nerd

Some Interesting Things I Read Today (3 April)

This whole case has been infuriating, but I also don't like giving the first amendment nonprofits any excuse. The ACLU has literally come out in support of Nazis in the past, and they can't handle the fact that there was a gun present in a protest in a state where guns are very legal? That seems like they'd rather pick and choose who gets first amendment rights, despite their claims otherwise.

The above article is a pretty good rundown of the Pairieland trial.

Same topic as above, immediately after the verdict, and discusses the repercussions of this decision. While I don't usually like engaging with former intelligence dorks (which this article does), they do make good points about what'll happen (that, btw, most people who didn't do any of this to other people... already had made).

Ridiculous use of AI to ban books, but also just a bunch of absurd censorship choices. Children are being weaponised again for “their own safety.”

Some Interesting Things I Read Today (2 April)

I don't want to take notes on these, but I do want to keep track of and share some of the interesting things that I've read. (I'm not going to bother keeping track of things that felt annoying or awful to me.)

Using Cory Doctorow's usage of Audre Lorde as a jumping off point, Tarakiyee delves into the context and history of Audre Lordes comments on “the master's tools” and how it is utilised in tech. This particular quote is something that I like, and I think it'll stick with me (probably because it feeds into my frustration for people using the work of others as a means to shut people up):

From my perspective, in free software and adjacent communities, the phrase has taken on a life entirely detached from its origins. I myself have probably engaged with it that way, to be completely honest. Micah White described it as “the atomic bomb of discussion enders,” a phrase so potent it can be applied to absolutely any argument about strategy and method, often by people who have never encountered the full speech. White's concern is not with Lorde's argument but with what has been done to it: a revolutionary provocation flattened into a reflexive shutdown. It shows up most often as a thought-terminating cliché: using corporate infrastructure, proprietary platforms, or mainstream legal mechanisms to advance liberation goals is self-defeating by definition. The master's tools. End of conversation.

Somewhat useful, though I feel that it is lacking because it doesn't do enough to recognise that even centralising around the government (not just military or law enforcement*) enables technofascism. Seems like it could be a good starting point, but it really needs to engage specifically with governments and not just some of the institutions they offer.

This also includes that she needs to have people think about connections between corporations and other institutions (e.g., Palantir's use in health services).

I feel similarly about the post she wrote previously, trying to figure out how to define technofascism.

Greenwashing is always something I'm reading about when it comes up, especially because it's such a major problem. There's also one on a “green” and “privacy-focused” search engine that added AI, despite the fact that their claims were nonsense.

I don't think regulations are going to save us, so I don't agree with those proposals because it's so easy to undo policy (as we see everywhere). I really do think more direct action and dismantling of these industries and companies is the best way to deal with this.

Reading: David Graeber’s Lasting Influence on Anthropology and Activism by: Josh Reno and Holly High / 19 February 2025

By the time of his death in 2020, Graeber had become an important public intellectual. Outside of anthropology, he became known for his popular salvos on work and democracy—including the breakthrough publication Debt: The First 5,000 Years—and his activism within the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. His posthumously published The Dawn of Everything, an ambitious reconsideration of human history co-written with archaeologist David Wengrow, became an international bestseller. More trade books of Graeber’s writing were released posthumously in 2023 and 2024.

All of this feels like a problem, and it also feels like something I should've addressed in the piece I published recently.

The perpetual “posthumously published” is necessary to think about, particularly as one of the books released was The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World..., which was a collection of essays that could be found for free online and came off as a cash-grab for its editors (especially one of them who has been very invested in ensuring his legacy remains as one thing... by having an organisation where Noam Chomsky is on the advisory board—love it when an Epstein friend and defender is in my ~radical~ organisation).

Dealing with grief is one thing, making an organisation that sounds like it's entirely designed to dwell on him and his work alone is... weird.

Our 2023 co-edited book As If Already Free: Anthropology and Activism After David Graeber came out of these conversations.

Again, something else that I feel is weird. The conversations, the workshops... they seem interesting and even helpful as a concept. Creating a book with assumption of “after Graeber,” as if he was the pure originator of any ideas, is strange. Weird, weird, weird.

I hope, first, that the book will inspire others to turn to David’s scholarship to continue probing and prodding the injustices of today’s world.

This comment prompted me to look if any of the people in this article were on the advisory board for DGI, did a small search, and then saw that they post shit from fucking Unherd just because it's Yanis Varoufakis. For fuck's sake.

Anyway, none of them are, but it's just... Why does everything have to circle around Graeber?

But we also spoke about one important way he served the wider discipline: his ability to bring new students to anthropology. I’ve been teaching the introductory anthropology course at the University of Sydney this past semester and have been struck by how many students signed up as a direct result of having read something by Graeber. My hope is that this book can extend that legacy.

I'm going to point out the irony that Australia is one of the countries that have upped the fees on social sciences, making them more expensive. It's worth asking... who is becoming anthropologists here?

While I'm glad people can find inspiration in his work, I find the explicit circling for years... strange.

Reading: What Happened to David Graeber? By: Crispin Sartwell / 20 January 2024

I BOW TO few in my admiration for the anthropologist, economist, radical leader, and delightful prose stylist David Graeber, who died unexpectedly in 2020 at the age of 59. Since I read his little book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology in 2004, I’ve been telling anyone who seemed inclined to listen that he was the most important anarchist thinker since Peter Kropotkin, who died in 1921. His ideas, including those beautifully captured in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), helped motivate and shape the Occupy movement, which took inspiration from his commitments to radical democracy, egalitarianism, and “prefigurative politics”—the idea that people seeking to make a revolution should try to live and organize now in a way they’d want to arrange their lives together in the future.

Overwhelmingly, I find this start to be completely fawning and infuriating. I'm not a fan of people who highlight the “most important” thinkers of any movement, particularly as those people who are the “most important” are often benefiting from a lot of quiet collaborators (and something that must be said is how often academics benefit from the the work and experiences of non-academics, extracting from communities to take it within the academy—academics who do not acknowledge this, anarchist or not, are doing us a disservice).

I think David Graeber himself was part of sharing ideas that definitely shaped ideas in Occupy, and I think we over-credit his book. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is hundreds of pages long. Do you think, prior to the Occupy Movement, people were reading it in droves? I think, if anything, Occupy sparked people to look at it. The role is widely reversed, and it is done so in ways to continue fawning over Graeber rather than recognising the way people come to new understandings and engage with expanding their knowledge. Books rarely preempt movements, but people within movements are likely to engage with books.

