Skip to content

Aidan Cornelius-Bell

I’m a social scientist and activist looking to create systemic change that serves the proletariat. I care about compassion, justice, genuine equity, reciprocity and radical social change.

Kaurna Yarta

Alienating the young people

Dear friends,

The ALP has announced new legislature being developed to ban young people from social media at an arbitrary age [1]. This differs from existing laws which, on paper, limit what younger people can see and do on social media. The alleged basis of this particular movement is, alongside other attacks on the youth such as phone bans, “protecting the children”. If I had created a more sophisticated blogging engine I may have inserted the gif of Helen Lovejoy screaming: “won’t somebody please think of the children” at this juncture, but you’ll just have to use your imagination.

There are a litany of problems which arise from this new law. Not least of which is for adults, who will also, obviously, be subjected to “age verification” to use social media. Let’s start here. Meta has long held the policy that Facebook, Instagram and other social properties they own should represent a real human. This is partly to combat bots, and partly because it plays well with the marketing of these platforms as “real” [2]. However, adding age verification, regardless of the mechanism, seriously increases the chances of invasive advertising profiling. Even if Meta, for example, have nothing to do with the verification process, as in they are subject to a TRUE or FALSE return from an (external) government verification process, they are still able to corroborate more personal details about you, and what do Meta, X, Snapchat and ByteDance want? Data … about you! That’s their -real- product.

But the problems don’t end here. Aside from issues of encouraging increasingly lax parenting and how much of a role should the government have in raising children... How might this answer change when the government is increasingly neofascist? How about when children meet the arbitrary age the government has decided is ‘okay’ for them to engage with social media, and they have had absolutely no preparation for this hyper-online world? Certainly young people are not being educated about the role and place of social media, the internet, and technology’s role in contemporary capitalism. Indeed, increasingly this is deliberately mystified by the back-to-basics bullshit peddled by the ALP and LNP. We have gone from a Millennial generation of “digital natives” (an assertion so thin it barely existed in the first place) to a Gen Z who could be legitimately convinced that the internet is run by wizards.

A surefire way to ensure the population is incapable of analytical thinking, critical analysis, and transformative thinking is to focus on literacy and numeracy at the expense of everything else. Do people actually believe our primary and secondary education system is designed to bring “intelligence”? And now that the federal government has direct control over school curriculum, again, and has spent years stripping anything resembling “thinking” from the curriculum, they’re moving on to domination of higher education (again) [3]. Between the states focus on phone bans, and now a federal focus on attempting to block kids form social media, we are seeing two simultaneous backslides in education, privacy, and the agenda of informed and agentive citizenry.

So, this bill heralds the beginning of verified identities online, the end of anonymity (from advertisers in particular), and another wave of young humans who have been deliberately abstracted from the tools and means of production through a third rate education. A great start to the day. But let’s also look briefly at some of the political manoeuvres going on under the hood here.

Malinauskas, one of the most authoritarian right-wing conservative M.P.s ever to grace this state’s grotesque parliament, has had a hard-on for controlling children and young people since he seized office from his, startlingly, more ‘liberal’ predecessor. He has already ideated and/or enacted legislation that requires ISPs and social media to have a duty of care for young people using their services (an enforcement impossibility of magnificent scale), empty attempts to curb deepfakes [4], increased parental control over young people by making them guardians of online accounts, forced more burnt out Autistic people into toxic work environments [5], oh and of course most importantly brought back the “Adelaide 500” (bread and circuses). It will surprise no one, then, that, alongside Albanese interest in making Malinauskas the next P.M. he is drawing on reports and research commissioned, influenced and funded by Malinauskas for this latest federal legislation.

This move comes in the global context of nanny-state crackdowns on encrypted private messaging (of course, politicians are exempted from this, their messages must be private, yours however are public property) and fundamentally technology-breaking legislation from this country [6], age verification laws emerging in the US [7], increasing website blocking in ways that only inconvenience and delay legitimate users [8], and blocking adult websites in, purportedly, “free” nations [9]. Criminals, felons (including, yes, that presidential candidate), and ethically disgusting people are not inhibited by these technologies. Indeed even most average users need spend only a few minutes searching for ways to bypass verification and censorship technology. If it is this easy to bypass, what is really happening? Of course it feeds capitalist rhetorics. Moreover, imagine the scene in schools where a handful of technologically more literate students are able to bypass verification and use social media tools to harass students who aren’t so empowered, this is the reality we are rapidly heading towards. What about when a foreign company refuses to implement age-verification due to technical impossibility? Will all of Australia loose access to the social web like Texas lost access to adult websites?

