nutricaniinc

[the-vampire-squid-from-hell]

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[avaisdramatic]

Putting this comment on here because I feel like I’m actually going insane…

It seems like nobody in the comments even watched the video, complaining about how paying for content is difficult in this economy, like, that's why they are doing this! They cannot continue to make the content they want for free based on ads and sponsors alone. If you have paid attention to the "Making Watcher"s of recent years, their company is not, and has not been profitable. They are so dependent on advertisers for funding that it is becoming a restriction to the content they want to make (y'a know, like Buzzfeed was), so they had to find a solution. I don't know why you all seem to think you are entitled to free content, I understand not everyone can afford it but Watcher doesn't owe you content personally. Frankly, I doubt they wanted to put their content behind a paywall, but if it's that or not make content at all, of course they are going to try to find a solution. So no, they aren't "turning into Buzzfeed” because the massive problem with Buzzfeed was its restrictions on creative freedom and exploitation of its workers. If Watcher wants to produce fulfilling content that gives their editors, designers, producers, etc full creative freedom and a livable wage, this is the best option. If you want them to pay their workers the bare minimum and tailor their content to advertiser interests just so you can watch it for free, that's fine. Just don't pretend that they are some evil media mega-corporation and you are the anti-capitalist shining hero for saying it. You don't have to like it, and you don't have to continue to support them, but don't try to shame and demonize them for making an already difficult decision.

Many of you DO have an understanding of the difficult position our current economic system puts people in because you have experienced it, but you are so unable to extend that understanding beyond your own point of view. Look past yourself for a moment and think critically, and maybe you will understand their perspective. Much love for all of the talented people within Watcher who are doing their best.

And just to add, their format going forward is almost IDENTICAL to CollegeHumor-Dropout's streaming service format (even down to the free premieres and advocating for sharing accounts with friends), which most people praise to high heaven as "the only ethical streaming service." As a huge fan of both companies the stark difference in response here is actually astounding...

[mahomadjicks]

Been seeing some posts about the Q and A the clash writing team did and man…

((WARNING: light rant below; mostly me rambling about worldbuilding aaaa))

I’m not fond of what the writing team wants to do, especially since it seems like they’re hyper-focusing on the kudos/street managers. It’s this section in particular that’s got me thinking and worried.

MAN does this phrase here have a lot of food for thought. Not just because of the horror fanfic i’m making, but now things clearly seem to be taking a large turn into the ‘Manager-focused plot’ I feared Clash would write themselves into.

Idk. The way i’m thinking about it, it��s a bit self destructive writing wise for suits to be in inherent ‘tiers’. (Grunt cogs have less personality/free will than managers, ete.)

If one of the goals is to show how COGs Inc exploits and mistreats their workers, isn’t it shooting yourself in the foot saying ‘COGs inc is a horrible company to ALL its workers’, but then turning to say ‘oh yeah, all those cogs aren’t as sentient compared to THESE ones’—

Like, in the case of ‘grunt’ cogs, wouldn’t these cogs be the ‘ground zero’ of the atrocities the company commits? Literally built for one purpose in life, in a cycle of being destroyed and rebuilt constantly without any say or agency. Being held under the thumb of a dubious company that in all technicality owns you, so you can’t really leave unless you’re fired?

If the grunt cogs were just as self preserving and sentient as the managers, then the message would be hammered in better. THEY’d be the ones constantly put under all the pressure for virtually nothing. Instead, the writing team has introduced the dilemma of ‘who is aware/deserving of company rights’.

If these (grunt) suits are inherently ‘lesser’ than their manager counterparts, then it changes the gravity of the situation from ‘discriminatory company practices’ to ‘changing a piece of machinery.’ No real loss, and its business as usual. The very problem i’d imagine the writing team wants to warn and help players to recognize in the story.

While not treated much better, it’s been shown/implied that manager cogs (specifically kudos/street and Litigation) get a lot more benefits and free time than anyone else besides bosses.

Removing personality/preservation from ‘grunt’ suits changes this element in the story from ‘They have higher positions, thus better work benefits,’ to ‘They get those benefits because they KNOW that they have them in the first place.’

In general, lot of the managers seem to have the luxury of being built without a specific company in mind, having childhoods, and ultimately CHOOSING to work at COGs Inc. Many seem to forget the whole reason the kudos/street managers were hired in the first place was in response to Atticus Wing’s death.

They weren’t randomly ‘dropped in’, and now the story needs to be changed to accommodate them. There already was an explicit reason, and it doesn’t seem to conflict with any manager lore after the fact. Why bend over backwards to force them into the story rewrites more?

I understand the managers are super popular, and have been a game changer in terms of story and gameplay, but I honestly feel they’re also blinding people in terms of prior lore and potential lore avenues. There’s no need to break the story/lore further to make the ‘special’ cogs even more ‘special’.

At the end of the day, I get the writing team wants to add more flavor, and I commend them for doing all this for free! Writing isn’t easy, and this isn’t me hating on them at all. I’m just not fond of this manager-centric mindset gripping people. I’m certainly looking forward to all the future content they wish to add, specifically rewrites in toon NPCS.

Anyway just had this in the back of my mind for a minute, feel free to throw in your two cents if ya like.

[edwad]

a few weeks ago i saw a video on twitter thats of some guy talking about how amazing it is that all these people make a pencil and then you can buy it etc. is this the type of stuff you/cordelia mean when youre talking about how some people actually take domination to be a great thing (not only consciously but as an actual articulated value, i mean)

i assume the video was friedman's "i, pencil" riff, which does get at some of those points (and which other socialists have responded to on similar terrain, doing the thing i talk about of merely describing the same processes but with different moralizations), but also at a more general level in the sense that the impersonal mechanisms of capitalism are seen as nondiscriminatory, which for liberal theorists is a major advance over the more direct forms of coercion found in pre-capitalist societies. the benefit here is that markets don't really care about your background, your money is as good as anyone else's, and there's a certain universalizing tendency which comes out of the formal equality which is baked into this logic.

this is echoed in the writings of plenty of classical liberal thinkers like walter e williams that argued segregation would've dissolved on its own if free market forces had been left to run their course, unhindered by racist laws upholding the forced separation of people. eventually, certain business owners would've put their profits before their potential racism, and other firms would've been forced to similarly accommodate in order to stay competitive. williams (who was black) actually criticized some of his friends at the time for spending their money in white businesses that they'd been previously barred from, because in their attempt to stick it to the shop owners that the day before had refused to service them, they were unintentionally enriching racists instead of giving their business to firms that would've taken their money all along, had it been legal and easy to do so. this particular problem (and its market solution) are sometimes dealt with in the context of things like the sears catalog during the jim crow era, which was a big talking point a few years ago as an instance of this market anonymity/impersonality delivering a certain form of economic fairness.

for a lot of marxists, this nondiscriminatory element isn't acknowledged for the merits of not caring about your background, but in some sense for not caring about you at all. everything is reduced to the merely economic. marx pretty famously says as much in the manifesto when he writes:

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."

this is also what's at stake in the formal equality of the worker in marx's capital, who, as a newly emerged legal subject with all the rights that entails, discovers their double freedom -- free to work or free to starve. and as he says there in v1, "between equal rights force decides".

what i think is significant here is that these aren't really two different accounts of how the system works. for people like smith and hayek, this impersonal mechanism (the invisible hand, etc) is understood as a kind of coercive force which pushes firms toward particular ends which are independent of the wills of any singular capitalist (and in fact express the whole of human economic activity in the aggregate) and which result in the universal generalization of particular principles throughout society, increasingly undermining lingering prejudices (eg smiths capitalist arguments against slavery). marx's analysis is pretty much identical (and this is the point), except in its normative angling. the totalizing character of capitalist production which recreates the world in its own bourgeois image and strives to constantly overcome its own self-imposed limits is similarly impersonal and indiscriminate, but this is presented as a problem to be overcome. hayek, even moreso than smith, recognizes this aspect of the price system which gets at the exact issue which marx is trying to highlight with his analysis of value.

