mind reader

Dear friends,

What the heck do I have in store for you today? Well naturally I have been enjoying pop music and thinking about the “climate” that the youth of today are experiencing. Okay, so, I can’t exactly claim to be vibin’ with the zeitgeist but I can give you a copy-paste of some song lyrics:

They say these are the golden years

But I wish I could disappear

Ego crush is so severe

God, it's brutal out here

Let’s go hard, or go home, straight out of the gate. The contradictions of youth culture under capitalism present themselves starkly in the simultaneous valorisation and exploitation of “youth rebellion”. Just think about popular (youth) culture. What begins as authentic resistance [1] – in music, art, fashion, or digital spaces – is rapidly co-opted by capital and transformed into commodified aesthetic facsimiles stripped of transformative potential. You only wanted to participate in consumption, right? The process is depressingly predictable: genuine expressions of alienation and resistance emerge from young people’s lived experience of capitalism’s brutality. As quickly as they are ideated, they are sanitised, packaged, and sold back by corporations that profit from the discontent. From punk to hip-hop to digital countercultures, capital demonstrates an remarkable ability to hollow out youth movements and render them safe for consumption. Amazing. This also dovetails with our previous discussions of mental health and wellbeing, where commodified versions of self-care leap into frame to obscure any authentic sense of wellness [2].

As we know, commodification of revolutionary thought serves a dual purpose for the capitalists. First, it neutralises genuine resistance by redirecting revolutionary energy into consumerist channels – indeed, why organise when you can buy a mass-produced sweat-shop t-shirt with a hot slogan on? Second, it creates new markets and opportunities for profit extraction from the very demographic most likely to challenge capitalist hegemony. Don’t you hate the built-in anti-revolutionary spirit our society has cultivated? With this spirit, young people’s natural inclination toward rebellion and reimagining social relations becomes nothing more than another vector for accumulation. Rebel, reintegrate, retain, reform, “you’ll vote for the Liberals when you get older and are sensible”. What a joke of a narrative. Except it’s worse, because as those who may have been rebellious reach stardom – and clusters of other characteristics come with the territory, here – they become the very oppressor and commodifier they sought to destroy with music, art, and restive communications. The marketing department works undertime, because the expropriation is being done by the counter-culture to itself. Capitalism’s predatory nature so infects our ontological perceptions that this predatory, vicious, and anti-human behaviour is completely rationalised. Even in those who believe they are “changing the world” – rather, lateral violence, peer-aggression and other treachery emerge. And yet, capitalism remains utterly indifferent, as it continues to grow like a cancer identifying movements, gutting them, and capitalising on each new expression of discontent. Forever forestalled from developing into something threatening to the hegemony [3].

From this twisted epistemology, a range of psychological (or, I suppose, epistemological) responses emerge. From the ruling class’s increased interest in employing bona fide psychopaths, to the role of social media in manufacturing vapid narcissists, there’s a capitalist benefit to personality disorders that make treating psychological issues much less interesting for the corporate bottom line. But this isn’t the only expression of despair and exhaustion at capital. Indeed, the psychological toll capitalism has manifest in an epidemic of anxiety and alienation. This is particularly acute among younger generations facing unprecedented precarity in their material conditions – and straight from the mouths of my 19-something-year-old students, this is a real fear. And it is far from accidental – the very mechanisms of capital depend upon maintaining a permanent state of insecurity and atomisation among the working class. In particular amongst younger people, to manufacture fear, division, distress and disengagement – this, again, forestalls revolutionary potential. And in answer to this, every aspect of life has become commodified and subject to market logic. Capitalist ontology strikes again. Even our most basic needs become sources of constant stress. Housing insecurity, crushing student debt, gig work, and the collapse of traditional career paths create a perfect storm of psychological warfare against (young) workers. I still, though my students laugh, consider myself one of those.

