mind reader

Dear friends,

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 ouroboros, to borrow from Fraser [1], which demands production – babies, knowledge, food, excess resources, and so on. We have seen the ever amplifying affect of this system of production on our ecology and allowed the capitalist class to drive us ever faster off the cliff of ecological safety.

The infection of our thinking, though, is perhaps the most concerning to me. Not only are we now, without thinking – and often literally subconsciously, competitive, but we are also in a position of such disillusionment with our own cognitive processes that we perceive individualist and competitive behaviour as normal, valuable and meaningful for progress. This is something that compassionate, thinking, and caring people spend a great deal of time working to counteract. However, this is not enough. Moreover, I have chosen words in this sentence particularly carefully – before I mentioned scholars thought on these matters, however I believe that much of this thought is done without genuine compassion or true commitment to an anti-capitalist modality.

For those scholars who work in the academy, precarity [2], instability, and a continued marginalisation of ethics [3] are contemporary hallmarks. These are carried forward by the only class holding stable employment in the academy – management. These managers are universally capitalist aspirants. I mean this in the sense of class treachery (where they were working class) and oppressors (where they continue to be capitalists). At best, they act and feel human as they work. Most of the time, however, they value and select for sociopathy and psycopathy. Finding space to create mental anguish and distress amongst precarious, contract, and bona fide workers in the academy. This has many affects – predominantly, however, it means for those with a predilection towards considering themselves ‘middle class’ (a faux group of class traitors) that they tacitly and epistemologically absorb the militant individualism.

I genuinely believe the greatest barrier to socially transformative thought in the academy is the proliferation and en masse creation of class traitors. Those who believe they can lift themselves in higher education through engagement with the performed values of the capitalist class, and their henchmen, to receive personal benefit. But this is not simply a cluster of behaviours or ways of thinking. Rather, the process of capitalist production can be so obscured by this way of thinking and working that the system itself does not resemble a producer of surplus value – simply a surplus of mental anguish. We have entered an era of ontic capital, a vicious, vile and anti-human way of thinking, working and understanding. Moreover, the deeply corrupted and sick system deliberately and with malice uses this modus operandi -over- those who are already more disadvantaged. Literally exploiting the intersection to foster competition, infectious capitalist epistemology, and sociopathy at the margins.

To draw away from this requires such reconfiguration of our thinking and working patterns that we become fundamentally incompatible with higher education, corporate work, and capitalism at large that we are easy to brush away – lazy, arrogant, or at best eccentric. Because the compassionate, reflective and proactive care mindset is so antithetical to the capitalist machinery, those class aspirants (traitors) who have ‘drunk the university kool aid’ themselves do the work of deriding and undermining the thinking and working of compassionate thinkers.

I want to be clear that I am as much part of this problem as others. Though, I hope, through service, analytical thinking, and sharing observations from the front lines of (higher education) hell that others may come to similar reflections and assert a new working-classness that enables a future not controlled by the ever tighter constrictions of the ouroboros.

We have literally run out of time. Not only do we desperately -need- change in order to ensure humanity, but we require change to not be a footnote to history. To some, humanity’s hubris and eventual self-destruction provides comfort, in that the true ontic reality will continue, but to me, I feel a sense of duty of care to try and create change that enables us to be better, to do better, and to make a better future for those who come next (human or otherwise). I don’t know what is possible, but I do know we can use the tools of education and research to foster genuinely uplifting capacities in others, and we can throw away competitive, cutthroat and aggressive behaviour in favour of mutual aid, collaboration, and positive futurism.

Your friend,

Aidan

[1] Fraser, N. (2022). Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It. Verso Books.

[2] Cornelius-Bell, A., & Bell, P. (2021). The academic precariat post-COVID-19. Fast Capitalism, 18(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.202101.001

[3] Morley, C. (2024). The systemic neoliberal colonisation of higher education: A critical analysis of the obliteration of academic practice. The Australian Educational Researcher, 51(2), 571–586. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-023-00613-z

Dear friends,

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, which I believe is one of the biggest challenges to corporate engagement in Linux. While LibreOffice and OnlyOffice offer alternatives to Microsoft’s near complete monopoly, collaborative features are unavailable and demand use of a sub-par web app for Linux use. Said sub-par web app, however, is eventually rumoured to become -the- app on Windows in an Electron wrapper like Teams already is [2]. This substantially lowers the barrier to Linux use in the corporate world, or at least provides a way to use Linux when writing (and collaboration features) is your profession.

Since May I have been using a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano (Gen 2) with Debian (and Gnome) as my daily driver laptop. I have written an article which has been accepted for publication, collaborated with peers on a range of research projects, and used increasingly excellent FOSS tools to do some graphic design and other document post-production. Tools such as Krita, GIMP, Inkscape, and Kdenlive are on a trajectory to match and in some areas exceed what is available in the Affinity and Adobe suite. These have enabled almost my entire academic workflow – including the obvious and excellent Zotero as a reference manager.

This engagement has proven to me, not only that I love to have weird side-projects to occupy my neurodivergent brain but, that Linux is in my particular use case ready for prime-time usage. While there are some frustrations and teething pains, I have felt increasingly comfortable in an environment where I have control over and can see and edit the source of the software I use throughout the entire software stack. In fact, I have even dabbled in development for Gnome to gap-fill a particular niche.

This is not to say I suggest anyone else move their existence to a Linux-only lifestyle [3]. But I would encourage those technically minded people, or those who just want a project, to dabble in the use of FOSS. Not just because you can — but because having a transparent view of where, how and why your data is used, where your data is, and how your computer works is similar to having working knowledge of how any tool is made and used. This shouldn’t just be interesting to those who like to tinker, but also those with an interest in data use, innovation, and positive futurism.