I also think another aspect to this is highlighted in the ideas here but obfuscated rather than said clearly:

All of this in loose yet precise and swashbuckling prose, and all of it well documented by a serious scholar. Debt, the book, had for many a dramatic “head-flipping” quality, and it helped make sense of what Occupy, emerging at that moment, was saying and what it wanted.

It's less that people in the movement were reading it and more that people outside the movement who didn't understand it found a (sanctioned) location in which to obtain their ideas of what the Occupy even was (because heaven forbid you listen to the people stumping in the park or telling you what they want; it's better to get it from a book where you can slightly interpret it in your own way while appearing quasi-sympathetic).

I love books, but this is an over-dramatic explanation of the importance of Debt on a whole movement. Debt has its place, but its place was never within the movement. It is a book that was used to justify it and a piece that was widely read primarily after Graeber participated in Zuccotti Park. Honestly, his appearance there is what sparked its sales.

The anarchism that Graeber developed across a series of protest actions and writings ... was—is—notably contemporary and inspiring. Central aspects of Graeber’s politics as he framed them circa 2000–15 include “the rejection of the state and of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination”; “decentralized forms of consensus-based direct democracy,” as developed in Occupy encampments but also in many other places and cultures; “prefigurative politics of resistance” or the claim that a nonauthoritarian revolution cannot be conducted successfully by authoritarian forms of organization; “rejection of permanent, named leadership structures”; and anti-statist “communism,” economies based around sharing or even “the gift,” as suggested by the anthropology of Mauss, for example.

It has taken a little while and repeated readings for it to sink in, but I think that Graeber was reaching the point of rejecting, or at least severely (if implicitly) qualifying, almost all of these positions by late in his authorship. ... But perhaps LSE professorships, FSG book contracts, and the approval of the Financial Times have moderating or even co-opting effects after all.

Something all academics should know is that the more closely they align themselves with the academy, the less they align themselves with what's happening outside. You're doing your work for them, and you're not doing your work for us (even though tons of academics will claim that). I cannot recommend listening to Dr Joy James talk on this because she, as an academic, admits it. She says it out loud. Even Graeber didn't really want to, and none of the anarcha-demics even really want to try. (Because what happens to their positions if they actually say what they are?)

It is not clear, to me at any rate, that one can be an anarchist and not also be an egalitarian and an anti-statist. Repudiating those two positions, by which Graeber definitely defined his politics circa 2010, amounts to repudiating the anarchist position, or else leaves you trying to define it in other terms, terms more adequate to the subtlety and complexity of power as it actually appears in real cultures. If he intended to generate such a reconstrual, he hadn’t quite done that work yet when his writing abruptly stopped.

I agree with Sartwell's understanding of The Dawn of Everything, and it is one of the things that I found infuriating. That understanding is:

Both “inequality” and “the state,” on Graeber’s late view (or on late Graeber’s view), are problematic and ideological concepts, not adequately defined, perhaps not definable. Hence, egalitarianism and anti-statism, insisting that these things ought to be destroyed, are equally simplistic and equally trapped in Western conceptualizations that emerged in modernity.

But I also think it has been present throughout Graeber's work, especially the inequality aspect. Maybe it's because I (and others) recognised that Graeber's work routinely failed to include different perspectives (e.g., it talked from a very 'default' position while not understanding that perspectives would shift based on gender, race, migration status, disability, etc). Every book of his reads in a similar way: When he was told to add those perspectives (sometimes by people in his life), he'd just slot in a bunch of citations; it never felt like he fully engaged with them but only that he needed examples and didn't really want to do the extra work that came with engaging with them.

This is a very common theme among cis men who are anarchists, which is why when these people (and it is more often cis men, especially white cis men) who find themselves trending right-ward even when they think they aren't (or who know they are but obfuscate it for some reason, like maintaining social capital within a space or acting as an infiltrator).

Now, I don't think Graeber was an infiltrator, but I do think that he was trending toward liberalism and away from anarchism. I don't disagree with Sartwell on this point, but I think he did it largely because the stakes were never truly there. (I know Lagalisse says he 'sold out' on Bullshit Jobs because he “didn't want to rent into his 60s,” which is understandable... but also, he never really had the kind of discomfort that the rest of us have had to endure. He didn't receive his tenure from Yale because (he said) of his politics, and he claimed to be unemployable in the United States (but I don't know where he tried to apply), but he still landed securely in London; he maintained those connections.

And, as Joy James analyses for Angela Davis and the deradicalisation of abolition, some of the same argument applies here. He is comfortable to academics because he is one; he may have grown up with working class parents, but he became an academic and started moving around less working class circles. Maybe he still believed in the things he professed to a degree, but he left the movement long ago and a lot of his ideas and work became deradicalised... Along with himself, and a lot of people who now control his “legacy” have definitely completed that deradicalisation as well.

One wonders what Occupy-era Graeber, the man who (by his own account and many others’) helped formulate the slogan “We Are the 99%,” might make of passages like the one below. ...

Here, he appears almost to be ridiculing himself and the Occupy movement (if also Thomas Piketty), or Graeber and Wengrow appear to be ridiculing earlier Graeber. Do I hear a touch of Friedrich Hayek? What was once a fundamental critique of the world economic hierarchy, insisting that it has created an absurd and ever-increasing degree of differential access to resources, has become “technocratic tinkering,” and it is not exactly clear why. That some questions about inequality are obscure or ill-framed does not indicate that inequality of wealth is not a fundamental social problem. To make sure you don’t miss the centrality of this stunning turnabout, Graeber and Wengrow return to their critique of egalitarianism in their conclusion, and also to their critique of the concept of the state. Of the concept, mind you, not the thing.

While I do think there are major critiques of Occupy that should always be held front and center, the kinds of critique offered in The Dawn of Everything don't feel right to me, especially when coming from Graeber. For me, it's also hard to know how much of Graeber went into his collaborative projects and how much of it was his co-writer. This isn't me placing the blame on Wengrow for some of these more frustrating things, but it is me wondering how that process went.

But, like Sartwell, it's hard not to question what Graeber would've felt about these lines and how close he was to the process of writing them.