Importantly, the growing use of psychological warfare against the working class to continually manufacture divisions, social disorders, and anxiety and fatigue is relatively novel, at least in the historical materialist sense. Some recent psychological research demonstrates how precarity and exploitation create “the privatisation of stress” – where systemic issues manifest as individual mental health crises [4]. Studies consistently show rising rates of anxiety and depression among young people [5], with researchers highlighting how economic instability and the gig economy create persistent psychological strain [6].

Rodrigo’s lyrics (circling back, lol) capture this contradiction – the simultaneous pressure to be grateful for youth while that very youth is being commodified and exploited. The line “who am I if not exploited?” reflects a devastating awareness of how capitalism shapes identity formation itself. If we consider that capitalism so fundamentally shapes how we think, who we are, and what we are able to become (i.e., privilege) we start to see identity development as intrinsically connected to the conditions of the market (at least amongst the working class), where stable identity formation is systematically undermined by market demands for constant reinvention and “flexibility”. Theorisations about identity precarity abound [7], but ultimately these new economic challenges manufactured to ensure the working-class keeps fighting each other, rather than for liberation, trigger significant developmental difficulties in creating coherent self-narratives amid constant economic instability – this is both a good and bad thing. Identity tied to values rather than production – win. Identity tied to instability, grief, fear and doubt – loss. And that’s the chasm we stand over particularly as new generations enter the “workforce” and are exploited, fucked over, and manipulated by despots, sociopaths and narcissists top to bottom.

The commodification of youth mental health itself represents yet another dimension of this exploitation. The same system that creates mass anxiety and depression then profits from selling individualised “solutions”. As we’ve discussed previously on mind reader, therapy apps, wellness products, and self-help guides that frame structural violence as personal failing – all this delusionally peddled as “we can think ourselves out of materially-created distress”. Meanwhile, genuine collective responses to psychological suffering are undermined by the continued reinforcement of atomisation that creates the crisis. The isolation that Rodrigo captures: “I don't stick up for myself” becomes both symptom and perpetuating factor of capitalism’s psychological warfare. Maybe I’m giving Olivia’s words a little too much meaning. Okay, let’s zoom out a bit.

The neoliberal imperative to continually reinvent oneself as an entrepreneurial subject, to treat one’s identity as a product to be optimised and marketed, only deepens this alienation. How many times have you been told in a seminar by an over-paid under-qualified marketing “guru” that you need to “build your personal brand”? Yet any acknowledgement of privilege, cultural capital, disability, and so on – i.e., the material basis for any stable sense of self – is systematically undermined. The ever proliferating bullshit jobs, meaningless bureaucratic labour, and psychological torture exacted upon us only ever serves to further separate workers from any sense of genuine purpose or connection to our work. Meanwhile, the atomisation of society and erosion of collective institutions (publics) leaves us to face these struggles in isolation, each person expected to bootstrap their way out of systemic problems through individual effort and “resilience”. Sweet – but we haven’t even arrived at the gnarliest end of this.

Perhaps capital’s greatest ideological victory has been convincing us that systemic problems require individual solutions. The self-help industry, wellness culture, and various forms of “lifestyle activism” perpetuate the fantasy that we can individually optimise, mindset-shift, or purchase our way out of capitalism’s contradictions. And people vehemently believe this – to their very core, the fact they’ve never tried illustrates the contradictory nature of this bullshit. All this does is enable militant individualist thinking, particularly on the part of the middle manager – forever suggesting a “wellness retreat” to their burnt out staff, while they manipulate, psychologically torment, and otherwise screw over their employees all while ignoring their conditions – I don’t know any worker with the expendable capital to purchase a wellness package, let alone get approval to attend such a retreat. Naturally, psychopathic middle management are more than adequately remunerated for such farcical “healing”, but can’t recognise their own twisted psychological issues in the first place. Of course this then culminates in the redirection of potentially revolutionary energy into an endless cycle of personal development and consumption that poses no threat to existing power relations. Hegemony protects its own. The very notion of personal success under capitalism has been constructed in opposition to collective liberation – we are taught to view others’ advancement as competition rather than solidarity.

