A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.
From Glastonbury to Gaza: no direction home | Chris Smaje
So. Much. This. (Well, the whole piece, obviously.)
[W]e live in a world of increasingly militarised walls and borders. It’s easy for those of us who live on the lucky side of those borders, with our fig and plum trees and our rights to life and liberty, to imagine that we’ll always be the lucky ones. I don’t make that assumption. As the meta-crisis unfolds, there’s no telling where the life zones and where the death zones will be, long-term.
Why Substack is nudging you to follow your ex, your hookups, randos who aren’t even writers
I've not quite given up on trying to persuade people I respect off Substack, so I keep on stacking ammo.
They’re building audiences on borrowed land, subject to algorithmic whims and platform policies they cannot directly influence, while helping to subsidize the infrastructure that promotes their ideological opponents.
See?
Pluralistic: Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes (22 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Trump is the head of a cult that has figured out how to turn fear, precarity and pain into the top of a sales funnel that destroys anyone who gets caught in it.
A fine diagnosis, through and through. The challenge now is, how to mass deprogram the members of the cult.
LECTURE NOTES: Lash, Cash, & Cotton in the Imperial-Commercial & Early SteamPower Age
”It is crucial to remember, though, that the principal beneficiaries of this system were not the plantation owners. The principal beneficiaries were the middle-class consumers at the heart of the industrial and commercial economies. Their cheap sugar, cotton, and tobacco were made possible by the brutal labor of enslaved people on distant plantations. This is the uncomfortable arithmetic of global capitalism: prosperity in one place, purchased at the cost of suffering in another.”