#Function Generators Market Growth

[ajaydmr]

Japan Energy Drink Market Industry Report: Growth Insights, Challenges & Forecast (2025)

The Japan Energy Drink Market is on a powerful growth trajectory, driven by changing consumer lifestyles, rising health consciousness, and increasing demand for functional beverages. As one of Asia’s most advanced economies with a health-aware and tech-savvy population, Japan is solidifying its place as a vital market in the global energy drinks industry.

Recent analysis indicates the market will grow from USD 4,016.5 million in 2024 to an impressive USD 14,177.0 million by 2033, representing a notable compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.0%. This expansion reflects innovation across product lines and a cultural shift towards beverages that boost energy and wellness.

Energy Drinks as Lifestyle Products

In Japan, energy drinks have evolved far beyond simple caffeine boosts. They’re increasingly positioned as lifestyle products designed to support mental focus, stamina, and overall well-being. Key ingredients like caffeine, taurine, vitamins, and herbal extracts have broadened their appeal to diverse consumer groups, including:

Professionals seeking sharper focus and performance

Students preparing for exams or long study sessions

Fitness enthusiasts in need of pre-workout energy

Office workers enduring demanding schedules or night shifts

This expanded customer base is fueling steady market growth.

For more details, you can download a Complimentary PDF Sample Report @ https://dimensionmarketresearch.com/report/japan-energy-drink-market/request-sample/

Drivers Behind Market Growth

1. Rising Health Consciousness and Functional Benefits

Japanese consumers are known for prioritizing health and longevity. This has spurred interest in energy drinks that not only provide an energy boost but also offer specific health benefits such as cognitive support, immune health, and reduced fatigue. In response, brands are innovating with natural caffeine sources, lower sugar content, and added nutrients.

2. Urban Lifestyles Increasing Demand

In urban centers like Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, fast-paced living drives demand for convenient energy solutions. Energy drinks have become part of daily routines for individuals balancing demanding professional and personal lives.

3. Strong Competition Between Global and Local Brands

Japan’s energy drink market is fiercely competitive, with international giants like Red Bull and Monster Energy facing strong competition from domestic players such as Suntory. Local brands excel in crafting flavors and products tailored to Japanese tastes, while international brands leverage global recognition and extensive marketing.

Competitive Landscape

Key players shaping the market include:

Red Bull GmbH: Famous for its branding tied to extreme sports, music events, and a youthful image, Red Bull maintains strong engagement through strategic sponsorships and digital campaigns.

Monster Energy Company: Known for bold flavors and a rebellious brand personality, Monster appeals to gamers, musicians, and younger consumers, often launching limited-edition flavors and collaborations.

Suntory and Domestic Brands: Local brands thrive by offering unique flavors, sugar-free alternatives, and packaging that resonates culturally. Their distribution networks, especially through convenience stores and vending machines, provide them significant reach.

The interplay between global reach and local insights continues to drive innovation and broaden consumer options.

Urban Areas Leading Consumption

Energy drink consumption is highest in Japan’s urban regions, supported by:

Higher disposable incomes

Large populations of students and young professionals

Extensive access to retail outlets and vending machines

Meanwhile, e-commerce is opening new opportunities, helping brands connect with consumers beyond major cities. Government initiatives supporting digital infrastructure are further boosting online sales potential.

Changing Consumer Trends

Japanese consumers are increasingly selective and health-oriented, shaping key market trends:

Preference for Low-Sugar and Natural Formulations Consumers are choosing healthier options, boosting demand for low-calorie, organic, and plant-based energy drinks.

Functional Ingredients and Nutraceuticals Energy drinks are increasingly infused with amino acids, collagen, and herbal adaptogens, appealing to both younger health enthusiasts and older consumers looking for added benefits.

Limited-Edition and Culturally Inspired Flavors Brands are launching seasonal and culturally themed flavors tied to Japanese festivals, anime, and pop culture—especially popular among millennials and Gen Z.

Sustainable Packaging Innovations Growing environmental awareness is pushing brands to adopt recyclable materials, minimalist designs, and transparent supply chains.

Market Segmentation Overview

Japan’s energy drink market can be segmented as follows:

By Product Type:

Caffeinated energy drinks

Decaffeinated and natural options

Sugar-free and low-calorie variants

Functional and fortified beverages

By Distribution Channel:

Supermarkets and hypermarkets

Convenience stores

Online platforms

Vending machines

Specialty health stores

By Consumer Demographic:

Students and teenagers

Young professionals in their 20s and 30s

Fitness enthusiasts

Middle-aged and older adults seeking health benefits

Outlook: A Promising Decade Ahead

With market size expected to more than triple by 2033, Japan’s energy drink industry is on the cusp of substantial growth. Brands—both global and domestic—that adapt to evolving consumer demands and prioritize health-focused innovation will be well-positioned to capture market share.

By combining functional ingredients, cultural relevance, and sustainable practices, companies can build strong loyalty among Japan’s discerning consumers. As digital commerce continues to grow and wellness trends become even more prominent, the Japanese energy drink market is set to redefine how beverages contribute to energy, focus, and overall health.

For deeper insights, visit the comprehensive market report here: https://dimensionmarketresearch.com/report/japan-energy-drink-market/request-sample/

[lackadaisycats]

Hey Tracy! Have you heard about the new Ai called Sora? Apparently it can now create 2D and 3D animations as well as hyper realistic videos. I’ve been getting into animation and trying to improve my art for years since I was 7, but now seeing that anyone can create animation/works in just a mare seconds by typing in a couple words, it’s such a huge slap in the face to people who actually put the time and effort into their works and it’s so discouraging! And it has me worried about what’s going to happen next for artists and many others, as-well. There’s already generated voices, generated works stolen from actual artists, generated music, and now this! It’s just so scary that it’s coming this far. 

Yeah, I've seen it. And yeah, it feels like the universe has taken on a 'fuck you in particular' attitude toward artists the past few years. A lot of damage has already been done, and there are plenty of reasons for concern, but bear in mind that we don't know how this will play out yet. Be astute, be justifiably angry, but don't let despair take over. --------

One would expect that the promo clips that have been dropping lately represent some of the best of the best-looking stuff they've been able to produce. And it's only good-looking on an extremely superficial level. It's still riddled with problems if you spend even a moment observing. And I rather suspect, prior to a whole lot of frustrated iteration, most prompts are still going to get you camera-sickness inducing, wibbly-wobbly nonsense with a side of body horror.

Will the tech ultimately get 'smarter' than that and address the array of typical AI giveaways? Maybe. Probably, even. Does that mean it'll be viable in quite the way it's being marketed, more or less as a human-replacer? Well…

A lot of this is hype, and hype is meant to drive up the perceived value of the tech. Executives will rush to be early adopters without a lot of due diligence or forethought because grabbing it first like a dazzled chimp and holding up like a prize ape-rock makes them look like bleeding-edge tech geniuses in their particular ecosystem. They do this because, in turn, that perceived value may make their company profile and valuations go up too, which makes shareholders short-term happy (the only kind of happy they know). The problem is how much actual functional value will it have? And how long does it last? Much of it is the same routine we were seeing with blockchain a few years ago: number go up. Number go up always! Unrealistic, unsustainable forever-growth must be guaranteed in this economic clime. If you can lay off all of your people and replace them with AI, number goes up big and never stops, right?

I have some doubts. ----------------------

The chips also haven't landed yet with regards to the legality of all of this. Will these adopters ultimately be able to copyright any of this output trained on datasets comprised of stolen work? Can computer-made art even be copyrighted at all? How much of a human touch will be required to make something copyright-able? I don't know yet. Neither do the hype team or the early adopters.

Does that mean the tech will be used but will have to be retrained on the adopter's proprietary data? Yeah, maybe. That'd be a somewhat better outcome, at least. It still means human artists make specific things for the machine to learn from. (Watch out for businesses that use 'ethical' as a buzzword to gloss over how many people they've let go from their jobs, though.)

Will it become industry standard practice to do things this way? Maybe. Will it still require an artist's sensbilities and oversignt to plan and curate and fix the results so that it doesn't come across like pure AI trash? Yeah, I think that's pretty likely.

If it becomes standard practice, will it become samey, and self-referential and ultimately an emblem of doing things the cookie-cutter way instead of enlisting real, human artists? Quite possibly.

If it becomes standard industry practice, will there still be an audience or a demand or a desire for art made by human artists? Yes, almost certainly. With every leap of technology, that has remained the case. ------------------ TL;DR Version:

I'm not saying with any certainty that this AI blitz is a passing fad. I think we're likely to experience a torrential amount of generative art, video, voice, music, programming, and text in the coming years, in fact, and it will probably irrevocably change the layout of the career terrain. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was being overhyped as a business strategy right now. And I don't think the immensity of its volume will ever overcome its inherent emptiness.

What I am certain of is that it will not eliminate the innate human impulse to create. Nor the desire to experience art made by a fellow soul. Keep doing your thing, Anon. It's precious. It's authentic. It will be all the more special because it will have come from you, a human.

[tea-potato-gt]

A Borrower at the End of the World Part 18

Word count: 4600ish words

Previous / Next / All Chapters

***

Now…

The early morning sun came through the green curtains, illuminating the room with a bright, almost sickeningly cheery glow. A particular beam seemed to have it out for Jace because it shined directly on his closed eyes. He scrunched his nose and sat up with a grown, his body ached and protested with every movement.

Then Jace remembered why: He was forced at gun point to walk for miles, from midday till the sunset with only a few breaks here and there. He even carried his sister on his back at one point. Layla had hit a growth spurt recently and was already too big to carry, but it was either he carried her or one of the other soldiers would. Jace didn’t regret protecting his sister from those beans— people—soldiers, he never would, but his body definitely hurt like nothing he had ever felt before. 

Despite his physical exhaustion, Jace didn’t sleep well. He wasn’t used to waking up in such a squishy bed. It was too... nice. No bugs or mildew smell lingered on the plush surface. It tilted and sunk with his weight as he sat up and turned. His feet hung over the bed frame and didn’t touch the ground. The very fact they were sleeping in a bed with a frame was odd. The mattresses the kids slept on were placed on the ground, because Jace moved any bedding materials he could find into the room with a fireplace. The nights got cold out in the world, they needed to stay in the hearth of the house with a burning fire to keep warm. Any wood they could find in the house, including the bed frames would usually be burned at some point. But here in General Monroe’s mansion— their birth father’s mansion- the room was pleasantly warm all night. The blankets were thick and kept any chill from creeping in.

Jace rubbed his hands down his face and looked at his eight year old sister laying beside him. Layla was still fast asleep, arms and legs sticking out in every direction, like a tangled mess of limbs. He wished, as he did most mornings when he found his sister sleeping in a weird way, that he could take a picture. Maybe somewhere in this “Sanctuary for Humanity” there was a camera? If there was electricity and running water, what else was there? That would have to be a question for his father later.

Jace stood and tried to stretch out his back, then he heard it. It was soft due to the windows being closed, but something in Jace knew exactly what it was. It was a sound he hadn't heard in years. The distant memory made Jace grin wildly as he walked to the window.

It was the sound of beans. Lots and lots of human-beans. Busy, talking, living humans.

Just as Jace thought, in the morning sun the streets below his window had come alive. Hundreds of people walked about and chatted. Men, women and children alike. There were markets and shops open. People trading their goods, shaking hands, and making conversation. He saw a group of soldiers marching in formation down the street. The shoppers moved out of their way, smiled and waved at them as they passed.

Jace's breath was taken away, he hadn't seen so many people in so, so long. It didn't feel real. The previous night, this place was like a ghost town, the streets were devoid of life. And now in the day, it was a vibrant (mini)metropolis.

Jace felt a pull within his chest, he needed to be down there meeting and talking to those people! Experiencing what it's like to be surrounded by people bigger than himself (who weren’t trigger happy soldiers). He looked to Layla, the only other human-bean he had contact with for the past three years, she was still asleep.

