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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

CEOs and death

Dear friends,

Overnight in the US a person killed a private health care company’s CEO [1]. The suspicion, of course, is that this company denied the person’s (or their family/friends) health care claim. I commented on mind reader that this could well be the start of rolling out the guillotines to end billionaires. Let’s see how good our odds are looking of an anti-capitalist revolution through our theoretical lenses, before we start partying on dead CEO’s graves. Hang about though because there is some cause for a party right out the gate: healthcare companies in the US have been allowing claims at a much higher rate today, they’ve removed information about their boards and directors, and are obscuring details about their CEOs. Okay, so one of those is a good thing. But it is interesting how scared the capitalist class is today. This is a deeply theoretically interesting time – if morally challenging.

While, of course, one cannot advocate for violence, there are some interesting nuances to consider in both the reaction to these events, and the fallout of showing “it’s possible” to bring an end to violence, suffering, and death – if only for a moment. To be extremely clear, I mean that quite literally the removal of a CEO brings a net positive in the world. Today, hundreds if not thousands of US citizens fortunate enough to have health cover are more likely to have their claims accepted. The direct causal effect of a CEO being murdered over the perception that their company denied too many claims and therefore became a target has led to mass positives. This tells us a lot about the nature of capitalism.

Normally, our “economy” – discussed ad nauseam, this is a fallacy to mask human suffering – channels all production towards capitalists (investors, shareholders, directors, CEOs, billionaires, and so on). But what if companies were operated for humanity instead? We see a brief glimpse of this as direct action forces the hand of corporate scumbags. Of course, sadly, this wont last. If the US people rally enough that they kill a CEO a week, perhaps for a short time corporations will turn to serving the people – a move that they can easily afford, and is the morally correct thing to do, but inconveniences the Musk types. More likely, though, is that Trump’s oligopoly succeeds [2].

There are a few implications, here, for Gramscian theorisation, and amongst these are: the role of the police as class-treacherous enforcers of capital (reacting only when CEOs are killed, not when thousands are denied owed healthcare claims), the media’s complicity in ethically sanitising billionaires and other oligarchs, and the role of politics and hegemonic enforcement in ensuring a status quo that oppresses 99% of people. As always, the reaction of various institutions reveal much about how hegemony operates. The media’s immediate rush to condemn individual action while normalising the systemic violence of denied healthcare claims demonstrates the manufacturing of consent that Chomsky identified. Corporate media portrays the daily deaths from denied claims as unfortunate but natural “market outcomes”, while framing any resistance as illegitimate violence. This selective morality serves capital’s interests by making the violence of the system appear invisible while spotlighting any challenge to it.

But particularly interesting, to me, is the role of “enforcement”.

The role of class traitors becomes particularly visible in these moments. Police mobilise (verging on massive) resources to protect corporate leadership while showing little interest in investigating deaths from denied claims. Middle managers in healthcare companies enforce policies they know harm people, having internalised capital’s logic that profits matter more than lives. The system’s gatekeepers – from HR departments to media commentators – work to maintain a status quo that ultimately harms them too, demonstrating how thoroughly hegemonic control shapes consciousness. Isn’t it weird? Don’t you find how amoral and unethical society is just extremely weird?

We teach kids to care for each other, to show respect, compassion, and to work collaboratively. We talk about centring values we describe as human: “kindness,” “care,” “love,” “affection” and so on, as natural, desirable, and important characteristics… At least of young people. As we age, this completely reverses. Cutthroat middle managers are celebrated – gaslighting and lying to employees, CEOs are lauded for their profiteering, and in Trump’s America, billionaires – the ones most responsible for the catastrophic environmental destruction which is sure to kill us all within a handful of years, are installed as dictators of government departments. The values held by Vice Chancellors, CEOs, directors, managers, and many many more belligerent, meaningless, and ultimately inhuman creatures are the direct opposite of “kindness”, “respect”, or “decency”. And yet, our system is geared for their protection – and is enabled in such a way that to even notice the cruelty and inhumanity of the system to which all 8 billion of us have consented requires a violent act? Ughhhh.