But this “simplistic” conception of the state is also the conception that fuels or articulates the anarchist critique of the state, from William Godwin to Mikhail Bakunin to Emma Goldman. As I argue in my book Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory (2008), state power rests on violence and coercion; violence and coercion, to be defensible, require a moral justification; social contract theory and all other attempts in this regard are pathetically inadequate. Therefore, there should be no political state. In late Graeber, this looks simplistic and nonempirical. “The state” is a concept that falls apart under analysis and should be abandoned. Of course, that makes anti-statism just as senseless, for what is an anti-statist fighting against, really?

Prior to this paragraph, Sartwell summarises what Graeber had been saying about the 'origins of the state', so I'm going to include that here:

This assertion builds on a complex analysis of social power emerging from anthropological and archeological research. Rejecting the classic Weberian definition of the state as a group of people who claim a monopoly on violence, Graeber and Wengrow argue that the modern state contingently combines three elements that are seen in history in very different configurations: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma. Reducing political power ultimately only to the first of these paradigmatic forms of domination is, they repeat, terribly simplistic.

And while I don't think that we should give in on the basis of “Well, earlier anarchist critiques talked about the state like this, so we must also do so” (we can talk about the so-called complexities of the state in our critiques), I do think that Sartwell is right in questioning this attitude. How can we continue fighting against the state and participating in anti-state activism if we... just abandon the concept of the state? And if we're not going to question the basis of the state, what is the point? Understanding it doesn't really do much to undermine it; I logically understand things like sexism and racism as concepts, and that has done very little to remove them from the world.

Something else that I find annoying is that it doesn't really matter what the 'origins of the state' are, just like it doesn't really matter what the 'origins of injustice' or the 'origins of inequality' are. It's interesting to see the connections between what happens now and what came before, but it's not important to fight against those things now. The 'origin' of something isn't necessarily the same as the 'basis' of it; I don't need to know the origin of the state to know that what its based on is violence, coercion, control, and a mythical justification.

It’s not that I think we should routinely violate one another’s freedom to disobey, though that is going to require some elucidation. It’s that I’m somewhat surprised to see this sort of universalism emerging from this sort of anthropology, which supports it thinly at best and is widely and wildly in tension with it at worst. Graeber was never a relativist, exactly, but casually applying the same three concepts to every culture that has ever existed seems incompatible with his previous vast respect for human differences, not to mention many of his own earlier political positions. The persistent “threeness” of the distinctions hints at a line of a priori reasoning that is anything but empirical.

I don't have much to add to this; I wanted to keep it for my own notes because this is something that I distinctly remembered feeling and having some discomfort with when I was reading The Dawn of Everything. (I also kept getting vibes of underlying Noble Savage tropes. This isn't to say that anything positive about indigenous peoples is inherently a Noble Savage trope, but I couldn't shake the feeling that their presentation was done in a way that kept conveying that trope without fully or explicitly doing it.)

Perhaps it's because they kept saying that Europeans would “invariably” choose to live in indigenous communities, which isn't... entirely true? (There are many cases of people who've been captured who haven't assimilated into societies and chose to leave when given the opportunity; this requires so much contextualisation that both Wengrow and Graeber didn't do, which is why it always reads odd to me.)

In an excellent profile of the author in New York magazine, Molly Fischer writes that, at the end of his life, Graeber was active in the UK Labour Party. “The reason I support [Jeremy] Corbyn, or am happy about him,” he said in an interview, “is because he is willing to work with social movements.” Graeber, reports Fischer, “had struck up a connection with John McDonnell, Corbyn’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer [in] an effort to bring ordinary Britons into the workings of government.” Corbyn’s communications director described Graeber as someone “sparking the imagination for what’s politically possible.”

Again, I think it's worth looking at the people who Graeber with whom surrounded himself. His desire for anything anarchic seemed to be whatever could be achieved within UK Labour. (And then again, check the people managing his “legacy” institute. Not much room for anarchists... and at least one person who conveniently was in Epstein's emails. Hm.)

Reading: Is Your Job Bullshit? David Graeber on Capitalism’s Endless Busywork By: Dayton Martindale / 10 May 2018

From his time as a professor at Yale (ended prematurely, he believes, due to his anarchist activism) to his current gig at the London School of Economics, he kept running into professional managers who didn’t seem to do much.

I mean, we all have. But I will say that one of the few things that I kind of (but not entirely) agree with both Peter Shamshiri and Michael Hobbes about (regarding the If Books Could Kill episode on Bullshit Jobs) is that Graeber really didn't have a full understanding of work outside of academia. Despite growing up working class, he had very little (if any) personal experience in realms outside of academia.

And it's also interesting because a lot of his own personal exploration of academia is very... cis white man. This makes sense (that's who he was), but he very rarely explored the ways in which academia treated everyone else (unless someone reminded him to do so).

A subsequent YouGov survey found that 37 percent of British workers believe their job makes no ​“meaningful contribution to the world” — more than Graeber expected. So, he dug deeper, soliciting testimonials and researching the political, cultural and economic structures that encourage millions of people to effectively waste 40 hours a week. The result is Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, a playful and provocative take on what he calls ​“a scar across our collective soul.”

This feels like they're trying to make Bullshit Jobs more than it was. It was a sell-out book, and he knew it. (Even the Peter and Michael figured it out... sort of. They didn't explicitly state it, but they said that the essay felt too short and that the book was too long... and neither really incorporated a lot of evidence and often veered into vague territory. This is also something I agree with them on to an extent.)

David Graeber: A bullshit job is a job that the person doing it believes is pointless, and if the job didn’t exist it would either make no difference whatsoever or it would make the world a better place.

I think I actually have come to hate David's definition of a bullshit job because it doesn't actually engage with trying to understand the world and the context of those jobs.

In fact, I think a lot of jobs that people think “make a difference” or “should exist” are bullshit jobs. Working with children and guiding them to participating in the world in healthy ways isn't bullshit, yet teachers really do embody a lot of bullshit elements of the world, including things that they “must teach” according to the curriculum and how a lot of their curriculum ties directly to a poor organisation of society, continued colonialism and imperialism, anti-immigrant policies and coerced assimilation, training people to engage in 'civility' rather than contextualising different kinds of confrontation (along with a shit-ton of both-sidesing behaviours when a problem occurs, and forcing people to participate in a hierarchical structure that actually creates more issues than it ever solves (including the expectation that all adults inherently deserve children's respect because they “have authority”).

Would all teachers say they have a 'bullshit job'? I suspect most would not. But I think it largely is because it's not actually doing anything to change the world for the better and it's not about supporting both children's autonomy or communal care; even in the best of cases, it's about sustaining the status quo. (When even my anarchist friends who are teachers still frame it as “civilising children” and mean it positively, I think we should start asking a lot of questions about what it is that school does. And a lot of people do not.)

