at the time it was not, and they were making some concerning closed-source noises.

[2] https://mndrdr.org/2024/the-power-of-ai

Dear friends,

It is happening here. The polarisation, the extremism, growing xenophobia and racism, anti-intellectualism, hatred, violence and climate-denialism. These are not “forthcoming” ideas in the Australian context, but rather actively festering features of contemporary society. Because of the way content is conglomerated under a singular social media corporation, lots of the proliferation of this kind of thinking is hidden. Algorithmic systems tailor content specifically for the viewer, and they deliberately cultivate extremist views – because extremist views garner more attention. In an “artificially intelligent system” trained on the KPIs of the CEO, it matters not if hate speech, right-wing extremism, and general villainy are promoted. All that matters is the cultivation of “attention”. As the yogi influencers like to put it: “Attention is currency”.

The republican party appealed to the American voting base on two key fronts: they told compelling lies about the significance of the economy and the role of the “others” in preventing its flourishing and they spoke the same hateful language that their supporters consume exclusively online and via fox news. The combination of hegemonic forces, here, manufacturing consent for fascism is a powerful combination. And this is the same combination that the Liberal-National coalition leverage every election in Australia. Look no further than the anti-abortion rhetoric of the LNP at the Queensland state election – and if you were kidding yourself into thinking that Australia is “more sophisticated” and “it couldn’t happen here” you are dead wrong. Australia’s particular cultural configuration around politics means that extremism festers far more quietly than it does in the states, but the increasing prevalence of vitriolic, hate filled, and vile bullshit from the LNP will attract mass voter support.

The problem is, and this is the big one, that the economy is fake. It is a deliberately abstract construct that distracts people from the reality of their exploitation. We discussed this in depth in the last post on mind reader [1]. The source of oppression of working people is capitalism, the capitalists, and their political subclass. The cultural institutions – the (social) media companies, schools and universities, and religious organisations play active yet ever “apolitical” roles in re-perpetuating exploitation and expropriation as natural and necessary. The masking of this – the exploitation of working people – as the “elite” is a cover for fearmongering or racist or nihilistic politicians latch onto to exploit. We know, as a global force of billions, that something is very wrong with our social order. It’s just that the system was designed from the start to prevent access to the knowledge of why the system is so broken. Those cultural institutions? They both inform and reinforce the views espoused by the ruling class. In the classical neoliberal system in the west, for middle-class white-ish able-bodied cisgender hetero kids, the journey goes something like this: born into relative comfort → educated through capitalist epistemology → university graduate → employment in culturally reinforcing institutions and businesses, with moderate if meagre reward affording housing security → the wife stays home looking after babies, and around the cycle goes. Of course, over time, the endless growth demanded by capitalism has eroded parts of that cycle, and with the inherent massive inequality, sexism, ableism and so on required to continue accumulation for the 1% division becomes a necessary tool to keep driving capitalism headlong towards the cliff.

Here, and you can guess where I’m going, the treacherous Australian Labor Party enters the scene. Simultaneously deeply involved in bringing neoliberalism to Australia, and allying with the unions to disempower any genuine revolutionary movement. As with the Democrats in the US, the Labor party is supported by the elite as the veneer of social progress, while true transformation (read: fascism) is supported by the more extreme position of the LNP or Republicans. The ALP’s role in this political theatre is critical to the perpetuation of the status quo. Noting that the status quo is ever more objectionable to anyone with a value system of compassion. While positioning themselves as the “progressive” option, they actively participate in the rightward march of Australian politics. Like the Republican/Democrat ratchet system, ours is similarly pernicious – and worse, because people still think that Labour represents the unions – but these unions only represent bourgeois leadership, not the worker. It doesn’t take much to judge them on their actions – from supporting genocidal regimes abroad to implementing increasingly draconian domestic surveillance measures, from funding military expansion while driving hate for China through stripping workers of their rights while professing a “right to disconnect” (recognition stolen from the Greens) the ALP demonstrate their fundamental allegiance to capital over human wellbeing. The party’s willingness to eject members who speak against genocide illustrates how thoroughly they have abandoned even the pretence of left-wing politics in favour of maintaining the status quo for their capitalist masters.

