We hate the pace of social media. And we think most algorithmic recommendations are a trap. So we tread our own path. A path of serendipity and erudition. And our one-time guest curators are happy to help.

Click on any of our Cyberflâneurs below to see their selections. 

About the Cyberflâneur

Asad Haider is a writer and intellectual historian, and an Assistant Professor at York University’s Department of Politics. His first book is Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. Asad is also a founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine.

The Syllabus was born to contest the all-too-predictable culture of social media. Hence, we regularly invite intellectuals, academics, artists, and politicians to share the pieces they found insightful - all of them found using our indexing infrastructure - with our subscribers. Think of this as a slow-paced Twitter that thrives on serendipity and erudition.

Cyberflaneur

We hate the pace of social media. And we think most algorithmic recommendations are a trap. So we tread our own path. A path of serendipity and erudition. And our one-time guest curators are happy to help. 

Click on any of our Cyberflâneurs below to see their selections.

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) and is often found in Berlin. He also makes board games, including Billionaires and Guillotines which will be published in 2025 as part of a new series of radical games from Pluto.

Haiven and his team have recently published The World After Amazon, a collection of 9 short speculative stories, written by rank-and-file workers about the titular conundrum, available in print and for free online and as an audiobook. The book is the result of a 3-year project that included online workshops and an interview-driven podcast, The Workers’ Speculative Society. There will be launch events for the book in London, Berlin, Toronto, New York and elsewhere in the autumn of 2024.

Max Haiven

Amazon is not only the world’s largest online retailer. It is a corporation that has reshaped the world, from logistics to web services, from robotics to groceries, from the shopfloor exploitation of labor to new platforms for digital serfdom. We might think of Amazon, like all corporations, as a kind of predatory artificial lifeform adapted to thrive under capitalism. If so, it is a lifeform made, in part, of stories: the story of its founder Jeff Bezos as a maverick genius; the story of the company as a bold pioneer into a bright future of technical prowess and customer satisfaction; the story of Amazon “associates” as partner’s in the firm’s noble mission to “work hard, have fun, make history." As cynical as these sci-fi narratives may sound, they are highly influential, securing the support of shareholders, consumers, workers, and regulators who have come to imagine Amazon’s actions as somehow both uniquely bold and also the inevitable march of progress. More generally, the emergence of a megacorporation as a powerful storyteller poses profound questions for us as a global society of what Sylvia Wynter calls homo narrans, a self-transforming storytelling species. This is perhaps especially important when it comes to Amazon, a company that, thanks to its hegemony over book and ebook sales as well as web services (an estimated half the public-facing internet runs on Amazon servers) and streaming media is the gateway to a huge percentage of what humans read and the stories we tell. What is the power of corporate storytelling today, especially storytelling about the future, particularly in the hands of firms like Amazon with the power to radically transform life as we know it? And what does this power imply for the struggle of workers and communities not only to defend their rights in the here-and-now, but to reclaim the right to determine the shape of the future?

Preamble

This invaluable study compares the conditions of alienation, power and worker resistance in two parts of Amazon’s operations: its warehouses and its online “Mechanical Turk” (or MTurk) microtask platform. The conditions in the former are the stuff of legend, with workers interacting with robots to meet ever more extreme benchmarks of efficiency in taking orders, sorting items, and packing boxes. Meanwhile, those toiling on the MTurk platform aren’t even classified as workers but, rather, independent contractors, located around the world and competing with one another to perform miniscule  “Human Intelligence Tasks” (HITs) at the cheapest possible rate, often contributing to the grooming of large data sets that help train so-called artificial intelligence. The author illustrates how, in each case, workers suffer the complexities of alienation (from their time, from one another, from the thing they’re making, from their potential). Their conditions also exemplify the ways that digitally-augmented capitalist power exerts itself in new ways through Amazon’s cutting-edge use of technology. But, importantly, this book also assesses the forms that worker resistance has taken at Amazon and the strategic opportunities that exist for workers and their allies to bring the corporation to heel and build a better economy. 

Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy

A gifted labor organizer and sharp critical analyst, Mostafa Henaway worked at a Montreal Amazon fulfillment center for several months, in part to see for himself the labor conditions of its significantly migrant workforce. That experience, and interviews with workers there, results in an analysis of the grueling way that human flesh is incorporated into the company’s state-of-the-art algorithmically-powered and robotized logistics machine. This cyborgian nightmare would probably horrify even the turn-of-the-century father of “scientific management,” Frederick Winslow Taylor. Cutting edge, AI-driven surveillance combines with a corporate culture dedicated to squeezing every ounce of productivity out of workers in ways that are exhausting, stressful and profoundly physically dangerous. But the author insightfully notes the ways Amazon sweetens the pill, including through what he calls “corporate Keynesianism,” a set of performance-rewarding health, education and career benefits that, in the absence of a functional welfare state, serve as a proxy for security and stability. We might take these, along with the gushing corporate narrative of technological advancement and customer satisfaction, as part of Amazon’s highly exploitative world-building project.