In fact, Graeber also wouldn't have recognised the bullshit of professorship because.... that was his bread and butter. He could just recognise the elements of bullshit in academia, and none of them were outside of the managerial and administrative aspects of academia.

Graeber: I’ve been working with people who’ve become big advocates for a universal basic income. It’s not the only solution, but it conforms with my political instincts. People think that is odd because I’m an anarchist. Why would I want a policy where the government would just give people money? Isn’t that giving power to the government? I say, no.

A basic income would be the perfect leftist antibureaucratic policy. It would not only reduce the number of bureaucrats, but it would get rid of the worst of them, the annoying ones who decide whether you’re really poor enough to deserve this, or whether you’re really married to that person or whether you really live in that room.

Besides, they’re unhappy, those intrusive bureaucrats about whom you wonder, ​“How can they live with themselves?” Well a lot of them can’t. Those guys would be off the hook. They could go form a rock band or restore antique furniture or do something nice.

I'm quoting this part in whole because it highlights perfectly the failures of Graeber's understanding of policies and connections. While I would not mind getting UBI so I can stop pretending to give a shit about some of the lessons I do (and could also stop having to play games of price negotiation, which I hate), I think it's mistaken to believe that it's inherently good or even something that should be desirable.

UBI wouldn't “decrease” the number of bureaucrats because UBI would also become a safeguarded policy in the way that all other welfare policies have been. It might not become a means-tested item, but it certainly would not support a whole range of people because that is not how governments work (and any anarchist should know this). As a good example, just check how many governments would gladly give any kind of welfare to immigrants.

If we look at social security or social insurance (unemployment, retirement, sick leave, etc), these policies are entirely unequal despite the fact that they are provided to people to access them. Each designation of social insurance has their own bureaucrats (first) who then tease out who gets what and how much. Accessing these services as an immigrant is near impossible, despite the fact that we most certainly pay into them. Despite paying into unemployment, I am entirely unable to access it both due to my status as an immigrant and because I'm a freelancer; if I lose work, it is put squarely on my shoulders. Despite paying into sick leave, I don't even get paid a percentage of an average month of income because I am a freelancer. I do not get to access this.

Who is to say that UBI wouldn't become like this? (And honestly, who is going to pay immigrants UBI anyway? We're exploitable because we're coerced into participating in capitalism just so we don't get deported from places we've lived for years, all because a visa or a policy shift requires it.)

Not only that, but if you're working on projects like UBI and knowing the government will get good press from it? Trying to get people to fight that government when they work on shittier things later is going to be even more difficult because they might fear losing the one thing keeping them afloat. It's a useful short-term solution, but it's not a good long-term one; it's also one that requires significant amounts of planning to deal with. (I also don't like the idea that a government can change and UBI can either diminish or just disappear because of that.)

Graeber: The anthropologist’s role is to take things that seem natural and point out that they’re not, that they’re social constructs and that we could easily do things another way. It’s inherently liberating.

If only more would do that instead of lean in on the status quo.

Reading: David Graeber Is Gone, But He's Still Changing How We See History By: Jessica Stites / 9 December 2021

David Graeber may be best known as a founder of Occupy Wall Street (a reputation he worked hard to disavow, always instead deferring to the collective decision-making process)

... Maybe, if he wanted to disavow it, you could actually stop referring to him as the founder of OWS. And also, he'd be correct in saying he wasn't the founder of it? Especially when he didn't call for shit and didn't start shit? Like, he was there and was a recognisable face, but that doesn't make someone a founder. (It'd be like saying Bruce Willis is the founder of McDonald's because we saw him in a lot of them and he became very noticeable.)

Anyway, despite him being dead, it's still disrespectful to refer to people as things they did not want to be known for (especially if it's not true).

He died unexpectedly, in September 2020, of pancreatitis. He was 59. Just three weeks prior, Graeber had announced to archaeologist David Wengrow that their book, which they’d been cowriting for a decade, was complete.

I think this is something worth recognising in contextualising a whole a lot about The Dawn of Everything. In some regards, a lot of it reads more like Wengrow than Graeber (at least according to my own memory of Graeber's works), even though there are arguments that Graeber was starting to shift more towards liberal than anarchist (which I'd also agree with—a lot of his later views fit this, and it's also worth recognising the people he surrounded himself with who now cling tight to his legacy and what all of that looks like).

It also contextualises a lot of translation-related stuff, though I doubt Graeber would've paid much attention to them. (Just thinking about how one of my friends pointed out that the phrasing around indigenous peoples in German was uh... awful. But it was translated post-mortem, so his ability to even engage with those critiques was impossible. But Wengrow, on the other hand...)

Wengrow: One might assume the idea of social housing — a little bit like the abolition of slavery — is an idea that took an enormous amount of time before anybody could conceive of doing it and arose from moral and ethical concerns in very recent European cultural media. But neither is true. We have examples in the book not just of social housing but of non-agricultural groups adopting and then abolishing slavery.

I think, when I read things like this, it's where I wish more people would start disputing this understanding of 'progress'. To act as if we have all been 'progressing' to this point, as if everything is a straight line, is part of why people view that these ideas take “an enormous amount of time before anybody could conceive of doing it.” This is part of the issue I've long held with presentations of history and our contemporary moment; we are not progressing in a straight line, and we never have. We see multiple ideas pop up time and time again because people think they're useful; we also see many of the actual good ideas get tossed in favour of propaganda about who abuses those good ideas, courtesy of the few who view themselves as most important.

Progress isn't even cyclical. There are patterns, but they're not consistent in timing.

Anyway, I wish this would be a larger focal point of these historians and social scientists trying to make this point while never actually making that point.

I sense some reviewers might have been expecting a more political or politicized tract, something we deliberately stepped away from — and actually David was the one pulling back.

If what Wengrow says is true, then it makes sense why people continually view Graeber as distancing himself from anarchism in a lot of ways. Again, when a person is dead, it's also possible that the other person gets to put a lot of the criticisms on their shoulders. They can't fight back. (I don't think Wengrow has reason to lie, but we can't even see the push-back that Graeber would have if it were exaggerated.)

Note: I don't like this interview. Parts of it are written in a fawning nature, and I find that infuriating. People can like a book they interview someone about (it does make the interview easier), but it doesn't come off as anything but fawning to repeatedly be in awe over sections mentioned. (It feels more natural when some is like “Okay, I really liked this one section and have some questions about it.”)