both are aware of the historical uniqueness of the social formation and have no illusions about it via cliche appeals to "human nature" etc, and as i've mentioned above, its not really a difference in analysis, or even really in results (as cordelia has said, the strong form of the marxian complaint isn't that capitalism is doing something poorly, but that these are the effects when it is working well/asserting itself fully). so the point im making and have made repeatedly is that what's at stake here is a set of underlying normative commitments which marx and marxists have basically left unjustified. the usual claim is that marx was too scientific for that sort of thing, but i don't think that's really a possible reading (and if it is, it's not a good/internally defensible one).

if anything, the immanence of his analysis to the liberal theory which constitutes his object sets the limit on his ability to express himself fully, but it also provides the only adequate place to ground his normative account. his notion of contradiction is supposed to do a lot of the heavy lifting here, but to the extent that these contradictions are located in liberal theory itself, they *necessarily* don't go unaccounted for by liberals. he's not saying or demonstrating anything which hasn't also been posed as a liberal political problem. if you don't like crises, then very well, you can be a keynesian (maybe even a radical one). you don't think that works? well, your argument probably sounds a lot like hayek's. what is marx able to contribute here that isn't already understood as a careful balancing act -- if not a definite limit -- in liberal theory? the potential salvation of communism, which is supposed to overcome the problems (whatever they are taken to be) of capitalism, necessarily stems from some set of normative commitments that can't be written off. if his critique is tightly immanent, as it arguably was, then what marxists need to justify isn't really the account of the system (you don't even have to be a marxist for that!) but the case for its abolition.

if your problem with it is "domination", you need to be able to demonstrate what's wrong with the mechanisms that word is intended to describe, and it can't just be that they're impersonal or coercive. liberals feel the same way about these things and all of us experience gravity that way. you have to be able to say something more than that, but contemporary marxist accounts tend to only go as far as calling it "domination" and getting away with it because the marxists nod along, knowing that domination is naughty, otherwise why would we call it domination?

so, although cordelia can surely speak for herself, this is part of the project that i think she and i have sorta been picking away at in different ways for a while, with me catching on a bit later (maybe too late tbh). when i expressed my frustrations on this point, directed at chambers, i was in some sense admitting that she'd won me over on this style (if not the specific line) of questioning.

all of this aside, this is of course not a defense of liberalism in the liberal sense, but it is a kind of "defense" of liberalism as a project which has to be taken seriously and can't be written off or dreamed away. in this sense, i am merely following in marx's footsteps, who i think felt very strongly about the need to grapple with liberalism on exactly this kind of terrain, but i am turning the ruthless criticism on the ruthless critic, because i don't think he or his contemporary disciples in the value-as-domination literature have done a good job of navigating this problem. probably though, like nearly everyone else, i'm simply left waiting for cordelia's book.

[theresattrpgforthat]

Hello! Do you have any suggestions for ttrpg that are like Control (video game)? I enjoy number crunching, and playbooks are a plus :D

THEME: Games inspired by CONTROL

Hello! I’m going to first reference to you one of the first posts I ever made, about Paranormal Agents. If you like playbooks, you’ll probably want to take a look at Against the Dark Conspiracy, but don’t sleep on External Containment Bureau! Not much of what’s in that post is big on math, but I don’t want to leave out any possible options. Now, on to some more recommendations.

In Case of An Emergency, by boyproblems.

You work at foundation., a global corporation known for its cutting edge inventions and morally dubious treatment of its labour force. It stays at the top of its field by exploiting the paranormal and the metaphysical. Due to an "incident", you are now trapped inside. The glitch causes you and a group of your co-workers to be tasked by a group known as THE SHAREHOLDERS to fix what has broken, and solve THE EMERGENCY.

The Head Office is an ever-shifting office complex that threatens to trap your intrepid group within its labyrinthine walls. Fable and superstition come alive and threaten your very life. Gain new abilities (ABSTRACTIONS) through exposure to the powers that lie beyond, investigate the truth behind foundation., traverse a place where new science is discovered daily, and cut through bureaucratic and literal binding red tape to escape and survive.

This is a one-shot game, but that doesn’t mean that your character can’t gain new powers throughout the course of play. In Case of Emergency is directly inspired by CONTROL, so theme-wise we’re definitely in the right territory. It doesn’t look like it has playbooks though, which is a bummer - in almost every other aspect I think it’s what you’re looking for!

Agents of the O.D.D., by Jason Tocci.

Agents of the O.D.D. is a tabletop roleplaying game of conscripted cryptids, shaky psychics, burned spies, and other investigators of the paranormal. Based on the rules from Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland, and inspired by series like Hellboy, Planetary, and The Laundry Files.

Agents of the O.D.D. doesn’t necessarily have playbooks, but it does have player archetypes. During character creation, you roll a d100 and take the result from a hefty list of archetypes. These will give you one or more special moves, companions, and/or pieces of equipment. And equipment is a really big thing in this game - there’a at least 6 pages in this 24-page game dedicated to equipment alone. This might be because Agents of the O.D.D. is built off of Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland, which are both minimalist and focus on dungeon-delving.

Now that I think of it, exploring a place that is abnormal and haunted is likely very similar to engaging in a dungeon-crawl, so expect a game like this to point you to your inventory when it comes to solving problems - like talking to extraterrestrials, or fighting against hostile cryptids. You’re also going to be tracking your gear, so if you like inventory-keeping this game is for you.

Making Change, by Beth and Angel Make Games.

Researchers at The Observatory study all sorts of objects that seem ordinary but are gifted with a special power. One of these objects is a coin. However, when the senior researcher went to start testing it, it… convinced them to "liberate" it. Surveillance shows the researcher was speaking to something or someone —presumably, the coin— and the researcher quickly went from arguing to utterly submitting to the coin.

This is an adventure made for the CoinSides Jam of 2023, which had the stipulation that the adventure have a coin as a central theme. This adventure invokes the coin with some kind of intelligence, as it has the ability to affect the desires and emotions of people around it. Because the adventure is system-agnostic, it’s meant to work with a number of different systems, but I would recommend using games that are good for detective stories or modern horror, or even something like External Containment Bureau.

You Can Check Out Anytime You Like, But You Can Never Leave, by Marn S.

You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave is a game for 3+ people, and a surreal horror-flavored hack of Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands by Meguey & Vincent Baker. It is also a loving homage to The Shining, NanQuest, and the songs of the 70s and 80. 

Play as a Guest, Staff member, or living Anomaly at the Hotel California, the first and only hotel to exist outside of time and space! Create messy entanglements — ally with monsters, or backstab your friends! Inject the surreal and horrific into everyday life! Solve mysteries! Have strange dreams! Chase someone with a knife! Burn it all to the ground!

The setting for this game takes place in a hotel rather than The Oldest House (or something like it) but what makes it interesting is that it’s a hack of Firebrands. This means that rather than following an adventure seed like a traditional RPG, you’ll be setting up and playing through various scenes in the form of mini-games. The creator has also published Such A Lovely Place, a supplement with five extra mini-games to incorporate into your eerie stay at Hotel California. There might be math here but if there is it’s probably only in a mini-game or two.

FIST, by CLAYMORE.

FIST: Ultra Edition is a tabletop roleplaying game about paranormal mercenaries doing the tough jobs no one else can. In the game, you belong to a legendary rogue mercenary unit called FIST. You are a soldier of fortune who doesn’t fit into modern society. You are a disposable gun for hire, caught up in the death and destruction of pointless proxy wars and oppressive establishments. You may also be someone who can turn into a ghost or control bees with your mind. 

FIST focuses on action and combat, but specifically against the paranormal. You aren’t regular soldiers, not by a long-shot. The time period is during the Cold War: there are tensions that will affect your missions outside of simply what you’re hunting. The combat is meant to be brutal, the missions highly tactical, and the character builds are modular (so there might be some number crunching). No playbooks here, I’m afraid, but if you want the gritty action that keeps you on your toes in CONTROL, you might want to check out FIST, especially since it’s on Kickstarter right now! (Ending soon!)