Jace sighed, it wouldn't be fair if he went out there without her, she was just as deprived of human interactions as he was. He'd better wait till she woke up and they could go out there together. But Jace was too restless to try and go back to sleep. He decided to go to the bathroom where proper, functioning plumbing was waiting for him.

It was a nice change indeed.

***

Briar watched Jace’s large, socked feet walk across the wooden floor as the boy left the room. The borrower was sitting under the bed, his back against the wall. He promised to be here when the kids woke up, so here he was. 

After Briar departed the night before, he quickly found an entrance into the walls. It was behind the bed, fairly accessible to himself and good sized to walk comfortably into without having to duck too much. Maybe there were rats in the walls, chewing large holes in the wood, Briar shuddered at the thought.

As soon as Briar was in the dark safety of the walls, he laid down, using his satchel as a pillow, and quickly fell into a dreamless sleep. He was so exhausted that he felt like he could sleep through the apocalypse all over again and still be none the wiser.

But unfortunately, he awoke with the morning light that illuminated from the hole in the wall. He sat up with a crick in his neck, and his body hurt like nothing he had felt in years. 

Borrowers have a naturally fast healing factor, definitely faster than beans. But as Briar had aged in years, his ability to bounce back easily slowly diminished. If he sustained injuries like he experienced the previous day 20 or even ten years ago, he’d be back in action in a day or two. But now it usually took his body three or four times as long to heal. He huffed and started to stand, trying to ignore the massive headache coming on, and made his way back into the room the kids stayed in.

Briar couldn’t bring himself to sleep too far from the children, sometimes Layla would have bad dreams and cry. Sometimes she would call for Briar in her sleep. Most of the time Jace could calm her down enough for her to go back to sleep, but other nights, she couldn’t relax until she saw, heard, or touched Briar. The nights where she needed to feel Briar were the harder nights. Her dreams were so vivid, but once she was fully awake— usually when Briar was in her grasp— she couldn't recall what she dreamed about or why it was so distressing.

One night a few years ago, she was in such a daze and began desperately searching for Briar that she was crawling on the floor groping in the dark. She was screaming Briar’s name into the darkness like if she didn’t find him she might die. Jace had to hold his sister until she fully woke up, and at that point, Briar felt safe enough to come out when she calmed down. She held the borrower to her chest for what felt like hours and sobbed. Briar didn’t know what exactly she dreamed about that upset her so badly, but he did his best to scare away her night terrors.

Layla hadn’t had night terrors like that in over a year, but he couldn’t bring himself to sleep too far from the kids. Yet he refused to sleep in the same room as beans. He found it too vulnerable, even if he trusted the children, his instincts would never let him relax enough to sleep near them. So as a compromise, he stayed in the walls close to where the kids rested.

That was on a normal night, but the place they were staying was not normal.

Briar refused to leave the kids that night when the beans who lived here were potentially dangerous. In fact, they most likely were. Never trust a bean, Briar’s Pa’s distant voice warned.

They were in an unknown, possibly hostile environment, given the way the kids were treated by those beans yesterday. But here they were, occupying space in the mansion of The General. The man who is apparently their real father.

The memory of that man holding, hugging, and kissing Jace and Layla left a sour taste in Briar’s mouth and irked him to no end.

The borrower let out a steadying breath as he felt the return of giant footsteps. He was pretty confident it was Jace. The boy had a distinct way of walking, modeled after how he watched Briar move. Borrowers were naturally light on their feet. Their steps are carefully placed to cause the least amount of sound or disturbance as possible. They were quick too, not pressing too heavily into the earth.

The way Jace walked made his steps mildly quieter and softer thuds than the average bean, but even with all the practice, there wasn’t much the boy could do about his giant size and weight. He was able to keep the earth tremors to a minimum though and Briar was thankful for it. At this point, the borrower walk came so naturally to the teen that he didn’t even have to think about it.

Jace slipped into the room and shut the door behind him as he made his way back to the bed. Before the teen could crawl back onto the mattress, Briar whistled like a bird four times. To the untrained ear, this might have sounded like nothing more than a distant morning sparrow, but Briar watched Jace’s socked feet freeze. Then like a building falling over in slow motion, Jace bent down and settled his large body on the floor. He extended his legs to the center of the room, as he peered under the bed. When Jace’s eyes finally saw the small form moving out of the shadows his smile grew. 

Briar gave a little smile as he came within reach of the boy.

Jace placed his hand out, palm up. After spending years with the kids, Briar (for the most part) no longer felt fear when the kids reached out to him. Even though he was roughly as tall as Jace’s hand, the kids had practiced over the years of proper treatment of their older, much smaller companion.

Briar nodded gratefully and took a seat on Jace’s palm with a grunt, his legs sticking over the edge of Jace’s hand. He felt his small body sink a bit into the squishy, leathery surface. Jace’s fingers twitched, but other than that he didn’t move. 

Jace put his chin on his other hand so the pair were at least a little on the same level. “Are you feeling any better, Boss?” Jace asked, his voice was a little hoarse from the early morning and the chaotic day before.

Briar nodded and looked down at himself, “I’ve felt worse.” He wasn’t sure that was entirely accurate, but anything to get that worried look off Jace’s face. The borrower didn’t like to be pitied. His head had stopped bleeding the night before, but it still pounded with a dull, distant ache. His back felt like he slept in the wrong position and his legs still shook if he stood on them too long. His left hand was out of commission given the terrible rope burns, meaning he probably shouldn’t go around climbing anytime soon. His injured hand (probably) wouldn’t stop him, Briar was nothing if not stubborn. Borrowers needed to climb like they needed to breathe. Though the lack of string and a proper hook might stop him. The Colonel had ripped off the string and thrown it aside like it was nothing the night before. Briar sighed. That was a borrowing problem for later.

“How’s your sister?” 

Jace glanced up over the curve of the bed, the only thing he could see was her right foot creeping over the side of the mattress. “She's fine, just asleep.”

“And you?” Briar reached out and patted the pad of Jace’s thumb. “How are you feeling, boy?”

“Fine I guess— Well as fine as I can be when it feels like I was hit by a truck.” Jace let out a breathy laugh that tousled Briar’s curly hair. 

“Yeah,” Briar tried to rub away the oncoming migraine by touching his temples. “I feel about as bad as the day I fell off your shoulder.” (That was probably the closest comparison Briar could get to being hit with a truck.)

“Okay– Briar, that was one time,” Jace dramatically sighed, “And I’ve already apologized for that more times than I can count. How many more times are you going to bring that up, old man?” He pulled the hand Briar sat on closer to his face, brought up his other hand and gently poked the borrower in the chest, mock accusingly. It was a rare day when Briar admitted to the pain he felt in his own body, even if it was at Jace’s expense, bringing up one of his earliest regrets when it came to traveling with the borrower. 

Briar snickered and pushed the intruding digit away, “I will stop the day borrowers learn to fly.”

Jace snorted, “Like that’ll ever happen. Though you are light enough that you might just… float away,” Jace lifted his palm up a bit as if he was weighing the borrower, the man was very light, barely making an indent in his hand.

Briar smiled good naturedly as the surface he sat on was rocked a bit and was set back down.

“But if you could float, maybe I could tie a string to your leg and we could go outside together," Jace giggled at the idea. If briar could float, they wouldn’t have to worry about colliding with other humans and accidentally hurting Briar, knocking him off the kid's shoulders or crushing him in their pockets. If Briar could float, he’d just be coasting above it all.

“Outside?”

“Yeah in the town!” Jace didn’t pick up on Briar’s hesitation. “There’s so many beans out there, Briar! Real human-beans! I can’t wait to go with you and Layla!”

Briar paled at the mention of the kids going out there. Then he began to sweat when he realized Jace wanted him to come too. His borrower instincts were kicking into overdrive, he hadn’t had to worry about being in a house with dangerous beans in a long, long time. Now they were in an unknown mansion with psycho soldiers and there was an entire city outside crawling with giants. It was something straight out of a borrower horror story. “Y-You can’t go out there,” Briar spoke in a hollow voice.

Jace cocked his head, “Why not?”

“You— you might get picked up by a hawk!” Briar blurted out the first thing he could think of.

“Briar, I’m five and a half feet tall, I don’t think I’ve ever had to worry about being taken by a hawk,” Jace laughed incredulously and shook his head. “In fact, I don’t think any bean has ever had that fear.”

“W-well, it’s a pretty common worry among borrowers.”

Jace rolled his eyes with a smile, “But you know I’m not really a borrower, right?”

“Oh.” It seemed Briar had forgotten he was literally sitting on a giant hand. Well not forgotten, it was still in the back of his mind that the kids were huge compared to him, but he somehow forgot how different Jace and Briar really were. “I know. I know,” Briar chewed his lip, “It’s just good to have a healthy fear of things that could have the potential to kill you.” He wasn’t just talking about hawks now.

Jace paused and studied the borrower’s small face. “Is everything alright, boss? You look worried.”

“To be completely honest, no.” Briar looked up at Jace’s big brown eyes, “It’s just— I don’t want you to go out there.”

“What?” The fourteen year old frowned. “Why?”

Briar sucked in a deep breath and grasped Jace’s thumb, showing how important his next words would be, “Something isn’t right about this place. I can feel it. Even in this house,” he gestured around them, “every instinct in me is saying something is deeply wrong, it’s making my skin crawl.”

“Hey, maybe I can help,” Jace offered, he didn’t fully understand the borrower’s concerns, but he wanted to at least make him feel a little more comfortable. “Maybe I can ask my father about what this place is or – what’s going on–-”

“No!” Briar bristled at the very mention of the General, the thought of that man irritated him to his core and burned with white hot ire. He cut Jace off, “No— no, don’t engage with that man unless you absolutely have to.” Briar stood up from the boy’s hand, to be more at eye level with him. “And even then, stay out of arm's reach from him. I don’t like that man— I don’t trust that bean.”

Jace’s fingers curled in after the borrower’s small form departed from his palm. “I… I can understand why you might not like him… I mean, sure my father was a bit… intimidating last night, but after he realized his mistake he let us go. He fed us and we slept in a real, proper bed.”

“What do you think might have happened if he didn’t realize you were his kin?” Briar questioned. “Do you think he still would have let you go?”

Jace paused. He wasn’t sure. He was so grateful to be out of that jail cell, it hadn’t occurred to him what might have happened if they didn’t leave.

“For all you know, you are still prisoners here in this house. This bean house might be nice and all, but a gilded cage is STILL a cage.”

“Briar, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jace spoke in a cold whisper. “He’s my father. You just— you just don’t know him like I do.”

Briar huffed and ran his hands down his face, “I have said my peace about that man.” He breathed. “And I don’t want either of you to go outside till I know it’s safe and I don’t want you to talk to ANY beans in this house if you can help it.”

Jace’s mouth gaped open, “How can I not talk to any beans?” He pulled his hand back to him chest and clenched his fist. “I’m a bea— I’m a Human Being for crying out loud! We haven’t seen another person in nearly three years!”  

“Am I not another person?” Briar laughed bitterly.

“Briar, you know what I mean.” Jace said exasperated.

“I do,” Briar conceded. He was mostly joking of course, he knew what Jace meant, but if he wasn’t also a person, then what was he, chopped liver? “Understand this boy, if we bumped into a colony of borrowers, believe me, I’d be overjoyed, but I still wouldn’t trust them. You never know what people are capable of. Especially not Beans.”

“Well, you trusted us,” Jace pointed out.

“That was different–”

“How? You didn’t know us, and yet you stayed.”

“If I remember correctly, I didn’t talk to either of you for weeks until I trusted you a bit. And even then, I would only talk to you through the walls before I ever let you get anywhere near me, let alone touch me.” Briar was getting all riled up.

