Tara McMullin

Whatever conditions people grow up with are the ones they generally consider normal. This is a tribute to the amazing plasticity of the human mind, but it means that we tend to take for granted things that should never be accepted.

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.

we define moral-emotion expression in social-media text as representational expressions of affect that reliably signal, either to others or to the self, that something is relevant to the interests or good of society, as defined by the conceptual knowledge of the expresser.

The fact that many American companies are paying paltry wages to workers while lavishing cash on top executives and investors is no happenstance. It's a policy choice. In the United States we have a tax and regulatory environment that rewards that behavior. We can decide to maintain the status quo or change it.

The distinction Wark makes of the vectoralist class vs. the capitalist is its power not to actually own anything but to simply extract enormous profit from various flows of value.

The hacker class experiences extremes of a winner-take-all outcome of its efforts. On the one hand, fantastic careers and the spoils of some simulation of the old bourgeois lifestyle; on the other hand, precarious and part-time work, start-ups that go bust, and the making routine of our jobs by new algorithms—designed by others of our very own

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Homelessness is about more than lacking a base that offers protection from the elements and material security. It’s about lacking an integrated identity, a “home” persona that is contained and shaped by, and active within, the home as a psychological boundary.

The problem, in other words, isn't intermediation – it's power . The thing that distinguishes a useful intermediary from an enshittified bully is power . Intermediaries gain power when our governments stop enforcing competition law. This lets intermediaries buy each other up and corner markets. Once they've formed cozy cartels, they can capture... See more