You and me, dear reader, may be amongst the last who had an opportunity to understand contemporary technology in a real way. As with all technologies which have come before, once the capitalists secure their mode for extracting maximum profit from it, the technology itself must become mystified else risk its use for liberatory ends. In a few weeks I have a journal paper coming out about how LLMs have been deliberately mystified and labelled as “Artificial Intelligence” for what is really a collection of data, relatively simple algorithms, some filters and many hours of human labour. This is an example of this kind of capitalist obfuscation of technology and ideas. They, the 1%, want us to be mystified, confused, and unawares of the power, potential and workings of technology. A tale as old as time, without control of the means of production, the capitalist class is nothing – indeed, they are nothing but a leech, and without control they are unable to -leech-.

If we accept this lens, that capitalism is deliberately stripping anything resembling agency and thinking skills right from birth, we can see why successive global governments are undermining the quality and nature of education, shifting problems and blame to drive division, and inventing solutions to problems which result only in pain for the workers and further accumulation for the capitalists. This age verification move in Australia is another in a long line of terrible decisions from a government more interested in driving capitalist profits than working for the people. It is a nanny state move which takes responsibility away from parents who should be championing the fostering of curious and analytical engagement the world, towards an ever intensified “know nothing; work for crumbs of leisure” system which the government -deeply- knows is what they are perpetuating and obscenely benefiting from.

The ALP, and increasingly Liberal party in coalition – yes the new Labor-Liberal coalition (huh, an LLC), are bringing fascism just as they brought neoliberalism to this country. And the brains behind the operation, if you could even call them that, are capitalist bootlickers to the extreme.

Its a sick society we’re living in, folks. I wonder what hell-trip is next for our exciting instalments.

In solidarity,

Aidan

  1. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/sep/09/social-media-age-limits-to-go-before-parliament-ahead-of-next-election-albanese-says ↩︎

  2. https://transparency.meta.com/en-gb/policies/community-standards/inauthentic-behavior/ ↩︎

  3. https://www.canberra.edu.au/about-uc/media/media-releases/2024/september/the-honourable-bill-shorten-mp-announced-as-the-next-university-of-canberra-vice-chancellor-and-president ↩︎

  4. https://www.premier.sa.gov.au/media-releases/sa-government-to-tackle-deepfakes ↩︎

  5. https://employcare.com.au/what-does-autism-works-mean-for-people-with-autism-in-sa/ not to mention they are -paying employers- for the ‘inconvenience’ of ‘dealing with’ an Autistic person, could. he. get. more. offensive. ↩︎

  6. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-46463029 https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-impact/ https://www.csoonline.com/article/2154094/chat-apps-end-to-end-encryption-threatened-by-eu-legislation.html https://www.gbnews.com/tech/signal-encryption-russia-venezuela-whatsapp-ban ↩︎

  7. https://www.theverge.com/23721306/online-age-verification-privacy-laws-child-safety ↩︎

  8. https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/internet-censorship-map/ ↩︎

  9. https://www.newsweek.com/porn-access-blocked-million-americans-1856686 ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
your friendly neofascist government, capitalism

Spidey senses, public health, and capital

Dear friends,

Today I ingested some media – what a gross way to say it – about the role and nature of the differential, challenged, and surmountable problems of COVID-19 management, from the early days. Here’s a topic I never thought I’d spend serious time with in an analytical sense, but why not, here we are, and this is basically a variety show. My political spidey sense started tingling, however, the minute that the public health response was rendered as inseparable from perceptions of (government) mandates and the rampant politicisation of a still deadly virus and disease. No, I won’t share what exactly I was engaged with, but you can safely assume that it was a U.S. targeted piece of media.

To be honest, and this will give you a clue to the inner workings of my brain – who knew we’d be getting intimate, I also “ingested”, if I must, several videos about trains, in particular how South Australia in what could only be considered as a massively anti-working class move removed metro and regional rail lines in favour of highways – but that’s a topic for another day. Okay, digression, let’s get back to politicisation, because that’s the overarching theme of our project here – class, race, gender, and their interstices with the exploitative economic model which grips and terrorises the world.

To set the context, which unless you were born in 2024 you’re likely partially familiar with, we know that “public health” both as an area of practice and an academic discipline, was thrown sharply into “public” view in very late 2019 and exponentially so through 2020. Importantly, public health never goes away, like medicine, public health deals with the health of people (and sometimes non-human animals) often in a more “administrative” (though this is painting public health in a very limited light) sense than medicine itself (i.e., as compared to primary and allied healthcare). In this way, public health can be encompass anything from a ‘health response’, preventative measure, educative strategy, policy creator and enforcer, analyser of broader health landscapes, modeller of impact of health on other parts of our lives, and so on. One of the primary activities of, for example, public health officers is the design, research, development and evaluation of health promotion strategies – literally campaigns to educate the “public” about “health”.