"Briar, please, this means everything to me— to us," Jace practically begged. "I mean— for a long time, I thought we were the last human beings in the world, and come to find out there is a whole town of people who were out there! And— and my father— OUR father is alive, Briar, and you're asking me not to even talk to him.”

"I'm doing it for your own good."

"My own good?" Jace laughed through gritted teeth, "For my own good." His face darkened and his frown deepened. Briar watched the giant opening and closing his fists with a strength that could crush a borrower's body instantly. Briar took an unconscious step back. It wasn’t often the kids made Briar nervous, but he was getting a real sense of danger forming in his gut. "This isn't for my own good and you know it. You're just asking— ordering me to do this because you're scared." Jace pointed an accusatory finger at the borrower.

"Of course I'm scared!" Briar practically shouted. Jace's eyes widened, it wasn't often the borrower raised his voice OR admitted to any form of weakness. Briar took a deep breath, trying to speak in an even, calm tone as he chose his next words: “Boy, all I’m asking for is that you and your sister keep a safe distance from them, until I know for sure if it’s safe or I find a way to escape ‘bean-town’.”

“Oh! So you're saying it's just up to YOU to decide if my people are safe? Don’t I get a say? Doesn’t Layla get a say–”

“Jace!” Briar raised his voice with a sense of finality that silenced the teen immediately. It wasn’t often Briar called either children by their first names, let alone shouted it. “I’m asking you, as a friend with many, many years under his belt to just be cautious.”

“I’m not a kid, so stop treating me like one." Jace rose up on his elbows, putting a good foot between their eyes. Whether or not he was indenting to be intimidating to the borrower, he definitely was. "I know what I'm doing," he said through gritted teeth. This wasn’t the first time Jace had talked about feeling he was being treated like a child, and it definitely won’t be their last. Briar liked to make executive decisions without either kids’ say. It was always Briar who picked where they stayed, rarely taking Jace’s ideas into account. The teen knew why the older man did what he did, but he still didn’t have to like it. 

“I’ll keep treating you like a kid as long as you ACT like one." Briar spat back. A bean using his size to intimidate another person seemed pretty childish to the borrower. "Especially if you are going to make half-cock decisions that put your life and your sister’s life in danger.” 

Jace instantly deflated.

The small man saw the hurt in the boy’s eyes, maybe Briar had gone too far. He let out a deep sigh and rubbed his uninjured hand down his face. Briar was the adult between them, he needed to act like it too. “I know you’re not a child. Of course, I know that.” Briar sighed, exasperated. “Just – just give me some time to figure this out and stay as far from those beans as possible. Please.”

In reality, Briar knew he had no control over the actions of beans, not even the kids he took care of. No matter how much he begged or kicked or screamed, the power of ultimate choice would always be in the hands of those bigger and stronger than himself.

Jace huffed, rolled his eyes and pushed himself to stand. They were just going in circles. Jace had to step away, his body was practically vibrating with anger and irritation. Briar always hated being near when either kid was experiencing 'big feelings' as Jace’s mother used to call it. The teen looked down at the small man from his full height. "I can do what I want, boss." He spoke the title 'boss' with such a venomous tone, never spoken out of his mouth before.

Last resort. The borrower really didn’t want to do this. Briar had to speak louder than usual to be heard by the towering bean, "I hate to pull this card, boy, but you promised me when we met that you would do anything I ask as long as I traveled with you."

Jace scoffed, "It was a stupid deal anyway. It's not like we need you around anymore--"

Oh.

Both the bean and borrower froze. The silence in the room was deafening.

The ground felt like it had just dropped out from underneath Briar. He couldn't breathe no matter how hard he tried. Dread and desolation coursed through his small body. A nagging fear that had steadily been building inside Briar's mind for months, was now all consuming.

They don’t need me around anymore…

It had been spoken into the world and there was no taking it back.

Jace paled. His throat constricted like his scarf was too tight. He stared at the borrower, who looked so small in such a gigantic room. So far away. "Briar... I--" Jace was cut off by the sound of rustling sheets on the bed. Layla was awake. Jace was surprised she didn't wake up sooner, what with the fight between him and Briar.

Layla yawned and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. She looked around expecting a small man to appear before her. Briar had promised to be there when she woke up, and Briar always kept his promises. 

Jace took a deep, steadying breath and looked back down at the floor, the borrower had disappeared under the bed. Probably for the best, Jace was still pretty upset and he didn't trust himself not to say anything else horrible. The teen didn’t like feeling guilty, but he was much too proud to apologize. Even if he tried to apologize, it was all too fresh that it would probably come out sounding backhanded.

Jace spoke in an unsteady voice, “Layla, the boss is und–”

A distant voice called from under the bed. “I’m right here, child.”

Jace’s blood pressure rose for a second at being cut off. Ugh! Does that man take delight in pissing me off? The teen thought as he opened the bedroom door and stomped out of the room.

Layla perked up and looked down to her left, there was a couple inch space between the bed and the wall, there peering up at her was the borrower. He waved, though he could only see part of her face, he could tell from the crinkle in her brown eyes that she was smiling at him. 

Layla’s face was suddenly replaced by her chubby hand as it descended towards Briar. The borrower took a step back, not out of fear, but respect for the powerful appendage. It finally stopped a couple of inches away from the floor. Layla most likely got stuck and couldn’t go down any further.

Briar smiled, he wasn’t sure if she was going to try to pull him up, but he walked to her chubby hand and gave her middle and ring fingers a hug. He wrapped his arms around the digits, and he distantly thought that her fingers would be about the size of an eight year old borrower. Her thumb gently tapped his back, not enough pressure to be able to lift him, but it felt nice and reassuring. She probably still remembered the painful reaction he had the previous day to her trying to hug him. Briar hated when he upset the kids, it seems like that was the only thing he could do in the last 24 hours. 

When he felt he was done, he gave her fingers a quick pat. She released him and gazed down at him from the crack above. 

“I’ll be back, but it will be a while, okay?” Briar called up to her. “I’m going to explore the walls. Stay inside the house if you can and don’t talk to any beans, okay?”

Layla nodded in reply.

With that, Briar glanced one last time at the space where Jace had previously stood before he stormed out. Briar let out a hefty sigh and entered the crack in the wall behind the bed. 

When he was finally inside, he had to lean against the wood for support, his legs shook like they couldn’t carry him far. Was it from exhaustion? Anxiety? Anger? Fear? Briar wasn’t sure, but Jace’s words echoed in his mind as he pushed himself to a stand and forced his body to move.

“It's not like we need you around anymore…”

He felt empty, like the cold, dark tunnels around him.

***

***

A spoonful of angst for my lovely readers 🎁😌 (sorry, not sorry) 🥰

Next chapter will be posted next Monday!

***

Previous / Next / All Chapters

[3liza]

sociopathic capitalist urban developers as a class have managed to fool an entire generation of self-identified leftist "YIMBYs" into bulldozing currently-occupied low income housing and functioning green space including the mature, carbon-sequestering, heat-protectant trees everyone is always crying about to build cardboard "luxury" slums for the Seattle ruling class to use as barbie houses and everyone gets mad at me when i suggest disrupting steady occupancy, neighborhood social support networks, and more intangible established occupancy benefits like not having to deal with packing and unpacking etc which takes at least a year for anyone with any level of dysfunction to recover from, might be bad, and that developers are lying to us about specifically the "need" for destructive new building construction, and that planting their shitty non native decorative trees will replace the mature native growth they had to rip up to build it. like what is it specifically about housing barons that makes leftists so happy to abandon the principles of "believe the capitalists when they tell you their goal is to make a profit above all else". you can literally go on reddit, type in 5-over-1, and find developers and people who work with developers going "yeah we use the cheapest possible materials and cut as many corners as we can make appear 'legal' to build these things, because it makes money". look up "low income housing closing", no one ever shows me numbers on how much low income housing is being lost because those aren't the cool numbers of grim, forward-thinking internet leftist stoicism but actual project housing is constantly being shut down and everyone kicked out because it turns out people who have a lot of problems sometimes have those problems visibly in public and this offends the Bainbridge Island parasites.

sorry folks we had to evict 20 poors who had been living in the Sundew Arms garbage apartment block from 1960 with below-market rent in order to build the new and improved condo, which will actually house fewer people per square foot regardless of the number of units because the rent will be higher and high income people don't have roommates or live with family and well all these shiny new amenities and the Peloton in the communal gym and the mini dog piss park and so on....we have to charge at least $2500. you understand. it's the market stupid. we're Building Housing you can't criticize us for Building Housing. there's a Housing Shortage.

well the government says we have to earmark 10% of the new building to Low Income Housing which means we will probably just pay the nominal fine instead or possibly a single unit will maybe at some point be gingerly allotted to someone who has been on the Section 8 waiting list for hang on let me look it up..."randomly via lottery or several years during which you will be continually means tested and/or kicked off the waiting list without notification or explanation". great. i love urban density. this is so walkable. this cheap carpet offgassing is so identity. are we really that stupid

[csuitebitches]

book review: Stolen focus by Johann Hari

Major learnings from this book. It basically talks about focus, why and how we’re losing it. Why can’t we pay attention anymore? Are we individuals to blame or our systems? 

There will be a time when the upper class will be extremely aware of the risks to their attention (caused by tech, social media, our current generation) and the masses, with fewer resources to resist the temptation of technology, will be manipulated more and more by their computers. 

Multitasking is a myth. What actually happens when we multitask is that we “juggle” between tasks. This results in incomplete tasks, higher error rates, less focus, less creativity and memory decreases. 

Sleep is extremely important, especially sleeping according to nature - when the sun sets and sun rises. If the whole world slept the way we are naturally programmed, we would have an economic earthquake. Our economic systems run on sleep deprived people. 

Reading online and reading print has a huge difference. Reading online creates tendencies of skimming and scanning text. This prevents our brain from focusing intently on one story at a time, which print allows you to do. You also remember and understand things from printed texts better. 

Empathy. Certain research suggests that reading fiction and novels improves empathy, because you are immersing yourself in another character’s life for a while. Empathy has played a huge role in human advancements. If a group of white people did not realise that colonisation was wrong, if men did not realise that women deserve equal rights, we would not have independent nations nor be close to gender equality today. 

There are multiple types of paying attention. Focused attention is one thing. But day dreaming and letting your mind wander with no distraction (that is, being alone with your thoughts) is equally important. Some of the most important breakthroughs in human history were because the inventors were not actively focusing on solving the problem. 

Being on social media = giving a free pass to be manipulated. No thoughts, opinions, desires that you have are original. They have all been fed into you by social media and the online world. It is by their design that we cannot focus. 

Leaked internal records of Facebook show that they are aware that their algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness. 64% of people, for instance, who join extremist groups join because FB’s algorithm directly recommends too. “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.” Zuckerberg eventually terminated the unit that was studying this. 

Diet and attention. The diet we consumed today is a diet that causes regular energy spikes and energy crashes. Our food does not have the nutrients we need for our brains to function well. Our current diets actively contain chemicals that seem to act on our brains almost like drugs.  

Be careful about reading research, especially when it’s funded by the industry itself. For 40 years, the lead industry funded all the scientific research into whether it was safe, and assured the world that it was. Lead later turned out to severely stunt your ability to focus and pay attention and that you are more likely to get ADHD. 

We define success broadly as economic growth. Economies should get bigger, companies should get bigger. Growth can happen in two ways - either the companies find new markets or they persuade the existing consumers to consume more. If you can get people to eat more or to sleep less, you’ve found the source of economic growth. It results in people working overtime, not having enough time with family, friends and themselves, stress and anxiety prone, lack of sleep and bad health, etc. 

Conclusion: use precommitment to stop switching tasks, try to focus more on intrinsic motivation than extrinsic, go off social media periodically (say 1 month at a time) and then extend those breaks; everyday spend 1 hour in walking in silence (no music, conversations or people- and if this is in nature, even better) to connect with yourself, 8 hours of sleep every night, build on slow practices like yoga, cut out processed food, take your PTO!!

