Tara McMullin

@taramcmullin

Writer, podcaster, and producer baffled by the absurdity of neoliberal capitalism. Autistic feminist. Aspiring independent scholar. Amateur baker. Host of the What Works podcast and author of a book of the same name.

whatworks.fyi

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No Redemption Arcs in Hell

Brandon blgtylr.substack.com

the art of writing

"Redemption comes from a character who has incurred a moral debt through their actions then making good on that moral debt by performing some deed or service or act of heroism that will ameliorate the bad. That seems simple enough. But in the arid secular plains of modernity and its accompanying moral relativism, what is even good? What is even bad? How can there be redemption in the absence of a functioning moral schema?"

What would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing toward something called “the... See more

David Graeber • A practical utopians guide to the coming collapse – David Graeber

Practical Utopia and Labor Under Capitalism

Not only do today’s platform-based workers exist in a nascent labor category, but their participation is decentralized, making it harder for them to connect with each other. As the industry has matured, and consolidation has led to monopsony power, platform labor has reached a turning point. Platforms are increasingly governing participants’... See more

A Labor Movement for the Platform Economy

The Creator Economy and Labor Under Capitalism

Media & Culture and Literary Criticism

Media & Culture

The securitized subprime mortgages that triggered the global financial crisis demonstrated that even the most material of possessions—the home—was as if made of air and could burst like a bubble. The same years saw the permeation of network technologies into everyday life through smartphone use. These were years in which the meanings of materiality... See more

Introduction to Hoardiculture | Stanford Humanities Center

Broken Links

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

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing • Salvage Accumulation, or the Structural Effects of Capitalist…

Capitalism

It is often only in the interludes that we come to realise just how much our busy lives are an active conspiracy against the very things that supposedly give our existence a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.

David J Siegel • Modern Life Subjects Us to All-Consuming Demands. That’s Why We Should Reflect on What It Means to Step Away From It All

Labor Under Capitalism and Finding Meaning

An Empire Divided

Graham J. Murphy lareviewofbooks.org