I think particularly revealing here is how quickly companies changed their behaviour when faced with direct consequences. This exposes the lie that denied claims are unfortunate necessities rather than choices made to maximise profit. The instant shift toward approving more claims proves these companies could always afford to provide care – they simply chose not to while the costs of their violence remained externalised onto the working class. At every possible moment, these corporate giants seek only to extract the maximum profit from us, all of us, yes you – dear reader, even your “wannabe millionaire friends” – we are all screwed over by billionaires and corporate giants. We created these machines of toxic destruction, and we empower their lackeys – the sycophantic narcissists that populate management in our institutions, corporations, and governments. Like a cancer they have grown and subsumed everything good, wholesome, healthy, and positive about the world – to the extent that our planet is dying.

The ruling class’s reaction also illuminates how democracy under capitalism is conditional. When electoral politics and permitted forms of protest fail to protect human life, and people feel driven to direct action, we see how quickly the system drops its democratic pretence [3]. The same voices who justify the violence of poverty, houselessness, and denied healthcare suddenly become deeply concerned with “law and order” when the 1% face consequences.
This moment forces us to grapple with uncomfortable questions about how change happens in a system designed to prevent it. While we cannot advocate violence, we must acknowledge how the system’s inherent violence – from denied healthcare to ecological collapse – creates conditions where people feel they have no other recourse. The fact that a single action produced more concrete positive change than decades of permitted resistance reveals the bankruptcy of working only within the system’s approved channels. And that is perhaps the most terrible part of all – in order to defeat this violent, disgusting system, the response that works seems to be more violence?

And yet, perhaps most importantly, this reveals the fiction of market inevitability. When faced with sufficient pressure, companies can choose to prioritise human wellbeing over maximum profit extraction. So, what, how do we build movements powerful enough to force this choice consistently, rather than temporarily? The answer as always lies in rebuilding class consciousness and solidarity while developing tactics that impose real costs on capital’s violence, without resorting to our own. Or at least that is my hope, because violence (physical and otherwise) does not bring good things – ever, not in the long run, it is incompatible with compassion, respect and decency.

The path forward requires understanding these dynamics while working to create alternatives to both individual actions of desperation and the system that produces them. This means building dual power – developing democratic institutions to meet human needs while delegitimising the structures that prioritise profit over life.

I feel like today I needed the “or something” more than the last post. This is a complex space to navigate, and it’s hard sometimes not to jump for joy when cracks in capital’s facade appear – even if they are brought by murder. I’m hopeful this is the start of some revolutionary activity that centres humanity, but I’m also fearful that we’re just seeing a further exponent on the curve towards extreme anti-human violence and that this isn’t really anti-capitalist at all, but rather a convenient scapegoat for further global authoritarianism…

In solidarity,

Aidan

  1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooting-celebrations.html ↩︎

  2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/06/trump-us-cabinet-billionaires ↩︎

  3. https://www.propublica.org/article/missouri-abortion-amendment-republican-bill-proposals ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
health care, capitalism, heat death, murder, values, morals, futurism

Housing and economic mythology

Dear friends,

When you think about it, a striking indictment of capitalism’s fundamental absurdity is that, humans remain the only species on Earth forced to pay for shelter. While other animals engage in the genuine labour of creating and maintaining their dwellings – think beaver dams, magpie nests, or ant cities – humans alone have been convinced that surrendering most of our life’s labour to access basic shelter is not only normal but desirable. This perverse arrangement is not a natural way of being – it has been generationally deliberately constructed through centuries of enclosure and dispossession, transforming what should be a fundamental right into a commodity to be bought and sold. And the capitalists like to remind you that not engaging with capitalism – not securing a dwelling – is a personal failure which will be punished (see also architecture which punishes those without homes). The fact that we accept this as “normal” reveals how thoroughly capitalist ideology has infected our basic understanding of what it means to exist in the world – capitalist realism again, hello. Every other species on Earth recognises shelter as a need to be met through direct engagement with the environment. Only humans, in our capitalist fever dream, have convinced ourselves that paying a landlord or bank for the privilege of having a roof over our heads represents progress.

