Brandon Marcus

William Carlos Williams: “It is an extraordinary phenomenon that Americans have lost the sense, being made up as we are, that what we are has its origin in what the nation in the past has been, that there is a source in AMERICA for everything we think or do.”

But the layer of the stack in which our subjectivities are formed, the place where our beliefs about the world are shaped, is also a battleground. We must teach ourselves to navigate the torrent that is replacing consensus reality, this turbulent, treacherous mediatized flow. There is no shore to swim back to, but in the new age of magic, when... See more

Democracy is a system of feelings. Citizens must feel included. When those feelings collapse, no procedural reform can restore legitimacy. Lilliana Mason, in Uncivil Agreement , demonstrates how partisan identity fuses with emotion, producing politics of anger and disdain. Liberals mistake this terrain for irrational noise, but illiberals treat it... See more

Scholars such as Jan-Werner Müller and Pippa Norris emphasize that populists frame politics as a battle between virtuous people and corrupt elites

1. Whatever it ends up doing, I interpret AI as intended to be a class weapon against credentialed, skilled, and cognitive workers.


2. Tech advances are, in fact, changing the “relations of production.” It’s proletarianizing new types of work.


3. This mayheighten class struggle again, as it creates more proletarianized workers who self-consciously organize

... See more

Algorithmic media companies exploit the difference between our attentional instincts and aspirations. In so doing, they make it harder for us to become who we might wish to be.