Okay, ground rules established. People who work in public health, then, range from sociologists and epidemiologists through to educators and services and wellness coordinators. There are also, in most European colonised countries at least, government bodies, members of government, cabinet and ministry, and legislators who are also “public health people” though, with any role involving politics, are less likely to respond to bona fide -health- and more likely to trend towards capital-imbued populism; not to mention lack any background in the discipline or its history. So – as I’m going about my day listening to podcasts – when someone says:

“I don’t think anyone will ever trust a public health response again”

I, naturally, feel a little prickly – and, like our spider-bitten friend, begin to burst out in a rash, fever and vomiting, wait … no, hang on.

Hopefully, dear reader, we can agree that the response to COVID-19 was weak at best. This is not because public health advice was incorrect, modelling was inaccurate, healthcare workers didn’t try, or any other trumpian nonsense. Rather, the COVID-19 response was weak because of the political apparatus both in terms of hegemonic enforcement (vis. media) and actual measures taken to prevent spread of the virus (vis. a public health response) were manipulated by politicians to seem palatable… to the capitalist class.

In the U.S. context a great deal of these measures were further watered down because of the political administration at the time, and the general denial and skepticism which ensures that moronic politicians find their way to power. However, in the final analysis, we cannot demarcate this as a U.S. specific occurrence. Rather, it is “always on display” in the overclocked context of highly emotive political drama which is essentialised in the republican vs democrat politics of that country. Indeed, this theatre provides us an important window to see, again, the anti-worker nature of capitalism and the ways in which political society serve as a meagre and momentary distraction in a constant race to the bottom. Irrespective of the purported political alignment of a ruling party in the anglosphere, the commitment to capitalism and capital come above all else.

If you cast your mind back to what we have collectively deemed a dark time in our history, you’ll recall after the first wave of lockdowns, a rapid “realisation” – particularly perpetuated by the media to which everyone was glued at the time – that “essential” services would need to operate to ensure human health. While, arguably, this is correct in that humans require food, water, and so on, it was also dually driven by the indissoluble connection between decision makers and capitalism. It wasn’t long before shops reopened and lockdowns “ended”. Frequently in spite of public health advice. And, importantly, out the window went lockdowns, social distancing, and other disease prevention measures as soon as the capitalist class had secured vaccinations and, on their sociopathic priority list, shot up the need to ensure micromanagement, slave labour, and most importantly, a better-lined pocket [1]. An embodiment of: “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make”, - sent via Twitter from inside my fortress bunker stocked with hundreds of COVID-19 vaccines and enough supplies and wealth for a nation.

But to fully trace the connection of capital, disease, and public health across global political movements we should also look at two other key features (briefly, my brain is tired): corporate greed generally (see also price gouging) and specific exploitation of health emergencies for their own benefit. This included multiple attempts to improve corporate public image (not naming anyone, Pfizer) or influence policy decisions in their favour (not looking at you, Woolworths) at the expense of public health interest – or, let me say that clearly for those in the back – at the -expense of human life-. Because above all else, capitalism is a murderous, treacherous, and deeply inequitable system of economic organisation [2]. We also need to consider how the “periphery”, or rather working-class elsewhere as a whole, i.e., we need to be cognisant of how globally work, health, and life intersect to continually and deeply disadvantage workers and intersectionally marginalised folks [3]. I could also spend time here considering the role of pharmaceutical industry, how drugs for a very wide range of very preventable diseases are ludicrously unattainable in majority countries around the globe [4] but, again, topic for another day.

Indeed, if we analyse political behaviour during and what some now call “post” pandemic, the fundamental rule has been: maintain economic stability. The human, animal, and environmental cost of this is something we feel in all quarters. And stability is, obviously, an oxymoron -for the working class-, whose existence is multiply exploited at the convenience of the capitalist and politician to ensure obscene growth of the mostly male billionaire class [5] and their unhinged rants about returning to the office, eating less avocado toast, and just getting over the sniffles (that may well have killed multiple people in your family).

So, sufficiently argued, or at the very least researched on pubmed, it seems that the public health humans are largely on my anti-capitalist bandwagon. Except, just like academia, public health is largely an organ of traditional intellectualism. The enforcement of which continually demands reintegration into extroverted and robust capitalist espousals in order to remain in the “intellectual” strata. Here, in spite of supposed “free speech”, “boundless progress” and “human capital” we can once again place capitalism into the antagonist role in our screenplay. The public health response to COVID-19 was, yes, sloppy, often weak, and changed frequently – but so do our understandings of science, medicine, health practices, and social life. This does not make it “less scientific”, or less meaningful or important to ensuring human life.