This individualist framework obscures the fundamental truth that no amount of personal optimisation can resolve contradictions deliberately foundational to the economic system itself. The economic system to which we are collectively, the 99% of us, literally slaves. A worker cannot mindfulness-meditate their way out of exploitation, nor can ethical consumption choices address the fundamental unsustainability of capitalist production. The promise of individual solutions serves as a pressure release valve, allowing people to feel they are “doing something” while leaving structural power relations untouched. Real transformation requires collective struggle and the development of class consciousness – precisely what individualist ideology works to prevent. The path to liberation cannot be walked alone – but they’ll happily tell you it can, because the “middle class’s” demented existence is just amplifying and redistributing their own pain onto others around them. What a cool group of people.

I honestly don’t even have solutions thinking today. I’m just constantly struck by how utterly demented and dehumanising “work” is in 2024. How have we not progressed past this, folks? Has everyone just been asleep at the wheel?

In real solidarity,

Aidan

[1] https://mndrdr.org/2024/assimilation-and-rebellion

[2] https://mndrdr.org/2024/on-burnout

[3] Gramsci, A. (2007). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-Smith, Trans.; Reprinted). Lawrence and Wishart.

[4] Fisher, M. (2011). The privatisation of stress. Soundings, 48(48), 123–133. https://doi.org/10.3898/136266211797146882

[5] though this is often blamed on “technology” nebulously: Twenge, J. M. (2020). Why increases in adolescent depression may be linked to the technological environment. Current Opinion in Psychology, 32, 89–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.06.036

[6] Petriglieri, G., Ashford, S. J., & Wrzesniewski, A. (2019). Agony and ecstasy in the gig economy: Cultivating holding environments for precarious and personalized work identities. Administrative Science Quarterly, 64(1), 124–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839218759646

[7] c.f. Hancock, P., & Tyler, M. (2025). Precarity, identity, and the meaning of cultural and creative work. In P. Hancock & M. Tyler (Eds.), Performing Artists and Precarity: Work in the Contemporary Entertainment Industries (pp. 83–95). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-66119-8_7; Nelson, J. (2018). Identity performativity and precarity. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(14), 1522–1523. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1461395; Pichler, S., Kohli, C., & Granitz, N. (2021). DITTO for Gen Z: A framework for leveraging the uniqueness of the new generation. Business Horizons, 64(5), 599–610. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2021.02.021

Dear friends,

I spent a little of my time today listening to other contemporary Marxists [1] – and then wondering about how to add to some aspects of their argument/s. In particular, in the interview I’m referencing, there’s a piece on meritocracy, capitalists, and innovation. Because interviews suck there’s too much pressure on the thinking and I think we’re robbed of Blakeley’s authentic response. So, I wanted to think about my own views on this, and how this might fit in the historical materialist but also intersectional approach we bring to mind reader together.

For Marx, innovation under capitalism represents a manifestation of human creative capacity - what he terms “species-being” - twisted and alienated through capitalist relations of production [2]. This twisting, and subsequent alienation, is what we here when the mainstream parrot: “Musk invented the electric car”. Worker’s natural drive to creatively transform nature and society becomes subordinated to capital’s need for constant revolutionising (read: reduce cost) of the means of production. This revolutionising, while represented as technological progress, serves only to deepen worker alienation and exploitation through increasing the organic composition of capital. The capitalist class mystifies this process, presenting innovations that emerge from collective social labour as the products of individual genius entrepreneurs. As Marx notes in Capital directly: “The social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves” [3]. This fetishisation of innovation mirrors the broader commodity fetishism that masks real social relations under capitalism. Hot.