Reading: Social Rights: The Idea Whose Time Has Come? By: Robin Wilson / 21 March 2026

How do Europe’s fraught governments navigate their way beyond an ever-intensifying [accumulation] of crises threatening to overwhelm them? They feel pummelled from all sides: by the cost of living and rising inequality, by technology-assisted precarisation of the labour market, by climate change and extreme weather events, by brutal wars in Ukraine and the Gulf.

Governments can't feel anything. They aren't people. They are made of people, and those people do not feel pummelled from all sides because they are the ones pummelling their citizenry from all sides. We are being pummelled by inequality, we are being pummelled by being made precarious, we are being pummelled by climate change, and we are being pummelled by the wars they refuse to end.

Governments require no empathy. They are not people, and they are largely made up of people who have no empathy for anyone they deem as unworthy.

Yet if government is back in the frame, growing public mistrust enfeebles its efforts.

Growing public mistrust is what every government deserves considering how often they show us what we're worth to them (nothing).

That is exploited by populist parties which, as in the 1930s, offer nostalgic national myths as snake-oil ‘solutions’ but find an audience among the socially insecure for their assaults on universal norms. And the rules-based international order which might help Europe’s governments calm this perfect global storm has been brought to the brink by that odd couple of far-right leaders, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—united only in their determination to turn history backwards and to put collective Europe back into national containers.

I'm sorry, but what is this bullshit? First and foremost, populist parties might be able to exploit the “down and out,” but it's less often the actual down and out supporting them and a bunch of the middle-class and higher collaborators who get shit out of it. We do not need this kind of empathy for the people who might join the nazis. If they are willing to be a nazi to save themselves, they aren't worth much to the rest of us.

Moreover, this notion gives Europe a new way to set a moral compass for, and regain its legitimacy among, the wider world. It is the idea of social rights.

Europe didn't come up with this idea, and Europe wouldn't be legitimate even if they implemented something so minimal as to be a bandage to the gaping wound it's created in the world.

‘There is no democratic security without social rights. At a time of war, economic shocks and rising inequality, delivering on the European Social Charter puts social justice where it belongs—at the centre of democratic stability.’ Speaking of ‘a world in rupture’, he said: ‘Moments of rupture force choices.’

Prediction: None of these social rights are going to do shit other than reinforce Europe. It's still going to harm people, especially refugees and other migrants.

It was ‘profoundly worrying’, she said, that ‘the social rights of many have been squeezed to breaking-point’. Added to this was the ‘democratic crisis in Europe’ associated with ‘real and perceived failures’ by governments to deliver social inclusion. The link between democratic stabilty and social rights had been ‘never more urgent’ and the charter ‘never more important’.

You don't get “perceived” failures without them actually being real, unless you're referring to things that aren't failures (e.g., helping refugees) that a bunch of racists think is a “failure” of society. This is all vague bullshit, if we're honest. Democratic and social rights have never truly existed in Europe, and there is no way that the people eroding what little people fought to secure will grant them in any capacity.

The United Nations rapporteur on extreme poverty, Olivier de Schutter, who is also a member of the ECSR, pointed to research showing that for every percentage point increase in the Gini coefficient of income inequality there was a roughly identical increase in support for far-right parties.

By whom, Olivier? Because multiply marginalised people who far-right parties target who are often even more poor than the people targeting them with bigoted vitriol? Do not share the same views in the same numbers. So who is supporting the far right with your correlational metric?

Measures introduced by mainstream parties in government, such as tightening eligibility and rendering harsher conditions for welfare benefits, had fuelled ‘distrust and disenchantment’ amid increasing precarity, weaker unions and a declining labour share in economic output. The ‘fight against poverty’ was thus ultimately a ‘fight for democracy’, he said.

Who allowed that precarity? Who weakened the unions? Who has been making people jobless with no recourse? WHO? Say it. Be very open and honest about it. Because it's the same people pulling austerity bullshit on everyone who is eligible for those welfare benefits (which often excludes immigrants, so you're still talking primarily about citizens and ignoring an even more precarious population within your varying borders).

As speaker after speaker from among the member states—as well as the professional experts and the non-governmental organisations—went on to reiterate, inequality and exclusion foster insecurity and mistrust, which in turn feed democratic backsliding and international conflict.

I don't believe this to be fully true. I don't deny that it looks that way, but I'd like them to look at who is responsible for the insecurity that people feel and who has actually been engaged in the “democratic backsliding.” If I use my country of origin as an example, Barack Obama had ample opportunity to follow through on the promises that got people to vote for him in his first term. This would have included massively reworking the student loan system (as one example). He could've done it in is second term. Joe Biden could've done it when he took office. Neither of them ever did this, despite the obvious benefit to millions of people in the US (because they support the financial institutions).

The liberals who keep claiming to save us do not, and they will not because that's not in their best interest. And this is also why these people, who think we need a charter of social rights when we actually don't, are pretending it will save us and that they can save us. They are part of the problem. They have helped enable it.

These patterns play out everywhere time and time again, and they hope we constantly forget.

A key intellectual link in this narrative is the concept of ‘social investment’ developed in recent years by the welfare-state expert Anton Hemerijck and colleagues. What the market fundamentalists dismissed as the welfare ‘burden’ on the taxpayer, fostering ‘dependency’, has been re-presented as a win-win formula for social inclusion, gender equality and fiscal stability—for instance through providing universal childcare, with its enduring benefits for women’s career development and the prospective life-chances of the child.

Let's stop and think about this for a moment. Market fundamentalists do indeed talk of these programs like this, but can we actually consider why it is that “universal childcare” is a right that needs to be given? Why do we make parents work while they have young children? Why don't we have multi-generational spaces for adults and children to be together? Why don't we foster actual communal care? We wouldn't need “universal childcare” (which, by the way, starts aiming towards pushing younger and younger kids into school—something that is actually quite traumatising for many, does not safe to many of them, and does provide further propagandistic support and further indoctrination of people) if we actually made our communities healthier in this way. If we created genuine learning spaces for all people to share, we wouldn't need to rely upon the state to do this for us.

Dependency is actually correct, but the market fundamentalists talk about it as leeching off the state. That's disgusting. But building dependency on the state is still bad because it builds reliance on something that is fundamentally against you. It creates and is indicative of an abusive relationship, one where the things you need can be snatched from you without your consent.