Amazon’s distribution space: constructing a ‘labour fix’ through digital Taylorism and corporate Keynesianism

The vast majority of items sold through Amazon are actually being vended by third-party sellers, who rely on the massive corporation to list their goods, manage their relationship to customers and often to fulfill orders from their warehouses. Amazon presents this as a boon to a world of eager entrepreneurs: the corporation makes getting products to customers easy, cheap and convenient, drastically reducing the set-up costs and unleashing the capitalist spirit of ambitious people around the world. The reality is, unsurprisingly, an highly exploitative “walled garden” where these would-be entrepreneurs take almost all the risk and, in turn, surrender not only a considerable share of their revenue but also a massive amount of control to the megalithic middleman. At stake here is not simply the plight of the exploited petit bourgeoisie. (Although the anger of this subclass is nothing to sniff at, and it frequently leans fascist). Rather, this is a key example of how Amazon wields its monopsony power (the power of a single hegemonic buyer or intermediary) to essentially subvert the very “free market” it claims to champion, leading Yanis Varoufakis to apply the label of “technofeudalism” to its operations (Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin prefer the term “chokepoint capitalism”). This report makes clear that the narratives that lure so many people to starting “small businesses”--the desire to escape the control of a boss and to succeed based of effort and resourcefulness--remain compelling myths. Amazon presents itself as a friend to entrepreneurial dreamers. In fact, it is predatory.

Amazon's Trickle-Down Monopoly: Third-Party Sellers and the Transformation of Small Business

This chapter, written by two scholars who are also labor organizers, takes a geographical approach to the way Amazon is at the forefront of the recomposition of the working class in the United States. In short: e-commerce is a significant factor in the processes known as gentrification, which sees wealthier, “better” educated young would-be professionals move into the core of cities, driving up rents. Amazon facilitates this way of life, bringing a world of commodities and services to their hip urban doorstep. Meanwhile, Amazon relies on precariously employed working class warehouse and logistics workers living in poorer suburban and exurban areas, who often spend hours commuting thanks in part to atrocious public transit. This has significant and predictable racialized and gendered dimensions. An invaluable part of this paper is that it offers important strategic lessons for those who would challenge Amazon’s power. The first is to take seriously the way Amazon is reorganizing the geography of class struggle, with some of the most important sites being warehouses in suburban and exurban locales like Bessmer, Alabama, New York City’s Staten Island and the broader Chicago or Los Angeles areas, where Amazon union efforts have been most successful. The second is to realize that race and racism are key elements of these struggles, at the cutting edge of what oppresses workers and divides communities. Beyond liberal pleas for tolerance and cynical corporate multiculturalism (including Amazon’s own saccharine efforts), worker-to-worker solidarity is the real basis of an anti-racist politics of liberation. The third is that, in this context, some of the most important aspects of workers' struggles are happening outside the workplace, for instance over housing, transit, or immigration. Finally, all of these have a fundamental gendered dimension, with reproductive justice, childcare, intimate partner violence and schooling as key issues. The authors advocate and are part of a movement that turns away from traditional “business unionism” and returns to a form of worker organizing that is built on and that builds grassroots, worker-to-worker solidarity and militancy.

Battling the Behemoth: Amazon and The Rise of America’s New Working Class

Amazon’s power and reach is so deep and broad that it can seem impossible to stop. And even if it were to be tamed, what would prevent the same system of rapacious tech-driven hypercapitalism from generating an even worse replacement or successor? Nonetheless, this article takes inspiration from the vast number of labor and civil society organizations fighting back against Amazon and tries to suggest a common platform. Rejecting the argument that Amazon is simply responding to market pressures, the author argues that its dominance and profound internal coordination might make it possible to transform it into a democratic organization that benefits, rather than exploits, workers. If so, a seized Amazon could be a flagship in the effort to end consumerism and move towards a degrowth economy. This approach does not entirely satisfy me in its ambitions or strategy, but it does reflect the wishes of many Amazon workers and has the advantage of beginning to think through the thorny problem of how to make a just transition from capitalism with the infrastructures we actually have, like Amazon itself. That company is, perhaps, the most impressive logistics operation humanity has ever built, capable of moving goods around the world in ways that allowed it to play hero during the Covid-19 pandemic, delivering essential commodities way faster and more reliably than most states. This article might be said to be social science as pragmatic, militant speculative fiction. We need more scholarly work like this that helps workers and communities envision real alternatives, even if those alternatives have their limits.

Toward Degrowth: Worker Power, Surveillance Abolition, and Climate Justice at Amazon

Amazon may be one of the most significant phenomena to happen to the novel since the genre emerged in the 18th century as a (at the time fairly controversial) pastime for the rising bourgeoisie. Today, this one corporation controls a whopping 80% of the ebook market (most of it through its exclusive proprietary Amazon Kindle Direct) and 50% of the total book market. If we add to that the fact that an estimated 50% of the public-facing internet runs on Amazon’s servers, including several social media platforms, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the lion’s share of the words that pass before human eyes today are mediated on some level by Amazon. McGurl’s brilliant book is an investigation of what all this implies for the novel and for society at large, especially in an era when most people read not for enlightenment or the challenge of new ideas, but for comfort. This comfort is increasingly found in the sameness of the writing that a new generation of genre fiction authors pen for the largest and most lucrative literary market ever: Kindle readers. Here, Amazon appears in many forms: a content empire the likes of which the world has never known; an employer pioneering new heights of worker exploitation and surveillance; a storytelling corporation that profits from and organizes itself around its own self-aggrandizing narratives; and a proxy marketplace that has terminally “disrupted” the market for fiction in ways that promise upstart writers and publishing industry outsiders a chance at fame and success. But at what cost for creativity, and for the imagination?

Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon

In offering a review of two recent books, something important but submerged comes into focus: Forms like Amazon are not just dangerous, “psychopathic” mobilizations of self-perpetuating capital, as Joel Bakan illustrated decades ago in his influent book and film The Corporation. They are also, like all narcissists, excellent storytellers. Corporations became legal “persons” decades before European empires afforded most humans that designation. As these organizations emerge as the most powerful beings in earth history (what is Napoleon next to Exxon?) we can and should ask: how did the fiction of the limited liability corporation make itself so deadly real? Beyond the advertising or propaganda of this or that corporation, beyond the smarmy “corporate culture” that builds itself around just-so tales of the founder’s wisdom, beyond even the power of companies like Amazon or Penguin Random House LLC or Netflix have over the stories our society tells itself, we are faced with the importance of narrative to the corporate-financial form of capitalism. 

The Stories Corporations Tell: Two new histories of American capitalism reveal how alluring narratives have nurtured corporate power

It’s Revenge of the Nerds, suicidal capitalism edition. Somehow, science fiction moved from the disreputable hinterland of popular entertainment to arguably the most influential genre on the planet. It’s not simply that beloved blockbuster franchises have raked in billions of dollars in revenues for film, TV and publishing giants. It’s also that a new generation of “big tech” plutocrats have appropriated unimaginable wealth and unrivaled power to shape the future of humanity and the planet with copies of Heinlein, Phillip K. Dick and an assortment of Star Trek fanzines under their arms. These (typically macho) sci-fi classics have inspired these tech overlords to plough their ill-got profits into private space programs and other dangerously absurd projects (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ massive 10,000 year clock is a harmless trinket compared to Elon Musk’s efforts Neuralink to hack the human brain, or next to Bill Gates’ tinkering with geoengineering). These tycoons have parlayed sci-fi ideas, rhetoric and enthusiasm into a hype machine that presents their corporations’ products as both revolutionary and inevitable, representing the unstoppable march of progress, enchanting investors, regulators and the public. Most of these personalities seem to resemble the villains rather than the heroes of classic science fiction dystopias. Nonetheless, their dedication to the genre is not just an ideological but an important part of how capitalism reconciles some thorny contradictions in the 21st century, notably tensions between the tech and financial sectors, who can both agree that speculating on the future is big business, especially if that future looks a lot like the present, but with more gadgets and, as Gil Scott Heron famously put it, “whitey on the moon” (or Mars). 

The Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley

When it was published in 2015, this collection of short stories from racial and economic justice activists represented a high water mark of a growing turn towards speculative creative writing as a reflex or companion to grassroots organizing. Since its inception with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein through to its unique role in the Soviet Union, the literary genre of speculative fiction has been a platform for social critique. Octavia Butler, after whom this collection is named, was among the first Black SF writers to rise to prominence, a reputation that has grown since her death in 2006 given her uncanny anticipation of the rise of white supremacist clown-led fascism in an ecologically and economically ravagedUnited States. The editors of this book, brown and Imarisha, convened workshops with grassroots organizers, asking them to use creative speculative writing to explore their hopes and fears and to reflect on their radical community work anew. The stories are not all inspiring, but the most important feature of the book is the model it offers for speculative creative writing as a form of activism. At the 15 October 2024 London launch of The World After Amazon, for example, we’ll be joined by several author-activists who are doing similar work: Lola Olufemi, who uses specualtive fiction writing to radicalize the imagination around racial and gender justice; Phil Crockett Thomas, who has worked with incarcerated people to write abolitionist science fiction; Sarah Truman, who does SF-writing workshops with young people in (post-)extractive zones, and Jamie Woodcock who, in addition to being a scholar and protagonist of Workers’ Inquiry methods is also a catalyst behind Red Futures, a platform for radical SF writing.  

Octavia's Brood : Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

For over 25 years, Mark Nowak has been hosting poetry workshops for working people, including most recently and famously the New York City-based Worker Workers School. Importantly, Nowak champions the radical politics of liberation that emerge when working people dignify their everyday lives and struggles in verse. There have been plenty of left-wing poets who have dwelled on their experiences as workers, or on the struggles of the working class; Nowak is, in his other work, a sterling example. But there is also a long history (that the author elaborates) of the writing workshop as a space for a radical class consciousness to arise, not out of Marxist propaganda (as important as that is) but from workers recognizing their own value in the collective experience of finding and developing their voice. Such workshops are, as Nowak explains, especially important as the nature of class changes under platform capitalism, of which Amazon is at the vanguard.

Social Poetics

Board Games as Social Media: Toward an Enchanted Inquiry of Digital Capitalism

The Radical Imagination in Reactionary Times

Mutual Aid and the Anarchist Radical Imagination

From Financialization to Derivative Fascisms

Dangerous Play in an Age of Technofinance: From the Gamestop Hunger Games to the Capitol Hill Jamboree

Selections & Comments

Brian Eno – a thinker, an artist, an activist – is our firstcyberflâneur. Famous for pioneering ambient music and “unique conceptual approaches and recording techniques to contemporary music”, Brian has been described as one of the world’s most influential artists.