Social Reproduction Theory reveals how innovation in care work, community organising, and social reproduction has been systematically devalued and appropriated under capitalism [4]. Women, particularly women of colour, have developed sophisticated systems for maintaining and reproducing labour power - from childcare networks to mutual aid systems - only to see these innovations commodified and privatised by capital. Indigenous knowledge systems, developed through millennia of sustainable relationship with land and community, face similar dynamics of appropriation and/or erasure [5]. Traditional ecological knowledge, sustainable agricultural practices, and communal governance innovations are first dismissed as “primitive,” then stolen and patented by corporations when profitable. This represents a double exploitation - both of the original innovation and of the reproductive labour that maintained and developed these knowledge systems across generations [6]. The capitalist drive, then, to enclose and commodify all spheres of life thus produces a dual crisis – of social reproduction and of ecological sustainability. And at the nexus of race, gender and class this exploitation and expropriation is particularly devastating, and obvious. This brings the weight of hegemonic enforcement – any crack in the belief that capitalism is the “only way” is a threat, so racism, sexism, ableism and so on are deployed.

Okay, with some theory in our back pockets, let’s pivot, slightly, to “innovation” in contemporary times.

Innovation emerges fundamentally from workers – from our daily struggles, creative problem-solving, and collective knowledge built through practice and necessity. The working class, through our direct engagement with production and society’s needs, naturally develop new ways of thinking, doing, and being. This is an organic development (more on Gramsci in a moment). This innovation “from below” (in capitalist terms) stems from workers’ intimate understanding of processes, materials, and social relations. Our innovations tend toward genuine solutions that benefit the collective rather than extracting profit. Whether it’s teachers developing new pedagogical approaches, nurses honing better patient care, or factory workers improving safety protocols, the working class continuously innovates to make work more efficient, safer, and more humane.

Under capitalism, however, worker innovation is systematically appropriated and alienated from its creators. The ultimate gaslight. The capitalist class, through intellectual property law, management hierarchies, and employment contracts, “legally” steals these innovations from workers. Patents are filed in the company’s name, not the workers. Improvements to processes are codified as corporate property. The creative and intellectual contributions of workers are rendered invisible, while the fruits of our innovation flow upward to shareholders and executives who had no hand in their development. This theft of worker innovation mirrors the broader extraction of surplus value under capitalism. What a cool system we all consent to and participate in – and yet we wonder why there’s misogyny, racism, xenophobia, gaslighting, narcissism...

The capitalist class has pulled the ultimate con, warping our understanding of our own innovation through hegemonic control of media, education, and culture. They have constructed a mythology where lone genius entrepreneurs and visionary CEOs are the drivers of progress. This narrative erases the collective nature of innovation and the essential role of publicly funded research, worker knowledge, and social cooperation. Instead, we’re fed stories of brilliant billionaires working in garages (Tony Stark who dis?), when the reality is that most major technological advances come from massive teams of workers building on generations of collective knowledge.

Painting this in a concrete example, let’s take our mate Elon Musk – a most egregious example of this innovation theft and mythmaking in recent history. Tesla’s “unique” technologies were developed by an engineering team early on, Musk simply bought his way in with PayPal wealth and then forced out the founders – alleged engineers and workers replaced with a capitalist. SpaceX relies heavily on NASA research, technology, and contracts while Musk takes credit for the work of thousands of engineers and scientists. And, in case that wasn’t enough, his acquisition of Twitter showcases perfectly how billionaires use accumulated wealth to seize and destroy organisations in order to better push extreme-right political agendas. Musk’s increasing shift toward far-right politics, from amplifying conspiracy theories to supporting anti-democratic figures, demonstrates how concentrated economic power breeds capitalist hegemony, division, distraction and other anti-human traits endemic to capitalism’s virus.

Through his carefully crafted public image as a “genius innovator”, Musk exemplifies how capitalists claim credit for the collective achievements of workers. His companies have consistently undermined worker organising efforts, violated labour laws, and maintained dangerous working conditions while he amasses unprecedented personal wealth. The cult of personality around Musk serves to mystify the real relations of production and innovation, presenting him as a techno-king while thousands of actual innovators remain nameless and exploited.