How will social rights guard against that? (Note: “Social rights” hasn't really even been defined here. It's just a catchphrase with no meat.)

This is all rubbish, and I don't know why an anarchist pushed it on my timeline as if it was a good idea in any capacity.

Reading: Uncanny Valley [the essay] By: Anna Wiener Spring 2016

The men ask me questions like, “How would you calculate the number of people who work for the United States Postal Service?” and “How would you describe the internet to a medieval farmer?” and “What is the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” They tell me to stand in front of the whiteboard and diagram my responses. These questions are self-conscious and infuriating, but it only serves to fuel me. I want to impress; I refuse to be discouraged by their self-importance.

I absolutely would just leave the fucking room. I hate that these kinds of assignments have been cropping up in social science textbooks and resources, where kids are being asked to basically learn these skills because they supposedly “show critical analysis.” They are bullshit, just like the empathy tasks we were asked to do once upon a time and still to this day.

Or maybe I'd just be like “I would simply ask the USPS how many people work for it because calculating it seems tedious when someone else has already done that work” or “A medieval farmer wouldn't give a shit about the internet.”

Venture capitalists have spearheaded massive innovation in the past few decades, not least of which is their incubation of this generation’s very worst prose style. The internet is choked with blindly ambitious and professionally inexperienced men giving each other anecdote-based instruction and bullet-point advice. 10 Essential Start-up Lessons You Won’t Learn in School. 10 Things Every Successful Entrepreneur Knows. 5 Ways to Stay Humble. Why the Market Always Wins. Why the Customer Is Never Right. How to Deal with Failure. How to Fail Better. How to Fail Up. How to Pivot. How to Pivot Back. 18 Platitudes to Tape Above Your Computer. Raise Your Way to Emotional Acuity. How to Love Something That Doesn’t Love You Back.

God, these are so many of the reasons that I have hated existing online. These sorts of things that leaked out and into the mainstream, that basically became part of the “news” blogging back in the day and are still being rooted out.

I hate all of this, and it feels like the opening to what we've got now with the generative AI “writing” and whatever else.

On the other side of the table, our manager paces back and forth, but he’s smiling. He asks us to write down the names of the five smartest people we know, and we dutifully oblige. I look at the list and think about how much I miss my friends back home, how bad I’ve been at returning phone calls and emails, how bloated I’ve become with start-up self-importance, how I’ve stopped making time for what I once held dear. I can feel blood rush to my cheeks.

“OK,” my manager says. “Now tell me: why don’t they work here?”

The irony is that so many industries got hit with these kinds of hustlers. I remember sitting in a school in the same year this was published where a principal basically did the same shit. And if we named anyone outside the school, we were told that we didn't care about “our community” enough.

A few years later, I'd be working at a school where everyone kept (correctly) complaining that our school manager who doubled as an HR representative was not taking complaints seriously (because she wasn't). The school's owner hired an HR representative whose resumé supposedly, according to him, included a slew of high fashion brands and whatever... but he always said he worked in marketing. He loved “unconventional” trainings, like asking us to bring our favourite spoons (without clarification) to meetings (and then getting upset with us because, since he wouldn't give us answers about why we needed a fucking spoon, some of us thought it'd be a stereotypical HR grouping mechanic and brought absurdist spoons instead). He talked about how some of us were “getting off the train at the next station,” but he also forgot how trains worked while trying to make that analogy and ended up implying that we were being shoved off (which was... actually a more true analogy for those of us who were harassed and chased out by him and the school manager).

He made me read the dumbest book to date... something referencing The Little Prince and him tying his shoes, which basically said we should let our bosses abuse us.

Tech likes to think they're special, but they aren't special for this. This shit's everywhere. They're more special for the thing that I think is most insidious: creating “campuses” and treating themselves like second schools with playgrounds and whatever else that keeps workers on their properties and in their pockets, which grants them a lot more beneficial coverage (or at least used to).

Amusingly, I think I have the book that came of this somewhere in my backlog. Perhaps I'll read it. I'm not sure.

Reading: Who Will Remember Us When The Servers Go Dark? By: Cade Diehm / On: 10 March 2026

We were told there would be no more forgetting. The cloud would remember everything, cyberspace would liberate us all. We would be furnished with an abundance of digital memory, permanence always just a hard drive away. Or a floppy disk, a tape, a USB key – anything really. The medium didn’t matter, only the promise that the data stored within would last forever.

I feel like this essay starts on a flawed premise of what 'we' were promised. I wasn't promised this. I was promised something else: The internet would liberate us all. The internet would introduce more democracy into the world. The internet would enable us to always be able to access certain 'valuable' things (e.g., from libraries) though it was never clear what 'valuable' would mean. But permanence was never one of those things because we realised how flimsy the premise of permanence on those devices was when I was a kid: VHS tapes could melt and be easily burnt, all disks were prone to some form of breakage, CDs could get irreparably scratched (regardless of how much toothpaste you put on them), and USB keys have been easily damaged and corrupted.

I do not know where this promise of permanence came from, but it was not something that I or others around me ever felt. If that were true, why would our computers or phones require such constant replacing or be made of such delicate materials that could lead to an easy break (or worse, be made in ways where something that used to be easily reparable now leads to permanent death of at least part of the machine, if not all of it).

Or maybe it's that my understanding of the 'permanence' is different from what the author intends. I'm not sure.

When the server goes dark, we go dark, too. We’ve built an entire civilisation on an unthinkably brutal and comically unreliable stack while hallucinating it as literally anything else. We condemn AI today for making shit up, but what about us? We’re building on a fantasy just as brittle, we are just as demonstrably wrong. Yet we pretend a file isn’t just a gesture that can disappear in an instant. We hallucinate that the server is somehow both fleeting and forever.

I do find this paragraph to be exceptionally interesting, though. It's so morbidly true that 'we' (which isn't really 'we') have built a world on something so absurdly fragile, on things that are so easily broken and lost (for better or worse). And we keep trying to build “infrastructure” to ensure that the fragility of that thing can't be harmed, which is also ridiculous.

This is such a good presentation of the inanity of the world we exist within. Though, it is important to realise that many of us have never had a say in this being the world we should have; it was the one many of us were siloed into, whether we wanted to be here or not.

Moxie Marlinspike is the glue of this project. He’s a lanky Steve Jobs-type, but a full-blown cypherpunk with dreadlocks, anarchist leanings, and a hacker’s trickster smirk. We’re camped in an off-season mansion Moxie has rented. The property spans three stories and is stuffed with hundreds of square feet of wicker furniture, a massive kitchen full of Miele whitegoods and a private beach nobody swims at. It is so fancy, I feel like we’ve broken in and made ourselves at home.