Moreover, because of climate change, we are now seeing such a new prevalence of disease, environmental instability, and rampant exploitation that the empty argument of “capitalism brought human progress” authentically rings hollow for many more than it used to, specifically amidst the European colonial diaspora qua globalised working class. The facile “for balance ensure to note that capitalism has created all human progress” rhetoric of the 1930s has even infected most of the LLMs now, which renders them dead to me – and useless for any liberatory project. Them alongside ‘innovators’ and other capitalist sycophants, there never ceases to be a fresh supply of boot-lickers. Golly what a world when your AI synthesised top box search results are straight up propaganda, too. It’s no wonder working people actually believe capitalism is their saviour.

We are now living in a world where the media has successfully poisoned the majority of humans against safe responses to health events, and capitalism has once again won out against humanity, ethics, and life. While podcasters certainly should not amplify this scepticism it is not overly surprising that they do so [6].

The public health worker of the future has an unenviable job of knowing just how bad things are, but must, now more than ever before, languish in a de-professionalised, undermined and fundamentally gutted infrastructure because, for a brief moment, it was deemed anti-capital. Though, speaking to my public health university students, I think this has always been well-known, except by those vanguards of capital from inside those organisations through which the propaganda flows. Sick fuckers that they are justifying loss of human life for capital’s continual expansion.

A rambling post for a rambling afternoon.

Your comrade,

Aidan.

  1. i.e., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7543589/ c.f. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7765415/ ↩︎

  2. i.e., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9765138/ ↩︎

  3. one illustration https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41285-022-00179-3 ↩︎

  4. https://socialistrevolution.org/pandemics-profiteering-and-big-pharma-how-capitalism-plagues-public-health/ ↩︎

  5. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/ten-richest-men-double-their-fortunes-pandemic-while-incomes-99-percent-humanity ↩︎

  6. If you’re really still wondering, no, I absolutely do not engage with right-wing commentary in audio form, this was from a soft-left social commentary podcast, and no I still won’t name it. ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
spider man

Are we moving closer to the sociopath strata?

Dear friends,

What a week in the world. I wonder if there will be a time where we can say otherwise, though. We have seen the continued propagation of neo-imperialism backed by the traditional imperialists (this just cancels out to “imperialism proper” anyway) [1], the detention of a tech CEO over encrypted(?) messages [2], a waste of human life, sorry, Australian billionaire, urging the end of -coffee breaks- because mask-off slavery of the workers suits his personal agenda better [3], and research showing an >80% failure rate of “AI” projects [4].

It would also be remiss of me to not comment on the slow car crash of a purportedly “worker-focussed” party. The ALP has once again stooped to its lowest common right-wing denominator in making decisions about census, ejecting another member from the caucus [5]. At this point I am beginning to wonder if they will retain enough MPs to make any decisions before the next election, and while this may feel like hyperbole to sensible political observers but, I can feel in my bones a future where the labor right and the liberal left form a coalition to block independents and greens from power (not to mention with the “less radical” right-wing independents who will surely be elected too).

In a sentence, we are once again in a grim place. So, with the ever depressing scene set, let us begin an inquiry into an aspect of the contemporary capitalist phenomenon, an ideas favourite, the sociopath. Today, however, let’s look directly into the horses mouth ­— we’re going to examine the capitalist and some of the fundamental laws of economic organisation which enable both capital’s reproduction and the (re)production of sociopathy. Spoiler alert, capitalism is a sociopathic economic and social organisation system, and it’s not getting better for being less examined. Three components are of interest to us today: first, fundamental precepts of imperialist capitalism (yes, again, hello), second, the reciprocal (but ouroboros­) nature of capital’s reproduction through the working class, and finally the erasure of the petit bourgeoisie (a move documented as early as Gramsci’s time in politics towards fascism [6]).

Capitalism demands predation upon those with something to give. Or, those with something to give demand capitalist participation. Yes, by and large, the predatory nature of capitalism has been erased in culture because of capitalism’s onto-epistemic seizure. In literal terms, capitalism has rewritten the way we see the world so fundamentally that workers see no alternative to selling a portion of their time in order to exist in the other portion [7]. For how does one acquire shelter, food, and life without paying a landlord or supermarket (capitalist)? This social mesh, in which we are born, raised and exist, demands monetary transactions flow from the worker to the capitalist to keep the worker “off the street”. The same, simultaneously, cannot be said for the capitalist, whose existence equally demands the proletariat’s offering of labour to power their accumulated (surplus) capital which furnishes their leisure lifestyles [8].