The notion of meritocracy under capitalism is high on the list of insidious myths. The idea that wealth and power flow naturally to the most capable, innovative, and hardworking individuals is a farce – one which denies class privilege and the mass human suffering under capitalism. This fiction ignores the reality that success under capitalism correlates most strongly with initial advantage - inherited wealth, social connections, and structural privileges. While capitalist ideologues trumpet the “efficiency” of the free market in allocating resources and rewarding merit, the reality is that planned economic activity - whether in large corporations or state institutions - drives most major innovations and technological advances. The majority of foundational research and development that enables private profit is funded by public institutions and performed by salaried workers, not entrepreneurs seeking “market opportunities” – we couldn’t, as workers, even if we tried, we’d starve first, or have our work stolen.

The mystification of innovation under capitalism represents, in Gramscian terms, a key battleground in the war of position between capital and labour [7]. The hegemonic narrative of lone genius inventors and visionary tech entrepreneurs serves to maintain capitalist control not just over the means of production, but over our very understanding of human creativity and progress. This cultural domination is sustained through what Gramsci termed the “intellectual and moral reformation” - where capitalist values become common sense through the work of traditional intellectuals [8]. However, this hegemony is never complete or stable – and importantly never represents liberation, even with moderate reforms applied. Worker innovations, Indigenous knowledge systems, and feminist practices of social reproduction all represent forms of counter-hegemonic knowledge production that challenge capitalist claims to innovation. The emergence of open-source technologies, mutual aid networks, and community-based solutions points toward alternative modes of innovation based on cooperation rather than competition. The task for organic intellectuals today is to make visible these counter-narratives and connect them to broader struggles against capitalist appropriation of collective human creativity. Only through counter-hegemonic movements can we reclaim innovation as a collective social process rather than a commodified product of capitalist exploitation.

Yours in solidarity,

Aidan

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZjFul2Uphs

[2] Marx, K. (1988). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 (M. Milligan, Trans.). Prometheus Books. (Original work published 1844)

[3] Marx, K. (1990). Capital: A critique of political economy, Volume 1 (B. Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1867)

[4] Bhattacharya, T. (2017). Social reproduction theory: Remapping class, recentering oppression. Pluto Press.

[5] Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40.

[6] Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia.

[7] Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-Smith, Eds. & Trans.). International Publishers.

[8] Thomas, P. D. (2009). The Gramscian moment: Philosophy, hegemony and Marxism. Brill.

Dear friends,

Astute stalkers amongst you may remember some 14 years ago I made a YouTube video by the same title. Let’s not go there. I want to talk with you today about cognitive bias and attribute substitution, in, of course, our favourite context: politics. These are interesting tools of hegemonic enforcement at the nexus of human behaviour and psychology. This, you might suppose, is part of a series on “methods” for our collective toolbelt with which to understand how hegemony maintains its stranglehold on culture, and how capitalist realism (or capitalist fatalism as I’m now borrowing) comes to be the linga franca of the entire globalised capitalist state. Sheesh – heavy stuff for a Wednesday morning, but when isn’t it.

Let’s start, confusingly, in reverse order. Attribute substitution is an important part of the puzzle of understanding how our physical (and financial) realities are shaped. This is because it represents a key tool of capitalist hegemons in manipulating the status quo. Quite simply, attribute substitution is where complex systemic issues are replaced with simpler, more emotionally resonant but ultimately misleading “proxies”. Rather than grappling with the true nature of exploitation under capitalism - the extraction of surplus value, the alienation of workers from their labour, the devastating ecological costs - the ruling class encourages the substitution of these “difficult” (or, rather, deliberately obfuscated) analyses with more simplistic narratives about individual success, consumer choice, or technological salvation. This psychological sleight-of-hand serves to, as usual, maintain the status quo by redirecting analytical thinking away from structural critique and toward superficial explanations that pose no threat to capital. When workers substitute “hard work” for systemic advantage, “personal responsibility” for class warfare, or “innovation” for exploitation, we unconsciously reinforce the very systems that oppress us.