THE COMPANY, by Mega_Corp.

The Company is a survival horror game centered around corporate emergency response teams and the aftermath of the situations they are assigned to deal with. Players take on the roles of Employees assigned to response teams that quickly find themselves in over their heads with one player facilitating play as the Game Manager.

Now this looks like a game with playbooks. At the beginning, your character chooses one of five Careers, each of which come with special Perks, pre-selected skills, a personal item random table, and some jobs and goals to focus your character. The game itself ins’t terribly long, but there’s enough lore to establish how the game borrows from CONTROL without copying it completely, and the designers have crated an Employee Handbook for players as well as a Management Manual for GM’s. You get both when you pick up this game on Itch. There’s definitely a lot of pieces to keep track in this one - I don’t know if that translates to number crunching but it might get you close!

[drumlincountry]

how about some old style blogging

feeling blown about by the winds of history recently. might be the election. Some of it is Palestine.

The evil empire in which we all live is particularly obviously evil and particularly obviously an empire at times like this. I'm thinking a lot about how the Irish became white, how we are both colonised people and now neo-colonisers.

Last night my mother showed me a small paperback book which belonged to my great-grandfather & I was reminded again that my grandfather's great-grandfather (I think?) landed in our area from probably-galway and the family managed to hold onto speaking irish for A CENTURY until my granddad married an english woman & decided it was rude to teach their children a language she didn't know. I love my granny, but come oooooooon.

& you know my mother did become fluent in adulthood and did her best to pass that on but. you know. failed. Love to have my tongue cut out.

The book was Tóraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne, and my great-grandfather had annotated it with loads of little pencil notes. That generation is gone & i can barely understand their language. The generation after it is gone except for my great-aunt who lives in Texas. There's a lot I will never know.

I've been thinking a lot about the image of sustainability vs the reality of sustainability. Greenwashing, etc. A lot of people think 'traditional ways' are greener. some of them are. A lot of people think modern high tech solutions are greener. Some of them are. the reality is that we are based in 2024 & no other generation has had to face the crisis we're facing & trying to lift solutions wholesale from any other time will be. ineffective.

So yeah. Image vs reality. sometimes the difference is hard to spot. A solid fuel stove burning wood which is locally grown (using native species, in an area suitable for woodland) & coppiced on a sensible rotation = VERY SUSTAINABLE. A solid fuel stove burning most firewood you can buy = I HAVE MY DOUBTS. A solid fuel stove burning turf = I'M SORRY BUT THIS IS SO SO BAD.

Empires are bad for the environment. This is so basic it feels like it shouldn't have to be said. Empires are bad for the environment!

Irish people only really started burning peat at scale in the 17thc I believe? because colonisation had denuded the landscape of its ancient forests. That great big british navy you know. Those ships had irish bones, among others. My point being: poor people have to make environmentally destructive choices to fucking survive.

The ecological footprint of my lifestyle is largely invisible to me as a citizen of the global north. I don't see the exploitative mining practices, farming practices, manufacturing practices. This is part of the evil of empire. The decision making is concentrated in the imperial core & the imperial core does not give a flying fuck about the ecology of the colonies.

Eating locally sourced food doesn't have much impact on ur carbon footprint btw, but it gives u more transparency.

The artist who designed jamie's engagement ring for me only uses Irish silver in her work, because she knows that 1. Ireland is bound by EU environmental regulations 2. Ireland has SOME level of worker protections 3. If a massive scandalous breach of these standards occured in a silver mine in Ireland, she'd hear about it somehow.

This is part of why I have this quiet worry that my work will betray me. For those who don't know: my job is about paying farmers to be good to the environment.

A few problems with this. 1. commodifying the environment is a dangerous game. if you STOP paying someone to be good the environment they're more likely to stop being good to the environment than they would be if you never paid them in the first place. Think like - paying people to donate blood. the rate of donations actually goes down. 2. if we're going to pay people around here to de-intensify agriculture & we all end up eating food produced in exploitative conditions at the imperial fringe. Well that would fucking suck! 3. the whole idea of the work rests on the idea that people who own big chunks of THE LAND have the right to do whatever they want to THE LAND & the rest of the community (& the state claiming to represent them) can only nudge these land "owners" to do things for the common good. bit too fucking libertarian for my taste. Whatever our paperwork may say, you can't own mud. mud owns itself!!

4. the conservative libertarianism baked into this system isn't a side issue. the fact that land is mostly passed down thru male lines, the association between the farm and the patriarchal family all leads to .....bad fucking politics! lotta queerphobia, misogyny, racism, climate change denial. I see this all the time with the people i work with and it is heartbreaking. If we manage to reverse some ecological destruction without in any way undoing the power systems that birthed it. uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh. We'll have done some good. but I'll be unsatisfied.

Yes you can quote me on that. I will not be satisfied unless my little job teaching people about wildflowers and hedgerows topples the empire of the global north.

Will they betray me? They're already betraying me all the fucking time. Today at work my coworker told me he thinks a local fascist 'had a point about immigrants'.

I betray me too! Not that way, but I'm a tool of empire. I'm dangling money in front of ppl without much of it, enticing them to do what the EU & the state wants them to do.

Today for work reasons I stood in a field and articulately defended the need for farming to continue in Ireland b/c of the benefits it can provide for climate change mitigation and ecosystem maintainence AND the value of our heritage and our traditional attachment to the land. Two people asked to exchange numbers at the end because they want to hear more. I agree with what I said, but it wasn't even half, a quarter of the picture.

The root of the problem is: we have become white. We have become colonists. The Common Agricultural Policy of the EU drives what happens with farming on Many continents & only one of those continents gets to vote on it. If we continue to exploit Africa, South America & Asia for our food, we are like the British cutting down the Irish forests for their ships. The root of the problem is: none of us are free until we're all free.

Last night I held my great-grandfather's book in my hands and remembered that I am living a life beyond his wildest dreams. I have a bright & warm home. Clean running water. Electricity. Cupboards full of food & I don't have to break my back toiling in the fields. I studied in a university. I've travelled farther than he could possibly have imagined.

But if all that comes at the cost of oppressing people the way he was oppressed? I don't want it.

Of course I want it. Everyone wants ease and comfort. I just want it without the cost. I need to not want the cost more than I want the ease. That's the only way to have a soul.

I have some knowledge of what life is like at the bottom of the heap. I am a strong believer in destroying the heap entirely.

I get so very annoyed when anyone refers to a two story house as a 'cottage'.

[sunset-synthetica]

Can you explain how the immortal science of marxism-leninism relates to Turbo Overkill

I don't believe TO is trying to have a huge deep political message, but some of it was intentional and the rest stems from its inspirations, ie Blade Runner, whose political messaging WAS intentionally a critique of capitalism and/or the more specific effects it has on our lives.

The backdrop is a late capitalist- using Mandel's definition- system where the largest and most powerful company's (Teratek's) capital is generated mostly, if not entirely, by selling increasingly more dangerous and experimental products to a consumer base spanning entire solar systems at the very least.

By looking at Johnny as a member of the exploited working class - albeit a class traitor, as he's a former cop* - a disabled person, unable to earn enough to save his life in any other way than by essentially selling himself to Teratek and gradually losing parts of his own body and surrenderong agency as this job becomes more and more demanding. We see a clear anti-capitalist sentiment built directly into the foundation of the game.

We can go further though.

SYN, in short summarized as a sentient, virus-esque AI, functions as an abstracted, personified representation of Teratek itself and its ultimate goals. SYN was supposed to enhance the process of human body augmentation, and, as Johnny's mother states, having been directly involved in the making of SYN, it should have been a way to help people, had Teratek not been the intended owner.

SYN goes rogue, and, instead of disobeying Teratek's policy, takes it further, either converting augmented people into a mind controlled force, or creating entirely new beings in the pursuit of human evolution. She seeks to force the human race to evolve, or be exterminated, which relates moreso to eugenics but is a vital part of her position in the story.

So, establishing SYN as both a manifestation of Teratek/the wider market as well as its relationship to the workers, and something of a next step in the evolutionary line of their thinking, her relationship with Johnny gets easier to pick apart.