Brian has collaborated with the likes of David Bowie, David Byrne, U2, Coldplay - to name but a few - and was recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Among his many interests and activities beyond the world of music, he is a founding member of the Long Now Foundation and has been President of the Stop the War Coalition.

He has chosen some terrific pieces from our stacks - across audio, video, and text - including on how architects have finally embraced communities in their work, the effects of pollution on crime, why we should trust intuition, and the power of the commons.

Brian's bio and Twitter.

Brian Eno – a thinker, an artist, an activist – is our firstcyberflâneur. Famous for pioneering ambient music and “unique conceptual approaches and recording techniques to contemporary music”, Brian has been described as one of the world’s most influential artists.

Brian Eno

Interesting argument about attempts to define and protect cultural innovations – whether it’s possible and/or desirable, and how to deal with the income thus generated.

Ghana’s Copyright Law for Folklore Hampers Cultural Growth

An argument for community – in the form of family.

Why Large Families Are So Happy

Cellular Automata are totally magical and completely logical at the same time! Here they are discussed by Stephen Wolfram, probably the leading thinker on their implications.

Announcing the Rule 30 Prizes (on cellular automata)

Jane Jacobs’ message finally makes an impact among architects.

Streets Make Communities. Have Architects Realised at Last?

Long term solitary confinement is a form of torture increasingly used in American prisons. This artist has developed a strategy for helping to make it less solitary. I really wish I’d thought of this!!!

The Solitary Garden

People dealing with climate change from the bottom up. An inspiring story showing a new form of political and social relationships arising out of the climate crisis.

Meet the Pioneering Women Farmers Saving the Catalan Pyrenees From Climate Change

Self-redefinition by smell. Beyond ‘unisex’, perfume is becoming a forum for olfactory gender discussion, a way of locating yourself on the gender spectrum.

Gender Fluidity as Luxury in Perfume Packaging [$]

Surprising research showing that air pollution has direct social effects in terms of mental as well as physical effects. People thinking about ‘smart cities’ might want to start with cleaner air.

The Effect of Pollution on Crime: Evidence From Data on Particulate Matter and Ozone

The asset managers at the root of the climate change problem. Please send their names and addresses to Extinction Rebellion…

World’s Top Three Asset Managers Oversee $300bn Fossil Fuel Investments

The concentration of land ownership into fewer hands – and the use of land as an investment vehicle – creates fundamental imbalances in society…

Land for the Many

Very important discussion of where wealth comes from and how else it could be distributed, and why distribution is a socially productive idea…

On Wealth and Democratic Socialism

Why the UK is in such a deep hole, why the attempted national suicide of Brexit happened, and why we need new politics. Also applies to the US, by the way…

Land and Territory

A brief and provocative survey of intuition – what it is, and under what circumstances it develops…

Intuition: Why Should We Trust It?

A brilliant, comprehensive and essential survey of the commons – their historical role and their contemporary demise into privatisation. New understandings of what the idea of ‘the commons’ could include: genes, cultural practices etc…

Power of the Commons

Jerome Roos is a Fellow in International Political Economy at the London School of Economics, and the author of Why Not Default? The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt, which won the Immanuel Wallerstein Memorial Book Award in 2020.

Jerome Roos

What has prompted the dramatic rise of anti-establishment politics in recent years? And why has this development taken a progressive form in some countries while taking a nativist form in others? For John Brown, “populism” is a result oftoo littledemocracy. In Europe, he observes, neoliberal de-democratization and austerity have led to an increase in anti-immigration sentiment. In Latin America, by contrast, the presence of powerful popular movements has prevented such scapegoating and tipped the balance in favor of progressive forces. This highlights the importance of social mobilization and credible leftwing alternatives.

Neoliberalization, De-Democratization, and Populist Responses in Western Europe, the US, and Latin America

The rise of the nativist far right in Europe and North America has brought back an old question: what makes liberal societies so vulnerable to far-right extremism? Focusing on the canary in the coalmine (the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party in Greece), a trio of Greek researchers highlight the role of the country's deep socio-economic crisis and the rapid implosion of its centrist establishment parties. We should be warned: with another global recession on the horizon, the familiar pattern of nativist backlash to socio-economic insecurity could easily be repeated.

Crisis and Extremism. How Does an Extreme Far Right Emerge in a Modern Democracy? Evidence from Greece’s Golden Dawn

Greece is not the only European country to have experienced a nativist backlash at the polls. The electoral advances of Marine Le Pen in France can be taken as another important symptom of Europe's democratic crisis. What role has European economic integration played in this development? Julia Lux dispels the claim that Le Pen is simply a result of the EU undermining France's national sovereignty. Instead, she locates the growing popularity of the far right in the marginalization of anti-capitalist discourse by the neoliberal turn towards technocracy.

Understanding the Crisis Symptoms of Representative Democracy: The New European Economic Governance and France's “Political Crisis”

Today's central banks stand as the very emblems of this neoliberal turn towards technocracy. We know that their much-vaunted “independence” is really a code word for their insulation from democratic pressures. But where did this technocratic idea of central bank independence originate? Adriano do Vale demonstrates that the roots of the concept go back much further than commonly recognized: at least to the 1920s. This is an interesting text to read alongside recent histories like Quinn Slobodian's Globalists and Jamie Martin's The Meddlers, which also trace the origins of neoliberal thought and economic governance back to the interwar period.

