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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Our Cohorts

barnraisersproject.org

William Morris - Useful Work versus Useless Toil

marxists.org

Labor Under Capitalism

Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, ‘professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers’ tripled, growing ‘from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.’ In other words, productive jobs have,... See more

David Graeber • STRIKE! Magazine – On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant

Labor Under Capitalism and Neoliberalism

That's why we have intermediaries, and why disintermediation always leads to some degree of re-intermediation. There's a lot of explicit and implicit knowledge and specialized skill required to connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, and other sides of two-sided markets. Some producers can do some of this stuff for themselves, and a... See more

Cory Doctorow • Pluralistic: Middlemen Without Enshittification; The Bezzle Excerpt

content as capital and Media & Culture

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?"

“True work is done for the sake of doing it. What is to be done with it afterwards is another matter, another job.” — Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places by Ursula K. Le Guin

Feminist Philosophy and Remarkable Work

We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.

Drew Austin • #162: Minimum Viable Self

Digital Identity and Broken Links

What distinguishes human economies is merely that they recognise that the chief business of any social system – or, indeed, of any system of the production and distribution of material goods – is the creation and mutual fashioning of human beings. Indeed, one could well argue that it’s only the emergence of commercial currencies that made it... See more

David Graeber • On social currencies and human economies: some notes on the violence of equivalence – David Graeber

Economics

When we place our faith in hard work, we’re wishing for the creation of character; but we’re also hoping, or expecting, that the labour market will allocate incomes fairly and rationally. And there’s the rub, they do go together. Character can be created on the job only when we can see that there’s an intelligible, justifiable relation between past... See more

James Livingston • What if jobs are not the solution but the problem? – James Livingston | Aeon Essays

Labor Under Capitalism