This distortion reaches an apex in the mythology of home ownership under capitalism. The 30-year mortgage – that great “achievement” of financial engineering – functions as indentured servitude, binding workers to wage labour for the majority of our adult lives. The cruelty and genius of this system lie in how it transforms what should be liberation – having a secure place to live – into a mechanism of control, nice. And we wonder why gaslighters, narcissists, and con artists (sorry, CEOs) are held up as exemplars of the peak of society. Workers must maintain steady employment, accept whatever conditions our employers impose, and suppress any revolutionary impulses lest we risk losing our homes. The increasing impossibility of affordability only tightens these bonds, as younger generations face the choice between eternal rent extraction or mortgage payments that consume ever-larger portions of their income. The “Australian Dream” of home ownership (yeah, that’s how basic we are, the entire dream is “a home” – not collective liberation, not a brighter future, just owning a box to sit in) serves as the perfect “carrot”, promising stability and wealth accumulation while actually functioning as a sophisticated tool of class control. Don’t you just adore capitalism?

This feeds into the broader mythology of “the economy”. You know, the reason that Trump won the election – didn’t you hear the workers saying how he would make a better economy? What they forgot to ask was “better for whom?”. The economy is a quasi-religious entity invoked to justify every form of exploitation and suffering for the 99%. The entire edifice of mainstream economic discourse serves to mystify what are, at their core, simple relations of power and extraction. When politicians and media figures speak of sacrificing social goods for “the economy”, they reveal how thoroughly this abstraction has supplanted human needs in our collective consciousness. Our entire epistemology is built on a foundation of exploitation and extraction, and the mind-games required to reinforce this are on by an order of magnitude more twisted than any other invention. The political theatre that accompanies this – endless debates about interest rates, housing policy, and affordability – serves primarily to maintain the illusion that these relations are natural and unchangeable rather than deliberately constructed systems of control. The economy isn’t real in any meaningful sense; it’s a story we tell ourselves to justify the unjustifiable. Trump wins? For the economy. LGBTQI+ folks lose equity? For the economy. Entire ethnic groups subjected to genocide? For the economy.

The psychological mechanisms that maintain this system of control are both sophisticated and brutally effective. Sociologists at the nexus of psychology have documented how economic precarity creates conditions perfect for mass gaslighting, where workers are convinced to doubt our own experiences of exploitation while internalising responsibility for systemic failures [1]. Similarly, this theoretical ground fits with “cruel optimism”, [2] the way workers remain attached to fantasies of economic mobility even as those fantasies actively harm them. The systemic deployment of uncertainty and fear as control mechanisms, particularly through housing insecurity, creates what Bauman calls “liquid fear”, [3] a persistent anxiety that prevents collective action while ensuring compliance with capitalist demands (not quite what he said, but this isn’t peer reviewed). But ultimately this all sits under Fisher’s “capitalist realism”, the widespread sense that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Together, these forces create a self-reinforcing system of psychological manipulation that makes resistance feel not just difficult but almost unthinkable. When the ALP, LNP, or US Republican party deploy economic mythology, they aren’t just lying – they’re activating deeply embedded psychological mechanisms designed to maintain working class compliance through a combination of fear, false hope, and manufactured helplessness.

The distortion of values reaches beyond housing and economics to infect our entire conception of human worth. And this is where we collectively offer our consent to this system, and I am further inclined to believe, is the root of a great many more misanthropic social problems. Under capitalism, ethical behaviour is synonymous with “productive” behaviour – being a “good person” means being a good worker, paying your debts, and accepting your exploitation with minimal complaint. The problem, of course, is who defines productive, what does productive look like, and for what ends. The possibility of grounding ethics in genuine human connection, mutual aid, or collective liberation becomes nearly unthinkable within this framework. Everything is a competition, everything is a battle, and everything is unthinkably “personal failure”. Even basic human needs like shelter become means of measuring and judging moral worth – the unhoused are viewed as moral failures rather than victims of systemic violence. The epistemic transformation is complete when workers internalise these values, policing themselves and others based on criteria that serve only to perpetuate our own exploitation. And this is where the mind-games really reveal themselves. We have become the prison cell for our own thinking, working, and relationships. Why?

The connections between these elements – housing commodification, wage slavery, economic mythology, and capitalist ethics – form a web of control that feels impossibly tangled. Yet understanding these connections is crucial for any project of liberation. The same logic that convinces us it’s normal to pay for shelter also convinces us that wage labour is freedom and that human worth can be measured in economic terms. Breaking free requires rejecting not just individual elements but the entire framework that makes them appear natural and inevitable. Because it is not.

