Suggested Reading
Each article link is followed by a summary in my own words. Note: jacobin.com put a paywall on old articles, so I replaced their links with archive.org versions.
Technology
- Pluralistic: Tiktok's enshittification by Cory Doctorow. 21 January 2023. Digital services and goods like social media platforms, search engines, and the internet as a whole become worse over time. 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 like most others because its gatekeepers (search engines, social media platforms) must keep trying to increase their profits under 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 sinecures in management positions, who have never worked the hours they impose on their workers.
Economy
- The Goal Shouldn’t Be Ending Poverty. The Goal Should Be Human Flourishing. by Elliot Haspel. 18 September 2022. Poverty measurements based on arbitrary income levels fail to determine whether people are actually thriving. Living wages are a good start, but they're a low standard to pass and doesn't account for job quality, leisure time, and in my own opinion, basic survival: time for cooking, cleaning, repairs, and rest.
- 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. Dental care is means-tested, does not cover the full cost of even the most basic dental needs, and is run by a single private insurance corporation. Public healthcare was a concession won by rural workers, not a gift from politicians. It was fought against by wealthy doctors.
- 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. This infographic is a great example of why welfare works. Most poor people have no involvement with addictions, mental illnesses, domestic violence, and so on - it's just easier to blame their poverty on these things.
- How Economists Depoliticized The Economy by Clara Mattei. 21 January 2026. Economics is largely pseudoscience, often used to justify drastic inequality. Everyday (financial) transactions are unfair and unequal, disguised by layers of private middlemen and business owners siphoning money from us, while taxes are spent on maintaining this sham economy, rather than providing high quality public goods and services.
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. Doctors value quality of life over longevity.
- Why we stopped making Einsteins by Erik Hoel. 16 March 2022. Geniuses throughout history were tutored aristocratically. Geniuses were taught to engage with ideas and thinking deeper (i.e. how one subject connects to another) than traditional school environments. 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 ones.
Identity Politics
- Black Politics After 2016 by Adolph Reed Jr. 11 February 2018. The article is long, but detailed, so a summary can't do it justice. (So, read it yourself!) Reed Jr. explains the phenomenon and perpetuation of race-based politics in America, which doesn't benefit most black Americans, the group that such politics supposedly helps. Worse, this enables poverty and extreme wealth inequality to continue. A cultural elite group perpetuates this system using euphemisms (e.g. "voice", "opportunity") to ensure that Wall Street can continue doing business as usual.
- Is Class an Identity? On Class-Identitarianism by Matt Drabek. 29 April 2019. An explanation of class politics and identity politics. The political right uses phony identities to divide people: from the mundane, like hobbies, to more complex ones, like race and sex. Unlike identity politics or even "intersectionality", class politics is not about respect. It is about eliminating the class system. (This point reminded me of Walter Benn Michaels' lecture in 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 the tribalism of 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. Corporations love "racial equity": diversify relatively tiny C-suites while doing nothing to change the system that makes the rest of the already-diverse population poor. Politicians also use equity to rebrand means-testing. The result is expensive and bureaucratic programs that not even the target populations want to use, if they use them at all. This chicanery perpetuates the myth that state-funded welfare doesn't work.
Additional
My own writing:
