Brandon Marcus

The demonic recognizes in our shortcuts the perfect opportunity: tempt humans away from the difficult labor of making, growing, and building with our own hands and minds. Instead, offer an endless stream of effortless consumption—images without artists, music without musicians, stories without storytellers. The devil’s oldest strategy is, of... See more

Slop emerges when we eliminate not just toil (the burdensome aspects of work) but labor itself (the meaningful human engagement with creation). Slop is production without history. Slop is detached from genuine human contribution. Slop born of effortless, replicable processes.

The market for feeling productive is orders of magnitude larger than the market for being productive.

The New Deal was not a peaceful coalition between capital and labor. It was not a workshop in D.C. It was not the product of industry leaders and policymakers sitting together to figure out how to share prosperity. The New Deal was a settlement that came together after decades of industrial violence. That is violence imposed on capital by organized... See more

This is the informational ecosystem we’ve made, without really intending to: one that has reshaped all of culture by privileging the outlook of those who bend their will to the masses

The culture of any given network is generated by a small minority of people with some trait (or, more likely, deficiency) that makes them desire this novel form of social competition more than others. And one way to ensure you’ll at least be in the conversation is to stay legible — to talk about what others are talking about, or at least to speak... See more

“Courage” has a moral valence that agency doesn’t. Agency is about action, but it tells us nothing of direction.

You can just do things, sure, but what will you do? In the 21st century in America, we’ve collectively lost a sense of moral guidance and don’t even know exactly where to look for it. But it’s still worth looking. To valorize agency... See more