Instead, we can ask, what might it look like to rebuild these systems based on genuine human needs and values? How could we organise shelter as a right rather than a commodity? What ethics might emerge when we no longer measure worth through the lens of capitalist productivity? These questions have no home in our current “politics”, “economy”, or socially constructed, deeply performative, and twisted epistemology. Indeed, even asking these questions in a public forum gives rise to eyebrows at least, and questions about your socialist affiliations at worst. From inside this system it is impossible to genuinely change our thinking, shift our current “paradigm”, and this is equal parts because our imagination has been colonised by capitalist logic. Our entire system of thought is governed on principles of extraction, exploitation and aggression (for the 1% from the 99%). But asking questions that seek liberatory ends remains one of the most important tasks of contemporary socialism, as does remembering that the current system is neither natural nor inevitable. It was built through deliberate choices and can be unmade through equally deliberate collective action.

Curiosity, compassion, comradery, these are human values – and asking questions, challenging the status quo, and staying open to alternatives in public spaces of discourse is of tantamount priority. Every other species on Earth manages to meet their shelter needs without landlords, banks, or 30-year mortgages. The fact that we can barely imagine doing the same reveals the depth of our captivity to capitalist logic. Breaking free requires not just critiquing individual elements but recognising how thoroughly these systems of control permeate our understanding of what it means to be human. Only then can we begin to imagine and build genuine alternatives.

Or something, you do you, I guess.

In solidarity,

Aidan

  1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122419874843 ↩︎

  2. https://www.dukeupress.edu/cruel-optimism ↩︎

  3. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Liquid+Fear-p-9780745636801 ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
housing, economics, fear, debt, crisis, socialism, radical change, questioning, human value

The kids aren’t alright – they’re banned

Dear friends,

Yesterday the ALP passed into law legislation that bans all young people from social media [1]. This has been widely regarded as a bad move [2]. Without wanting to sound like a broken record, this is another step towards fascism from a supposedly union-supporting party – populism anyone? As mentioned a few days ago, social media bans for young people are not Lovejoyesque “won’t somebody please think of the children”, but rather a sinister configuration of common sense that seeks to shape and control the development of class consciousness in the digital age – amongst those most likely to see that there’s something really very wrong with our social order. This enacted ban, dressed up in the language of protection, is nothing but an attempt to forestall the development of digital literacy and thinking skills among young people. In 2024 the best tool the ALP and LNP can dream up together (yeah, those two supposedly opposed parties) is banning – this is simply because they can’t force US tech giants to capitulate to their will and enforce their particular brand of fascism.

So, to get to the bottom of this, we need to understand what social media actually represents under contemporary capitalism. These platforms aren’t spaces for connection. In fact, I doubt anyone is “connecting” on any tech-bro founded social media (and if you’re on social media, odds are you’re on social media not the fediverse). No, contemporary social media platforms, of which there are ever smaller numbers not subsumed by Meta (Zuckerberg), are a human-machine hybrid of mechanisms to enforce hegemony. They simultaneously atomise users while harvesting their data for profit. Does that make you feel good about your social media use? Nah, me either. Meta, Twitter, “Truth Social”, Bluesky and their ilk function as digital fiefdoms – we talked about this earlier today [3] – where interaction itself becomes a commodity. The “social” in social media is a cruel joke. What’s actually being cultivated is a form of managed isolation that serves capital’s interests. So, not a great place to exist if we can agree on the toxicity of these systems and their owners. So what, banning this is a good thing now?

The trouble here is young people are being systematically denied access to even this hollow form of connection, while simultaneously being prepared for lives of digital exploitation. And more importantly, because social media is such a “thing” their ability to navigate these spaces is forestalled, and appropriate forms of engagement aren’t suitably developed. At least, that’s what this bill would prefer. Remember the “digital native” narrative? I was supposed to be one of those, computers were just accessible enough during my youth that I pretty well had access to one from birth, and this made me a digital native – no questions asked. Except I’m the exception – most of my peers have no clue how a computer works, how to navigate digital spaces critically, or engage with thinking about the problematic nature of platform concentration. No, they were too busy seeing the opportunities presented by MySpace to cyberbully each other. I’m not helping here, am I?