[proustiansleep]

"Cinema appeared first as a particular technology at the end of the nineteenth century; but precisely what it would be used for was not immediately clear. The work, both historical and theoretical, of my friend and colleague André Gaudreault indicates that cinema’s purposes were originally less well defined than were its mechanics. As Gaudreault has shown, cinema as a cultural form emerged gradually from a number of differently defined uses and rather separate cultural series. These include: Marey’s need for a means of recording scientifically the movement of bodies: human, animal, and inanimate; the Lumière’s company’s desire to extend the market and methods of amateur photography; Edison’s attempt to “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear,” that is, follow one successful recording invention with another. Such examples could be multiplied. Clearly defined goals play a lesser role in technological development than we tend to think.

Rather than following a specific plan and defined purpose, the Edison research lab explored various possibilities in materials and methods, often unsure of, or radically revising, their goal as experiments progressed. Research was often not designed to realize a specific project, but to generate projects generally.

As Bernard Stiegler has claimed, understanding technology as simply devising a means to accomplish an end distorts its nature. The technical object itself (and even more an ensemble such as the Edison laboratory) possesses, as Stiegler puts it, a genetic logic of its own, not simply attributable to human intention. We enter here into the understanding of the technical world introduced by Gilbert Simondon in which we seek, as Muriel Combes puts it, “to know the functioning schemas of technical objects, not as fixed schemas but as schemas necessarily engaged in temporal evolution.” In Simondon’s theory of technology we move from the goal oriented use of the tool to the open technological environment of the machine and its ensembles (such as the Edison laboratory, open to new uses and revisions). Thus, cinema with its initial variety of purposes may not be aberrant, but rather exemplary of a Simondon’s view of technical development. “The technical object exists, then, as a specific type achieved at the end of a convergent series.” Thus, the technical object must be understood as more than an inert utensil, a means to a predetermined end. Following Martin Heidegger, Tekhne should be conceived as process of growth and unfolding. This is not to claim that the technological processes that resulted in cinema were in any sense random or irrational, but rather that their ultimate outcomes were not necessarily inscribed or foreseen in their origins." —Tom Gunning, Cine-Graphism : A New Approach To The Evolution Of Film Language Through Technology

[pedropascalunofficial]

Pedro Pascal's love of shrooms leads to his investment brand and tv show to collaborate

Alice Mushrooms Lands Investment From L Catterton, Zac Efron, Pedro Pascal and Kevin Hart

August 14, 2024

Functional mushroom chocolate brand Alice Mushrooms has secured an undisclosed raise led by L Catterton with participation from actors Zac Efron, Pedro Pascal and Kevin Hart. They join existing brand backers Jason Strauss, co-chief executive officer of Tao Group, and former chief medical correspondent for ABC News and Alice’s medical adviser Dr. Jennifer Ashton. 

Alice Mushrooms, which launched in October 2022 on a mission to promote functional mushrooms and make wellness indulgent, currently has three functional chocolates: Brainstorm, $29, to promote focus; Happy Ending, $29, to boost arousal, and Nightcap, $29, to support sleep. At the time of launch, the brand had secured a small pre-seed investment from former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. 

“We made a point to not over raise or overspend because we honestly had no idea what was actually going to happen once we put the product into the market. Then we launched, and everything changed,” said cofounder Lindsay Goodstein. “We were sold out only a few months into the business.” 

After about two years in business, however, the brand was ready to raise and L Catterton was an ideal partner. 

“We bonded with the team at L Catterton right away. It was one of those things that felt like a puzzle, and it became a perfect fit because not only were they right out of the gate, aligned with our vision, saw the potential for the business and saw the potential for the category as a whole, but the team that we work with at L Catterton is led by two women,” said Alice cofounder Charlotte Cruze. 

Whitney Casey, partner at L Catteron who led the deal, said in a statement: “Alice Mushrooms distinguishes itself with its innovative branding and unique product offerings that connect with a new generation of consumers. This investment aligns with our strategy to support forward-thinking companies in the VMS (vitamins, minerals, supplements) space. We look forward to partnering with Alice and supporting their mission to transform the wellness market.”

While L Catterton has had its sights set on the wellness category, most recently acquiring Naomi Watts’ menopause brand Stripes, Alice’s cap table includes several celebs. 

“We built this really cool group of people who have incredible reach, who have amazing industry experience, who are super strategic, who understand food as medicine,” said Cruze. “This came about organically. As the brand grew, we got a lot of exciting attention.” 

Efron, Hart and Pascal also recently invested in Dr. Mark Hyman’s diagnostic health platform Function. 

According to Goodstein, this raise will go toward retail expansion, product development and team growth. 

“To hint a few things, we have new formulations [and] limited-edition flavor drops of our existing chocolates,” Goodstein said. “We’ll be using our chocolate as an ingredient in collaboration with some of our favorite brands coming up.” 

Alice, which is available at Erewhon, Pop Up Grocer and other specialty retailers, has previously secured several buzzy collabs with other companies like Fleur du Mal. 

“We see it as very tactical and strategic, given that we are still creating a new category,” said Cruze. “Partnering with brands that have established reputations and that have all of this market awareness help to make mushrooms more mainstream.” 

The team hinted at a cameo on the “big screen” coming next spring. In the fourth quarter, the brand also will be revealing a national grocer and department store retail launch. According to Goodstein, the brand was in about 200 retail doors at the start of 2024 and is expected to close the year with 1,000, though direct-to-consumer has been the largest channel. 

While the brand declined to share specific sales figures or the details of the raise, the team noted the brand is on track to exceed eight figures this year and has experienced 175 percent year-over-year growth. 

Alice Mushrooms IG

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The old promises are collapsing. Growth no longer lifts all boats—it lifts yachts. Progress no longer means shared prosperity—it means shareholder returns. What we’re witnessing isn’t a system in crisis; it’s a system reaching its logical conclusion. Neoliberalism was never about efficiency or freedom. It was about transferring public wealth into private hands while dressing the theft in the language of merit and inevitability.

We’re now living in its endgame.

Every domain of life is being made extractable—our labor, our attention, our data, our ecosystems, even our grief. Where public institutions once existed to buffer risk and extend care, they’ve been gutted, outsourced, or rebranded as markets. What’s left is a politics of managed precarity, where the illusion of choice masks deepening dependence on volatile systems.

Control no longer needs to announce itself with force. It’s embedded in systems we’re told are neutral. It works through spreadsheets, billing codes, and risk scores—quiet mechanisms that control without appearing to rule.

Anthropology has long studied systems of exchange, reciprocity, and redistribution. Neoliberalism offers their inverse: a world where every need becomes a payment plan, every right becomes a subscription, and every crisis becomes an opportunity for someone else to profit. The commons—whether land, water, health, or education—are being enclosed anew, not with walls but with pricing tiers and contractual exclusions. The dispossession is as subtle as it is ruthless.

But the extraction isn’t just material. It’s temporal. What neoliberalism extracts is the future itself. Delayed transitions, deferred maintenance, stalled climate action—these are forms of temporal looting. The system generates short-term profits by mortgaging long-term stability. Every unmet obligation, every deferred repair, every “not yet” becomes a mechanism for robbing the next generation of options they never had a chance to claim. This is extraction across time, not just space.

The logic of this moment isn’t only economic—it’s ecological. Political ecology reminds us that systems of power are embedded in landscapes, infrastructures, and flows of energy and capital. Extraction is not confined to oil rigs and clearcuts. It is structured into zoning laws, data centers, insurance markets, and eviction courts. Accumulation by dispossession has become accumulation by design—a regime that doesn’t just seize opportunity, but manufactures scarcity in order to profit from it.

Look closely, and you’ll see the pattern. The same firms underwriting fossil fuel expansion are buying up water rights, farmland, and housing. The same actors slashing climate funds are cutting Medicaid and food assistance. The billionaires rebranding as technocrats are buying influence, shaping regulation, and engineering predictive models of your behavior. In this new economy, you are not just a consumer—you are a datafied asset, evaluated for risk, monetized through surveillance, and expected to perform in real time.

What looks like failure is often functioning exactly as intended—a system designed not to serve, but to extract.

Climate denial, austerity, deregulation, border militarization, and corporate greenwashing aren’t isolated tactics—they are components of a coherent toolkit. Together, they protect capital from accountability by dispersing blame and disorienting the public. But behind every market correction and manufactured crisis is the same imperative: protect capital at all costs, even if it means rendering entire communities—and ecosystems—uninhabitable.

And we know where it leads.

Across the country and the globe, we see sacrifice zones multiply. These are not accidents of neglect—they are the continuation of colonial logic turned inward. Flint. Jackson. Pine Ridge. Standing Rock. Gaza. Places where extractive industries and militarized policing converge, where public health collapses and no one is held accountable. These are domestic frontiers, where the violence of empire is repatriated and masked as budgetary constraint.

The lines are drawn by insurability. Those deemed too costly to protect are left to absorb the damage: rising premiums, evictions, unlivable heat, chemical spills, food deserts. In this system, insurance becomes the new passport—a gatekeeper of risk that determines not just what you can afford, but whether you can belong.

The ideology that sustains this is not neutral. It’s racialized, gendered, and historically rooted in conquest. The fossil fuel regime isn’t just an energy system—it’s a worldview. One that insists prosperity requires no limits, that nature is inert, and that markets are moral arbiters. Anthropologically, it is a cosmology of domination—one that crowds out other ways of being, knowing, and organizing life.

But alternatives do exist. And they are not hypothetical.

Across Indigenous and land-based communities—from the Amazon to the Arctic—are models of reciprocal governance, ecological stewardship, and collective care. These aren’t relics of the past. They are systems of survival honed over millennia. The fact that they are ignored or actively undermined is not a coincidence. It is part of the same colonial logic that demands control, even at the cost of collapse.

Neoliberalism thrives on exhaustion. It teaches us to fear rather than imagine, to hustle rather than organize, to consume rather than care. Its most insidious achievement isn’t privatizing services—it’s shrinking the horizon of what we imagine to be possible.

But that, too, can be reversed. Systems endure because they are reproduced—and they can be dismantled the same way.

The fight ahead is not simply about policies or elections. It’s about unmaking a worldview that sees life as extractable, inequality as natural, and solidarity as a threat. A livable future won’t come from tech fixes or carbon markets alone. It will come from shifting the underlying logic—from profit to reciprocity, from scarcity to care, from collapse to repair.

Neoliberalism may not end with fire and fury. It may fade, hollowed out by its own contradictions. But what rises in its place will depend on how ready we are—not just with critique, but with vision.

Because the real endgame isn’t theirs.

It’s ours to reclaim.

(James Greenberg)

[laundryandtaxes]

It really highlights how deeply unserious, superficial, and functionally random the populist conservative bit is for Trump (the alternative explanation is being surrounded by enough real conservatives to tame his populist impulses, but I think Trump actually learned his lesson on that even by the end of his first term) that his idea of boosting American manufacturing involves just placing tariffs on basically everything Americans purchase day to day when the vast majority of Americans cannot afford the American made alternatives where they even exist. Perhaps a shift at McDonald's didn't teach him this, but it is obvious to me that the manufacturing capacity of the country itself is a fraction of what it once was- it's not that American goods are just being outcompeted in the global market AND in the domestic market, they often just don't exist at all, or are too expensive for most American consumers to consider purchasing (which they largely have to be, in order to support anything like a living wage for the workers who produce those goods because the person making your T shirt has to eat food).

If the end goal was actually just to make more stuff here, we could just pay people to manufacture here via financial incentives- carrots such as nearly free money. This would still not solve the math problem of the cost of making goods here, but it would mean more factories and workshops making shirts and boots and plates and such, and it would mean employment in those jobs. He could tax an incredibly small population of unimaginably wealthy people to fund it and even call it an "elites tax" if he wanted. He could run it through Congress and brag that it was bipartisan whether it needs to be (due to the makeup of the House) or not. And he could actually inject money, meaningfully and directly, into American manufacturing and its growth. And I genuinely think that would be great- even if it wouldn't solve high prices, it would mean new jobs and it's possible that prices could come down a bit on products if they became more widely purchased generally, and there are enough people interested and able to purchase American made to, I would guess, sustain real growth for those manufacturers.

