Stalker, trauma, simulation, and the horror of liquid modernity
An essay comparing Backrooms and Tarkovsky’s Stalker through liquid modernity, post-bureaucracy, trauma, simulation, and the collapse of solid institutional forms.
Normative control for elite workers, technical control for everyone else
An essay on post-bureaucratic capitalism’s classed division of labor control: lifestyle, authenticity, and normative discipline above; metrics, platforms, and technical discipline below.
Data centers, overcapacity, and the bubble that may not leave an infrastructure legacy
An essay on AI data centers, fixed capital, energy demand, overcapacity, and why an AI crash may leave a different kind of stranded infrastructure than earlier bubbles.
Twin Peaks, Dostoevsky, and the embarrassment of goodness
An essay on David Lynch’s non-ironic moral seriousness, Twin Peaks, Dostoevsky, Major Briggs, the Log Lady, Albert Rosenfield, and the difference between postmodern form and ironic evasion.
Capitalist dissolution, conservative idolatry, and democratic formation
An essay on Marx, Feuerbach, G. A. Cohen, Mill, AI retrieval, and the reconstruction of culture as democratic formation rather than content or idol.
AI, objectified memory, and the erosion of embodied discernment
An essay on objectified culture, embodied memory, AI-mediated retrieval, monopoly over cultural access, and the democratic conditions of discernment.
Automation, socialized intelligence, and the politics of post-wage capitalism
An essay on Paul Adler, artificial intelligence, commodity fetishism, and the wage-form crisis produced by the intensified socialization of production.
Dylan Riley, Baran and Sweezy, and the political forms of surplus absorption
An essay on Dylan Riley, political capitalism, Baran and Sweezy, and why state-backed rent extraction belongs within the afterlife of monopoly capital.
AI compute costs, workslop, subsidized tokens, and the false simplicity of replacing payroll with compute
A follow-up essay on AI substitution, token budgets, model costs, gig-economy subsidy logic, and why compute is not a substitute for judgment.
Labor, vendor dependence, and the cost of losing the ability to leave
A work-in-progress essay on AI labor substitution, organizational dependence, credible exit capacity, and capture without ownership.
Popular culture and the partial confrontation with social fear
A working essay on film history, collective anxiety, popular culture, and the partial ways movies confront institutional change.
Movies, post-legitimacy, and the cultural scripts of crisis
A working essay on movies, popular culture, institutional erosion, and the frames publics use when official explanation loses authority.
Technology, spiritual eclecticism, and modern re-enchantment
An essay on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, David Noble, technical rationality, spiritual eclecticism, and instruments as modern divining rods.
Moralism as status practice and the loss of consequential judgment
An essay on moralized refusal, mock horizontality, and the need to judge oppositional politics by what it builds, alters, and makes possible.
On production, accumulation, and value capture
Muskism as a politics of technological spectacle, regulatory monetization, platform control, and accumulation by capture.
On desocietization and its discontents
Post-legitimacy, desocietization, and the substitute forms of belonging that appear when institutions stop persuading.