Johnny is offered a choice that, while more obvious in its immediate effect, partially reflects the experience of the worker- debase himself, be stripped of choice, free will, identity, be exploited for the rest of his life to build a future he will not see or enjoy, sell his labor for the cost of staying alive - or die. It's not a choice, not really, it's an illusion.

He chooses to stay alive, of course, and though SYN is defeated at the end, it doesn't break him out of the loop. SYN is not the root of the problem, she is not the cause for Johnny's suffering and exploitation, she's the more extreme, almost caricature-like version of his struggle.

Johnny ends the story the same as he'd began, only the illusion of a choice in the matter is shattered.

The Street Cleaners

The Street Cleaners are a mercenary-like faction, essentially fulfilling the role of the police, though on a much less regulated, official level. We don't have a lot of information about them, but from what I've been able to gather, they are generally disliked by the Regulators- police force- and work outside the law to an unknown extent, without pretending otherwise, all while fulfilling the interests of corporations.

Within the Street Cleaners, everything goes if the money is good enough, which was the incentive for Johnny to join in the first place- do the dirty work, get paid, survive.

I wanna look at Maw specifically. He's all around an interesting character, but it really shines from this angle.

All of the Street Cleaners seem to enjoy their work, including Johnny, but Maw's relationship to it is particular, in that he doesn't see his colleague or fellow people as either competition or allies on the same level, but as inherently beneath him, not worthy of his consideration.

Maw criticizes the corporations, claims them to be untrustworthy and incapable of wielding power without abusing it, and yet his solution is not the collective seizing of the means of production- SYN's platform and all its available resources, including the augmentation process in this context- but rather the accumulation of all for himself.

He plans to change the system from within by establishing himself as in control, as its driving force, instead of seeing the system as inherently flawed and needing to be dismantled. No amount of gradual change could have changed SYN, or the system for the better, and so, Maw only speeds up a process that, under SYN, might have taken longer, but would have been inevitable regardless.

Maw loses control, loses his sense of reality and objectivity, of himself, and crumbles under the weight of this process, this power.

Were SYN the one in control during the time of Maw's rampage, the process may have been more gradual, less chaotic, but the ending would have been the same - a mass extinction event, countless deaths and destruction, regardless of whether the motive was a false hope for the evolution of the human race, or profit for the bourgeoisie/market, as represented mostly by Teratek's Executive.

In short, Maw allows himself to become absorbed by the system, accelerates its negative outcome, and upon being killed, just like SYN's own death, nothing changes. Both deaths slow the progress down somewhat, hide the obvious, but result in no meaningful change.

All of this, while a reach in some parts, is not contradicted by anything in the story of Turbo Overkill, rendering it an insane, but viable analysis.

My conclusion is that Marxism-Leninism couldn't have saved Johnny Turbo, but it could have eased his suffering and made him see his struggle as founded in a material reality outside his own control, and inherent to the very system he exists within.

-----------

*the situation of the Regulator force isn't exactly clear, but Paradise- Johnny's home, and the respective Regulator force of which he was a part of- is stated to have heavy criminal activity, which necessitated the Regulator presence, and may have inspired Johnny to join in the first place.

SYN, ironically enough, directly states that Johnny's presence in the Regulator force meant he "enforced [her] goals," until he was led astray by his injury. Said goals are specifically the elimination of the weak to make place for the strong, a genocide, but it's unclear if by "her", SYN describes herself as the sentient person possessing agency, or the purpose for which Teratek utilized her prior. If we assume the latter is true, it would mean the Regulators are simply a cleaner, more widely accepted version of the Street Cleaners, as I've already stated is my belief.

[racefortheironthrone]

So! I was planning on writing a Batman fan fic and had a question about the urban facing side I was wondering if you could help on. I suppose this can intersect with other super hero / billionaire figures. Interested in exploring urban development in the setting but trying to avoid pitfalls , but ofc no worries if this isn’t something in your purview or interest

I feel like Gotham, so deeply realized as a fictional setting and riddled with its issues as a city, would be a great template to explore these urbanist issues. And while Batman treats symptoms - protecting people from acts of violence, and also pursuing those who are responsible for the corrupt systems who have put themselves above conventional pursuit. But Bruce Wayne I feel like by a lot of fans can he overlooked as an agent of improvement in Gotham - he can use his political and economic clout to both publically and privately improve the systemic conditions of the city, like his famous hiring program for ex cons. And I would like to explore this side a lot deeper, however I’m wary of showing a billionaire as the only solution , or even the best solution to a city’s issues and basically recreating public policies privately.

Since showing a privatized solution to be the answer to all these problems isn’t the sentiment I want to give, as often private corporations are the ones exploiting / building up this cult of personality around millionaires is already troublesome. But ofc, Bruce Wayne is fictional and can be an example of how a CEO ought to act, but would like to show these solutions are achievable and to be sought after in the public sphere - we shouldn’t expect CEO to hire ex cons, build free transit, eliminate all these zoning issues by buying half the city because 1) unrealistic and 2) can institute a dangerous mindset where it’s like “just give everything to billionaires and they’ll fix things!” (See, the cult of musk)

So my question is, do you have any recomendations on how to achieve this balance of using Wayne as a championing workers rights, urban development , reform etc. without just shilling for billionaires? Because, after all, billionaires have been opponents and don’t want to diminish that. Perhaps using his influence to give away his infouence to others , if that makes sense. or even better - historical examples of figures of privilege utilizing their position to advocate for the public sector and go all in as earnest urban Allies as a roadmap to model this after?

This is a really interesting question, and I think points to some of the limitations of what can be done with the Bruce Wayne archetype.

As I've said before, I think what can be done to make Wayne an enlightened person without falling prey to the mentality that "the billionaires will save us!" (looking at you, RALPH) is to really explore the limitations of top-down reform.

Because if there is one genuine weaknesses both to the Batman and Bruce Wayne, it's that he has a well, "heroic" mindset in which he thinks that if he's just smart enough, prepared enough, tough enough, that he can win a one-man-war on crime and other social evils - but you don't really see him engaging in movement-building in either his vigilante or civilian sides.

In the former, even if we leave aside his more "lone wolf" depictions, Batman has issues with trust and working well in groups. At best, he cultivates a small number of people (the Robins, the JLA), and he tends to keep people at arm's length. In the latter, even when Bruce is trying to make systemic, social interventions in transportation or housing or health care or social welfare, it's usually done through a top-down approach - build this project here, support this politician there - rather than sitting down and doing an analysis of how he could build a sustainable majority coalition with the muscle to change Gotham on its own.

Realistically, an honest, militant, and strategic Waynetech union (albeit assisted from the shadows to keep the mob and the supervillain gangs at bay) could do more to change Gotham for good than any Foundation that has ever or could ever exist.

[feckcops]

Mental health diagnoses are capitalist constructs

“Mental and physical diagnoses aren’t objective facts that exist in nature, even though we usually think of them this way. While the experiences and phenomena that fall under different diagnostic categories are, of course, real, the way that we choose to categorise them is often influenced by systems of power. The difference between ‘health’ and ‘illness’, ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ is shaped by which kinds of bodies and minds are conducive to capitalism and the state. For example, the difference between ‘ordinary distress’ and ‘mental illness’ is often defined by its impact on your ability to work. The recent edition of the DSM, psychiatry’s comprehensive manual of ‘mental disorders’, mentions work almost 400 times – work is the central metric for diagnosis.

“When we look across history, it becomes even more obvious that diagnosis is tied to capitalist metrics of productivity: certain categories of illness have come in and out of existence as the conditions of production have changed. In the 19th century, the physician Samuel A. Cartwright proposed the diagnosis of ‘drapetomania’, which would describe enslaved Black people who fled from plantations. While we might think of drapetomania as a historical outlier among ‘true’ and ‘objective’ diagnoses, it is underpinned by the same logic as other diagnoses: it describes mental or physical attributes that make us less exploitable and profitable. In the 1920s, medical and psychological researchers became interested in a pathology called ‘accident-proneness’, which was applied to workers who were repeatedly injured in the brutal and dangerous factory conditions of the industrial revolution. Dyslexia, a diagnosis I have been given, also didn’t emerge until the market began to shift from manual labour towards jobs that relied on reading and writing, when all children were expected to be literate. Despite having problems with reading, I understand that in a world where reading and writing weren’t so central to our daily life, there would be no need to name my dyslexia, no need to diagnose it.

