The Great Maw of Consumerism
This whole machinery of human needs, your whole 88-key piano of exquisite emotional subtleties, the poetry and art of us… is all being gamed by the consumption algorithm.
This whole machinery of human needs, your whole 88-key piano of exquisite emotional subtleties, the poetry and art of us… is all being gamed by the consumption algorithm.
We have the technology, the resources, the imagination and the political measures to achieve this goal, but will it be possible with our business as usual painted green?
What is the dark side of the energy transition — particularly for the Global South and Indigenous communities?
Knowledge may not be power, but should the future ‘become what it must’, the process of building power will have been one of building knowledge.
Can Black liberation be achieved through individual successes within capitalism — through Black capitalism — as Booker T. Washington suggested? Or can true liberation for Black people in the United States only emerge through a collective struggle against racial capitalism?
Five decades should have been enough for us to find the path to prosperity without growth. Apparently, we didn’t take the lesson to heart.
We owe it to each other to create those spaces of active love and healing. Along the way, we can all learn from the ADD brain’s refusal of labour time and capitalist bureaucracy.
We can regenerate the life systems to which our future is linked. But change must be at the root. Because after every crisis, we don’t want to return to normality, we want to return to the earth.
Asking himself how deep the reconstruction of the project of Enlightenment has to go, McCarraher’s answer is an emphatically italicized “all the way down” I think he’s right.
All paths forward come back to the fact that democracy is not a spectator sport. The worst – but unfortunately not all – of the climate crisis is avoidable, but doing so will require system change with urgency.
The fundamental defining principle of a capitalist economy is that what happens is determined by what will maximise the profits, income and wealth of the few who own most of the capital, by competing in the market place.
In these and many other battles, commoners heroically fought to preserve their land and rights, but they were unable to stop the growth of a highly-profitable industry that was supported physically by the state and legally by the courts. As elsewhere, capital defeated the commons.