Central Bank Independence, A Not So New Idea in the History of Economic Thought: A Doctrine in the 1920s

The past decade has seen a huge amount of new literature highlighting neoliberalism's antagonistic relationship with democracy. Yet many recent contributions still fail to recognize the racialized dimension behind this – especially in the context of the Global South. In this article, Lars Cornelissen provides an important corrective. Turning to neoliberal discussions of post-colonial self-determination in the postwar period, he shows that “these discussions were steeped both in racialized tropes and in more explicitly racial theories, which served to enframe post-colonial peoples as 'civilizationally immature' and hence unfit for democratic rule.”

Neoliberalism and the Racialized Critique of Democracy

If neoliberalism is all about insulating economic policy from democratic pressures, we should not be surprised to observe a growing gap between the political preferences of citizens and real-world policy outcomes. In 2014, Gilens and Page published aninfluential studythat revealed a clear representation gap in the US. Zoe Lefkofridi and Nathalie Giger find something similar for the EU: their study shows that the poor are systematically underrepresented in the European Parliament and Council, leading these institutions to take political positions that are always to the right of the preferences of most citizens and closer to the views of the wealthy.

Democracy or Oligarchy? Unequal Representation of Income Groups in European Institutions

If neoliberalism is all about insulating economic policy from democratic pressures, we should not be surprised to observe a growing gap between the political preferences of citizens and real-world policy outcomes. In 2014, Gilens and Page published an influential study that revealed a clear representation gap in the US. Zoe Lefkofridi and Nathalie Giger find something similar for the EU: their study shows that the poor are systematically underrepresented in the European Parliament and Council, leading these institutions to take political positions that are always to the right of the preferences of most citizens and closer to the views of the wealthy.

The legitimation crisis of the advanced capitalist democracies is closely intertwined with the socio-economic consequences of financialization and the financial crisis of 2008. How did these same developments impact China? In this article, Shenjing He, Mengzhu Zhang and Zongcai Wei show that China is not immune to the legitimation problems of financialized capitalism. The Chinese state, too, has been forced to contend with the threat of growing social discontent triggered by the economic recession of 2008. The result has been a pattern of “over-intervention” by the state, leading to a “crisis of crisis management.”

The State Project of Crisis Management: China’s Shantytown Redevelopment Schemes Under State-Led Financialization

The tensions between technocratic rationality and democratic representation are not limited to economic policy. The failure of many advanced capitalist democracies to address the climate crisis has led some to wonder whether democracy may be holding back the green transition. Should we place environmental policy in the hands of technocratic experts instead? Amanda Machin answers firmly in the negative: what we need is more democracy, not less. Without “the creative power of the demos,” we will not be able to address the looming environmental crisis.

Democracy, Disagreement, Disruption: Agonism and the Environmental State

How will the world respond to the planetary crisis of climate change and ecological destruction? As efforts at decarbonization continue to fall short of stated objectives, there has been a notable increase in proposals for geo- and climate engineering. Here, Columba Peoples critically interrogates such proposals, identifying them as part of a “technopolitics of planetary crisis management” that is narrowly geared towards securing the survival of “market civilization.” If this vision prevails, he warns, it will likely deepen the global crisis of inequality and insecurity.

Global Uncertainties, Geoengineering and the Technopolitics of Planetary Crisis Management

How will the climate crisis impact the future of capitalism? In this case study of Canada, the country with the highest per capita carbon emissions in the G20, William K. Carroll dissects the political economy of fossil capitalism and argues that we can already detect the early stirrings of a “passive revolution” by corporate and political elites that will eventually lead towards a new form of green capitalism. In opposition to this hegemonic ruling class project, Carroll explores the potential for an anti-hegemonic project of energy democracy, opening onto eco-socialism.

Fossil Capitalism, Climate Capitalism, Energy Democracy: The Struggle for Hegemony in an Era of Climate Crisis

How the Weather Shapes History

The Survival of the Paris Commune

Capitalism Causes Disasters, Socialism Can Solve Them

Si hay algo que no funciona, es el sistema financiero

New Deal: The Role and Control of Finance

Marcia Chatelain is Professor of History and African American studies at Georgetown University. Her 2020 book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, which chronicles how fast food restaurants came to saturate Black neighbourhoods, won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for History and the 2022 James Beard Foundation Book Award.

Marcia Chatelain's selections as Cyberflaneur

Marcia Chatelain

A fascinating narrative about the racial boundaries in the wine and spirits industry, which illustrates the logics of segregated marketplaces, as well as the cultural baggage associated with alcohol and alcohol consumption. What happens when Black political power is galvanized to integrate the alcohol sales forces in Harlem? Would boycotting the white dominance of the beverage industry create a window of opportunity for Black professionals across the industry, including brewers and vintners? An excellent piece of history on the limits of consumer activism.

The Untold Story of Harlem's 'Whiskey Rebellion,' the Civil Rights Campaign for Black Liquor Salesmen

In 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., gospel music star Mahalia Jackson launched a fried chicken franchise aptly named Glori-Fried Chicken. Unlike most fast food brands, this Black-owned business was designed to not only feed communities, but to also uplift them. Dedicated to expanding Black economic opportunity, Glori-Fried was among a number of start-up fast food outfits that promised Black people a pathway to economic independence in an era of contention about the role of capitalism in Black freedom movements.