“As a system of state power, many of us rely on diagnosis to get the material things that we need to survive in the world. When illness or disability interferes with our ability to work, we often need a diagnosis to justify our lack of productivity – and for some, diagnosis is the necessary pathway to getting state benefits. If we want to get access to medication, treatment or other healing practices provided by the state, diagnosis is also the token that we need to get there. This is made all the more complicated by the fact that doctors have the power to dispense and withhold diagnoses, regardless of our personal desires. When it comes to psychiatric diagnosis, most of us know someone who has had to fight or wait for years for a diagnosis that would improve their quality of life – particularly in the realm of autism, ADHD and eating disorders. The internalised racism, sexism, classism or ableism of doctors often gets in the way of our ability to access the diagnoses that we want and need. Then there are those of us that are given diagnoses that we reject, a process that we also have no say in ...

“When we understand that psychiatric diagnoses are constructed, contested, and aren’t grounded in biological measures, the idea of ‘self-diagnosis’ starts to feel less dangerous or controversial. Self-diagnosis is grounded in the idea that, while the institution of medicine may hold useful technologies and expertise, we also hold valuable knowledge about our bodies and minds. I know many people who have found solace and respite in communities for various diagnoses, even if they don’t have an official diagnosis from a doctor. These spaces, which respect the wisdom offered by lived experience, can be valuable forums of knowledge-sharing and solidarity. Self-diagnosis also pushes against an oppressive diagnostic system that is so centred around notions of productivity.”

[the-path-to-redemption]

Hello, redeemed Adam AUs anon here! Thank you so much for your thoughtful response. Despite close friends telling me to watch FMA for years, I've never gotten around it so I didn't know about Scar. However it's obvious the writing is far superior, and I've watched Arslan Senki from the same author so I know we can trust her with antagonists.

You mentioned the authors having to acknowledge that the system is flawed in the first place, to which I nod eagerly! Except, the authors already acknowledged this!!!

In V4 E6, at the charity party, there's a businessman that's always forgotten, who mentions the real problem is society as a whole. Even worse, that the faunus were PROMISED JOBS by the SDC! So they were cruelly tricked! By the dialogue, Jacques says mining staff from Atlas and Mantle are paid the same, but the businessman points out that there's a significant economic disparity between the two. Obviously it was a good scene to portray and acknowledge the actual issue and how people of power in Atlas didn't care anyway. Good scene.

Except it was never brought up again!!!

I swear, every time you think CRWBY can't get worse, they prove you wrong. So you acknowledge society is at fault, Adam and Ilia's families were tricked into getting a job, and the SDC is very aware of the issue (including Weiss WHO WAS PRESENT), yet ADAM is at fault? Huh? Wha? HUH?!

I know V4 and V5 are known to be some of the worst volumes (dethroned by V8 and V9), but they had so much lore hidden in details that went forgotten two seconds later, they sometimes feel like a fever dream.

Thank you again for reading my ask and answering it! I read the response many times!

Long Post Ahead

You're welcome, anon! To be honest, having such a nice ask after so long was a refreshing surprise for me lol. I'm glad that my answer was satisfactory, and you really should get into FMA! (Based for reading Arslan Senki tho-).

I'm really impressed that you remembered that segment of V4, so I went back to rewatch it myself (in Japanese dub, I can only take Nora and Ruby's Eng voice for so long), and yeah! They DID acknowledged it! Which is why not having Weiss confronting the malpractice of her family's company in V7-8 was so frustrating! Not SHOWING MORE of the wealth disparity of Atlas and Mantle was so bad! We were stuck in a nothing arc where the only person making sense, Ironwood, was bastardized even though in the same episode in V4, he stood up for Weiss!

Ironwood understood that the system of Atlas was extremely flawed, and he ran himself ragged to make sure it gets reformed against an entire council who doesn't care! The guy who actually gave a fuck was made into a villain because the writers are incompetent, the child slave who was branded and disabled was killed off with NO ONE knowing about his abuse or even acknowledged after his death, and the two main characters (Weiss and Blake) fucks around in Atlas with people they do not like instead of at least going to a political rally to support a council candidate who wanted to do better for both human and Faunus!

Hell, Blake and Weiss never brought up the abuse that Faunus goes through in the SDC itself after V7C3, where all Weiss does was give Blake a luke warm apology about her family's sin. Hello?? DO SOMETHING THEN! ARRESTING YOUR SHITTY DAD WILL NOT CHANGE THE WAY FAUNUS WORKERS ARE TREATED, ALL YOU DID WAS CREATE A POWER VACUUM FOR PEOPLE WHO BACKED HIM UP TO TAKE CHARGE AND CONTINUE THE ABUSE!

The show can acknowledged the imbalance all it wants, if it doesn't take the fucking charge of challenging the system it's calling out with its characters, it means nothing. Adam and the Amitolas weren't the only ones tricked to work so that they can survive in a kingdom that hated them for existing, but our protagonists do nothing to prevent more like them from being exploited.

I also stated that the authors have to acknowledge this systematic abuse applies to fan creators. You can criticize Adam for his actions against innocents all you like, but the moral of the story is that he is still a victim and shouldn't be made into the scapegoat of anti-Faunus violence. Adam wasn't wrong to be angry or hateful, stop demonizing him for being rightfully bitter about being abused! Stop with the Perfect Victim shit, please!

V4-5 were bad because they had potential but the writers elected to be boring with them instead, at least those two had a point. V7-9 meant nothing, and that's why they're the worst of the show yet.

Thank you for your asks, anon!

[kyeterna]

I am starting to think that being a tourist visiting Greek islands is completely unethical.

In a similar way as buying fast fashion is unethical.

This problem is very prevalent in the islands which is why I am specifically talking about them and not tourism throughout the country (though in specific areas that are tourism heavy the problem still stands).

Very coincidentally, along with Greece's economic protections of the working class collapsing, the new lucrative industry of tourism arose, after the economic crisis. With labour laws becoming more lax to "help the economy" we've seen the rise of seasonal work. What's that you might ask. Young adults with no working experience working in tourist heavy areas in service at restaurants and cafés and what not. Sometimes for 12 hours a day if not more, no benefits, sometimes they don't even provide you with housing, barely any days off. I've had cousins and friends who worked the summer season, it is hell and dehumanising. Especially with how many tourists there just are. Just earlier this month there was a story about how a sea side cafe bar owner had his waiters serve their patrons *in the sea*. THE WAITERS HAD TO WALK INTO THE SEA WITH THE DRINKS TO SERVE THE CUSTOMERS WHO WERE SWIMMING. "But tourists give good tips" AND THAT FIXES THINGS???? YOU THINK THIS MAKES THINGS BETTER??

But it's not just worker exploitation. It's how tourism becomes hostile to the locals themselves. How tourism is actively destroying the local environment. A friend of mine who comes from an island talks about how because of AirBnB locals are outpriced out of their rented homes. How students are kicked out of their apartments as soon as May enters because that's when thr tourism season starts. We gotta rent those apartments to our lovely tourists! How in islands even as big as Crete, every summer the locals have no access to water because it is all used up by hotels and tourists. All greek islands have limited access to drinking water and this is made worse through tourism. But you see you can't have the tourists not use water in abundance! How over the years I have seen my local beach become commercialised. How the public umbrellas crumbled and were replaced by privately owned by a sea side cafe bar umbrellas and sunbeds, making it so you have to pay to have access to that beach. How tourists have no beach etiquette, which ends up littering the area. How businesses' desire to get more tourist customers leaves to natural landmarks just altered beyond recognition, local fauna driven out.