The deployment of attribute substitution, particularly in connection to identity politics, is perniciously effective in forestalling class consciousness – and it fits neatly with anti-(working-class)-intellectualism, as cultivated by the Dutton-mafia. By providing ready-made, easily digestible explanations for complex social phenomena, it prevents the development of more sophisticated analytical frameworks that might challenge capitalist relations. We see this clearly in how poverty is attributed to personal failings rather than systematic inequality, how climate change is reduced to individual consumption rather than corporate extraction, and how workplace exploitation is reframed as “culture fit” or “attitude problems”. Ohhhh boy. And let’s not forget the role of the Murdoch-Albanese alliance in ensuring a septic-tank seal of shit is forced down the public’s throats to ensure no challenges to this hegemony ever emerge. Manufactured consent says what? And what’s worse, many on the left fall prey to this tendency, substituting aesthetic markers of radicalism for genuine revolutionary praxis, or allowing hyper-focus on specific instances of oppression to obscure the broader machinery of capital. This is not about the left marginalising the marginalised, but rather the bourgeois essentialising the marginalised group to “a problem” for reintegration and inclusion in the capitalist system [1]. Naturally, though, we’re not done here…

Cognitive bias, then, serves as both tool for and manifestation of hegemonic control, working together with attribute substitution to maintain capitalist relations through the manipulation of human psychology. Anyone else dizzy at the psychological depths we’re plumbing here? Naturally, the ruling class has become adept at weaponising these inherent cognitive shortcuts – confirmation bias reinforces existing prejudices and prevents class solidarity, availability bias keeps workers focused on immediate personal concerns rather than systemic exploitation, and status quo bias creates resistance to radical change even among those most harmed by current conditions. What makes this particularly effective is that cognitive biases operate below the level of “conscious awareness”, creating what appears to (the person in question, at least) be “common sense” while reproducing capitalist ideology. The bourgeoisie need not actively conspire to maintain their position when they can rely on these psychological mechanisms to do the work of dividing and pacifying the working class. Enter Gramsci on the creation of good sense.

The relationship between “common sense” and “good sense” in Gramscian thought is useful to consider here. These two opposing “senses” (epistemologies, really) represent a battleground in the war of position, where hegemonic “common sense” – the uncritical, fragmentary, and often contradictory absorption of ruling class ideology – must be transformed through struggle into “good sense” – a coherent, analytical understanding of social relations that can support counter-hegemonic movements. This transformation doesn’t occur … spontaneously … but requires the development of organic intellectuals from within the working class who can articulate and advance revolutionary consciousness while remaining grounded in proletarian experience. What a challenge – and often, a contradiction where “peel off” sees them end up in traditional intellectual roles anyway. Unlike said traditional intellectuals, who often unconsciously reproduce ruling class ideology while claiming objectivity, organic intellectuals emerge from and maintain connection to their class origins, developing theoretical frameworks that speak to the bona fide experience of proletarian life while advancing systematic critique of capitalist relations for emancipatory futures. The struggle here is not academic, it is about developing ways of understanding that can challenge the “common sense” assumptions that keep workers consenting to their own exploitation – the cognitive biases and attribute substitutions leveraged by the ruling class to keep us fighting each other [2].