For secret reasons the working classes, unless agitated, are more or less forced to accept these relations as “natural”. To be careful and clear here, one cannot blame the working classes for the promulgation of capital. Indeed, Gramsci’s theorisation of civil society and the institutions in it which channel the bourgeoisie thought into the mainstream (the civil sphere) helps us understand that all types of engagement with society in the west (at least, if not elsewhere) are engrained with capital and allow only capital. So the secret reasons are, as inferred above, that social conditioning reproduces capitalism as natural, necessary, and innate. It is, of course, anything but.

The natural world, the antithesis of capitalism, does not demand moneys for the purchase of property. Indeed, if they were a person, mother nature would likely laugh at you, or maybe cry with you, for attempting to render cash for shelter. The capitalist world, on the other hand, sees humans as the only species in the universe dumb enough to pay another human for land, materials, and shelter. Fundamentally the needs for shelter, food, and other necessities have been exploited by capitalists in order to create a wealth-skimming 1% ­— a leisure class whose lavish lifestyles are based entirely on the expropriation of work, through gruelling daily labour by the working class, and extraction from nature. The problem, or conflict if you like, in capitalism is its need for continual growth, the “line must go up” mentality to retain the comfort of the capitalists.

First this need for growth drove colonisation, the brutal and genocidal expansion of European capitalism across the globe. Next the double expropriation from workers, in that not only must you sell your labour power to the capitalist for a means of subsistence, but that in so doing you subsist only to serve the capitalist another day. In the more bourgeois parts of the world this is supposedly “fairly traded” for a “socialist” retirement — of course, more unethical lies have never been told. The products of your labour, be it the curriculum and pedagogy you produce and enact when teaching a class of students, or be it the coal you remove from the coal seam, are alienated from you (hello Karl) in exchange for an empty value — a wage, which you must spend on subsistence. What’s worse is that the capitalist class demand competition, and pit you against your colleagues and comrades for the lowest possible subsistence. But, let’s diverge from explaining Capital again and look at how political society (in Gramsci’s terms) also enforces this mode of human life.

The current majority ALP government in Australia is interested in two main things, both of which are twistedly ironic for a party called “Labor”: the unrestricted accumulation of wealth for the capitalist at expense to the worker, friends and neighbours and environment; and the unashamed squeezing of the working classes to force basic subsistence living on a perpetually static wage. The first of these is an ipso facto necessity for participation in political society. I suggest, here, that to participate in the ruling and governing of any modern capitalist country in any capacity requires, at least, an acceptance of onto-epistemic capital. While there may be revolutionaries and resistors, the actual daily “work” (if you can call it that) of parliament requires belief in capitalism as vehicle for “momentum”, even if the momentum is anti-capitalist (vis-à-vis liberal reformism). The second of these, demonstrated time and again in a litany of anti-worker moves [see also 9], is a fundamental admission of adherence to capitalism over democracy (if there were such a thing). Political society, handmaiden itself to the bourgeoisie, not only perniciously enforces capital as model of operation for government, services, and so on, but sets the agenda for stasis and reproduction in civil society.

If political society both sets the tone for and inherits the tone of the media (murdoch), education (government curriculum), and social organisations (i.e., religions), we can begin to see where a capitalist onto-epistemology develops. Workers and capitalists alike consume media, education, and social fabrics which enforce capitalism. Naturally, the education and media a capitalist receives is vastly different from a working class person, right down to the sociopathic attitude modelled by their teachers. It is from this fundamental insertion of capitalist ontology into the minds of the young ­— the endless reproduction of political propaganda for capitalism’s reproduction — that capitalist reproduction springs forth. And knowingly the capitalists reproduce this, and their capitalist ideology (more recently popularly called neoliberalism).

So this cyclical “politics produces capitalism” and “civil society produces capitalism” just as “worker produces value which is alienated from them” and “capitalist sells the products of the workers labour for their own leisure” creates the conditions in which the working class must prostitute themselves for capitalists, and capitalists continue to fatten and brine themselves in stolen products. An ouroboros­ of human suffering, except for the 1%, their leisure time more than makes up for the massive and cripplingly anti-human “ethic” they employ to secure their fortunes and perceived favour. So finally we arrive at the erasure of the middle class, or the petit bourgeoisie both by government and institutions of civil society — because primary extraction/extracted relationships are simpler to maintain, and do not require the capitalists to cede leisure (a mega yacht, for example) if production is “down” or there is civil unrest over capitalist unfairness.