Our government has over relied on tourism to rebuild its economy. When covid happened this showed how vulnerable an economy is if it relies on tourism alone. It feels like even our government treats us more like a tourist attraction than an actual nation. Obviously the issue is capitalism. Some might say it's unregulated capitalism. Whatever. The whole tourism industry was set up so that its vulnerable workers cannot even organise nor fight back. They are only contracted to work 3-4 months a year after all.

If you ever decide to visit Greece for vacation, I don't know, maybe think about all this.

[clickbliss]

Loddlenaut: a cozy clean up that leaves the bigger questions behind

by Amr (@siegarettes)

Loddlenaut

Developers - Moon Lagoon

Publisher - Secret Mode

PC,

With a chill, and I daresay--cozy--atmosphere, Loddlenaut offers exactly the kind of laid back routine that’s easy to dip into for small moments of satisfaction. Taking the role of an ocean sanitation worker, there’s an immediate satisfaction to clearing the junk and gunk in the area, which builds towards the long term goal of creating a clear, inhabitable biome. Loddles, the native lifeform of the planet, provide a light pet raising element, not unlike Sonic Adventure’s Chao Gardens.

Alongside the cute, slightly aliased aesthetic, and some light survival game elements, Loddlenaut kept me plenty engaged and doesn’t overstay its welcome, with plenty smaller goals for those looking for more. Yet it's those same cozy elements, and the vague gestures toward an environmental message that Loddlenaut struggles to square away. 

Loddlenaut follows a familiar structure, starting you out with limited capabilities, clearing areas to reveal the next, and in the process gaining access to new materials and faster, more efficient abilities. Intentional or not, this turns the world into a “frontier”, where wildlife and environmental resources become stepping stones to greater control over the space.

Loddlenaut attempts to sidestep these issues by focusing on restoring an environment that was already previously inhabited, cleaning up the mess left by a careless corporation that exploited the planet’s resources. Materials are simply reclaimed from debris left behind, and it’s restoring the habitats of the plant and animal life that provides resources, not harvesting them. But it’s difficult to throw off the underlying motivations that drive its progression. 

Systems like fast travel emphasize this struggle, only allowing you to quickly travel between areas after you’ve cleared them, and consequently, reclaimed all their materials. The framing is slightly different, but functionally it feels no different to clearing all the objectives in an open world game. The feeling is exasperated in the late game, where the amount of trash increases, and the limited inventory pushes against your ability to make steady progress. The goal quickly became gathering materials to ease the tedium, and more than a few times I considered jettisoning trash back into the area instead of lugging it back to base, so I could clear more of an area before making a return trip. (Dropped trash doesn’t count against an area’s completion). I ultimately didn’t, but looking at the forums it seems that I wasn’t the only one with that idea. 

The story gestures towards larger environmental concerns, but never resolves. Your operator makes repeated comments about the massive damage done by the corporation that’s hired you for cleanup, but reassures you that it’s not your job to question your actions, only clean up after them. The delivery had me almost sure that there’d be a turn somewhere near the end, but Loddlenaut concludes with a simple “nature is healing”, creating an unintentional downer ending as I left knowing the underlying problem creating the pollution hadn’t been dealt with.

The team’s intentions seem more to imply that the work is not yet done, to avoid a simple easy solution, and inspire further action, but it leaves so many underlying assumptions unchallenged in an attempt for a feel good ending. I walked away feeling less like my character had made a meaningful contribution, but instead was doomed to be a janitor for the messes of a corporation who would continue to move to new worlds and leave the same problems behind. 

I ended up returning to Loddlenaut after the ending, wanting to clear up the areas that had become polluted again in my absence, and to check up and name the Loddles that I hadn’t had time for as I barrelled through the last areas. The little creatures remained cute as ever, but I couldn’t help notice the eerie stillness of the planet. Without the pollution cluttering up the landscape, it had the vibe of an aquarium. An isolated space to raise pets, with sunken structures to add visual variety. 

The thing is, as an aquarium, it’s easy to find joy in. At the end of the day I do love to feed and raise my pets, and clean the gunk out of their tank. Loddlenaut is just that, a playground for your pets that I enjoyed, that gestures at the bigger questions without any answers for them.

[sapphichymns]

I’ll admit, I’ve been thinking about Kerblam a lot due to the rise of AI and how it’s used as a gotcha about the politics of 13′s era being actually conservative and not ‘woke’. So basically, Kerblam is a really annoying fungi in the fandom wank.

Here’s the thing, I know what the problem with the episode. It’s the word System. System is only ever used to describe the AI. Never was used to describe the way Kerblam uses the capitalist system to operate in Kandoka. Of course, it wouldn’t really raise eyebrows for a script editor, it really isn’t contradicting anything that came before. But when the Doctor says:

DOCTOR: The systems aren't the problem. How people use and exploit the system, that's the problem. People like you.

It somehow automatically became about the capitalist system Kerblam operates on. If it had been:

DOCTOR: The AI isn’t the problem. How people use and exploit the AI, that's the problem. People like you.

the fandom wank about it wouldn’t have ever reached this level of political jerk off (I swear I didn’t want to reach this level of the metaphor but I did).

The episode is not about capitalism in space(!), it’s about automation anxiety. How Kerblam is using an AI to replace jobs from people to maximize profit and it does cause an issue to the people of Kandoka.

KIRA: I was terrible too, my first week. I'm amazed the System kept me on. But now I just take a deep breath at the beginning of every shift and tell myself, Kira Arlo, you can do this. Sometimes I almost believe myself. DOCTOR: What I don't understand is, why does Kerblam need people as a workforce? These are automated and repetitive tasks. Why not get the robots to do it? KIRA: Do you not watch the news? DOCTOR: We travel a lot. RYAN: A lot. KIRA: Kandokan labour laws. Ever since the People Power protests, companies have to make sure a minimum ten percent of the workforce are actual people, at all levels. Like the slogan says, real people need real jobs. Work gives us purpose, right?

The people of Kandoka were indeed holding Kerblam accountable for the push of automation, even the way the episode ends is a continuation of that.

SLADE: We're suspending all operations for a month, pending review and while the TeamMates are rebuilding Dispatch. JUDY: All our workers have been given two weeks' paid leave, free return shuttle transport. And I'm going to propose that Kerblam becomes a People-Led Company in future. Majority organics. People, I mean. We're always looking for good workers to join our management team. DOCTOR: Er, thanks. We're strictly freelance.

(Note: Charlie did not  care about the people who worked at Kerblam. He only cared about Kira and only because, it affected him directly.)

I understand Oxygen is more popular because the Doctor says capitalism sucks and it’s basically abolished by the end of it but not every story needs the Doctor to just show up and somehow solve a systematic issue. Some times, talking about the importance of fighting little by little to make things better is just as important. It’s a recurring theme in 13′s era.

I don’t even think Kerblam needs a medal for effort or its issue is somehow some big moral failure. It just happened. It’s common for this show (or many others) to have its moment where it trips on itself. It’s just the conversation around it is so fucking dumb.

[dailyanarchistposts]

France, 1968

This has undoubtedly been the greatest revolutionary upheaval in Western Europe since the days of the Paris Commune. Hundreds of thousands of students have fought pitched battles with the police. Nine million workers have been on strike. The red flag of revolt has flown over occupied factories, universities, building sites, shipyards, primary and secondary schools, pit heads, railway stations, department stores, docked transatlantic liners, theatres, hotels. The Paris Opera, the Folies Bergères and the building of the National Council for Scientific Research were taken over, as were the headquarters of the French Football Federation — whose aim was clearly perceived as being “to prevent ordinary footballers enjoying football’.

Virtually every layer of French society has been involved to some extent or other. Hundreds of thousands of people of all ages have discussed every aspect of life in packed-out, non-stop meetings in every available schoolroom and lecture hall, Boys of 14 have invaded a primary school for girls shouting “Liberté pour les filles”. Even such traditionally reactionary enclaves as the Faculties of Medicine and Law have been shaken from top to bottom, their hallowed procedures and institutions challenged and found wanting. Millions have taken a hand in making history. This is the stuff of revolution.

Under the influence of the revolutionary students, thousands began to query the whole principle of hierarchy. The students had questioned it where it seemed the most ‘natural’: in the realms of teaching and knowledge. They proclaimed that democratic self-management was possible — and to prove it began to practice it themselves. They denounced the monopoly of information and produced millions of leaflets to break it. They attacked some of the main pillars of contemporary ‘civilisation’: the barriers between manual workers and intellectuals; the consumer society, the ‘sanctity’ of the university and of other founts of capitalist culture and wisdom. Within a matter of days the tremendous creative potentialities of the people suddenly erupted. The boldest and most realistic ideas — and they are usually the same — were advocated, argued, applied. Language, rendered stale by decades of bureaucratic mumbo- jumbo, eviscerated by those who manipulate it for advertising purposes, suddenly reappeared as something new and fresh. People re-appropriated it in all its fullness. Magnificently apposite and poetic slogans emerged from the anonymous crowd, Children explained to their elders what the function of education should be. The educators were educated, Within a few days, young people of 20 attained a level of understanding and a political and tactical sense which many who had been in the revolutionary movement for 30 years or more were still sadly lacking.

The tumultuous development of the students struggle triggered off the first factory occupations. It transformed both the relation of forces in society and the image, in people’s minds of established leaders. It compelled the State to institutions and of established reveal both its oppressive nature and its fundamental incoherence. It exposed the utter emptiness of Government, Parliament, Administration — and of ALL the political parties. Unarmed students had forced the Establishment to drop its mask, to sweat with fear, to resort to the police club and to the gas grenade. Students finally compelled the bureaucratic leaderships of the ‘working class organisations to reveal themselves as the ultimate custodians of the established order.

But the revolutionary movement did still more. It fought its battles in Paris, not in some under-developed country, exploited by imperialism. In a glorious few weeks the actions of students and young workers dispelled the myth of the well-organised, well-oiled modern capitalist society, from which radical conflict had been eliminated and in which only marginal problems remained to be solved. Administrators who had been administering everything were suddenly shown to have had a grasp of nothing. Planners who had planned everything showed themselves incapable of ensuring the endorsement of their plans by those to whom they applied. This most modern movement should allow real revolutionaries to shed a number of the ideological encumbrances which in the past had hampered revolutionary activity. It wasn’t hunger which drove the students to revolt. There wasn’t an ‘economic crisis’ even in the loosest sense of the term. The revolt had nothing to do with ‘under-consumption’ or with ‘over-production’, The ‘falling rate of profit’ just didn’t come into the picture. Moreover, the student movement wasn’t based on economic demands. On the contrary, the movement only found its real stature, and only evoked its tremendous response, when it went beyond the economic demands within which official student unionism had for so long sought to contain it (incidentally with the blessing of all the political parties and ‘revolutionary’ groups of the ‘Left’). And conversely it was by confining the workers’ struggle to purely economic objectives that the trade union bureaucrats have so far succeeded in coming to the assistance of the regime.

The present movement has shown that the fundamental contradiction of modern bureaucratic capitalism isn’t the ‘anarchy of the market’. It isn’t the ‘contradiction between the forces of production and the property relations’. The central conflict to which all others are related is the conflict between order-givers (dirigeants) and order-takers (éxécutants). The insoluble contradiction which tears the guts out of modern capitalist society is the one which compels it to exclude people from the management of their own activities and Which at the same time compels it to solicit their participation, without which it would collapse. These tendencies find expression on the one hand in the attempt of the bureaucrats to convert men into objects (by violence, mystification, new manipulation techniques — or ‘economic’ carrots’ and, on the other hand, in mankind’s refusal to allow itself to be treated in this way.

The French events show clearly something that all revolutions have shown, but which apparently has again and again to be learned anew. There is no ‘inbuilt revolutionary perspective’, no ‘gradual increase of contradictions’, no ‘progressive development of a revolutionary mass consciousness’. What are given are the contradictions and the conflicts we have described and the fact that modern bureaucratic society more of less inevitably produces periodic ‘accidents’ which disrupt its fuctioning These both provoke popular intervention and provide the people with opportunities for asserting themselves and for changing the social order. The functioning of bureaucratic capitalism creates the conditions within which revolutionary consciousness may appear. These conditions are an integral part of the whole alienating hierarchical and oppressive social structure. Whenever people struggle, sooner or later they are compelled to question the whole of that social structure. These are ideas which many of us in Solidarity have long subscribed to. They were developed at length in some of Paul Cardan’s pamphlets. Writing in Le Monde (20 May 1968) E Morin admits that what is happening today in France is “a blinding resurrection: the resurrection of that libertarian strand which seeks concilation with marxism, in a formula of which Socialisme ou Barbarie had provided a first synthesis a few years ago...”. As after every verification of basic concepts in the crucible of real events, many will proclaim that these had always been their views. This, of course isn’t true.’ The point however isn’t to lay claims to a kind of copyright in the realm of correct revolutionary ideas. We welcome converts, from whatever sources and however belated. We can’t deal here at length with what is now an important problem in France, namely the creation of a new kind of revolutionary movement, Things would indeed have been different if such a movement had existed, strong enough to outwit the bureaucratic manoeuvred, alert enough day by day to expose the duplicity of the ‘left’ leaderships, deeply enough implanted to explain to the workers the real meaning of the students’ struggle, to propagate the idea of autonomous strike committees (linking up union and non-union members); of workers’ management of production and of workers’ councils. Many things which could have been done weren’t done because there wasn’t such a movement. The way the students’ own struggle was unleashed shows that such an organization could have played a most impotent catalytic role without automatically becoming a bureaucratic ‘leadership’. But such regrets are futile. The non-existence of such a movement is no accident, If it had been formed during the previous period it certainly wouldn’t have been the kind of movement of which we are speaking, Even taking the ‘best’ of the small organizations — and multiplying its numbers a hundredfold — wouldn’t have met the requirements of the current situation. When confronted with the test of events all the ‘left’ groups just continued playing their old gramophone records, Whatever their merits as depositories of the cold ashes of the revolution — a task they have now carried out for several decades — they proved incapable of snapping out of their old ideas and routines, incapable of learning or of forgetting anything.

The new revolutionary movement will have to be built from the new elements (students and workers) who have understood the real significance of current events. The revolution must step into the great political void revealed by the crisis of the old society. It must develop a voice, a face, a paper — and it must do it soon. We can understand the reluctance of some students to form such an organization. They feel there is a contradiction between action and thought, between spontaneity and organization. Their hesitation is fed by the whole of their previous experience, They have seen how thought could become sterilizing dogma, organization become bureaucracy or lifeless ritual, speech become a means of mystification, a revolutionary idea become a rigid and stereotyped programme. Through their actions, their boldness, their reluctance to consider long-term aims, they had broken out of this straight-jacket. But this isn’t enough.

Moreover many of them had sampled the traditional ‘left’ groups. In all their fundamental aspects these groups remain trapped within the ideological and organizational frameworks of bureaucratic capitalism. They have programmes fixed once and for all, leaders who utter fixed speeches, whatever the changing reality around them, organizational forms which mirror those of existing society. Such groups reproduce within their own ranks the division between order-takers and order-givers, between those who ‘know’ and those who don’t, the separation between scholastic pseudo-theory and real life. They would even like to impose this division into the working class, whom they all aspire to lead, because (and I was told this again and again) “the workers are only capable of developing a trade union consciousness”.

But these students are wrong. One doesn’t get beyond bureaucratic organization by denying all organization. One doesn’t challenge the sterile rigidity of finished programmes by refusing to define oneself in terms of aims and methods. One doesn’t refute dead dogma by the condemnation of all theoretical reflection. The students and young workers can’t just stay where they are. To accept these ‘contradictions’ as valid and as something which cannot be transcended is to accept the essence of bureaucratic capitalist ideology. It is to accept the prevailing philosophy and the prevailing reality. It is to integrate the revolution into an established historical order. if the revolution is only an explosion lasting a few days (or weeks), the established order — whether it knows it or not — will be able to cope. What is more — at a deep level class society even needs such jolts. This kind of ‘revolution’ permits class society to survive by compelling it to transform and adapt itself. This is the real danger today. Explosions which disrupt the imaginary world in which alienated societies tend to live — and bring them momentarily down to earth help them eliminate outmoded methods of domination and evolve new and more flexible ones. Action or thought? For revolutionary socialists the problem is not to make a synthesis of these two preoccupations of the revolutionary students. It is to destroy the social context in which such false alternatives find root.