Mahalia Jackson’s Glori-Fried Chicken

The late 1960s and early 1970s initiated a golden age of Black food – from the advent of soul food, to the publication of Black cookbooks and the popularization of Black eating regimes and diets. The rise of Black culinary and food expertise suggested that Black eating habits were a means of asserting or refining Black identity.

How to Eat to Live: Black Nationalism and the Post-1964 Culinary Turn

Considering the importance of land to the project of Black freedom after Emancipation, the loss of Black farmland is a critical topic of concern for food justice and racial justice activists alike. The federal promises of Reconstruction, ongoing racial discrimination against Black farmers, and the power of Big Agriculture has imperiled the hope that Black agrarianism could yield Black freedom.

How USDA Distorted Data to Conceal Decades of Discrimination Against Black Farmers

Throughout the mid-century Civil Rights Movement, activists targeted restaurants and lunch counters to protest the practices of segregation of and abuse towards Black consumers. This very public strategy was used to highlight the ways that racism shaped the marketplace. Equally important to the movement were struggles against punitive policies that targeted state food aid to poor, Black communities. This paper examines the Greenwood Food Blockade to illustrate the weaponization of food access in response to Black political organizing.

Food and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement: Re-Reading the 1962-1963 Greenwood Food Blockade

Although the national memory of the era of segregation is infused with images of lunch counter sit-ins and other forms of nonviolent resistance in the South, the culture of Jim Crow in the North still evades recognition. This article about efforts to end restaurant discrimination in New York City emphasizes how the Northern color line was enforced and experienced by Black diners.

Neither Welcomed, Nor Refused: Race and Restaurants in Postwar New York City

When local foods become national trends, there is often a process of erasure that happens, especially when it comes to Black culinary contributions. The rise of the Nashville hot chicken and its appearance on fast food menus and in restaurants in gentrifying neighborhoods provides a case study of what going mainstream means for palates and politics.

Innovation and the Incinerated Tongue: Hot Chicken, Race and Culinary Crossovers

McDonald's and Black America

The Intricate Ties Between Fast Food And Black America

Book Talk on Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America

Fast Food, Urban Crises: A History

Capitalism Can’t Save Us

Joan Subirats is a professor of political science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a frequent contributor to the Spanish media. He’s a leading voice on issues of city governance, public management and public policy. Moreover, Joan has turned words into deeds. He’s actively involved in Spanish politics – currently the Deputy Mayor for Culture in Barcelona – and the co-founder of the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú.

Joan’s selections from our stacks make for excellent reading for anyone interested in fresh perspectives and case studies on urban society and governance. The pieces drawing on areas such as “new municipalism metropolitan rebellions” or “urban entrepreneurialism” are especially relevant in the context of our cities under assault from COVID-19.

Joan Subirats is a professor of political science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a frequent contributor to the Spanish media. He’s a leading voice on issues of city governance, public management and public policy. Moreover, Joan has turned words into deeds. He’s actively involved in Spanish politics – currently the Deputy Mayor for Culture in Barcelona – and the co-founder of the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú.

Joan Subirats

Are there really innovative elements in the so-called “new municipalism”? What differential characteristics does it present?

What’s so New about New Municipalism?

What significant elements emerge from the experience of “Barcelona en Comú” during its first years of government in the Barcelona city council? Challenges and opportunities.

Urban Governance and Political Change Under a Radical Left Government: the Case of Barcelona [$]

Despite the fact that the municipalities do not have the necessary competencies to address the scale and significance of the problems they face, it is important to understand the political capacities that they can deploy in an enabling logic.

Municipalities as Enablers in Urban Experimentation

The metropolitan areas as a field of intersection of processes of city making, city occupying and rights claiming.

Metropolitan Rebellions and the Politics of Commoning the City

A volume devoted to pose two critical questions with respect to inequality: the eruption of far-right politics and the geographic separation between haves and have-nots.

New Angles on Inequality

The case of Liverpool as an example of de-commodifying land, labour and capital using Polanyi framework.

Re-Grounding the City with Polanyi: from Urban Entrepreneurialism to Entrepreneurial Municipalism

Analysis of the limits and potential of the new municipalism, in part emerged after the movement of the “Indignados”, in Spain after the experience of government between 2015 and 2019, with a special emphasis on the public-community relationship.

La Colaboración Público-Comunitaria para Defender lo Común

This article analyze the role unions have played in the struggles against austerity and increasing inequalities, particularly in the European periphery that suffered the recession’s consequences.

Social Movements in Times of Inequalities: Struggling against Austerity in Europe [$]

This article presents a history of the concept of the right to the city.

The Right to the City: Conceptual Transformations and Urban Struggles

As the vulnerability of cities to the effects of climate change and now with the Covid-19 crisis increases, so does the urgency of and interest in urban transformational adaptation. The question is how “everyday” urban politics shape the multi-scalar political constraints that prevent municipalities from implementing transformational adaptation. In this article they analyze the Poblenou superblock project in Barcelona as an effort to enact transformational land use planning linked with climate adaptation and post-Covid efforts.

