mind reader

I’ve heard a few (bad) hot takes on US politics lately and this has really got my hackles up about fascism. We need a common literacy to understand that low-grade sociopathy, manipulative bullshit, and lateral violence are the same things played out in our social worlds, work lives, and in politics. The political class is not smart, they are not strategic, and they are most certainly manipulating you. So let’s build some literacy around narratives that let (small l) liberals off the hook as fascism builds complicity. We need a theorist, and as you know, we’re big into Gramsci in these parts, we’ll start there. Gramsci gave a poignant analysis of fascism’s rise in Italy. He did something no other historical materialist scholar had done to that point – provided a devastatingly accurate framework for understanding his political moment – and the value of this has not diminished, despite new technologies and manipulation. Wri...

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 huma...