1-800-FUCKIN-A

[tensetrips]

Human action is the driver, but it seems that things, not people, are in control. Our corporations, governments, technologies, institutions, and economic systems seem to have lives of their own.

Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed and What it Means for Our Future, Dale Jamieson

[wednesdaychildhasfartogo]

- - - We have moved from A to Z This nuclear state is our demise Fly away peter, hide away Paul Who can watch as the earth burns, shatters and dies? Failsafe, foolproof, we’ve heard that before Good sense is needed Let’s hope we’ve got men on the job

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Unclear to me why I put this song on a playlist titled "laidback party"

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[probablyasocialecologist]

We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way | Olivier De Schutter and others

Our roadmap has been shaped by experts across the world. We call on political leaders at all levels to use it, says Olivier De Schutter and

Today, governments in the global south are chided for not doing enough to tackle poverty, while being squeezed by unilateral sanctions, restrictive trade agreements, unequal exchange and debt burdens rooted in centuries of colonial dispossession. About 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on debt servicing than on healthcare or education. Meanwhile, global supply chains enable a vast net transfer of labour and resources from south to north. International solidarity is therefore a legal and moral obligation rooted in the historical reality that many rich countries built their wealth by impoverishing the south, through patterns of extraction that continue today in new forms. A just transition beyond growth must include debt justice, increased south-south cooperation, reparative climate finance and support for universal social protection floors, rooted in the principles of non-domination and self-determination so that countries can chart their own sovereign economic futures. Equally crucial is who gets to shape this transition. All too often, policies affecting people in poverty are designed without them – and sometimes against them. When welfare systems are built around suspicion, sanctions and humiliating conditions, they deepen stigma and deter people from claiming their entitlements. Those who live in poverty know better than anyone how systems can fail in practice. Their expertise must guide the design, implementation and monitoring of anti‑poverty strategies, from local councils to parliaments and international forums.

[...]

Poverty is manufactured. That is the bad news – and the good news. What has been manufactured can be dismantled and replaced.

10 June 2026

[tensetrips]

So I've been reading Fossil Capital, and its discussion of how steam power was fetishized during the industrial revolution is really eye-opening. First, a useful definiton:

"In critical studies of capitalist societies, certain objects – notably money and commodities – have long been recognized as modern fetishes, operating as though they had agency of their own, placed on a pedestal above ordinary mortals and venerated; like 'primitive' fetishes, they conceal within themselves their true origins. Social power is imparted to the objects, so that relations between human beings appear in the guise of things, to the detriment of some and the gain of others. Now, to this body of theory [Alf] Hornborg has made the signal contribution of attending to the machine, which he claims, is nothing less than ' the most central fetish of industrial capitalism.' 'Machine fetishism,' then, is the attribution of generative capacity and independent productivity to the machine, ostensibly the greatest agent of progress, a cornucopia and latter-day idol, whose real foundations are obscured. It occupies a liminal zone imbricating fantasy and actuality, the two moments reflecting and reinforcing each other."

A reminder that Fossil Capital was written in 2016, and so what follows could not be intentionally invoking comparisons to a certain new technology that became popular around 2022, but boy...

“A machine is a slave that neither brings nor bears degradation: it is a being endowed with the greatest degree of energy and acting under the greatest degree of excitement, yet free at the same time from all passion and emotion. It is therefore, not only a slave, but a supernatural slave.

Finally, no more need for human employees, we can just use our AI agents!

“Such mysticism was everything but rare in accolades to the machine: in his treatise on the power loom, master weaver William Radcliffe spoke of 'the magical power of machinery, which subjects wool, linen, silk, and cotton to illimitable production by mechanical agency that consumes no bread'

“What business of life is there in which steam will not have a part? … Nothing is too great or too small for its potent and subtle agency.”

"You better get used to steam. If you're not using steam, you're going to get left behind!"

“Time and again, the engine was described as being alive, a subject acting and performing and doing all sorts of thins ex proprio vigore, even an organism with all the hallmarks of metabolism and vitality."

"ChatGPT wrote this for me -- Claude thinks it means this -- I was talking to my AI Therapist"

Same shit, different wrapper. I've come around to "AI" boosters claims that it it's like the industrial revolution -- it is also a massively exploitative and harmful technology, overhyped by its proponents that will eventually lead to terrible consequences for the entire human race, just like fossil fuels!

[tensetrips]

The Ashworths were first convicted in August 1836, on three different counts: lacking an obligatory roster of their workers, lacking Time Registers, and worse, 'employing children more than 9 hours per day.' [...] The court at Bolton was packed with mill-owners, managers, and notables throughout the six-hour trial. Angry and cocky, Henry [Ashworth] put up a show, defending the reputation of his establishment, attacking factory legislation, piling up copies of regulations and asking rhetorically 'if it were possible for any one to attend to all of these.' [...] He was found guilty on a total of ten counts.

Fossil Capital, Andreas Malm

[tensetrips]

Think I've realized that for me, the most annoying thing anyone can do is believe something will happen because they want it to, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

[tensetrips]

Coil >> "Sex With Sun Ra (Part One - Saturnalia)"

[achillesinhighheels]

[azspot]

“Pope Leo points out that the creators and users of AI are already allowing the technology to make moral decisions—such as by using algorithms to figure out who to hire, whether to fund surgeries, or where to target bombs. This withers people’s capacity to think through these problems on their own, and perhaps more worryingly places the ability to broadly influence these choices in the hands of those who train and control AI technologies. This means that the moral philosophies of tech gurus will steadily guide the moral decisions of ever more people as these technologies gain wider purchase in society.”

— The Pope’s Defense of Human Imperfection

[wonderstruck]

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

[tensetrips]

new reblog button has me fucked up, but Fossil Capital, Malm Techno-Negative, Dekeyser

[tensetrips]

Translating his theory of degeneration into a series of proposition on human affairs, [Ray] Lankester asks whether, for all its celebration of convenience and artificial tools, should modern civilization not fear that it too, like the parasite, may be in the process of decay, shedding its organic functions, and slowly drifting 'to the condition of intellectual Barnacles or Ascidians'?

Thomas Dekeyser, Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, p. 71

[tensetrips]

[W]orkers no longer in need of protection, the defiant laborers were now, as the Regent of the York Special Commission set up to quell machine-breaking would write, 'ill-designing and wicked Men' who are not just engaged in the 'Destruction of the various Kinds of Machinery now most beneficially employed in the Manufactures of this Kingdom," but are in fact 'destructive of the good Order and Happiness of Society.'

Thomas Dekeyser, Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, p. 67

[tensetrips]

This whips Ramleh >> "HYPER VIGILANCE"

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Buying Rilo Kiley records and black jeans, I think I'm turning 14 again

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"His revolt against death and the deadly passivity with which society deals with this phenomenon [AIDS] give a deeply emotional character to his life work, which literally transcends the style of passivity and abandon of the entropic slope of fate which characterizes this present period." -Felix Guattari on David Wojnarowicz

[tensetrips]

Prompt: Can't cynicism be vulnerable?