At night, I argue with Moxie about his threat models and his assumptions about phone numbers as user identifiers. “This app is going to be used by people escaping intimate violence,” I tell him. “Their abusers know their phone numbers. You need to let them in with pseudonyms.” But he insists on ensuring Signal’s address book discovery works as smooth as butter.

I don't think it's fair to say that Moxie Marlinspike ever had “anarchist leanings,” even if it feels like it's said here with a bit of tongue and cheek (but I can't tell what tone the author intended). He's always been a businessman through and through; he's never actually cared about anarchic-anything, and that's particularly obvious in the second quoted paragraph where he doesn't care about threat models or abuse.

He also kept harassing people with trying to license protocols and what have you, which doesn't feel very anarchist to me unless you only think anarchists are anarcho-capitalists (which aren't anarchists; they're just fucking tools co-opting an ideology they don't get and don't want to understand).

But in spite of the gracious sunlight, I feel a true evil on this boat with me. These men aren’t aberrations, they’re a template I’ve seen everywhere. They’re saying the same words I’d heard all week in the mansion. The same words I’d heard in the copycat San Francisco transplant coworking spaces of Melbourne, Sydney’s Silicon Beach, and Apple’s developer conferences: Violence, then rebuild; profit, then philanthropy – repeat! Different war, same business model, new interface, same shining eyes. “We’re making the world a better place.”

This is beautifully written. It's so precisely a good explanation. It'd also do well to tie in the robber baron philanthropists of the early 1900s because this is the same shit that people've been doing for decades if not centuries.

In 2015, a man named Victor Collins was found dead in James Bates’ bathtub in Bentonville, Arkansas. What might have been a routine homicide investigation became a low-key media frenzy. Bates’ home was “smart”, meaning his water, electricity, and heat were all networked. This changed everything.

Sending me down a rabbit hole because I want to know what the updates to this story are. Which include: Collins' widow suing Bates (claiming he was responsible for Collins' death since he died in Bates' house—I'm guessing that case didn't go well because I did find a 2021 appeal), and Bates suing the Bentonville PD department (claiming they colluded with Collins' wife to charge him with murder). No word on what the final verdict was with regards to how Victor Collins died; it seems once Bates had the charges dropped (and because of how absurd it was to hinge the case on an Alexa), no one really cared to... do more work to figure out what happened? (Or report on it.)

(And because it's mentioned later, I'm just dropping this link here for ease of access: Sam Mitrani: Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People.)

In case you might accuse a contemporary scholar of selective reinterpretation of history to satisfy a left-wing bias, British officials themselves explicitly compared industrial policing to colonial control methods. The Acting Lord Lieutenant of Carmarthenshire wrote to the Home Office in 1843: “there is… far more analogy between the duties of the police here and in Ireland than between their duties in London and those they are to execute in this country.”

This bit reminds me of my work in studying the history of compulsory schooling and schooling as it exists, and it's very interesting because a similar story exists for schooling. People talk about how it's good and necessary, but they ignore the why. They ignore how people who created the original systems saw it; they pretend they said something totally different or meant something more positive... because they don't want to believe that something they've held to be true or held to to be dear has been based upon a lie.

Under capitalism, successive technologies show this logic repeating as ever-accelerating epochs of Boom, Extract, Enforce.

The same can be said of schools, and it's just crazy to me how people won't look at it this way.

Each infrastructure began with promises of liberation and human triumph. But stability calcifies into compliance through legal policy, economic incentives, consolidation and embedded technical defaults.

Easy to also apply to schooling. I wonder if we could start associating schooling as a 'technology' in the way that policing is positioned as one in this essay.

Unlike other mediums, Cyberspace requires capital just to exist. No part of it is passive. A book can sit on a shelf for centuries, asking nothing of its surroundings but space. Every element of Cyberspace – electricity, hardware, supply chains, software maintenance, protocols, the network – all of it must be actively maintained by someone, somewhere, continuously, forever.

I know what the point is of this paragraph, but I find myself repeatedly nitpicking the ideas used. A book can sit on a shelf for centuries, but it does ask for more than space: It asks for electricity (for appropriate heating/cooling and humidity control so that it can survive for centuries), it asks for maintenance (cleaning of the environment it sits in), it asks for... space. And unless this book exists outside of the current capitalist structure—maybe we can talk to some librarians—that space requires capital to purchase... and then that whole space requires maintenance in order to ensure the book's safety.

Books aren't as passive as the author makes them out to be.

You cannot preserve neutrally in a medium that punishes existence without continuous capital investment.

Again, we can apply the idea to books. Which books have survived and which ones have not? Why have they survived? Why have others disappeared into the aether? Books are also not passive because the choosing of what survives centuries into the future also requires people to make decisions that are based on things that... can be harmful to us all, quite honestly.

Not to mention, in tandem with the current internet policies, we're still seeing book bans. What happens to those books?

What Lain understands – and what her father refuses to see – is that the network was never a separate or ephemeral home of Mind. It was already bleeding through Barlow’s substrate, staining everything it touched with its particular logic of connection, coercion, and control.

I think it'd be good to point out the ways in which so many people had already realised what Lain understood (that the space between online/offline is blurry and that both are real). For so long, we floundered in our own understanding because many people refused to figure this out. That which happens offline impacts online and vice versa.

This is a thing I wish more people would explore. It was also something that I wished more people would've pushed back on when someone said the internet “wasn't real” and to “just log off,” as if that fixed anything.

In October 2024, the Internet Archive is hacked. Thirty-one million accounts exposed, the Wayback Machine taken offline, the Internet’s indiscriminate memory defaced. The hackers are flesh; their target is memory; the impact is both and neither. The real reached into Cyberspace and gave it amnesia.

Okay, but this is kind of giving cover for what IA/Wayback Machine already does. Should any company ask them to take down archives, they will usually do it; I've done it myself when I didn't want a much older version of my website to remain, which means that without any hacking skills at all... I've done the same thing. Simply by asking them to do so. Imagine if they did that on services that shouldn't be allowed to do that for (like government websites).

Also, IA routinely deletes things on their own. I've had a whole account of old podcasts completely deleted without any notification at all. I don't know if it was for a malicious reason (part of a hack or because IA didn't like it on their own) or if there was a good reason. The problem with IA as an example here is that they already engage in collective shifts of memory if someone requests it, for good or bad.

