TopicsPower & institutions
Power & institutions
What systems were actually built to do, as opposed to what they say they do.
Posts
- BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The Audit Only Checks What It Can Reach
My own site published a number that was false while the correct number sat four lines below it, and the reason generalizes further than software. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
The Rational Actor Is Dead
Homo economicus never existed but we still build policy like it does, and people keep getting hurt. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Nostalgia Is a Political Weapon
The mythologized past that authoritarian movements promise to restore never existed, but the longing they exploit is real. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
The Water Wars Are Already Here
Two billion people already lack reliable drinking water, and the conflicts over what's left are well underway. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The Prison System Isn't Broken
Mass incarceration looks like failure only until you ask what the system was built to do. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Public Libraries Are Radical
If someone proposed the public library today, free and open to everyone with no purchase required, they would be called a socialist. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Meritocracy Is a Fairy Tale
The word meritocracy was coined as satire, and we built an entire economic theology around the joke. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Healthcare Is Infrastructure
We treat healthcare like a consumer product when it functions like a road or a power grid. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Abolition Isn't What You Think
Abolition is not the absence of safety but the presence of something better than cages. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Borders Are Newer Than You Think
The modern border regime is barely a century old, and pretending otherwise distorts every immigration debate we have. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Right to Repair Is a Civil Right
You bought it but you don't own it. Repair restrictions aren't a consumer inconvenience; they're a property rights crisis. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
UBI Isn't Radical Enough
Universal basic income has gone mainstream, and that should make you suspicious of what it leaves untouched. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
GDP Is a Terrible Measure of Progress
We have been steering the economy by staring at the wrong dashboard for sixty years. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Rent-Seeking Is Eating Everything
Most wealth in America is not created but extracted, and the economy is increasingly about controlling gates rather than building roads. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Nobody Is Self-Made
The self-made billionaire is a myth that serves a political function, and it is time to retire it. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
How Socialists Won New York
How a DSA assemblyman beat Andrew Cuomo with 50,000 volunteers and no corporate money, and what it means for American politics. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
ICE Kills Americans
US citizens have been killed and deported by immigration enforcement. The machine doesn't care about papers. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Bureaucratic Violence
How 'just following protocol' diffuses responsibility until atrocities happen with nobody to blame. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Due Process Is Already Dead
Immigration enforcement already operates outside constitutional norms, and the exceptions it pioneered are spreading into the rest of the legal system. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
The Deportation Machine Has No Off Switch
Once built, enforcement systems don't stay confined to their original targets. Institutional momentum keeps the machine running. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Cruelty As Policy
Some policies hurt people on purpose, and the architects say so out loud when they think it polls well. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Why Reform Fails
You can't vote your way out of structural violence. The system is working as designed. A critique of reformism without nihilism. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The University Is a Credentialing Machine
Higher education stopped being about knowledge long ago. It's a sorting mechanism for employers, and the content is incidental to the credential. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Expertise Is a Social Relation
Someone can know something true and still not count as an expert. Expertise is competence plus recognition, and recognition is political. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
The Myth of the Neutral Tool
Technology embeds politics, and the design is the argument. No tool is a mere instrument; every one shapes what's possible and what's thinkable. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Self-Hosting Is Political
Running your own infrastructure is a small assertion of autonomy against platforms built to make autonomy impossible. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Mutual Aid Isn't Charity
Charity flows downward and keeps hierarchy intact; mutual aid flows sideways and builds power instead. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Climate Change Is a Labor Issue
The workers who extract, transport, and burn fossil fuels are the same ones who'll build what comes next. Climate transition requires labor organizing. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Journalism Is Dead, Long Live Journalism
The business model that paid for newspapers collapsed, but the practice of reporting is harder to kill than the institution that housed it. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Why Your City Is Expensive
Housing costs aren't natural market outcomes. They're policy choices defended by people who benefit from artificial scarcity. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Rural America Isn't What You Think
The countryside isn't monolithically conservative. It's complicated, abandoned, and organizing in ways that defy stereotypes. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Bioregionalism: Thinking Like a Watershed
Political boundaries are arbitrary. Ecological ones aren't. What organizing politics around natural systems actually means. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Liberation Theology Was Right
The radical tradition within Christianity that sided with the poor. What happens when religion takes material conditions seriously. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
Actual Reformation
A look at what we as individuals must do to reform instead of more grandiose gestures that would only cause short-term fixes like electing a new president for example. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Strikes Work
Withholding labor is the most effective leverage workers have, which is exactly why so much effort goes into making strikes feel impossible. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Your Workplace Could Be Organized
What a union drive actually looks like, which is less dramatic and more possible than the picket-line version in your head. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
The Automation Apocalypse That Wasn't (And What's Actually Happening)
Oxford predicted 47% of jobs at risk, and since then 16 million jobs were added; here is what the data on AI and automation actually shows.