Suggested Articles
Each article link is followed by a summary in my own words.
- Pluralistic: Tiktok's enshittification by Cory Doctorow. 21 January 2023. Social media platforms, search engines, and the internet as a whole get shittier over time. These services start with a great service, often free or cheap. But the demand for profits means monetization. Formerly good products become bad, even unusable. For example, Google searches now are full of ads and spam sites of all sorts.
- How doctors die. It's not like the rest of us, but it should be by Ken Murray. 12 April 2016. Doctors often reject life-saving or life-extending treatments they offer to patients.
- Digital “Retrobait” Trades on Your Present Unhappiness to Collect Your Data by Grafton Tanner. 12 November 2023. Nostalgia is commodified to profit off of modern day misery.
- Swedish unions, why do we suck? by Rasmus Hästbacka. December 2021. Sweden's pro-business unions cooperate with businesses and maintain "peace", rather than take strike action. Syndicalism is proposed as an alternative. (I think syndicalism is short-sighted, but I fully agree with their strategy and goals.)
- If the Temporary Foreign Worker Program Exists It Should be Run by Unions by Jay Lesoleil. 7 November 2024. A very simple compromise that ensures workers vital to Canada's existence are not exploited. (Note: Whether the country's existence should depend on imported labour at all is not the point of this article.)
- Sure, Phones Drive Anxiety. But So Does the Economy by Roland Paulsen. 27 November 2024. A scathing rebuke of therapy and mental health discourse, specifically showing how such individualistic approaches are not only unproductive (i.e. therapy doesn't cure or help most "depression"), but also obscures economic factors that directly cause all sorts of mental malaise.
- Nobody Works Eight Hours a Day, And You Are An Idiot If You Think They Should by Ed Zitron. 30 March 2022. Zitron's works are largely repackaged versions of old ideas. As humans we're only productive for a few hours a day, broken up with copious breaks. People arguing otherwise are typically managers who themselves don't work and never have worked the hours they impose on their workers.
Identity Politics
- Is Class an Identity? On Class-Identitarianism by Matt Drabek. 29 April 2019. An explanation of class and how it is not merely an identity like others. The political right uses phony identity groups to divide humans: mundane categories, like hobbies, to more prominent identities, like race and sex. Unlike identity politics or even "intersectionality", class politics is not about respect - it is about obliterating the class system. (This echoes Walter Benn Michaels' point in a talk from 2006.)
- A Response to Clover and Singh by Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels. 1 June 2023. Race-based politics are the "left wing" or neoliberalism. (summary) If liberals want to obsess over race (and racial minorities), universalist class-based politics disproportionately benefit minorities anyway, in addition to the poor of the racial majority.
- The Rise and (Likely) Fall of Wokeness by Vivek Chibber. 20 March 2025. Identity politics has been used by elites within minority groups to advance their own economic interests. It eventually mutated into "wokeness", which historically failed to address inequalities between workers and landlords/business owners, let alone those between minority groups. Diversity initiatives, as they currently exist, along with cultural policing are phenomena perpetrated by elites and their adjacents for their own benefit.
- Breaking Free From Identity Politics by Tiffani Warren. 24 July 2018. Identity politics are popular because it's a shortcut for self-perception, or lack thereof. Most people have long abandoned historical caste/feudal/religious imperatives, which have been supplanted with individualism. Consequently, people gravitate toward identity politics as a substitute, which resembles team sports: think or feel like the rest of the team or its fans.
- The Trouble With Equity by Jennifer C. Pan. 13 May 2025. Equity is a euphemism used by elites to rebrand means-testing. Regardless of branding, the end result of non-universalist policy is expensive and bureaucratic. It fails to solve problems, like access to post-secondary education or even basic welfare. This perpetuates myths that welfare doesn't work, consequently hampering welfare expansion. The reason equity is popular in elite circles is because it's compatible with elite politics: a group of people deserving to live vastly easier and longer lives than others.
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