Suggested Reading

Each article link is followed by a summary in my own words. The headers are rough categories for the articles below them.

Technology

• 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.
• SEO and the Death of the Internet by The Elle. 25 April 2023. Search engines today are mostly useless thanks to the practices of the SEO industry. This industry is, shockingly, no different than most others, because it operates through gatekeepers (platforms, search engines), which themselves operate within capitalism. Business going well tends to be a bad thing for consumers.
• 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.
• 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.

Labour

• 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 support this, but it doesn't go far enough.)
• 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.)
• 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 productive for only a few hours a day, and only when broken up with breaks. People arguing otherwise are typically managers who themselves don't work, or have never worked the hours they impose on their workers.

Economy

• Canadian Oligarchy: How the Super-Rich Rule "Socialized" Healthcare by Miranda Schreiber. 27 September 2023. Canada's public healthcare system still ignores many parts of common sense healthcare: free care for your ears, but not your eyes; free intake interviews, but not medication. (In my opinion, after decades of partial to no dental coverage, it's only somewhat improved - still means-tested and run through the same parasites from before, only now it's just a single insurance company.)
• The Simple Math of Poverty by Matt Bruenig (People's Policy Project). 29 August 2025. The welfare state, specifically through universally distributed payments to everyone, is the best way to reduce poverty. Poverty also has "churn": many poor people were not poor to begin with (and might not stay poor). Most important, there is little difference between the distributions of income and things like addictions, mental illnesses, domestic violence, etc.

Trivia

• How doctors die. It's not like the rest of us, but it should be by Ken Murray. 12 April 2016. Doctors often reject the life-saving or life-extending treatments they offer to patients.
• Why we stopped making Einsteins by Erik Hoel. 16 March 2022. Geniuses in known history were tutored aristocratically. In addition to school subjects "useful" to society, geniuses were taught to engage with ideas and thinking at a higher level. This was done by intellectually minded adults. Modern education focuses on efficiency (cost, breadth, depth, utility). At best, this produces imitations of geniuses, rather than genuine geniuses.

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" of neoliberalism. (summary) If liberals want to obsess over race (and racial minorities), universalist class-based politics disproportionately benefit minorities anyway, because minorities make up much of the poor.
• 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.

Additional

The following pieces are my own thoughts. At least, mostly my own thoughts, as not much thought is original. I try to cite as much as necessary, but most of it is just "general knowledge" I picked up from reading, listening to, and watching media by various people.

• Unions. Why unions are key to improving or outright fixing many of society's problems, but aren't a panacea. Why you should organize a union in your workplace.
• Modern Slavery. Rewrite pending!