Ideological “flexibility” of supposedly left-wing parties is part of the theatrics that supports an appearance of democracy under contemporary capitalism. As the contradictions of capital become more apparent – through climate catastrophe, growing inequality, and social breakdown – the political apparatus works harder to maintain hegemonic control. Here, parties like the ALP and Democrats serve offer superficial reforms which fail to connect with working people because all they do is perpetuate the same violent, broken, and dispossessive system that brought us here in the first place. While “moderate” parties exist we will never see a challenge to capitalist relations emerge. And currently we have a moderate party led by a fascist, an extreme-right party led by a fascist, and then the Greens whose political messaging fails to align with the workers because they are routinely denied fair representation in the extreme-right wing media duopoly and social media algorithm. Between deliberate intensification of deployment of identity politics, stripped of any class analysis, and the march towards ever more property owning, shareholding, and other economics scum – the ALP, LNP, as with the Democrats and Republicans only aid fragmentation of working class solidarity leaving structural power relations untouched. It’s just one party is much, much, worse in both instances for human rights – particularly at the margins.

Fundamentally, the media landscape, dominated by the extreme right-wing Murdoch empire in Australia, plays a crucial role in manufacturing consent for the ratchet. Ensuring that the LNP can move politics, issues, identity, and so on to the right, ever distracting from the crushing destruction of capitalism, and positioning any real opposition (read: the Greens) as bourgeois they move the goalposts time and again. Through careful curation of “acceptable” discourse, they – and their distant social media cousins – present fascism as a reasonable response to social problems created by capitalism itself. The algorithmic amplification of extremist content concomitantly accelerates these normalised, socialised, perspectives and the holistic process of creating filter bubbles of hatred and division for every single individual in the nation becomes par for the course. Yep, digital acceleration of fascist ideology builds on decades of traditional media conditioning – cheery.

What makes this situation particularly dangerous is how the appearance of choice, between Labor and Liberal, masks the fundamental unity of their commitment to capital behind supposedly differing social reforms. While they may differ on social issues or, perhaps more accurately, the speed at which they wish to implement reactionary policies, both major parties are fully committed to maintaining the extractive, exploitative system that is destroying human and ecological wellbeing. Here, political theatre replacing religion as the opium of the masses, as individualised AI generated slop directs the micro-political battles of fake social media forums flooded with Russian State actors under the guise of “parliamentary democracy”. Don’t get me wrong, the ALP is a better option than the LNP, just as the Democrats are better than the Republicans, but to suggest either party offers any genuine solutions to the 99% is a farce. Reductionist commentators on “both sides” of belonging politics seek only to legitimate this false choice, preventing more radical alternatives from emerging, and maintaining capitalist hegemony – and in cases such as the US, and increasingly in Australia, the rapid installation of fascism over democracy as modus operandi for maintaining the status quo.
As climate collapse accelerates and inequality reaches unprecedented levels, we can expect this drift toward fascism to intensify. People are being told the reason they can’t afford to feed or home themselves is Albanese’s failures in “the economy” – at the same time, their social media feeds show them how migrants and queer people are personally responsible for that situation. The hate, anger and intentional division of the human population of this planet driving Meta’s share-prices ever higher – and “attention is currency” paralleling “line must go up” as the drivers of global destruction, heat death, and the end of any semblance of care for one another. A social contract? Nah, social media, mate. As the ruling class abandon liberal democratic pretences in favour of more direct forms of control and violence, fearing an anti-capitalist awakening amongst a slightly better educated populous, the ALP’s active participation in stripping education, driving hate and division, and attacking worker’s rights only enable the cycle to continue and amplify. Moreover, through expanded surveillance powers, anti-protest laws, and the criminalisation of dissent, we have seen the extremist groundwork laid for overtly authoritarian governance from the LNP at our next federal elections. Unless the working class can develop genuine solidarity and class consciousness to resist this trajectory, Australia’s inevitable march toward fascism will only accelerate. With Albo’s commitment to the United States of Australia, sorry, “working with trump” [2] in a paramilitary alliance we can genuinely see the failings of Australian democracy. Joy.

With a sense of foresight and uncertainty,

Aidan.

[1] https://mndrdr.org/2024/for-the-economic-policies-the-reason-you-may-no-longer-have-any-rights

[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/australias-ambassador-washington-deletes-trump-comments-after-election-win-2024-11-07/

Dear friends,

I accidentally engaged with some US election coverage in the last 24 hours. Amidst flitting between various streaming services, noticing how absolutely appalling US news actually is – dripping with hegemony, the one resounding quote that has stuck in my brain like a shard of glass is: “people voted for Donald Trump this election because above all else, rights issues notwithstanding, they knew the economy was more important”. I mean what an absolutely ratshit interpretation of the platform Trump was running on. Results be damned, there is absolutely nothing in the republican party that signals “good economic management” rather, they run the economy into the ground, punish working folks, destroy the environment, and revoke liberal rights through overactive and deeply “involved” government. I don’t even FEEL like doing analysis today, but let’s go anyway:

