Category: Social Theory
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the creation of a non-discretionary door-tax
A great extended-metaphor explainer for money, from Cory Doctorow, channeling Warren Mosler: … consider this thought experiment devised by economist Warren Mosler, one of the foremost proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT, the theory built upon this understanding of money): Sometimes when Mosler is explaining money to an audience, he’ll hold up a handful of…
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organ of leviathan
A very on-point aside found among a splurge of interesting musings on queuing from Jo Lindsay Walton: The Guardian is perhaps the most Hobbesian of the British papers, in its unwavering insistence that any order, however arbitrary, is preferable to disorder, which can only be understood as a war of all against all. Jo Lindsay…
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meandering toward a (trans)media ecology of futures
I realised just the other day that I’d somehow managed not to do a serious wrap-up–or even an unserious and/or cursory wrap-up—on the Futures Brought to Life symposium in Vienna that I attended back in May. I’m not going to do one now, either*, but I thought I might at the very least point at…
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as if there was necessarily just one transition
Graeber and Wengrove again, referring to archaeological evidence from the soi disant ‘Fertile Crescent’: If the situation in just one cradle of early farming was that complicated, then surely it no longer makes sense to ask, ‘what were the social implications of the transition to farming?’ — as if there was necessarily just one transition,…
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accumulations (three different ones)
So much chewy material in this genuine monster of an Evgeny Morozov essay at New Left Review. Absorbing it fully would likely take a number of re-reads, not to mention a greater familiarity with the literatures and debates he’s navigating here; as such, to the only precis I can offer is Morozov’s own, from near…