But that would mean that Elon Musk and literally just 800 other people would be given a new tax burden, and we can't have that because it would squash innovation. Offshoring was an innovation, once. We just ended one of the longest periods of basically free money for them in my lifetime and have seen how much good that does for working people- none.

So no, instead let's give even more tax cuts to the corporations that intentionally decimated America's manufacturing capabilities so that they could pay almost nothing for labor and have almost no accountability for workplace conditions offshore. Thanks for offshoring the work that sustained whole communities and never got replaced in many places- here are some juicy tax cuts for you in return. It's actually a joke.

[gatheringbones]

[“Illness,” SPK argued, “was the only form of ‘life’ possible under capitalism.” In both “Eleven Theses on Illness” and “Illness and Capitalism,” SPK explain that illness is the “essential condition” in which the human body and the productive forces of capital intersect: “The capitalist production process is at the same time a process that destroys life. It continually destroys life and produces capital.” This is why, SPK argued, capitalism as a political economic system is dominated by the duality of destructive industry (which creates illth—ill health) and rehabilitative industry (which seeks to cure illth), thereby creating not a collective regime of population health, but instead systems of wealth transfer generating surplus profit from the system of care. (This idea is, notably, similar to Marta Russell’s money model of disability, which was first theorized at least two decades after SPK’s work. Although not discussed at length in SURPLUS, we have found SPK’s “Eleven Theses” immensely valuable to our conception of “extractive abandonment.”)

While the social model of disability frames the exclusion and creation of disability as the result of dynamic social forces that could theoretically be realigned to create a more equitable society that would reject stigma and welcome inclusion, SPK’s social-symptomatic model argues that all impairments, disabilities, illnesses, and differences are excluded relative to their perceived market value as worker. Furthermore, while the identity of disabled/mad/ill is a social construction, the symptoms that exist as the expression of this oppressive social force are very physically and biologically real. The social-symptomatic model makes room to radically embrace one’s spoiled identity but doesn’t seek to eliminate or erase the pain, suffering, and struggle that comes with a life of symptoms under capitalism. It does not recognize a “fix” to symptoms, only a path toward a freedom from the forces that compound and exacerbate them. These symptoms present not only a challenge to the survival of “the patients” but also represent a call to arms—not just for reform, but for revolution. It is the capacity to identify a symptom and its social forces, and to rise in solidarity to overcome the challenge that provides the only real palliative and path to lessen emotional or physical suffering, rather than sock it away and feed the “spoiled body” back into the meat grinder of industrial capitalism as if that person is only worth their weight in flesh.

SPK cited Marx’s work as the grounding point for their analysis, theorizing that industry “cripples” the worker through capitalist demands for endless growth and productivity and by forcing austerity and economic valuations of life onto the conditions of work. SPK saw this as a means by which illness itself was a kind of raw productive power, arguing that the critical function of the healthcare system itself was the “maintenance and enhancement of the exploitability of the commodity of labor power.” To resist repair, to be incurable, was to be engaged in revolutionary struggle against these social-reproductive forces of extractive abandonment, whether you wanted to be or not. To SPK, this was simply the irrefutable condition of a body under capitalism; it was up to the individual to realize their position and act on the revolutionary potential it contains. It is the task of the healthcare system, SPK argued, to distract, burden, and prevent “the patients” from the realization of illness’ radical relational potential.

SPK based their praxis on the notion that the sick person under capitalism becomes an “object” of “two-fold exploitation: the destroyed labor force has to be repaired in order to continue its exploitation,” and “as a consumer [they make] for a ‘fashionable market of’ the medical technology and pharmaceutical industries.” SPK importantly, and in sharp contrast to the anti-psychiatry movement, did not differentiate between “bio/physical” illness and “mental” illness, reflecting a remarkable approach to understanding illness and disease from the perspective of patients rather than through the materially distanced observation of patients. As the system was, and still is, patients are the object of study, rarely the ones allowed to ask the research questions. SPK argued that regardless of the cause of your symptom, be it cancer, madness, or anything else, you still experienced the negative effects of the eternal clash between your symptoms and the life-denying forces of capitalism. To differentiate between the bio and mental symptoms was a false game, SPK argued, because under capitalism, it only served to pathologize the pathology itself.

To describe something as bio or mental is to ascribe stigma to it of one kind or another, and the perceived dichotomy between the two, SPK thought, was a means by which to further disincentivize solidarity among the entire sick proletariat. By separating people into categories of illness, capitalism enforces a structure upon relations of the sick to preserve its own survival. That is why, SPK argued, “health is a biological, fascist fantasy, whose function … is the concealment of the social conditions and social functions of illness.” If care, rehabilitation, and therapeutics were to be truly and totally oriented toward their self-professed goal of alleviating or curing the “symptoms” that all people experience in daily living, regardless of the cause, “health” must be wholly severed from the capitalist political economy.”]

health communism, by beatrice adler-bolton and artie vierkant, 2022

[mariacallous]

Something is happening in the housing market that really shouldn’t be. Everyone familiar with America’s affordability crisis knows that it is most acute in ultra-progressive coastal cities in heavily Democratic states. And yet, home prices have been rising most sharply in the exact places that have long served as a refuge for Americans fed up with the spiraling cost of living. Over the past decade, the median home price has increased by 134 percent in Phoenix, 133 percent in Miami, 129 percent in Atlanta, and 99 percent in Dallas. (Over that same stretch, prices in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have increased by about 75 percent, 76 percent, and 97 percent, respectively).

This trend could prove disastrous. For much of the past half century, suburban sprawl across the Sun Belt was a kind of pressure-release valve for the housing market. People who couldn’t afford to live in expensive cities had other, cheaper places to go. Now even the affordable alternatives are on track to become out of reach for a critical mass of Americans.

The trend also presents a mystery. According to expert consensus, anti-growth liberals have imposed excessive regulations that made building enough homes impossible. The housing crisis has thus become synonymous with feckless blue-state governance. So how can prices now be rising so fast in red and purple states known for their loose regulations?

A tempting explanation is that the expert consensus is wrong. Perhaps regulations and NIMBYism were never really the problem, and the current push to reform zoning laws and building codes is misguided. But the real answer is that San Francisco and New York weren’t unique—they were just early. Eventually, no matter where you are, the forces of NIMBYism catch up to you.

The perception of the Sun Belt as the anti-California used to be accurate. In a recent paper, two urban economists, Ed Glaeser and Joe Gyourko, analyze the rate of housing production across 82 metro areas since the 1950s. They find that as recently as the early 2000s, booming cities such as Dallas, Atlanta, and Phoenix were building new homes at more than four times the rate of major coastal cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, on average. The fact that millions of people were being priced out of the locations with the best jobs and highest wages—so-called superstar cities—wasn’t ideal. But the Sun Belt building boom kept the coastal housing shortage from becoming a full-blown national crisis.

No longer. Although the Sun Belt continues to build far more housing than the coasts in absolute terms, Glaeser and Gyourko find that the rate of building in most Sun Belt cities has fallen by more than half over the past 25 years, in some cases by much more, even as demand to live in those places has surged. “When it comes to new housing production, the Sun Belt cities today are basically at the point that the big coastal cities were 20 years ago,” Gyourko told me. This explains why home prices in the Sun Belt, though still low compared with those in San Francisco and New York, have risen so sharply since the mid-2010s—a trend that accelerated during the pandemic, as the rise of remote work led to a large migration out of high-cost cities.

In a properly functioning housing market, the post-COVID surge in demand should have generated a massive building boom that would have cooled price growth. Instead, more than five years after the pandemic began, these places still aren’t building enough homes, and prices are still rising wildly.

As the issue of housing has become more salient in Democratic Party politics, some commentators have pointed to rising costs in the supposedly laissez-faire Sun Belt as proof that zoning laws and other regulations are not the culprit. “Blaming zoning for housing costs seems especially blinkered because different jurisdictions in the United States have very different approaches to land use regulations, and yet the housing crisis is a nationwide phenomenon,” the Vanderbilt University law professors Ganesh Sitaraman and Christopher Serkin write in a recent paper. Some argue that the wave of consolidation within the home-building industry following the 2008 financial crisis gave large developers the power to slow-walk development and keep prices high. Others say that the cost of construction has climbed so high over the past two decades that building no longer makes financial sense for developers.

Both of those claims probably account for part of the growth in housing costs, but they fall short as the main explanation. The home-building industry has indeed become more concentrated since 2008, but the slowdown in housing production in the Sun Belt began well before that. If the problem were a monopolistic market, you would expect to see higher profit margins for builders, yet Glaeser and Gyourko find that developer profits have remained roughly constant. (Other sources agree.) Likewise, construction and financing costs have risen sharply since the early 2000s—but not to the point where builders can’t turn a profit. In fact, Glaeser and Gyourko find that the share of homes selling far above the cost of production in major Sun Belt markets has dramatically increased. Put another way, there are even more opportunities for home builders to make a profit in these places; something is preventing them from taking advantage.

The Sun Belt, in short, is subject to the same antidevelopment forces as the coasts; it just took longer to trigger them. Cities in the South and Southwest have portrayed themselves as business-friendly, pro-growth metros. In reality, their land-use laws aren’t so different from those in blue-state cities. According to a 2018 research paper, co-authored by Gyourko, that surveyed 44 major U.S. metro areas, land-use regulations in Miami and Phoenix both ranked in the top 10 most restrictive (just behind Washington, D.C., and L.A. and ahead of Boston), and Dallas and Nashville were in the top 25. Because the survey is based on responses from local governments, it might understate just how bad zoning in the Sun Belt is. “When I first opened up the zoning code for Atlanta, I almost spit out my coffee,” Alex Armlovich, a senior housing-policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank, told me. “It’s almost identical to L.A. in the 1990s.”

These restrictive rules weren’t a problem back when Sun Belt cities could expand by building new single-family homes at their exurban fringes indefinitely. That kind of development is less likely to be subject to zoning laws; even when it is, obtaining exceptions to those laws is relatively easy because neighbors who might oppose new development don’t exist yet. Recently, however, many Sun Belt cities have begun hitting limits to their outward sprawl, either because they’ve run into natural obstacles (such as the Everglades in Miami and tribal lands near Phoenix) or because they’ve already expanded to the edge of reasonable commute distances (as appears to be the case in Atlanta and Dallas). To keep growing, these cities will have to find ways to increase the density of their existing urban cores and suburbs. That is a much more difficult proposition. “This is exactly what happened in many coastal cities in the 1980s and ’90s,” Armlovich told me. “Once you run out of room to sprawl, suddenly your zoning code starts becoming a real limitation.”

Glaeser and Gyourko go one step further. They hypothesize that as Sun Belt cities have become more affluent and highly educated, their residents have become more willing and able to use existing laws and regulations to block new development. They point to two main pieces of evidence. First, for a given city, the slowdown in new housing development strongly correlates with a rising share of college-educated residents. Second, within cities, the neighborhoods where housing production has slowed the most are lower-density, affluent suburbs populated with relatively well-off, highly educated professionals. In other words, anti-growth NIMBYism might be a perverse but natural consequence of growth: As demand to live in a place increases, it attracts the kind of people who are more likely to oppose new development, and who have the time and resources to do so. “We used to think that people in Miami, Dallas, Phoenix behaved differently than people in Boston and San Francisco,” Gyourko told me. “That clearly isn’t the case.”