But this is the fundamental trouble.

Young people either learn to be consumers of technology, and particularly today’s youth are directed almost exclusively towards consumerism. YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, it’s all “consume” with very little create – beside perhaps performative selfies. This doesn’t build technical literacy, actually it seems to do the opposite. Young people today can’t touch type on a keyboard (maybe on a phone screen), they don’t know what a CPU is, and they certainly don’t understand TCP/IP. Yeah, so the last one is maybe not so necessary – but my point here is about deliberate mystification of technology. This mystification only ever serves capitalist interests – it reinforces the exploitative status quo, and by denying young people access to digital literacy, it reinforces digital sheep – giving up all their personal information and attention, numbing the existential pain of knowing we are all dying from human-made climate death. Weeeee.

The intersectional impacts of this ban also demand our attention. For young people already marginalised by race, class, disability and other axes of oppression, being cut off from digital spaces means being denied access to community, support networks, and critical information about identity and resistance. The bourgeois fantasy that kids will just “go outside and play” ignores how digital spaces can provide vital refuge and resources for marginalised youth – particularly LGBTQI+ kids who are at incredible risk of “vengeance” from their right-wing moron parents. When the ALP talks about “protecting children”, they tacitly, and deliberately, mean only the straight white middle class children. Certainly not working class kids, Indigenous kids, or queer kids who rely on digital connections to find community and survival strategies. They also deny knowledge of how these systems operate, are governed, and whose interests they serve – the real educational piece needed today. We know creating communities is a threat to the ALP. Because anything that’s not one of “theirs” is a threat to their hegemony, and they are viciously and disgustingly protective of their “community” (cult). Probably something to do with the ban, ey.

Rather than dwelling in doom and gloom, let’s think about the interesting aspect, and perhaps hopeful corner offered by this ban. The very attempt to lock young people out of mainstream social platforms could create opportunities for new forms of digital resistance and community-building. And I don’t mean because Meta will basically refuse to enforce this (unless they see it as an opportunity to force you to tie your social media profile to a drivers license, etc. so they can extract more real-world data from you, the opportunities are endless, if you’re a sociopath). No, as a response to the “enshittification” of mainstream services we have already seen the emergence of federated platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy that operate on fundamentally different principles than the corporate social media giants. Different, but still susceptible to human problems. These spaces, governed by communities rather than algorithms, suggest possibilities for social interaction that isn’t primarily oriented toward data extraction and profit generation. As long as that’s what the communities focus on (and ignoring those problematic fascists purporting communism over in the .ml TLD).

Okay, back on the constructive bandwagon. Our questions become: how might we support young people in developing the technical literacy and the critical consciousness needed to build and maintain alternative spaces? Not “teaching kids to code” (though it probably wouldn’t hurt). What I’m pushing here is fostering forms of digital literacy that help them, and frankly everyone else, to understand and resist the mechanisms of control embedded in mainstream platforms. We need to craft tools and practices that support genuine community governance, intersectional equality, and meaningful dialogue rather than engagement metrics and algorithmic manipulation. The systems we have now either started as and became perfected under capitalist ontology, or are late-comers who go full throttle capital accumulation and propaganda out the gate. Where community run systems exist, we need safeguards that prevent hijacking on the basis of popularity, attention, and ad sales.

Let’s get into the construction zone – pouring some concrete here, we could:

  1. Develop open-source moderation tools that centre harm reduction and community accountability rather than automated content filtering
  2. Create educational resources that teach both technical skills and critical analysis of platform capitalism
  3. Build infrastructure for local, community-controlled social spaces that can’t be easily co-opted by capital
  4. Support young people in understanding and creating their own governance structures for digital spaces

But we should also be clear-eyed about the challenges. Capital is proven at co-opting and neutralising resistance movements. Any alternative platforms or practices we develop will face intense pressure to either conform to market logic or become irrelevant. Or worse, be legislated out of existence. The history of the internet is littered with promising experiments in digital democracy that ended up serving as research and development for corporate platforms. Remember when that soccer club setup a digital platform for making all their corporate decisions? Neither does capitalism, but the emergence of investor decision centres based on the same principle – just tailored for accumulation rather than public good – certainly go strong even today.