I’ve noted, -ad nauseam- at this point, the sociopathy of the capitalist class – the bourgeoisie. Importantly, this is not becoming more prevalent. The capitalist class is sociopathic. They foster and demand competition between their fellow human for literally just existing. There is no other species on the planet which enslaves and manipulates, undermines and attacks another in this way. The capitalist class and its remaining adherents among the petit bourgeoisie and proletariat are either sociopathic themselves, or subscribe wholesale to sociopathic ideas in a quest for “pulling oneself up by their bootstraps”. A more impossible, and torturingly accurate, statement about the nature of capitalism has not been said, except that some people in capitalism are born without even the boots to begin with, while the engorged capitalist screams at them about pulling their straps up. Ok, yes, one of my great past times is over-stretching metaphors.

The middle class, however, the petit bourgeois, is always being actively undermined by those above. In times of relative economic (a fake science, and a fake system) surplus the petit bourgeois may grow, and even some of the more privileged amongst them may become class ascendant. However, when economic conditions change, this class is stripped of its (surplus) accumulation and gaslight to believe it wanted to do that. The middle’s leisure time disappears, and their true nature as a fraction of the proletariat is revealed. However, in contemporary times we can add a semi-psychological analytical opportunity, because those petit bourgeois in this relation are both being controlled in the style of an abusive relationship while simultaneously acting as a propagandist mouthpiece for capitals reproduction. What a contradiction. Passing the abuse down to those around them. If it happens that a member of this middle class sits in management, they delude themselves to believe they are not replicating the extractive, expropriative, and malicious toll required to feed the capitalist class, and they pass on the moral guilt of the capitalists (notably, this is largely absent due to true sociopathy in a clinical sense [9] which is broadly known and lauded by the capitalists themselves) through a prism of their own treachery, self doubt and moral concern.

For the remainder, the ALP is working hard to ensure that the working class primarily and the petit bourgeoisie as a happy coincidence are forced back on to subsistence wages through use of inflation to drive down the value of a wage to the worker. These are the terms with which economists speak, and the fundamentally anti-human nature of the language, the approach, and mentality of these traditional “intellectuals” is so infectious that they even believe themselves to be socially liberating others. So, what? We are seeing increasingly sociopathic behaviours in the workplace, from politicians, and across media not because of some new phenomenon. So, cheerily, I say...

Capitalism is run by sociopaths. Capitalism creates sociopaths. Capitalism is slavery.

Can we please wake up and smell the ashes before the planet is gone?

Your comrade,

Aidan

  1. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/harris-says-she-wont-stop-bidens-policy-of-sending-weapons-to-israel/ ↩︎

  2. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/28/tech/pavel-durov-telegram-custody-released-intl/index.html I have mixed feelings about this ↩︎

  3. https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/aug/29/australian-billionaire-boss-coffee-breaks-office-chris-ellison-perth-mineral-resources ↩︎

  4. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/research-shows-more-than-80-of-ai-projects-fail-wasting-billions-of-dollars-in-capital-and-resources-report ↩︎

  5. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-29/albanese-governemnt-lgbti-census/104280744 ↩︎

  6. Gramsci, A. (1977). Selections from political writings (1910-1920) (Q. Hoare & J. Mathews, Trans.). Lawrence and Wishart; Gramsci, A. (2007). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-Smith, Trans.; Reprinted). Lawrence and Wishart. ↩︎

  7. Marx, K. (1976). Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit. International Publishers. Marx, K. (1990). Capital: a critique of political economy (B. Fowkes & D. Fernbach, Eds.). Penguin Books in association with New Left Review. ↩︎

  8. Yes, the very ones that tell the working classes to eat less avocado on toast. ↩︎

  9. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-many-successful-millionaires-are-psychopaths-and-why-it-doesnt-have-to-be-a-bad-thing.html what an absolutely fucked up article, though. ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
sociopathy and capitalism

Apple was never pro-creative

Dear friends,

Do you remember the glory days of Apple as the underdog? From early scrapes with Microsoft, through years of struggling management, the triumphant return of Steve Jobs, and the iPod boom. For decades of its existence Apple had been, and held closely its title of, underdog. Microsoft, IBM, HP, Dell, and other “big players” in the personal computing arena held majority market share. Apple envied the position of those with more market share. Not because it was the creative underdog – but because it was greedy [1].

As a marketing strategy Apple cornered creatives. Offering software with particular affordances to a limited set of creative professionals, and emphasising lock-in. Little to no Apple software had been successful outside of Apple platforms, and barring iTunes, little has remained available on other operating systems. The prototyping of control, ownership and entitlement starts here with the Mac – and it has festered into the pinnacle of entitled, greedy, and overbearing techbro bullshit that dominates silicon valley, the Fortune 500, and most of American capitalism today.