Real-world examples aren’t hard to find. In early 2024, an affordable-housing developer proposed a project for an 85-unit apartment building in an affluent suburb of San Antonio. The apartments would have consisted entirely of subsidized units reserved for low-income residents, and the building would have included an on-site preschool. The project had buy-in from the city government, but a handful of local residents opposed it, citing concerns such as traffic, crime, and the height of the building. “It’s too much—we’re turning into Houston,” one nearby resident told the planning commission in April. “I would appreciate if you all would keep San Antonio residential and feeling like home.”

Those residents took advantage of a 1927 Texas law known as the “valid petition,” a procedure originally introduced as a way to preserve segregation after the Supreme Court struck down explicitly racial zoning. Under the law, any effort by a developer to get an exemption from a zoning ordinance (say, to build apartments on land zoned for retail) can be blocked if the owners of just 20 percent of the land within 200 feet of the proposed project site file a petition opposing the effort. At that point, the only way to rescue the project is to summon a three-fourths supermajority vote by the city council. In San Antonio, that meant nine of the city’s 11 council members would need to vote to overturn the valid petition. In the end, only seven did. The project was killed.

Experts told me that from the mid-20th century through the 2000s, valid petitions were hardly used in Texas. But in recent years they have become such a common way to kill new projects that they have earned the nickname “the tyrant’s veto.” They have been wielded against, among other things, a hospital expansion in Dallas, student housing in Bryan, and Habitat for Humanity houses in Austin. According to Nicole Nosek, the chair and founder of Texans for Reasonable Solutions, a pro-housing advocacy organization, the law chills development before it even gets proposed in the first place. “Developers call it ‘the silent killer,’” Nosek told me. “Many of them don’t even try to propose projects in places like East Austin, because they know that one person could stir up enough trouble to kill it altogether.”

Justin Webb, the owner of a small family-owned home-building business in Dallas, told me that when he started out in 1990, the local environment was “every builder’s dream.” Not anymore. “Now everything is a negotiation; everything is a process,” Webb said. He cited a project first proposed in May 2022 to turn a run-down strip mall in North Dallas into a mixed-use development with 2,300 new housing units alongside offices, retail, walking paths, and green space. After three years of local opposition and several contentious community meetings, the proposal has been scaled back to just 868 units. And it faces a lawsuit filed by a local neighborhood association that might kill it altogether. “A lot of times, the last person to move in wants to close the door and throw away the key,” Webb said. “I think that’s what’s happening all over Texas right now.”

Texas isn’t an outlier. Similar anecdotes abound in cities such as Orlando, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Atlanta. This trend has turned some of the most developer-friendly cities into absolute nightmares for home builders.

When Mike Vasquez began working for his family’s Arizona-based construction business in the 1980s, he told me, he could walk into the local planning office with a proposal “written on a napkin” and get approval for a new project within hours. Today, that process requires navigating an agonizing thicket of paperwork, regulations, town-hall meetings, neighborhood resistance, and potential lawsuits. Simply breaking ground on a new project can take years, if it gets approved at all. “It used to be the case that if you owned a piece of land, you could just build on it,” Vasquez told me. “Now it takes a year or two just to get the land rezoned so I can start a project. You can’t run a business like that.” So after 43 years of building homes out West, Vasquez has decided to pull up stakes and move across the country to North Carolina, where he has heard it’s still possible to build like in the good old days.

Right now, the same story is playing out again and again across the Sun Belt: Eventually, suburban sprawl runs its course, and cities must face both the restrictiveness of their own land-use laws and the seemingly universal human tendency to put down roots and then oppose new development. If current trends continue, then in 20 years, the housing crisis in cities such as Miami, Phoenix, and Atlanta will be as severe as it is in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York today.

The good news is that these cities have been warned. They can look at the crisis plaguing their coastal counterparts, see into their not-so-far-off future, and choose to do something about it. Some already have. In 2021, Raleigh, North Carolina, responded to an influx of new residents by reforming its laws to make building multifamily housing much easier. Over the next three years, the city built 60 percent more units annually and experienced half the rental-cost growth than it had during the previous five years, according to data gathered by Alex Horowitz, the project director for housing policy at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The forces opposed to new development are just as vehemently opposed to the kind of reforms needed to avert a future crisis. Many local and state governments across the Sun Belt have tried and failed to implement lasting pro-housing reforms. But the recent spike in home prices across the region has put even more pressure on lawmakers to act. The Texas legislature recently passed several pieces of legislation that will, among other things, reduce the minimum lot size of new homes, limit the power of the “tyrant’s veto,” and allow multifamily housing to be built on land currently zoned for offices and retail. Red states like to portray themselves as free from the pathologies that have made housing such a problem in other parts of the country. Now they have an opportunity to prove it.

[acornintheroad]

I mentioned talking about my wands a little while ago. Right now there's these three, and the assortment of crafting tools that get used as wands, though I suspect that I'll wind up with a couple more by the time I'm done with my current study.

Each of these has a very different feel to them, size, weight, texture and just the general vibes they carry.

The first from the top is Hark, the one that I've had the longest and the only one of the three that I made myself. It's made of a magnolia branch that I found and harvested with assistance from the spirit of a forest I spent years running around in as a child, though initially with the plan that it would be as much a prop for an event as a functional tool. This means that Hark tends to be incredibly, theatrically dramatic. It also usually wants to be used for more lighthearted bits of magic.

The wand in the middle I bought at a market a couple years ago from a semi-local wand maker. It was the simplest of the wands she had on offer, made from the roots of a cherry tree with the intention that it be a road opener and a tool of new beginnings. I usually use it for when I'm starting my garden each year, to clear away the metaphysical dust from the past year and get everything set for the growth to come, though I admit that I haven't used it enough to know if it wants to be used for that. Though, if it does, it would likely be quite good for job spells and charging newly made items.

And the last, down at the bottom is the one I've acquired most recently, an oak wand that was made on a lathe by a different semi-local crafter, the material for this one was used for more than a hundred years as part of the flooring in a local warehouse before being purchased and reshaped. It is heavier than it looks, but it feels good in hand, and the brass filler from where the board it was made from had a nail hole is a bit fascinating. Interestingly, while it definitely wants to be handled, it does not seem to have any sort of preference for what sort of magic it is used for or if it gets used at all. I assume that part of that is because I just got it and part might be because being a wand is a radical change from being part of a floor.

I'm going to have to work with each of these more as the year goes on, to get a better feel for them and to work on which works best for what sort of magic. But it's been nice to talk about them a little.

[m2iconsulting]

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[dailyanarchistposts]

A.4 Who are the major anarchist thinkers?

Although Gerard Winstanley (The New Law of Righteousness, 1649) and William Godwin (Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793) had begun to unfold the philosophy of anarchism in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was not until the second half of the 19th century that anarchism emerged as a coherent theory with a systematic, developed programme. This work was mainly started by four people — a German, Max Stirner (1806–1856), a Frenchman, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), and two Russians, Michael Bakunin (1814–1876) and Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921). They took the ideas in common circulation within sections of the working population and expressed them in written form.

Born in the atmosphere of German romantic philosophy, Stirner’s anarchism (set forth in The Ego and Its Own) was an extreme form of individualism, or egoism, which placed the unique individual above all else — state, property, law or duty. His ideas remain a cornerstone of anarchism. Stirner attacked both capitalism and state socialism, laying the foundations of both social and individualist anarchism by his egoist critique of capitalism and the state that supports it. In place of the state and capitalism, Max Stirner urges the “union of egoists,” free associations of unique individuals who co-operate as equals in order to maximise their freedom and satisfy their desires (including emotional ones for solidarity, or “intercourse” as Stirner called it). Such a union would be non-hierarchical, for, as Stirner wonders, “is an association, wherein most members allow themselves to be lulled as regards their most natural and most obvious interests, actually an Egoist’s association? Can they really be ‘Egoists’ who have banded together when one is a slave or a serf of the other?” [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, p. 24]

Individualism by definition includes no concrete programme for changing social conditions. This was attempted by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first to describe himself openly as an anarchist. His theories of mutualism, federalism and workers’ self-management and association had a profound effect on the growth of anarchism as a mass movement and spelled out clearly how an anarchist world could function and be co-ordinated. It would be no exaggeration to state that Proudhon’s work defined the fundamental nature of anarchism as both an anti-state and anti-capitalist movement and set of ideas. Bakunin, Kropotkin and Tucker all claimed inspiration from his ideas and they are the immediate source for both social and individualist anarchism, with each thread emphasising different aspects of mutualism (for example, social anarchists stress the associational aspect of them while individualist anarchists the non-capitalist market side). Proudhon’s major works include What is Property, System of Economical Contradictions, The Principle of Federation and, and The Political Capacity of the Working Classes. His most detailed discussion of what mutualism would look like can be found in his The General Idea of the Revolution. His ideas heavily influenced both the French Labour movement and the Paris Commune of 1871.

Proudhon’s ideas were built upon by Michael Bakunin, who humbly suggested that his own ideas were simply Proudhon’s “widely developed and pushed right to … [their] final consequences.” [Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, p. 198] However, he is doing a disservice to his own role in developing anarchism. For Bakunin is the central figure in the development of modern anarchist activism and ideas. He emphasised the importance of collectivism, mass insurrection, revolution and involvement in the militant labour movement as the means of creating a free, classless society. Moreover, he repudiated Proudhon’s sexism and added patriarchy to the list of social evils anarchism opposes. Bakunin also emphasised the social nature of humanity and individuality, rejecting the abstract individualism of liberalism as a denial of freedom. His ideas become dominant in the 20th century among large sections of the radical labour movement. Indeed, many of his ideas are almost identical to what would later be called syndicalism or anarcho-syndicalism. Bakunin influenced many union movements — especially in Spain, where a major anarchist social revolution took place in 1936. His works include Anarchy and Statism (his only book), God and the State, The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State, and many others. Bakunin on Anarchism, edited by Sam Dolgoff is an excellent collection of his major writings. Brian Morris’ Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom is an excellent introduction to Bakunin’s life and ideas.

Peter Kropotkin, a scientist by training, fashioned a sophisticated and detailed anarchist analysis of modern conditions linked to a thorough-going prescription for a future society — communist-anarchism — which continues to be the most widely-held theory among anarchists. He identified mutual aid as the best means by which individuals can develop and grow, pointing out that competition within humanity (and other species) was often not in the best interests of those involved. Like Bakunin, he stressed the importance of direct, economic, class struggle and anarchist participation in any popular movement, particularly in labour unions. Taking Proudhon’s and Bakunin’s idea of the commune, he generalised their insights into a vision of how the social, economic and personal life of a free society would function. He aimed to base anarchism “on a scientific basis by the study of the tendencies that are apparent now in society and may indicate its further evolution” towards anarchy while, at the same time, urging anarchists to “promote their ideas directly amongst the labour organisations and to induce those union to a direct struggle against capital, without placing their faith in parliamentary legislation.” [Anarchism, p. 298 and p. 287] Like Bakunin, he was a revolutionary and, like Bakunin, his ideas inspired those struggle for freedom across the globe. His major works included Mutual Aid, The Conquest of Bread, Field, Factories, and Workshops, Modern Science and Anarchism, Act for Yourselves, The State: Its Historic Role, Words of a Rebel, and many others. A collection of his revolutionary pamphlets is available under the title Anarchism and is essential reading for anyone interested in his ideas. In Addition, Graham Purchase’s Evolution and Revolution and Kropotkin: The Politics of Community by Brain Morris are both excellent evaluations of his ideas and how they are still relevant today.

The various theories proposed by these “founding anarchists” are not, however, mutually exclusive: they are interconnected in many ways, and to some extent refer to different levels of social life. Individualism relates closely to the conduct of our private lives: only by recognising the uniqueness and freedom of others and forming unions with them can we protect and maximise our own uniqueness and liberty; mutualism relates to our general relations with others: by mutually working together and co-operating we ensure that we do not work for others. Production under anarchism would be collectivist, with people working together for their own, and the common, good, and in the wider political and social world decisions would be reached communally.