The Everyday Politics of Urban Transformational Adaptation: Struggles for Authority and the Barcelona Superblock Project [$]

Peter Galison is the Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. A MacArthur Fellow, and member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, Peter is the author of numerous books that explore the embedding of science and technology in the wider world, including Image and Logic (1997), and Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003). He is also a filmmaker whose documentaries have covered such subjects as nuclear waste and, most recently, the physics and philosophy of black holes.

Peter Galison

There is a standard story about the American and German research universities repeated endlessly—and it is wrong. That account has it that the research university began in Germany, traveling to Johns Hopkins and then Harvard in the last third of the nineteenth century. Levine shows, convincingly, that the two countries had a much more interesting alliance/rivalry, with the Americans taking up the idea of research, and the Germans adapting the intra-American university rivalry and integration of teaching with research.

Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University

Peter Mandler accomplishes three important goals. First, he shows that despite the antiquity of the oldest British university, the aim of providing more than elementary education in England is a relatively new phenomenon, hard fought (often from below, not from above) to secure secondary and tertiary education. Second, he casts a rigorous historical eye not only on the famous reports and studies that helped shape British education, but also on the history of the social science and bureaucratic moves that enabled these reports. Third, he tracks the long-running tension between meritocracy and democracy in British society, key to understanding current debates about the fundamental aims of higher education.

The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain's Transition to Mass Education Since the Second World War

Zheng presents a feminist analysis of the contingent labor (non-tenure-track, NTT) positions that have proliferated across universities and national borders. For the US, the ratio of tenure track (TT) to NTT has gone from 70% to 30% some fifty years ago to the inverse today, 30% TT versus 70% NTT. She casts a sharp, critical eye on meritocratic arguments, but most importantly addresses the historical and ideological reasons that women are so over-represented in these insecure jobs (in the European Union women are about 1.5 times more likely to be among the “casual” labor force). Astutely, Zheng notes that academic precarity builds on long-standing gender stereotypes that put women in more “reproductive” rather than “productive” roles, and that single them out more than men for caretaking responsibilities—taking care of students’ well-being rather than research engagement.

“Precarity is a Feminist Issue: Gender and Contingent Labor in the Academy”

This is a short overview of conservative academic philanthropy. It very usefully outlines—and gives many references to the study of—some key benefactor families (e.g. Walgreen, Olin, and Koch). Walsh is particularly interested in tracking the ways that these foundations of the right have been successful in institutionalizing academic research along free-enterprise, libertarian, and anti-statist lines—starting with the Chicago School in economics. Of particular interest is the contrast the author proposes, offering this as a topic for further inquiry, between the often efficacious intervention by the donors of the right rather than the less controlling donations of their more liberal peers.

“Conservative Philanthropy in Higher Education”

Using interviews and other discursive methods, Koch and Vora put into question the simple binary that sets American universities on the liberal democratic side and their franchise branches elsewhere (e.g. Arabian peninsula, China, Singapore, Central Asia) as lesser, anti-liberal, even non-modern. The authors want to put pressure on such characterizations, looking to see how faculty in these extensions of the university see questions of authoritarian governments and, by contrast, the American “home’ institutions. Agree or disagree, the article rotates our perspective on this novel, global, and expanding reach of North American universities.

“Laboratories of Liberalism: American Higher Education in the Arabian Peninsula and the Discursive Production of Authoritarianism”

Hoffman very usefully aims to shift away from the post-hoc or universal characterization of commercially-inflected, university-based scientific work. Not for him the “triple helix” or “mode-2” or “Pasteur’s Quadrant”—various attempts to capture once and for all interdisciplinary research as a new path toward innovation. Instead, Hoffman wants a more processual account, more focused, in a lively AI lab example, on the moment-to-moment adjustments to commercial opportunity. The payoff of this paper is a promising emphasis on the style of research that emerges as this new breed of scientist tries to stay “nimble,” keeping some remove from the in-depth digging that more academic structures encourage.

“A Story of Nimble Knowledge Production in an Era of Academic Capitalism”

Freud’s Drawings and the Visual Origins of Psychoanalysis

Visualizing Science: From Black Holes to the Future

How Do You Photograph a Black Hole?

“The Great Speakers of the Vienna Circle: Rudolph Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Otto Neurath, Hans Reichenbach”

“21 July 1773: Disputation, Poetry, Slavery”

Olivier Tesquet is an award-winning investigative journalist and author whose work unpacks the consequences of surveillance technologies under capitalism. His latest book,Etat d'urgence technologique, explores how the surveillance economy is profiting from COVID-19.

Olivier Tesquet

Unpopular but necessary opinion when documenting issues at the intersection of police and technology. As this article recalls, “Derek Chauvin wore [one] as he knelt for more than eight minutes on George Floyd’s neck”. Yet, governments regularly accused of excessive use of force see it as a cure-all: France will deploy them nationwide next summer. Who are the two contenders currently battling to win the contract? The manufacturer of the Taser (Axon) and a Chinese company helping Beijing to profile Uyghur people in Xinjiang (Hikvision).

Why Police Body Cameras Haven’t Stopped Police Brutality

As this doctoral thesis points out, “citizens perceive a growing threat of crime to their society, but perceive a low risk that they themselves will fall victim of crime”. I will add that, addressing this “feeling of insecurity” and exploiting its political leverage (in France, it has become a mandatory rhetorical step for anyone aspiring to the presidency), liberal democracies have become obsessed with the growing “feeling of security” provided by technology.