The process, though, of slowly gaslighting creatives to drag their friends to Apple’s platforms was gradual. Apple knew, above all else, that building decent software, selling overpriced commodity hardware in nice chassis, and fostering an ecosystem of devices would serve their profit motive. But they knew one thing above all else. Build a brand on the underdog status. Sell “premium” consumer hardware. Monopolise on services. This is the post-iPod Apple. And it has only metastasised with its explosive growth over the last ten years.

Decision after decision about the approach, marketing, and practices of the Company are now so clearly driven by an entitled greed that many “creatives”, intellectuals, and core platform users (from the “real” underdog days) are abandoning ship [2]. With Apple’s treatment of developers over the last 10 years [3] much of the innovative force of new software, tools and artistic expression has left the platform for greener pastures. Unsurprisingly, the newest platform entry has been an abject failure, and yet shamelessly still sells for basically the going rate of an uninsured MRI in the US [4]. However, this is only symptomatic of a much deeper issue.

There continues to be developers working on Apple platforms. Indeed, many large corporations develop for Apple’s platforms now, at minimum for iOS and iPadOS, and accordingly many large corporations support, at minimum through BYOD policies, the use of Apple’s tools in workplaces. If you went down the cultural studies line of reasoning, you might argue that ever since Apple climbed into bed with corpos, the cool, creative and indy folks jettisoned – think digital hipster (with neither configuration being particularly “cool”). But this is a well-covered gripe – indy devs, small startups, and -people with ideas- are, mostly, not welcome on any “platform” today. The best app in the world might be on the Google Play Store right now, but without a million dollar marketing budget, a pocket full of hegemonic “content creators”, and more fair-weather friends than one billionaire could reasonably count, you’ll never find it.

The contemporary “marketplace” of apps, media, “content” and so on have gone the way of television. I mean this in the sense that what was once an open internet, open “marketplace” if you will, has been replaced with broadcasters – or, perhaps more fittingly, narrowcasters. Instead of the limited role of discovery that was stumbling upon niche Mac apps on websites far and wide, has been replaced with App Stores and mainstream channels. With the rise of the Play Store, App Store, and Microsoft Store, software distributed ‘elsewhere’ is increasingly less visible – and it was rarely visible to begin with. Even on smartphones which are -allowed- to sideload (i.e., install applications from somewhere beside the Play Store or App Store) the practice has barely taken off.

Instead, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and a small handful of other players control the platform. They have become the Channel 7, 9 and 10 of apps. If you want to sell an app, an electronic interactive art piece, a song, a movie, whatever – you go to the only market in town. And the companies behind these markets are like Apple, and worse. Freedom of choice? Not on corporate America’s watch. Anyone reminded of neoliberalism at this juncture?

The problem deepens, however, as corpos are regulated (by countries and unions that still have something vaguely resembling teeth for being pro-consumer) and then fight back against nations. Yes, these companies, often acronym’d to FAANG, bring their revenues higher than most countries GDPs to employ lawyers to fight against the very consumers they purport to supply and “love”. When they fail to comply, they keep belligerently snubbing their noses at government bodies until they might incur a fine large enough to be worried about their profit margin [5]. Between this and paternalistic, monopolistic, and flagrantly anti-human AI practices [6] the technosphere has only become a more toxic mess. Not to mention the corporate lobbying in support of privacy-invasion, slave-trade and extractivism. Somehow, though, I’m not able to finish here.

If you develop, sell, buy, interact with, or in any way engage with Apple’s platforms, any transaction you conduct through anything but the web browser [7] you are giving 30% of your transaction to Apple. Giving to charity? No worries, Apple will take 30% of that for their bottom line. Doing some online shopping? No worries, Apple will take up to 3% through Apple Pay. These massive marketplaces move billions of dollars a day – and Apple, Google, and Microsoft (amongst others) are there to take most of your pie. The justification is that they “made the tools” thereby entitling them to 30% of your revenue, forever, no questions asked. Just what in the fuck is -free market capitalism- that the corner-store vanguards of capitalism continue espousing, I guess its just code for “shilling for billionaire and trillionaire corpos”. But the plot thickens…

In the last week both Apple and Patreon have been up to some shady business. Patreon, another kind of marketplace for content creators and creatives, were, for some reason or other, initially exempt from Apple’s “30% of your profit goes to us” extortion. Patreon has grown massively over the last few years, with most YouTubers, bloggers, artists, developers and so on having some kind of vague involvement in the platform. Here you can sell your art – publish a piece, and subscribers can pre-sign to say “yep, give them $5 for every creation”. Write a monthly blog? Yep, $7.99 a month. This micro-economy of subscriptions and gate-kept content has proliferated, but really only between Patreon and OnlyFans – the rise of new marketplaces? Well of course, if they’re controlled by a capitalist. Talk about everything being a subscription, ey. Well, Apple, like the mafia, have decided that the rent is due – they want content creators, creatives, programmers, bloggers, and more to yield 30% of their bottom line to Apple [8]. Alongside this, Patreon has decided that it will end per-creation payments, effectively forcing everyone into a subscription model, and ending the ‘slow’ creation of art – -sigh-, capitalist work intensification at its finest.