It should also be stressed that anarchist schools of thought are not named after individual anarchists. Thus anarchists are not “Bakuninists”, “Proudhonists” or “Kropotkinists” (to name three possibilities). Anarchists, to quote Malatesta, “follow ideas and not men, and rebel against this habit of embodying a principle in a man.” This did not stop him calling Bakunin “our great master and inspiration.” [Errico Malatesta: Life and Ideas, p. 199 and p. 209] Equally, not everything written by a famous anarchist thinker is automatically libertarian. Bakunin, for example, only became an anarchist in the last ten years of his life (this does not stop Marxists using his pre-anarchist days to attack anarchism!). Proudhon turned away from anarchism in the 1850s before returning to a more anarchistic (if not strictly anarchist) position just before his death in 1865. Similarly, Kropotkin’s or Tucker’s arguments in favour of supporting the Allies during the First World War had nothing to do with anarchism. Thus to say, for example, that anarchism is flawed because Proudhon was a sexist pig simply does not convince anarchists. No one would dismiss democracy, for example, because Rousseau opinions on women were just as sexist as Proudhon’s. As with anything, modern anarchists analyse the writings of previous anarchists to draw inspiration, but a dogma. Consequently, we reject the non-libertarian ideas of “famous” anarchists while keeping their positive contributions to the development of anarchist theory. We are sorry to belabour the point, but much of Marxist “criticism” of anarchism basically involves pointing out the negative aspects of dead anarchist thinkers and it is best simply to state clearly the obvious stupidity of such an approach.

Anarchist ideas of course did not stop developing when Kropotkin died. Neither are they the products of just four men. Anarchism is by its very nature an evolving theory, with many different thinkers and activists. When Bakunin and Kropotkin were alive, for example, they drew aspects of their ideas from other libertarian activists. Bakunin, for example, built upon the practical activity of the followers of Proudhon in the French labour movement in the 1860s. Kropotkin, while the most associated with developing the theory communist-anarchism, was simply the most famous expounder of the ideas that had developed after Bakunin’s death in the libertarian wing of the First International and before he became an anarchist. Thus anarchism is the product of tens of thousands of thinkers and activists across the globe, each shaping and developing anarchist theory to meet their needs as part of the general movement for social change. Of the many other anarchists who could be mentioned here, we can mention but a few.

Stirner is not the only famous anarchist to come from Germany. It also produced a number of original anarchist thinkers. Gustav Landauer was expelled from the Marxist Social-Democratic Party for his radical views and soon after identified himself as an anarchist. For him, anarchy was “the expression of the liberation of man from the idols of state, the church and capital” and he fought ”State socialism, levelling from above, bureaucracy” in favour of “free association and union, the absence of authority.” His ideas were a combination of Proudhon’s and Kropotkin’s and he saw the development of self-managed communities and co-operatives as the means of changing society. He is most famous for his insight that the “state is a condition, a certain relationship among human beings, a mode of behaviour between them; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently towards one another.” [quoted by Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, p. 410 and p. 411] He took a leading part in the Munich revolution of 1919 and was murdered during its crushing by the German state. His book For Socialism is an excellent summary of his main ideas.

Other notable German anarchists include Johann Most, originally a Marxist and an elected member of the Reichstag, he saw the futility of voting and became an anarchist after being exiled for writing against the Kaiser and clergy. He played an important role in the American anarchist movement, working for a time with Emma Goldman. More a propagandist than a great thinker, his revolutionary message inspired numerous people to become anarchists. Then there is Rudolf Rocker, a bookbinder by trade who played an important role in the Jewish labour movement in the East End of London (see his autobiography, The London Years, for details). He also produced the definite introduction to Anarcho-syndicalism as well as analysing the Russian Revolution in articles like Anarchism and Sovietism and defending the Spanish revolution in pamphlets like The Tragedy of Spain. His Nationalism and Culture is a searching analysis of human culture through the ages, with an analysis of both political thinkers and power politics. He dissects nationalism and explains how the nation is not the cause but the result of the state as well as repudiating race science for the nonsense it is.

In the United States Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were two of the leading anarchist thinkers and activists. Goldman united Stirner’s egoism with Kropotkin’s communism into a passionate and powerful theory which combined the best of both. She also placed anarchism at the centre of feminist theory and activism as well as being an advocate of syndicalism (see her book Anarchism and Other Essays and the collection of essays, articles and talks entitled Red Emma Speaks). Alexander Berkman, Emma’s lifelong companion, produced a classic introduction to anarchist ideas called What is Anarchism? (also known as What is Communist Anarchism? and the ABC of Anarchism). Like Goldman, he supported anarchist involvement in the labour movement was a prolific writer and speaker (the book Life of An Anarchist gives an excellent selection of his best articles, books and pamphlets). Both were involved in editing anarchist journals, with Goldman most associated with Mother Earth (see Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth edited by Peter Glassgold) and Berkman The Blast (reprinted in full in 2005). Both journals were closed down when the two anarchists were arrested in 1917 for their anti-war activism.

In December 1919, both he and Goldman were expelled by the US government to Russia after the 1917 revolution had radicalised significant parts of the American population. There as they were considered too dangerous to be allowed to remain in the land of the free. Exactly two years later, their passports arrived to allow them to leave Russia. The Bolshevik slaughter of the Kronstadt revolt in March 1921 after the civil war ended had finally convinced them that the Bolshevik dictatorship meant the death of the revolution there. The Bolshevik rulers were more than happy to see the back of two genuine revolutionaries who stayed true to their principles. Once outside Russia, Berkman wrote numerous articles on the fate of the revolution (including The Russian Tragedy and The Kronstadt Rebellion) as well as publishing his diary in book from as The Bolshevik Myth. Goldman produced her classic work My Disillusionment in Russia as well as publishing her famous autobiography Living My Life. She also found time to refute Trotsky’s lies about the Kronstadt rebellion in Trotsky Protests Too Much.

As well as Berkman and Goldman, the United States also produced other notable activists and thinkers. Voltairine de Cleyre played an important role in the US anarchist movement, enriching both US and international anarchist theory with her articles, poems and speeches. Her work includes such classics as Anarchism and American Traditions, Direct Action, Sex Slavery and The Dominant Idea. These are included, along with other articles and some of her famous poems, in The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader. These and other important essays are included in Exquisite Rebel, another anthology of her writings, while Eugenia C. Delamotte’s Gates of Freedom provides an excellent overview of her life and ideas as well as selections from her works. In addition, the book Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth contains a good selection of her writings as well as other anarchists active at the time. Also of interest is the collection of the speeches she made to mark the state murder of the Chicago Martyrs in 1886 (see the First Mayday: The Haymarket Speeches 1895–1910). Every November the 11th, except when illness made it impossible, she spoke in their memory. For those interested in the ideas of that previous generation of anarchists which the Chicago Martyrs represented, Albert Parsons’ Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis is essential reading. His wife, Lucy Parsons, was also an outstanding anarchist activist from the 1870s until her death in 1942 and selections of her writings and speeches can be found in the book Freedom, Equality & Solidarity (edited by Gale Ahrens).

Elsewhere in the Americas, Ricardo Flores Magon helped lay the ground for the Mexican revolution of 1910 by founding the (strangely named) Mexican Liberal Party in 1905 which organised two unsuccessful uprising against the Diaz dictatorship in 1906 and 1908. Through his paper Tierra y Libertad (“Land and Liberty”) he influenced the developing labour movement as well as Zapata’s peasant army. He continually stressed the need to turn the revolution into a social revolution which will “give the lands to the people” as well as “possession of the factories, mines, etc.” Only this would ensure that the people “will not be deceived.” Talking of the Agrarians (the Zapatista army), Ricardo’s brother Enrique he notes that they “are more or less inclined towards anarchism” and they can work together because both are “direct actionists” and “they act perfectly revolutionary. They go after the rich, the authorities and the priestcraft” and have “burnt to ashes private property deeds as well as all official records” as well as having “thrown down the fences that marked private properties.” Thus the anarchists “propagate our principles” while the Zapatista’s “put them into practice.” [quoted by David Poole, Land and Liberty, p. 17 and p. 25] Ricardo died as a political prisoner in an American jail and is, ironically, considered a hero of the revolution by the Mexican state. A substantial collection of his writings are available in the book Dreams of Freedom (which includes an impressive biographical essay which discusses his influence as well as placing his work in historical context).

Italy, with its strong and dynamic anarchist movement, has produced some of the best anarchist writers. Errico Malatesta spent over 50 years fighting for anarchism across the world and his writings are amongst the best in anarchist theory. For those interested in his practical and inspiring ideas then his short pamphlet Anarchy cannot be beaten. Collections of his articles can be found in The Anarchist Revolution and Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, both edited by Vernon Richards. A favourite writing technique was the use of dialogues, such as At the Cafe: Conversations on Anarchism. These, using the conversations he had with non-anarchists as their basis, explained anarchist ideas in a clear and down to Earth manner. Another dialogue, Fra Contadini: A Dialogue on Anarchy, was translated into many languages, with 100,000 copies printed in Italy in 1920 when the revolution Malatesta had fought for all his life looked likely. At this time Malatesta edited Umanita Nova (the first Italian daily anarchist paper, it soon gained a circulation of 50 000) as well as writing the programme for the Unione Anarchica Italiana, a national anarchist organisation of some 20 000. For his activities during the factory occupations he was arrested at the age of 67 along with 80 other anarchists activists. Other Italian anarchists of note include Malatesta’s friend Luigi Fabbri (sadly little of his work has been translated into English bar Bourgeois Influences on Anarchism and Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism) Luigi Galleani produced a very powerful anti-organisational anarchist-communism which proclaimed (in The End of Anarchism?) that “Communism is simply the economic foundation by which the individual has the opportunity to regulate himself and carry out his functions.” Camillo Berneri, before being murdered by the Communists during the Spanish Revolution, continued the fine tradition of critical, practical anarchism associated with Italian anarchism. His study of Kropotkin’s federalist ideas is a classic (Peter Kropotkin: His Federalist Ideas). His daughter Marie-Louise Berneri, before her tragic early death, contributed to the British anarchist press (see her Neither East Nor West: Selected Writings 1939–48 and Journey Through Utopia).

In Japan, Hatta Shuzo developed Kropotkin’s communist-anarchism in new directions between the world wars. Called “true anarchism,” he created an anarchism which was a concrete alternative to the mainly peasant country he and thousands of his comrades were active in. While rejecting certain aspects of syndicalism, they organised workers into unions as well as working with the peasantry for the “foundation stones on which to build the new society that we long for are none other than the awakening of the tenant farmers” who “account for a majority of the population.” Their new society was based on decentralised communes which combined industry and agriculture for, as one of Hatta’s comrade’s put it, “the village will cease to be a mere communist agricultural village and become a co-operative society which is a fusion of agriculture and industry.” Hatta rejected the idea that they sought to go back to an ideal past, stating that the anarchists were “completely opposite to the medievalists. We seek to use machines as means of production and, indeed, hope for the invention of yet more ingenious machines.” [quoted by John Crump, Hatta Shuzo and Pure Anarchism in Interwar Japan, p. 122–3, and p. 144]

As far as individualist anarchism goes, the undoubted “pope” was Benjamin Tucker. Tucker, in his Instead of Book, used his intellect and wit to attack all who he considered enemies of freedom (mostly capitalists, but also a few social anarchists as well! For example, Tucker excommunicated Kropotkin and the other communist-anarchists from anarchism. Kropotkin did not return the favour). Tucker built on the such notable thinkers as Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner, Stephen Pearl Andrews and William B. Greene, adapting Proudhon’s mutualism to the conditions of pre-capitalist America (see Rudolf Rocker’s Pioneers of American Freedom for details). Defending the worker, artisan and small-scale farmer from a state intent on building capitalism by means of state intervention, Tucker argued that capitalist exploitation would be abolished by creating a totally free non-capitalist market in which the four state monopolies used to create capitalism would be struck down by means of mutual banking and “occupancy and use” land and resource rights. Placing himself firmly in the socialist camp, he recognised (like Proudhon) that all non-labour income was theft and so opposed profit, rent and interest. he translated Proudhon’s What is Property and System of Economical Contradictions as well as Bakunin’s God and the State. Tucker’s compatriot, Joseph Labadie was an active trade unionist as well as contributor to Tucker’s paper Liberty. His son, Lawrence Labadie carried the individualist-anarchist torch after Tucker’s death, believing that “that freedom in every walk of life is the greatest possible means of elevating the human race to happier conditions.”