We are in a world where proprietary “artificial intelligence” is growingly vacuuming the internet for any content — regardless of copyright status — and where at an operating system level both Windows and MacOS are integrating products from OpenAI and other privacy invasive proprietary LLM tools. While LLMs can be useful, the proprietary nature of these platforms should be a concern, particularly as we look at capitalists leaning on the LLM space to do the thinking work of a society.

While there is some comfort that there is a lot of Marxist text freely available on the internet, proprietary computing has always been a threat to innovation, privacy, and freedom. Having a better understanding of our tools, more control over the software we use, and choices about how we expose ourselves to corporations or individuals is only a good thing.

So, do what you want, but consider how FOSS factors into your life. For me, thinking critically about where my software comes from, how I contribute (financially) to software development, and where my data and information goes has been both enlightening and somewhat terrifying in some regards. For a better future in this space, I think having a better blend of open source software, where users who can contribute financially or technically do, will lead to a better technology future.

I’ve also written, aforementioned article, about corporate AI and the economic and environmental impacts of unchecked closed source “AI” being deployed throughout our lives. So watch your local journals for that piece.

Have a beautiful day,

Aidan.

[1] I remain interested in the RISC-V architecture as an avenue for this; and am excited about Framework bringing this to a laptop form factor: https://frame.work/au/en/blog/introducing-a-new-risc-v-mainboard-from-deepcomputing

[2] Electron and Microsoft Teams remain two of my least favourite technological inventions. They are bloated, heavy, and often privacy invasive in their design.

[3] In fact, I’m not sure this is feasible or possible except in some edge cases. For example, our TVs at home hinge on use of Apple TV, and while Android is Linux based it is far from open source, so iOS remains. This is just a practicality and personal preference but let no one say I have a fixed mindset!

Dear friends,

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 intersections, manifests differently but always demands a severe toll on the natural and social world.

This process of extraction can be seen as simultaneously oppressive and extractive, and a site of progress — progress for who? And here the space for the day arises. We have seen, globally, a pattern of extraction and exploitation which demands that all workers give over their labour to, according to capitalist logics, their betters. Their betters, in turn, enjoy leisure, opportunity, inordinate wealth, and so on. This process, which harms workers and the environment, demands continuous growth and increased production, in whatever form that may take.

Across history there have been many forms and configurations of capital — moments, if you like. These moments all offer, in historiographical analysis, spaces where we can identify acute exploitation. For example, in contemporary times we can see the flows of minerals, rare earth, and others to the global north (west) from the global south. Not only are the methods of literal extraction barbaric by contrast to States with “labour laws” but the removal of irreplaceable minerals, and so on are never (adequately) compensated. Thereby, even States which should by all accounts be wealthy due to their possession of “expensive” goods, continue to be exploited under capitalist economics. This is reinforced through mandatory borrowing from the IMF, and others, at interest rates higher than it would be possible for these countries to generate.

What are we looking at, then? Well clearly a system built deeply on the privileging of a very small handful of people — smaller than the 1%. This .1% depends on the (varied) exploitation of 99.9% of the “others”. It is important to acknowledge that this varied application has been absent in historical analyses of class and labour power and that with an increasingly (though hard won) intersectional frame for understanding exploitation, there is much more work to be done to understand the nature of raced, colonial and gendered violence. These forms are all configurations of the same violence of capitalism, though in many instances are more brutally or unequally applied.

So that was way more than a paragraph, hey.

Here’s where something slightly more novel comes in which, I felt, explained some of what we’re experiencing in the collective hellscape of late capitalism. Governance, jurisprudence, management, and practically everything which is professed and ejaculated by the ruling class is now symptomatic of a hollow, greedy and maniacal economic system built on the dehumanising and valueless expression of capitalism. Not new, but intensified and distinctly globalised in the 2020s. Now, allow me to back-fill some of this with elaborations to give some vegetables to the bone.

Increasingly, we find that the decisions of the capitalist class and, of course, those lodged firmly in their asshole — looking at you middle managers (class traitors) up to CEOs — are devoid of the traditional illusion of pseudo humanist managerialism. I have no shortage of examples but let’s think — supermarket price gouging, scarcity manufacture, perpetual housing crisis, installation of needless systemic complexity, deep rooted surveillance and monitoring of the populace, and so on. These phenomena are by no means new, rather they are intensified and clearly devoid of any perceptible “human” ethics.

My contention, essentially, is that the value system of the capitalist class, and thereby its aspirants and bootlickers, has descended into an anti-human mode. This is an obvious, almost foregone, realisation when we examine the extractive and violent nature of capitalism at the colonial and gendered interfaces. The zoom in is a capitalist class who are comfortable with a mask-off destruction of human life on earth to line their own pockets — even at the expense of their own families. The zoom out is a global system of production which has always been based on the (uneven) exploitation of 99.9% of people, who, due to the nature of the weight of hegemony, defend to their own death the adherence to and reproduction of capitalism as “the only way”.

Am I grumpy about this? Hell yes. We (humans) have built and perpetuated a deeply anti-human system of living. I frequently quip that humans are the only species on earth dumb enough to have to pay for housing. Well, guess what, most of us believe this is inherently correct. Moreover, a vast majority of humans actually believe there is a meritocratic process involved in the creation of the 0.1% which, if they just play the game hard enough (bootlick) they, too, may one day achieve. This is flatly bullshit, unless you already exploit, murder, and extinguish human life for thrills.

Welcome to 2024, another year in the blisteringly obvious fall of empire and destruction of an entire species for the sheer joy and elation of the 0.1%, and the political class that has been surgically attached to their ass.

Tomorrow we start fighting this — even harder. Please.

Aidan.