The media’s portrayal of the economy as both a natural phenomenon and supreme metric of societal wellbeing represents one of the most successful deployments of manufactured consent in modern capitalism. Through relentless coverage of stock markets, GDP figures, and corporate profits – metrics that predominantly measure the wealth accumulation of/for the 1% – corporate media convinces civil society that their existence is inextricably linked to these bullshit numbers. This manufactured narrative serves a dual purpose: first, it obscures the fundamental reality that “the economy” is simply a set of human-created social relations designed to exclusively benefit the ruling class, and second, it provides cover for right-wing parties to enact policies that further concentrate wealth and power while stripping rights from workers – as mentioned, this is how we have arrived at fascism in 2024. When media conglomerates trumpet the “expert economic management” credentials of Republicans or the Liberal-National Coalition, they deliberately mystify how these parties’ policies of tax cuts, deregulation, and austerity serve only to accelerate the upward transfer of wealth while destroying social protections.

This ideological sleight-of-hand creates the conditions for an accelerating cycle of exploitation and dispossession – he literally said he was going to make their lives hard [1]. Right-wing parties, backed by corporate media’s economic mythology, first target society’s most vulnerable – attacking welfare programs, workers’ rights, and protections for marginalised groups (if they ever existed). The bourgeois “middle class,” conditioned to believe these attacks won’t affect them, support or remain silent about these initial assaults on civil society. As wealth becomes increasingly concentrated among the 1%, this same process inevitably comes for the petit bourgeois. And we’re already there folks, people on $250k household salaries are “doing it tough” and those idiots think the Liberals or Republicans will save them. Their scabbed labour rights, social welfare safety net, and “self made” economic security are steadily eroded while they continue desperately clinging to the fantasy that they too might one day join the capitalist class. The media’s role in manufacturing consent for this process cannot be overstated. By continually promoting the fiction that right-wing economic policies serve the common good, rather than acknowledging them as instruments of class warfare, they help ensure the 99% remain divided and unable to recognise their shared interest in opposing capitalism’s inevitable acceleration toward fascism. If you haven’t noticed it, it’s because the water around you is just shy of a rolling boil, yes, you are a frog.

The corporate media’s self-reinforcing cycle of degradation exemplifies the inherent contradictions of capitalism’s drive for ever-increasing profits at the expense of quality and truth. Or frankly anything resembling a human value – as vapid narcissism and bitchy bullshit skyrocket in popularity. While media conglomerates consolidate power and market share, their commitment to actual journalism steadily erodes. Replaced by cheaper content mills, inflammatory opinion pieces masquerading as news, and recycled press releases that require minimal investigative effort. This “enshittification,” in Doctorow’s parlance, accelerates as media outlets chase engagement metrics and advertising dollars rather than pursuing meaningful reporting. The resulting death spiral of journalistic standards creates a vacuum where actual news should be, increasingly filled by sensationalism, manufactured outrage, and thinly-veiled propaganda that serves the interests of the ruling class while further mystifying the real operation of power in society. Identity politics, here it is, with all its disgusting paraphernalia. Through this process more and more right wing, anti-human, and anti-ecological propaganda grips civil society, the manufactured consent around “the economy”, enables media outlets to increasingly abandon even the pretence of critically examining capitalism, quality of living, and what is really happening to people at the margins. Because unlike the latter, the former uncritical repetition of corporate talking points makes the line on the stock ticker go up. Stop the ride – I want to get off.

The algorithmic amplification of extreme content through social media platforms then supercharges this degradation of public discourse. As engagement-driven recommendation systems push users toward increasingly inflammatory and ideologically extreme content, the Overton window of “acceptable” discourse continuously shifts rightward. What begins as standard corporate propaganda evolves into increasingly unhinged conspiracy theories and overtly fascistic rhetoric, all while maintaining the foundational lies about “the economy” and “good economic management” that justify continued class warfare against the 99%. The social media giants, themselves massive corporations driven by profit imperatives, have zero incentive to address the radicalising (or indeed neutralising) effect of their platforms - instead, they continue optimising for enagement, washing their hands of the consequences. This creates a feedback loop where traditional media, desperate to compete for attention in the algorithmic attention economy, further degrades their own standards to match the extremism being amplified online. The result is an ever-accelerating race to the bottom which serves to fragment and confuse civil society (again, identity politics) while reinforcing capitalist hegemony through increasingly crude and violent means. And even the left are utterly confounded by this, repeating back utter bullshit from the ABC, 7, 9 and 10. Propaganda has won, folks – and it’s greatest success is that it has successfully masked the death of its own planet. Truly capitalism and its hegemony is cancer of the most savage variety.