The likely immediate effect of the social media ban will be to push youth interaction into even less accountable spaces – private Discord servers, anonymous forums, and encrypted messaging apps. While this might temporarily evade state and corporate surveillance, it also fragments community and makes collective organising more difficult. The ALP knows this – again, the goal isn’t actually to “protect” young people but to prevent them from developing the digital literacy and class consciousness needed to resist exploitation. Added bonus points if adults forced into validating their age also have to hand over 100 points of ID to Zucc to expand his surveillance propaganda machine. And a big glaring reminder that Zuckerberg recently “bent the knee” to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, granting the dictator platform control [4].

We can’t ignore how this ban fits into broader patterns of surveillance and control – and a space of continued interest to the ALP who seek to regulate anything “private” into their domain. A friendly reminder that the Australian Labor Party is the very same current government who are expanding police powers, criminalising protest, and maintaining some of the most draconian digital surveillance laws in the supposedly “democratic” world. It’s never been about safety. It’s all about maintaining hegemonic control as capitalism enters an increasingly authoritarian phase. Of course, the very intensity of these control efforts suggests their underlying fragility. Capital wouldn’t work so hard (they rarely work at all) to prevent young people from developing digital literacy if it wasn’t afraid of what they might do with it. The challenge is always using moments of crisis to build genuine alternatives. Letting corporate social media platforms win is just a modern system of “digital enclosure”. Instead, we can, and are, finding better ways of community building.

This means thinking beyond individual platforms or technical solutions to consider how we might fundamentally reshape human interaction in digital space. Instead of engagement metrics and data extraction, what if we oriented digital tools toward mutual aid and collective liberation? Instead of algorithmic manipulation, what if we developed practices of genuine dialogue and democratic decision-making?

We already see, globally in forums, fediverse tools, and other digitally-mediated social spaces:

  1. Networks of community-controlled servers and services
  2. Educational programs that combine technical skills with political analysis
  3. Tools that support consensus-building and collective decision-making, and
  4. International solidarity networks that can resist state and corporate control.

Ultimately, though, the question of youth access to digital spaces can’t be separated from broader struggles against capitalism and fascism. The ALP’s social media ban is just one front in a larger war being waged against the possibility of collective resistance and alternative futures. Our response needs to be equally comprehensive – not just “building better platforms”, but developing new forms of governance, engagement, solidarity and struggle that can effectively challenge capital’s control of digital (and physical) space. The fascist creep doesn’t just happen in parliament or the streets – it happens in code, in algorithms, in the architecture of our digital lives (and we choose who the architect is). Resistance means developing not just alternative platforms but alternative ways of being together online, of making decisions, of building power.

They want to deny young people access to digital literacy and community? Fine. Let’s build something better – something they can’t control or co-opt. The future isn’t in the Metaverse or government-approved platforms. It’s in the spaces we create.

In solidarity,

Aidan

  1. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/28/labor-passes-migration-and-social-media-ban-bills-after-marathon-senate-sitting ↩︎

  2. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/26/australia-social-media-ban-expert ↩︎

  3. https://mndrdr.org/2024/on-immunity-and-the-ruling-class ↩︎

  4. https://www.mediaite.com/tv/mark-zuckerberg-visits-mar-a-lago-after-trump-threatened-him-with-imprisonment/ ↩︎

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
social media, labor party, fascism, corporate control, meta, digital literacy

On immunity and the ruling class

Dear friends,

I woke to news that France was refusing to arrest Netanyahu despite the ICC’s ruling on his creation and maintenance of genocide. So yes, in one fell swoop, France declares a law of its own and renders the ICC as a theatre for political drama, not action – same as it ever was I suppose. This movement gives us yet another lens, in what has basically become a camera store or optometrist, through which to examine how the ruling class protects its own. This isn’t surprising, after all when was the last time you saw a billionaire or war criminal actually face consequences for their actions? But what makes this moment interesting is how this protection is being reinforced in mainstream society through broader political moves – once again creating opportunities to climb and hoist up the ladder. What we see, here, is concomitant and frankly thus far unprecedented control of digital information to manufacture consent.