Keeping trouble at a safe distance : Unravelling the significance of ‘the fear of crime’

Palantir is a crystallisation of contemporary anxieties: CIA-funded, shady and almost mythological. I was recently asked by the French Parliament to participate in their audition, and it was far from spectacular: On the contrary, their local president, who used to work for Airbus, acted and spoke like he was selling washing machines. It was all about boring plumbing work. To quote the article, “the whole activity becomes depoliticized precisely to the extent to which it is deemed ordinary and procedural”, and I think that’s exactly the point. I don’t think Palantir is a private NSA, but I do think it’s a big problem when a democracy subcontracts its political decisions to any company who owns the intellectual property of the tools upon which those decisions are made. That’s a convincing definition of kleptocracy.

Seeing with Software: Palantir and the Regulation of Life

Very insightful piece to understand the intellectual backbone of Thiel and Karp.

Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School

Last but not least: What level of cynicism have you achieved when, as the CEO of a surveillance company, you pose for a photo under a portrait of the late Michel Foucault?

Does Palantir see too much?

Ten years ago, one could have thought that the sole purpose of China was to insulate its Internet from the Western world with the help of their so-called Great Firewall. But it’s now clear that the Chinese model described in this article is designed to be exported as a plug-and-play solution to other countries, particularly nations of the Global South. It’s not just a commercial operation: China, aiming to become an AI superpower, uses African faces to train their facial recognition datasets. To misquote William Gibson, the dystopian future is already here—and it could be becoming more and more distributed.

Digital neo-colonialism: The Chinese model of internet sovereignty in Africa

God bless the “safe city”. After years of innocuous, depoliticized “smart cities”, this new buzzword sheds some light on the perils of a militarized public space. About a year ago, I was strolling through the alleys of Milipol, one of the main international security fairs, and it was striking to see so many defense companies advertising for the public space of the future, filled with sensors, drones, cameras and one-way mirrors. Consequently, I agree with the authors of this article, “the governance of the smart city is intrinsically related to surveillance and social control”. It reminds me of an old and prescient slogan invented by art students during the May 68 riots: “Don’t say urban planning, say preventive police”.

Fear and Fantasy in the Smart City

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been trying to read as much literature as possible about the roots of public health, and Italy has provided some answers. This is a fascinating dive into the Bolognese office of the fango, created in the middle of the 13th century to be the noses, eyes and ears of the city officials to enforce social order. In times of Covid-19, the division between public and private spheres is crucial, and I strongly recommend a medieval perspective when looking at urban marginality.

Finding Matter out of Place: Bologna’s ‘Dirt’ (Fango) Officials in the History of Premodern Public Health

État d'urgence technologique : Comment l’économie de la surveillance tire parti de la pandémie

Olivier Tesquet - État d'urgence technologique

La surveillance banalisée

Surveillance, contrôle, traçage: les salariés n'ont jamais été aussi fliqués qu'au temps du Covid

Polynésie française : dans les coulisses d’une enquête sur un lourd secret d’État

«Le Covid-19 banalise la surveillance à grande échelle»

À la trace : Enquête sur les nouveaux territoires de la surveillance

Heather Berg writes about sex, work, and social struggle. Her first book,Porn Work(UNC Press, 2021), explores workers’ strategies for navigating – and subverting – precarity. Her work appears in Signs, WSQ, Feminist Studies, and Porn Studies, among others. Heather is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Today’s syllabus themes focus on some of the preoccupations that animate her second book project, an intellectual history of the sex worker left.

Heather Berg

Vital reading on the politics of community self-defense. Navarro parses the tactics indigenous people take up to keep each other safe when the state fails. I'm especially interested in his discussion of progressives' discomfort with self-defense, even as they perform concern with what happens in its absence.

Self-Defense in Mexico: Indigenous Community Policing and the New Dirty Wars

On how worker resistance persists even as surveillance grows and organized labor's power recedes. I appreciate Woodcock's refusal of left nostalgia here.

The Fight Against Platform Capitalism: An Inquiry into the Global Struggles of the Gig Economy

A stunning inquiry into Black girls' resistance to discipline, including the disciplining power of the research encounter. Shange's effort to ‘write in collusion with [her subjects'] ethnographic refusal’ is a model for resistance studies.

Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography

On anti-work and the politics of pleasure. Stallings' push to avoid calling ‘work’ forms of art making that refuse work ethics should make labor scholars think twice about how we might be ‘contributing to the production of more machines’.

Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures

Some of my favorite sex worker theorists on the intersection of anti-work politics and disability. The panel does a beautiful job of holding ‘sex work is work’ in tension with the reality that it is so often also a way to resist work's discipline.

Sex Work as Work and Sex Work as Anti-Work

On the Black Panthers and the politics of self-defense. Bin Wahad argues against liberals' ‘psychological pablum of non-violence’. There won't be freedom without struggle.

Toward Rethinking Self-Defense in a Racist Culture

Honig's theory of refusal asks readers to take seriously even those forms of refusal that ultimately ‘fail’. Even when efforts to refuse don't get the goods, they expand the refuser's, and the reader's, capacity to imagine otherwise.

Asad Haider

Asad's

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