Gramsci’s observation, living in prison in fascist Italy, that hegemonic power operates through cultural institutions rather than just direct coercion finds perfect expression in today’s media landscape, where the gradual degradation of journalism serves to mystify rather than illuminate power relations. The genius of modern hegemonic control lies in how it has transformed what should be instruments of democratic accountability into tools that actively undermine class consciousness – not through crude propaganda, but through the subtle erosion of the intellectual frameworks needed for critical analysis. At least in Gramsci’s time there was high quality leftist opinion being written (L'Ordine Nuovo always becomes Ordine Nuovo). When media outlets normalise increasingly extreme right-wing positions while simultaneously degrading their capacity for substantive reporting, they create exactly the kind of ideological conditions Gramsci identified as necessary for maintaining bourgeois control: a civil society that lacks the analytical tools to recognise its own subjugation while actively participating in reproducing the cultural conditions that enable it. This realisation is what Gramsci helped Italians achieve, and capitalism has been running from crisis to crisis since to claw us back to fascism. Naturally, this goes some way to explaining why attempts at building counter-hegemonic movements so often struggle, they must first overcome not just specific false beliefs, but the systematic degradation of the very capacity for critical thought that the modern media ecosystem engenders.

Chomsky’s model of manufactured consent, here in its newest formation, encompassing new and more insidious forms of control in the digital age, aids our analysis further. While the basic filters he identified - ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and anti-communism/fear - remain operational, they now function within an accelerated system of algorithmic amplification that makes their effects both dizzyingly more powerful and harder to resist. The “worthy ” versus “unworthy” victims dichotomy he identified operates at hyperspeed, with social media algorithms rapidly determining which stories receive “attention” and which are buried, while the economic pressures of the attention economy ensure that even nominally independent media outlets ultimately serve power rather than challenge it. The genius of this system lies in how it appears to offer more choice and diversity of viewpoints while actually narrowing the range of acceptable discourse – exactly the kind of sophisticated propaganda model Chomsky theorised, but operating with a speed and efficiency that would have been unimaginable when Manufacturing Consent was first published.

Between manufactured consent, right-wing hegemony, and rapidly disappearing human rights – not to mention a burning planet - the fetishisation of the economy stands strong as “the only issue that matters”. Women dying because they are denied life saving care? No worries, but shit the economy is down 0.000000001% today we need Trump! Just kill me now. “The economy” depicted constantly as something so beautiful, special, and important and simultaneously utterly superior to human life and labour represents capitalism’s ultimate victory in rewriting our ontological relationship with reality. What Marx identified as commodity fetishism has evolved into something somehow more grotesque. Not just the mystification of social relations between people as relations between things, but the elevation of abstract economic metrics above human existence itself – what. is. happening. When politicians and media figures speak of sacrificing lives to “save the economy” during crises, they reveal the true nature of capital’s grip on our collective consciousness: a system so deeply ingrained in our way of thinking that even basic survival instincts become subordinate to maintaining the flow of profits to the ruling class. And the whole thing is predicated on lies. Lies that the Liberals, Tories or Republicans are better “economic managers”. Lies that the sacrifice of “a few women” or “a few Mexicans” is worth it to save “the economy”. Lies about the economy being a real thing. The utterly perverse prioritisation of abstract numbers over human life is the system now. Capital’s need for endless accumulation has dropped any pretence of serving human needs – we’re here for their money, and apparently we’re fucking grateful.

With the currently increasingly shockingly concrete chance of a second Trump presidency, the capitalist death cult is in the headlights – just think back to 2021, Trump’s eagerness to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives to maintain stock market numbers during the pandemic? That’s the right’s comfort with openly advocating death for profit - whether through COVID denial, climate change denial, or dismantling healthcare access. It’s, why do I have to keep saying this people, mask-off capitalist sociopathy. If “the economy” is so godly and significant, why does it demand literal human sacrifice? And the capitalists, their cultural institutions, and most of your friends and neighbours serve as its eager priests and proselytisers. “Line must go up” is now more important than human survival. We see the full realisation of Marx’s warnings about capital’s inherently anti-human nature. Its just operating at a scale that threatens the continued existence of our species – and worse, the entire ecology of the pale blue dot.

With sorrow and love,

Aidan

[1] just, look at everything he’s said.