- Blog
-
Smart technologies for disciplining the poor
There are millions of energy prepayment meters in Britain. They’re supposed to liberate customers from financial worry. They do the exact opposite. — (I updated this post on 5 January 2024 and again on 8 January when it was announced that some energy suppliers have been given permission to start ‘force-installing’ prepayment meters again. We’re…
-
Reverse redistribution
During the pandemic, innovators and opportunists improvised bold new ways to move money from the state into private hands – it was like the seizure of assets in a socialist state – only backwards. — We know that in emergencies governments turn to compulsion to get things done. In wartime manufacturing capacity will be requisitioned,…
-
Defending the indefensible
This is a guest post from the nice people at Radlett Wire, a local blog that, having spent ten years providing, let’s face it, mostly quite boring information about the small Hertfordshire town in its name, is now doing something a bit more political and keeping an eye on the public life and shifting fortunes…
-
From the other end of the modern
Italo Svevo and Adam Tooze (and Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng) — So, this post originally started with a bit about how I’d read about Svevo in Franco Moretti’s The Bourgeois but I just looked in the book and there’s nothing about Svevo at all, so I literally imagined it. in his book about the…
-
Seeing Vincent
Tate Britain, London, 2019.
-
Ten times the Labour party stood behind workers in Britain
Actually, there aren’t any. Sorry. — The conventional wisdom is that Labour is the only major socialist party in the world that emerged directly from organised labour—every other important party—in the USA, Germany, France, Japan—was the product of an actual revolution or of a popular socialist movement. Labour founders Keir Hardie and Arthur Henderson had…
-
What was it about the urgency of protecting your profits through the carbon transition that first attracted you to the wonder-fuel Hydrogen?
It’s easy to check if a proposed tech solution to the climate crisis is legit or not. Examine the solution; if it looks like it might have been designed to cleverly carry forward the capital structures and shareholder value of fossil industries to the post-transition economy then that’s all you need to know. It’s a…
-
We’re hypnotised by the social media giants. We’ve convinced ourselves they’re impossible to deal with. They’re not.
The more frantic we become about the wickedness and power of the platforms, the more we confirm that power. The more action we demand of police and legislators, the more we confirm their exceptional status, their untouchability (some updates in this text to reflect recent news stories) The standard position now is that the social…
-
Let’s rebuild the internet and make it much more awkward. More like Bluetooth in fact. Seriously.
Everybody knows now, we built the wrong internet. Instead of a democratic, participatory playground we seem to have built something predatory and exploitive. The solution—bear with me—is more awkwardness, more friction—Bluetooth! — JANUARY 2023 UPDATE: Since I wrote this I’ve been reading a lot about techno-feudalism and the disagreement between those who believe the network…