Tara McMullin

If you’ve used all of your creative powers to come up with a cure for cancer and you want to follow a playbook for the FDA approval process, by all means, do that.

But it seems as if too often, people are going through the FDA approval process in hopes that it will lead them to the cure, metaphorically speaking.

Most analysts of capitalism, following nineteenth- and twentieth-century leads, have ignored the formation of “raw” materials, taking them for granted as capitalist resources. Yet these materials have their own genealogies of production outside the capitalist purview, and our recent awareness that capitalism is destroying Earth’s livability makes... See more

Already a fourth of the adults actually employed in the US are paid wages lower than would lift them above the official poverty line – and so a fifth of American children live in poverty. Almost half of employed adults in this country are eligible for food stamps (most of those who are eligible don’t apply). The market in labour has broken down,... See more

Anything that we playbook becomes more legible to AI.

So we must burn the playbooks .

This is the real Butlerian Jihad, not destroying the machines, but destroying the playbooks that would turn us into machines.

Better design is warranted, but it is not enough if the goal is risk reduction. Risk reduction requires socialization, education, and enough agency to build experience. Moreover, if we think that people will still get hurt, we should be creating digital patrols who are there to pick people up when they are hurt.

Revolutions are thus planetary phenomena. But there is more. What they really do is transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about. In the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate.

I’ve spent the last year and a half telling everyone that TikTok saved my career. But that’s not true. What saved my career was writing a great fucking book.

Knowing your site will survive for decades to come gives you the mental wherewithal to tackle long-term tasks like gathering information for years, and such persistence can be useful⁠⁠19⁠—if one holds onto every glimmer of genius for years, then even the dullest person may look a bit like a genius himself⁠⁠20⁠.