[wizard-archivist-official]

What’s your favourite piece of forgotten lore?

We raised this question in our biweekly Head Archivists' Meeting to make sure the whole team got to have their input. Once the fires had died down and the various demons had been banished back to their planes of origin, we decided that rather than trying to settle on a single piece we would produce a shortlist based on the most popular answers across the team. The original list of 37 items was then cut down to a "top 3" with the highest degree of consensus between the archivists, and then extended to a "top 4" when Ainsworth threatened to release a Greater Hypercurse of Enpigening in the lobby if his favourite wasn't included.

So, without further ado,

Our sort-of top 34 consensus list of some of our favourite pieces of forgotten lore

Iacobus Stultus (James the Fool)'s Four Prime model of alchemy. Proposed some time after 1613 in the (possibly pseudographical) De Arte Divina Transmutationis et Anates, Iacobus argues against previous Paracelcian tripartite Salt-Sulfur-Mercury theories, as well as later bipartite Sulfur-Mercury and Mercury-alone models, of prime materials in favour of a quadripartite model consisting of salt, sulfur, mercury and ducks as the four fundamental elements of reality. Iacobus's argument hinges on the claim that ducks are such essentially peculiar and transcendental beings that it is inconceivable that they may be constituted of more discrete parts, and must instead be understood as foundational elements and principles of reality. This theory was widely panned by other alchemists on the grounds that ducks are clearly composed of constituent parts and can be subdivided, although a number of later texts attributed to Iacobus continued to defend the salt-sulfur-mercury-ducks theory with a gradually increasing role for elemental ducks in the theory, with the last text, De Divinis Anatibus, going so far as to defend a duck-only theory of prime materials.

The Second Banned Spell. Now, all wizards know the story of the first banned spell, so we won't bore you by repeating it. What is often left out of these stories, however, is that, at the time, the wizard council only created the requisite ordinances and regulations to ban exactly that spell, and did not provide any appropriate institutions for the generalised banning of spells that would follow. In fact, there was significant pushback against the banning of that first spell for fear that this would lead to the council exerting tyrannical control over the wizarding community, and so various clauses and provisions were put in place to prevent the council banning any other spells. So what changed? Throughout the 16th century, wizarding bosses had sought for ways of increasing the effeciency of their apprentices and workers. In 1536, Alfonso of Piccolamerda developed the Lesser Wage Theft spell which, alongside Efficacious Torture and Shatter Will, was widely used by wizarding bosses to force workers to produce more in ever harsher conditions. The result of these harsh and exploitative conditions was the great Apprentice Revolt of 1593, which led to the passing of the Rights of the Apprentice Act 1595 (an early predecessor to the 1707 Wizard Apprentices' Right to Live [WARL] Act) and the addition of Lesser Wage Theft to the list of bannded spells.

Why installers are called "wizards". When computers were first developed, there was some difficulty in developing hardware and software solutions to replacing information within a storage system with other information, or transfering information between storage systems. The original solution for this problem was to shrink a wizard down small enough that they could stand on the computer chip with a little screen that told them when a new file had been called for. When required, the wizard would then summon that file from its original source and use a magical transmutation ritual to imbue it directly into its new storage device. While this was a very quick method of data transfer, it was also expensive, and so it was eventually phased out in favour of the software installers that you know today, although they were referred to as "wizards" for a long time to recall the original information transfer system. Interestingly, the last computer to still use the wizard-based data transfer system was Horatio of Slough's WizBook 7, released in 2011, was discontinued in 2012 following the council establishing the Use of Wizards and Other Sapient Magical Beings in Technological Devices Act.

The invention of blue. Now, you may be familiar with Homer's "wine-dark sea", which some people use to argue that the Ancient Greeks couldn't see blue, and others say is just a metaphor because the idea that the Ancient Greeks couldn't see blue is obviously stupid. As it turns out, neither of these answers is correct - Ancient Greek eye-sight was just as good as anyone's today, but the colour blue hadn't been invented yet. Back then, the visual colour spectrum just went straight from teal to purple. The colour blue was added by the revered Archwizard Wolfgang Sauerkraut, as part of his performance in the 32nd Annual Wizarding Polylympics. While historically notable, the invention of the colour blue and expansion of the visible light spectrum was largely overshadowed for viewers by the second half of the archwizard's act, in which he summoned a seamonster from the plane of water and attempted to have sexual intercourse with it, and as a result, Archwizard Sauerkraut was remembered not for his light-bending creation but as "Archwizard Serpentshagger".

[secretmellowblog]

Anyone who thinks AI is going to “revolutionize/democratize copyright law” is a fucking idiot and just as stupid as all those people who thought NFTs would revolutionize copyright. Because no, it will not? It won’t? That’s now how any of this works? You are just lying? It’s the same argument people always made about Nfts— “currently it looks like it’s just a scummy way for Silicon Valley types and big companies to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else, but in our distant libertarian cyber future it will somehow revolutionize/democratize the concept of ownership in some nebulous poorly defined way we haven’t figured out the logistics of yet!”

The thing is. In my opinion the biggest problem with current copyright law isn’t that it allows people to have any kind of rights over the work, or that people having some kind of rights over their work is inherently always bad. The much greater problem with current copyright law is that it is massively skewed in favor of corporations, and benefits them to an insane degree while giving very little to the people who actually create the work. The people who actually make your favorite movies and comics and games usually don’t have any rights whatsoever over their creations, and instead massive companies have complete control over them.

And that’s the whole problem with the unevenness of current copyright law. if I as an individual violate Disney’s copyright by stealing a single image owned by them, or create derivative work/fanfic based on their stuff, they can sue me. But if a big corporation steals my entire life’s work and everything I’ve ever made to shove in a algorithm and create infinite derivative copies, I can do nothing. Theft on a small scale is a crime— but theft on a massive scale is business.

OpenAI is not some leftist project about taking power away from corporations by revolutionizing ownership. it is itself a giant corporation determined to get as much value for its investors as possible. It needs to be regulated. And laws protecting individual working class artists from a massive corporation determined to use their stolen labor to make them obsolete are necessary, actually!

This is not creating a world free of copyright; it’s creating a world where only individuals are bound by whatever rules exists, and whatever pretense used to exist that we had any rights over our work whatsoever is gone, because now only corporations can own things. AI can generate an image but it cannot generate a movie, which is one of the only “products” that can’t be “generated”, so only big companies with the budgets to make larger projects will be able to generate things that can be owned.

I thought we all agreed that the idea that a libertarian world where “~we don’t need laws and regulations let the free market decide and somehow everything will work itself out-“ was utterly stupid, and there needed to be limits on corporate power?

I find it literally insane that people think it’s somehow progressive to cheer on a massive corporation attempting to get infinite power, and that working class artists who are already overworked and underpaid are ~not real leftists- for pointing out it’s wrong to cheer on corporations getting to play by their own separate rules (rules that WE are bound to but they are not), even when their technology relies on the exploited labor of the people they’re going to drive deeper into poverty.

The leftism leaves people’s bodies when you tell them that they don’t actually need a machine whose data was trained by underpaid impoverished workers in Kenya making less than $2 an hour to write free shitty fanfic for them… and that the machine doesn’t create things “withojt labor,” it creates things by finding corporates loopholes to current laws that allows them to avoid paying the people for their labor. Everything you generate with image/text generators is things that are generated by the all the free labor of the artists they didn’t pay, and all the poor people in developing countries that they exploited. It doesn’t create things without labor, it creates things by obfuscating where the labor came from.