Undoubtedly the Russian Leo Tolstoy is the most famous writer associated with religious anarchism and has had the greatest impact in spreading the spiritual and pacifistic ideas associated with that tendency. Influencing such notable people as Gandhi and the Catholic Worker Group around Dorothy Day, Tolstoy presented a radical interpretation of Christianity which stressed individual responsibility and freedom above the mindless authoritarianism and hierarchy which marks so much of mainstream Christianity. Tolstoy’s works, like those of that other radical libertarian Christian William Blake, have inspired many Christians towards a libertarian vision of Jesus’ message which has been hidden by the mainstream churches. Thus Christian Anarchism maintains, along with Tolstoy, that “Christianity in its true sense puts an end to government” (see, for example, Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is within you and Peter Marshall’s William Blake: Visionary Anarchist).

More recently, Noam Chomsky (in such works as Deterring Democracy, Necessary Illusions, World Orders, Old and New, Rogue States, Hegemony or Survival and many others) and Murray Bookchin (Post-Scarcity Anarchism, The Ecology of Freedom, Towards an Ecological Society, and Remaking Society, among others) have kept the social anarchist movement at the front of political theory and analysis. Bookchin’s work has placed anarchism at the centre of green thought and has been a constant threat to those wishing to mystify or corrupt the movement to create an ecological society. The Murray Bookchin Reader contains a representative selection of his writings. Sadly, a few years before his death Bookchin distanced himself from the anarchism he spent nearly four decades advocating (although he remained a libertarian socialist to the end). Chomsky’s well documented critiques of U.S. imperialism and how the media operates are his most famous works, but he has also written extensively about the anarchist tradition and its ideas, most famously in his essays “Notes on Anarchism” (in For Reasons of State) and his defence of the anarchist social revolution against bourgeois historians in “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” (in American Power and the New Mandarins). These and others of his more explicitly anarchist essays and interviews can be found in the collection Chomsky on Anarchism. Other good sources for his anarchist ideas are Radical Priorities, Language and Politics and the pamphlet Government in the Future. Both Understanding Power and The Chomsky Reader are excellent introductions to his thought.

Britain has also seen an important series of anarchist thinkers. Hebert Read (probably the only anarchist to ever accept a knighthood!) wrote several works on anarchist philosophy and theory (see his Anarchy and Order compilation of essays). His anarchism flowered directly from his aesthetic concerns and he was a committed pacifist. As well as giving fresh insight and expression to the tradition themes of anarchism, he contributed regularly to the anarchist press (see the collection of articles A One-Man Manifesto and other writings from Freedom Press). Another pacifist anarchist was Alex Comfort. As well as writing the Joy of Sex, Comfort was an active pacifist and anarchist. He wrote particularly on pacifism, psychiatry and sexual politics from a libertarian perspective. His most famous anarchist book was Authority and Delinquency and a collection of his anarchist pamphlets and articles was published under the title Writings against Power and Death.

However, the most famous and influential British anarchist must be Colin Ward. He became an anarchist when stationed in Glasgow during the Second World War and came across the local anarchist group there. Once an anarchist, he has contributed to the anarchist press extensively. As well as being an editor of Freedom, he also edited the influential monthly magazine Anarchy during the 1960s (a selection of articles picked by Ward can be found in the book A Decade of Anarchy). However, his most famous single book is Anarchy in Action where he has updated Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid by uncovering and documenting the anarchistic nature of everyday life even within capitalism. His extensive writing on housing has emphasised the importance of collective self-help and social management of housing against the twin evils of privatisation and nationalisation (see, for example, his books Talking Houses and Housing: An Anarchist Approach). He has cast an anarchist eye on numerous other issues, including water use (Reflected in Water: A Crisis of Social Responsibility), transport (Freedom to go: after the motor age) and the welfare state (Social Policy: an anarchist response). His Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction is a good starting point for discovering anarchism and his particular perspective on it while Talking Anarchy provides an excellent overview of both his ideas and life. Lastly we must mention both Albert Meltzer and Nicolas Walter, both of whom contributed extensively to the anarchist press as well as writing two well known short introductions to anarchism (Anarchism: Arguments for and against and About Anarchism, respectively).

We could go on; there are many more writers we could mention. But besides these, there are the thousands of “ordinary” anarchist militants who have never written books but whose common sense and activism have encouraged the spirit of revolt within society and helped build the new world in the shell of the old. As Kropotkin put it, “anarchism was born among the people; and it will continue to be full of life and creative power only as long as it remains a thing of the people.” [Anarchism, p. 146]

So we hope that this concentration on anarchist thinkers should not be taken to mean that there is some sort of division between activists and intellectuals in the movement. Far from it. Few anarchists are purely thinkers or activists. They are usually both. Kropotkin, for example, was jailed for his activism, as was Malatesta and Goldman. Makhno, most famous as an active participate in the Russian Revolution, also contributed theoretical articles to the anarchist press during and after it. The same can be said of Louise Michel, whose militant activities during the Paris Commune and in building the anarchist movement in France after it did not preclude her writing articles for the libertarian press. We are simply indicating key anarchists thinkers so that those interested can read about their ideas directly.

[pyraffin-drgo]

My ideas for Inside Out 3!

You know they're gonna milk this cash cow

IDEA 1/3(4?)

Maybe Riley is in the place of the team leader now like the one she looked up to in the 2nd, and having to deal with potential new recruits that are now in the place she used to be in.

One of them is better (while being younger) than her so Envy and Anger has a lot to do! A relatable internal struggle to play out.

Riley overcoming this would be an act of maturing emotionally. Maybe there's also learning the responsibility of being/behaving like someone young ones look up to (since she doesn't have siblings OH GOD WHAT IF THEY GO THE EASY WAY AND JUST ADD A NEW BABY TO THE MIX BOSS BABY STYLE I SWEAR TO GOD-

Ignoring that.

There's also the possibility of her having to uphold her (now) long distance friendships which was kind of glanced over in the first movie. Imagine balancing the two separate friend groups. One you have to manually schedule hangout times outside of school with, the other just happens naturally from being classmates/teammates.

How ARE her old childhood friends doing? They kinda just drift apart because they split so young and long distance ain't something 9-11 kids really do? Ngl forgot her age

IDEA 2

A larger timeskip. She's now worrying about going into high-school, as all the middleschool teachers say it will be 10x harder, no-nonsense, no leniency, college level expectations and basiclaly adulthood. (As I remember them expressing to my class :/) And kids around her talk about horror stories their older siblings tell them about freshmen hunt or whatever fake hazing humors people spread.

The general vibe the world puts on going into high-school is awful and a lot to deal with emotionally. But when she gets there, she realises it's way chiller than middle school. But they DO start hounding her about her future and picking out a college already, as if a 9th grader could make a good choice to hold on to forever, when she's doesn't even know how it works yet. I hated feeling this pressure when my biggest previous concern was my Minecraft diamonds being stolen in my single player world.

As for plot, other than suffering from expecting to be hazed by kids bigger than you until 2nd semester where it finally clicks that no one cares, maybe this one's plot is more focused on the emotions' adventure. Idk what that would be sorry-

But I know the outcome will be! It will be Riley learning to make room for ALL her emotions- meaning the new guys get their own mf beds now. No more sleeping on chairs. She LITERALLY makes room for them, learning to compartmentalize them and give them their own proper space equally. This is also part of the headquarters expansion finally being done by the puberty construction crew, Riley to the point growth spurts slow down so a lot of the work is done. I haven't gotten taller since 9th grade RIP

This can be paired with the jealousy of a new recruit route!

IDEA 3

Graduating high-school???? I really don't expect them to do this big of a skip, but it's also a very emotionally, mentally wild time. Prepping for college and the like. More friendship and family upkeep, learning to live on your own in a dorm, maturing as a person and into a functional adult. The possibilities for such a big skip are endless!

IDEA 4

The one everyone has already guessed/wants/expects. A crush is introduced! Shenanigans ensue. Maybe pair this with the Entering High-school idea for a double whammy. Add the new recruit story for a TRIPLE whammy.

BONUS

I really hope they don't give her a new sibling like cmon the baby route is too easy. For some reason babies are really marketable to kids and, while becoming an older sibling is a lot to deal with emotionally, I'd think Riley's too old to have too much of a problem with it..? Like, her family island is already smaller and she's distant on it. A new sibling would be a lot more impactful if she was still attached to her parents and the baby feels like a rift between them and their care for her. But as a preteen she'd already want more space to herself. Her biggest concern is her friend group.

If they go Boss Baby on this shit I swear-

Cursed idea:

D i v o r c e

[thatstormygeek]

An optimist doesn't have to prove that things will go well — a skeptic must, in knowing that they are in the minority, be willing to do the hard work of pulling together distinct pieces of information in something called an "analysis." A skeptic cannot simply say "I talked to some people," because skeptics are "haters," and thus must be held to some higher standard for whatever reason.

The ramifications of a tech industry that has become captured by growth are that true innovation is being smothered by people that neither experience nor know how (or want) to fix real problems, and that the products we use every day are being made worse for a profit. These incentives have destroyed value-creation in venture capital and Silicon Valley at large, lionizing those who are able to show great growth metrics rather than creating meaningful products that help human beings. The ramifications of the end of hyper-growth mean a massive reckoning for the valuations of tech companies, which will lead to tens of thousands of layoffs and a prolonged depression in Silicon Valley, the likes of which we've never seen. The ramifications of the collapse of generative AI are much, much worse. On top of the fact that the largest tech companies have burned hundreds of billions of dollars to propagate software that doesn't really do anything that resembles what we think artificial intelligence looks like, we're now seeing that every major tech company (and an alarming amount of non-tech companies!) is willing to follow whatever it is that the market agrees is popular, even if the idea itself is flawed. Generative AI has laid bare exactly how little the markets think about ideas, and how willing the powerful are to try and shove something unprofitable, unsustainable and questionably-useful down people's throats as a means of promoting growth. It's also been an alarming demonstration of how captured some members of the media have become, and how willing people like Roose and Newton are to defend other people's ideas rather than coming up with their own.

Engaging with this kind of thinking is far from comfortable, because what I am describing is one of the largest abdications of responsibility by financial institutions and members of the media in history. OpenAI and Anthropic are abominations of capitalism, bleeding wounds that burn billions of dollars with no end in sight for measly returns on selling software that lacks any real mass market use case. Their existence is proof that Silicon Valley is capable of creating its own illogical realities and selling them to corporate investors that have lost any meaningful way to evaluate businesses, drunk off of vibes and success stories from 15 or more years ago. What we are witnessing is a systemic failure, not the beginnings of a revolution. Large Language Models have never been a mass market product — other than ChatGPT, generative AI products are barely a blip on the radar — and outside of NVIDIA (and consultancy Turing), there doesn't appear to be one profitable enterprise in the industry, nor is there any sign any of these companies will ever stop burning money. The leaders behind the funding, functionality, and media coverage of the tech industry have abdicated their authority so severely that the consensus is that it's fine that OpenAI burns $5 billion a year, and it's also fine that OpenAI, or Anthropic, or really any other generative AI company has no path to profitability. Furthermore, it's fine that these companies are destroying our power grid and our planet, and it's also fine that they stole from millions of creatives while simultaneously undercutting those creatives in an already-precarious job market.