Brandon Marcus

Science and technology are not bound to the peculiar notion, seemingly characteristic of the last 150 years of their application to production, that new knowledge of nature's laws has to be locked into increasingly more specialized and highly capitalized preparation of men to use them. The sciences, which specialized out of philosophy, have become... See more

I use the term 'tool' broadly enough to include not only simple hard-ware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements, or motors, and not just large machines like cars or power stations; I also include among tools productive institutions such as factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, and... See more

The commodity called 'education' and the institution called 'school' make each other necessary. The circle can be broken only by a widely shared insight that the institution has come to define the purpose. Values abstractly stated are reduced to mechanical processes that enslave men. This serfdom can be broken only by the joyfui self-recognition of... See more

Our imaginations have been industrially deformed to conceive only what can be moulded into an engineered system or social habits that fit the logic of large-scale production. We have almost lost the ability to frame in fancy a world in which sound and shared reasoning sets limits to everybody's power to interfere with anybody's equal power to shape... See more

I choose the term 'conviviality' to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I... See more

Technique transforms traditional practices by making them conscious and rational — by turning the tacit into the explicit and by relying on the authority of specialists and calculations to find the most efficient, most effective, most profitable way of doing something.

Five companies that privately own the public communications and commercial operating system that increasingly write the rules of society

• We have outsourced the management of our critical informational pathways to algorithms run by for-profit companies, working hand in glove with governments,

• Centralized clearinghouses of news, messages, and content.

... See more