As always, let’s delve into a little theory first. Gramsci (hello there) gave us a robust understanding of how the dominant group in society controls and maintains their power – hegemony – which helps us understand how ruling class power is maintained not just through direct state violence, but through cultural control and manufactured consent. In our digital age, this hegemonic control manifests equally through cultural institutions – now reconstituted to include social media companies – and through use of force when this manufactured consent fails. The ruling class isn’t just controlling traditional media anymore, in fact they are actively shaping the architecture of digital spaces to prevent class consciousness from emerging. The newspapers, radio stations, and cultural organisations of Gramsci’s time served to normalise fascist ideology and make it appear as “common sense”, today’s social media platforms serve the exact same function – personalised propaganda for fascist ends.

Consider how platforms like Meta, Twitter, and YouTube have “evolved”. What began as seemingly neutral spaces for connection and information sharing have become (badly tuned) instruments of ideological control. The concentration of power in the hands of a few tech oligarchs – looking at you Musk and Zuckerberg – is an extension the media barons of Gramsci’s era, hell of our era – looking at you Murdoch. These modern-day Hearsts (or “Johnny Newspaperseed” if you like) don’t just own the platforms, they shape what information users can see – right so history repeats itself, got it? The “freedom” – that brief flash of democratisation – to post whatever you want is, now more than ever, utterly meaningless when “the algorithm” ensures only certain viewpoints gain traction. This hasn’t “changed” because the technology itself changed – rather the technology is now more fit for purpose. Capital recognised the threat posed by truly “open” digital spaces and moved aggressively to capture and reshape them. That’s why there’s so much platform monopolisation and so many moves to lock down hosting, platform providers, and fundamentally “open” parts of the internet. The early internet’s potential for activist organising and counter-hegemonic discourse was precisely what made it dangerous to ruling class interests. And now it’s nice and Musky instead — and what’s left in the open web is not substantial enough to shake Meta’s exclusivity.

Modern digital hegemony is not a major departure from previous forms of platform control. Nothing truly innovative has ever emerged from capitalism, it is capable only of subsuming peripheral ideas that benefit control and manipulation tactics. But its propaganda machine is enviable and terrible – the modern Web 2.0 internet was a con to pull democratic voices and conglomerate them under tech giants. The aura of “open” remains in forums like Facebook, where people feel a sense of broad connection because their once upon a time physical network of actual friends migrated there (and then promptly stopped interacting in the real world). Mediation of friendship and human connection through technology could have been a wonderful thing, instead it’s an intensification echo chamber that amplifies the worst of humanity to serve capitalist ends. Users feel like they’re freely choosing what content to engage with, but the choices themselves are curated by algorithms designed to promote ruling class interests. This is Gramsci’s “spontaneous consent” operating at a deep level of sophistication.

Varoufakis offers a compelling framework, here, for understanding this transformation through his concept of technofeudalism. He argues that we’re seeing the emergence of a new form of economic domination where tech platforms function as digital fiefs, extracting rents from all social and economic activity that occurs within their domains. Much like feudal lords who could demand tribute from anyone living on their land, companies like Meta and Twitter can extract value from any interaction that takes place on their platforms. Look no further than Twitter’s claim that it owns Alex Jones’ profile and therefore criminal action cannot seek to sell it to reclaim damages. This isn’t traditional monopoly power - it’s a restructuring of social relations where tech oligarchs function as modern-day lords, determining what information can flow through their digital fiefdoms while demanding tribute (in the form of data and attention) from their users. The parallel to feudal power structures is apt when we consider how these platforms have become essential infrastructure for modern life. Just as medieval peasants couldn’t simply “opt out” of their local lord’s domain, today’s workers can’t realistically withdraw from these digital spaces without facing social and economic isolation – though, I’m happily Meta free for 6 months and counting and my mental health has significantly improved.

When we couple these background pieces with our key point – bad people can do what they want, as long as they work for capital, and legislature, public opinion, common sense and judiciary will be turned on anyone who doesn’t agree – we see hegemony in action with all its warts. What better capturing of coercive control than the Australian, particularly South Australian, Labor government’s utterly insane legislation to ban under-17s from phones in school and social media altogether. As always, this isn’t about “thinking of the children”. It is about preventing young people from developing critical digital literacy skills that might help them see through ruling class propaganda. Rather than teach young people how to critically engage with digital information, the response is to simply cut off access entirely. The message is clear: better to prevent access than risk class consciousness emerging through digital means. That’s what TikTok was fostering – communist awareness, even if it was the Chinese brand of capitalist communism (yes, that’s an oxymoron folks – and also another form of international state actors creating dissent).