In the political sphere, cognitive biases manifest as powerful barriers to transformative change, functioning as part of what Gramsci identified as the apparatus of cultural hegemony. We see this clearly in how the “sunk cost fallacy” keeps workers defending capitalism despite its clear failures, how “in-group favouritism” is manipulated to prevent cross-racial class solidarity, and how “anchoring bias” limits political imagination to minor reforms rather than systemic transformation. The latter of these remains a real problem for the “left” (centre) faction of the ALP as the right continues its disconnect from unionism and its marriage with capitalist vanguardism. The political deployment of these biases is not accidental. Both purportedly “left” and right parties leverage them strategically both in campaigning and in political communication – and are adept at exploiting cognitive biases to maintain capitalism even if they appear to be proposing moderate liberal reforms. This gets most people on side but it is dangerous – it diminishes the fighting willpower of the left, and it erodes the genuine messaging of transformative thinkers. This leads to a self-reinforcing cycle where biased thinking leads to biased information seeking, which further entrenches the very cognitive patterns that prevent recognition of and resistance to exploitation. Let’s not even get started on what happens when we introduce computational algorithms that control the media and news we receive along digital lines which reinforce these same bourgeois patterns of behaviour and thinking. Breaking this cycle requires not just awareness of these biases, but active development of counter-hegemonic frameworks that can help overcome them – and a collective disengagement from Murdoch and Zuck [3].

Ultimately, the formation of organic intellectuals faces ongoing and deep challenges under capitalism, where the commodification of education, the precarity of academic labour, and the deliberate mystification of technology and knowledge work all serve to maintain separation between intellectual and manual labour. The continued and deliberate identity-based division of labour to enable division and distraction from the real enemy, a tale as old as time. Moreover, the bourgeois university system – an example dear to my heart (sorry, no, “gross to my heart”), far from supporting the development of organic intellectuals, actively works to co-opt and neutralise potential organic intellectual formation through various mechanisms – from the imposition of productivity metrics that prevent deep engagement with communities, to the enforcement of academic conventions that render theory inaccessible to workers, to the individualisation of intellectual work that prevents collective knowledge building. But – and let’s not get trapped in an “academia is important” loop because it’s not, well, not for the reasons that this might lead you to think. Academia, and to a lesser extent the school system, are only useful in that they are massive cultural institutions designed to reinforce the hegemony. This – the curriculum and pedagogy – is something we must work to capture and change in order to create a brighter future. Yet paradoxically, these very contradictions create opportunities for organic intellectual development, as workers increasingly recognise the gap between hegemonic “common sense” narratives about technology, progress, and merit, and their lived experience of exploitation, surveillance, and deskilling – all while being doubly, triply or more extracted from and burnt through by a deeply despotic higher education system. The challenge lies in building solidarity, affirmative, and collaborative “alternative” practices for intellectual development that can nurture this emergent good sense while resisting co-optation by capital, and throwing off the egoism, bullying, and rampant sociopathy of management of higher education. Another big task – what am I Hercules’s (incredibly physically weak) spotter?

Some concepts for our toolbelt, and another brick in the wall.

Have a wonderful day,

Aidan.

[1] https://mndrdr.org/2024/assimilation-and-rebellion

[2] https://mndrdr.org/2024/grim-realities-emancipatory-futures; Cornelius-Bell, A., & Bell, P. A. (2024). Educational Hegemony: Angloshperic Education Institutions and the Potential of Organic Intellectuals. Canadian Journal of Educational and Social Studies, 4(1), 49–62. https://doi.org/10.53103/cjess.v4i1.213

[3] Make no mistake, Zuck’s deliberate “rebranding” as a human (rather than robot) and slow creep into household familiarity is a deliberate “friendly face” for the knife in your back that is Meta’s social media monopoly.

Further reading:

Mayo, P. (2014). Gramsci and the politics of education. Capital & Class, 38(2), 385-398. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816814533170

Stanley, M. L., Dougherty, A. M., Yang, B. W., Henne, P., & De Brigard, F. (2018). Reasons probably won’t change your mind: The role of reasons in revising moral decisions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(7), 962–987. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000368

Clark, N. (2016). Red intersectionality and violence-informed witnessing praxis with indigenous girls. Girlhood Studies, 9(2). https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2016.090205