Apple’s domineering: “we made the tools, you pay the price” argument has gone out the window in this new low. It has been replace with: “you exist on the internet, we’ll extort you”. Patreon already takes between 4-18% from creatives’ proceeds. But, at least, Patreon provides billing infrastructure, web hosting, customer support, and profile management services. In this instance, all that Apple is doing is … making smartphones (which they overcharge consumers for like nobodies business). But, if you want to be in this marketplace, well, you’ll pay – or you’ll leave. I know which I’m doing (and I’m not even on Patreon - ew!).

The corporate greed, entitlement, and fighting over unconscionable quantities of money speaks to the fundamentally unethical nature of capitalism. This anti-human, anti-creative, and distinctively oppressive ideology and political apparatus has truly devolved into a corporate-hegemony of infantile narcissism. Who is leading the charge in the technosphere? The “underdog” Apple. And what a shame, because knowing the struggles of “indy” developers, makers, and creatives, Apple could have chosen a better way – an inclusive way. Instead, like so many others, they hoist the ladder up behind them as they climbed to the very top of the NASDAQ. And now they spend all their time “enshittifying” (as the internet is obsessed with calling it) their platforms and services to extract as much profit as possible. Sick.

I’ve posted before about transitioning to open source software where possible, barring what is needed for employment. Indeed, since that last post, allegedly Linux market share has risen above MacOS on desktop and laptop deployments [9]. Personally, I’m still daily driving Linux, Firefox, LibreOffice, and more – and I’m more than tempted to get a GrapheneOS capable smartphone next time I break something. But this is only the beginning of the reason that I find Linux and open source software compelling. Unlike its corporate counterparts, it is fundamentally based on the idea of transparency, visibility, skilled contributors, and, as much as humanly configurable, meritorious contribution. In fact, it is anti-capitalist by the license agreement. I’ve been GitHub and OpenCollective sponsoring a range of indy projects, contributing to the Linux Foundation, Open Document Foundation, and Mozilla (org, for Thunderbird, Firefox is a subject for another day). In the process of doing this, I’ve found increasingly that software, solutions, creativity and expression in these communities is passion driven and infinitely cooler than any marketing image Apple ever deployed.

Indeed the “cool software”: the tools, tweaks, gadgets, and fun stuff that Apple has slowly sanitised from the App Store, all seems to have moved over to Gnome and KDE. Brilliant. Once Microsoft transitions Office to a PWA (and it’s getting very close) there will be little, beside perhaps the Affinity suite, keeping me dual-booting. And barring an -actual- Linux phone (yes AOSP is Linux powered, but it’s not -Linux-; the same way iOS is BSD-powered lol) my transition to an open source lifestyle will be complete – and I will gladly financially contribute as much, if not more, to these communities than I ever have to Apple, Microsoft and others.

It’s a sad day when you feel ethically as though use of a tool required to do your work – intellectual, creative, fun, freedom, whatever – is fundamentally opposed to your way of life. Either I’m getting more radicalised (lol, jk, of course I am) or Apple and the rest of capitalism has really gone to shit. Probably both. Who cares – get FOSS.

Much love,

Aidan.

  1. https://aidan.cornelius-bell.com/idea/14/ ↩︎

  2. https://www.adnews.com.au/news/dissecting-apple-s-crush-ad-controversy this ad truly fulfilled its underlying tone – “crush the creatives, who cares?” – Apple. ↩︎

  3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27385314 https://www.kotaku.com.au/2024/08/devs-say-working-with-apple-arcade-is-frustrating-like-an-abusive-relationship/ ↩︎

  4. https://www.macrumors.com/2024/07/11/apple-vision-pro-under-500000-sales-this-year/ ↩︎

  5. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_24_3433 ↩︎

  6. https://www.macstories.net/stories/ai-companies-need-to-be-regulated-an-open-letter-to-the-u-s-congress-and-european-parliament/ ↩︎

  7. even then, Apple is likely taking a cut on Apple Pay, or another lock-in scheme. ↩︎

  8. https://www.engadget.com/apps/patreon-will-have-to-use-apples-in-app-purchase-system-or-be-removed-from-the-app-store-192631471.html ↩︎

  9. https://itsfoss.com/linux-market-share/ ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
corporate greed