All this legislature to dumb down the working class nests within a broader pattern of global control. The ruling class clearly recognised that Gen Z’s unprecedented access to information posed a threat to their hegemony. For a brief moment, young people had the ability to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and access unfiltered information about capitalism’s contradictions, imperial and intersectional violence, and class struggle. The response has been swift and brutal: the algorithmic promotion of fascist content, the strategic purchase of Twitter to control discourse, the flooding of the internet with AI-generated slop, and the deliberate degradation of search capabilities. There’s a reason Google only offers you mainstream news, social media posts, and “Reddit discussions” (read: AI bots screaming at each other; and sadly the other dominant search index is not much better).

The purported “neutrality” of algorithms provides perfect cover for the neo-Nazi ideological project (sorry, “Labor Party”) – the rise of fascism to cement capitalism under fire. When YouTube “randomly” promotes far-right content, or TikTok faces bans for allowing anti-hegemonic narratives to spread, we’re supposed to believe these are natural or necessary technical decisions rather than deliberate acts of class warfare. This is what manufactured consent looks like for the digital age. No longer just filtering information through corporate media ownership as Chomsky described, but actively manipulating the infrastructure of digital spaces to fragment class solidarity – and then enacting laws that ensure this is the only way to engage with politics, society, and critique. Meanwhile, the traditional protection racket continues unabated. France’s refusal to arrest Netanyahu follows the same logic as America’s refusal to prosecute war criminals from its own imperial adventures, or Australia’s protection of mining executives who destroy Aboriginal land. The ruling class doesn’t arrest its own – whether they’re genocidal leaders or billionaire exploiters. What’s changed is their ability to couple this direct protection with digital platform manipulation to preempt and prevent resistance from forming. This is what Marx would recognise as the intensification of class warfare through new technological means. The current axis of economic exploitation coupled with maintenance of “correct ideology” prevent workers from developing the consciousness needed to recognise our shared interests.

I think the worst part is that this all seems to be working. Despite having theoretical access to more information than any generation before, many young people are being systematically channelled into reactionary politics through carefully curated digital spaces. From PragerU propaganda to algorithm-boosted fascist content, the ruling class has turned digital spaces into machines for manufacturing consent. It’s a nazi’s world out there, or rather the new nazis, zionists, cryptofascists and other bullshit peddlers. The fact that they’re working to control digital information flows reveals their fear of what might happen if workers could freely share information and recognise their common interests. As always, all it takes is looking at how the 1% destroys the souls of the 99% and using these tools against them … not that that ever seems to happen.

Is there an opportunity here, now, to use the open technologies of the modern internet to undermine their propagandist, ecologically destructive, and toxic ideology? Of course there is, and there are a litany of open source projects that promote free platforms moderated by communities not tech oligarchs. There are many ways to learn digital literacy, to be critical of information that appears in front of you, and to reject racist, sexist, ableist, xenophobic and hollow explanations for exploitation. The real problem is very simple – capital is destroying us as a species, and all those trapped in this jail with us. If we, the vast majority of people don’t take meaningful action to change course, we’re doomed – we are already doomed, even with traditional intellectuals sounding alarms of no return. If it’s so bad that the ruling class is divided on it, the urgency of working class action has never been clearer.

We can use our own digital infrastructure, we can find ways to connect with fellow humans, and we can reject the laws, propaganda, and bullshit the ruling class has cranked up to 11. From critiquing the colonial-capitalist project, to teaching our communities how to understand information that is presented to them, there are better ways. And if none of that sounds like you, the least you can do is get off Meta’s platforms – it’s actually as simple as just deleting the app. The ruling class is betting everything on their ability to control digital spaces and prevent class consciousness from emerging through these channels. Our job is to prove them wrong.

In solidarity,

Aidan

,   &  Aidan Cornelius-Bell
genocide, fascism, capitalism, israhell, literacy, social media