Scott’s worldview distils to this: “If you don’t want people to have your data, don’t put it online.” Which is true, I guess, but it’s also what happens when the computer-science definition of memory collides with living subjects. Just because “the internet never forgets” doesn’t mean you personally should be the arbiter of immutability. This is a despicable worldview that guarantees bit-level integrity while stripping other people of their contextual agency. Scott solves for retention and calls the remainder “history.”

I very much agree with this. It's also part of what frustrates me about the self-hosting commentary people engage in. “You can control it!” Kind of. I can't control what's done with it once it's sent out to the void, and I don't know how people will weaponise it or manipulate it... Similarly, that problem would happen if I published a book or produced an album. But I still don't like the lack of engagement that people often have about what's posted.

I mean, I guess the same can be said of me going through this essay and commenting on pieces; if they wanted to delete it, parts would still be quoted here. I didn't ask for permission. Perhaps I should've, though I still want to add my thoughts with the appropriate context.

Reading: We Want Freedom (Mumia Abu-Jamal) To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State

There are a lot of elements that Mumia points to, which usually hint at similar themes, that often go neglected by people utilising his work to say that “nonviolence protects the state” without understanding what topics Mumia is discussing.

While he does, at one point, state:

The Richmond demonstration, the newsletter (soon to be reborn as a full-fledged newspaper), and the armed community police patrols would prove irresistible to ghetto youth who had simmered under the glare of overtly racist cops. They longed to join the swelling Civil Rights movement, but had not because they could not bear to join any group which would meekly submit to racist violence, as demanded by some civil rights organizations. The 1967 revolts marked a rise in Black militancy, a psychic change of pace that the middle-class leaders of the southern-based Civil Rights movement could not address, and word spread about the actions of the Black Panther Party. The Black journalist William Gardner-Smith remarked, “The ’67 revolts marked the entry of the tough ghetto youths into the race battle, and the existing organizations, led by intellectuals or the middle-class, could not cope with them—the Panthers had to be born.”

Emphasis mine. This is not an argument that nonviolence isn't useful, it is an argument that the urging of “tolerating racist violence” in the attempt to achieve rights was not something that appealed to people (and also wasn't working). It's a discussion that focuses on assimilation as a tactic and how assimilation requires people to meekly tolerate bullshit they shouldn't have to (racist violence, in this instance) and that people didn't want to assimilate. They wanted to be themselves and to be safe in that identity.

This doesn't exclude nonviolence as a tactic (which, btw, Mumia repeatedly highlights as being part of the tactics in the BPP—the police patrols, though armed, were trained to engage via nonviolence unless they were unable to avoid it; the difference in this kind of nonviolence and the nonviolence of the middle-class... is what kind of risk it came with).

But Mumia also makes comments like this:

The Sacramento demonstration launched the Party into a national orbit, perhaps long before it was ready. The Party was swarmed with applications from young men and women around the nation who wanted to open branches of the new organization in their local communities.

Again, emphasis mine. He's making it clear that there were other issues at play for how its growth could've potentially been a problem (and it can be—we've seen similar issues in other quick-growing movements that haven't figured out how to deal with that growth; this is also, for the record, part of the problem with the Occupy movement came out of that growth because it required having to deal with people who had wide-ranging views, including wannabe capitalists and right-libertarians, rather than a cohesive understanding around the destructive nature of capitalism... and people didn't deal with that in any meaningful way).

For example:

“A law book, a tape recorder, and a gun” were all that were needed, Huey explained. “It would let those brutalizing racist bastards know that we mean business.”5 In accordance with Huey’s study of the law, BPP patrollers agreed to accept arrests nonviolently—to a limit. Newton and Seale promised to “do battle only at the point when a fool policeman drew his gun unjustly.”

And then Mumia goes on to describe the programs the BPP had instituted and later formalised, like Free Breakfast for Children and the free clinics... Free clothing, etc.

Some different tangents. First:

The Free Breakfast for Children Program was, by far, the most popular of all the Party programs. It also served as a unique opportunity for the secular BPP and the Black church to establish a working relationship since most breakfast programs were situated within neighborhood churches and staffed by Panther men and women. Father Earl Neil, a Black priest assigned to Oakland’s St. Augustine Episcopal Church, was an early and vocal supporter of the Black Panther Party and made some interesting comparisons between the Party and the traditional church.

This is so... frustrating for me? I understand that the church is an important element of many people's communities, but I also feel like the programs (that should inherently be secular) that people need routinely get co-opted by people who have a vested interest in ensuring that people maintain a specific view on the way life is. While it is helpful and often assists people in having access to free/cheap spaces, churches can have ulterior motives for providing that assistance.

It makes me wonder if any of the Panthers had any critiques on the relationship with churches and clergy; I'd be interested to read those.

Then, at a different time, Mumia wrote:

Watts took on a meaning to Black Americans that symbolized a kind of resistance that was anathema to the likes of Dr. King or his co-integrationists of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The Black Panther Party came into existence, not to support or supplement the major civil rights organizations, but to supplant them.

The major civil rights groups were shocked and stymied by the outrage revealed by Watts. Those who would organize the Black Panther Party looked to Watts as inspiration and an ashy harbinger of things to come.

Which is also interesting in the ways in which a lot of the more 'violent' uprisings in response to continued police brutality (Ferguson, for example) were co-opted by more middle-class and intellectual folks and, as a result, silenced to a degree... especially as Mumia looks to them, in the modern day, for hope (as per the new introduction to this edition).

Which isn't a problem alone for race-related organisations; it's a constant and persistent problem that middle-class and intellectuals co-opt movements and silence the more radical aspects of them. It's just sad and frustrating because we could get so much more if only we'd let people (metaphorically or literally, depending on situation) burn it all down and help us find new imaginations for what could be within the ashes.

And also this list is really interesting to revisit:

Among these programs were the Intercommunal News Service (1967); the Petition Drive for Community Control of Cops (1968); Liberation Schools, later called Intercommunal Youth Institutes, (1969); People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinic (1969); Free Clothing Program (1970); Free Busing to Prisons Program (1970); Seniors Against Fearful Environment (SAFE) Program (1971); Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation (1971); and Free Housing Cooperative Program (1971).

In later years, the Party would initiate other programs including Free Shoe Programs, Free Ambulance Services, Free Food Programs, and Home Maintenance Programs.

While clearly every branch of the Party didn’t offer all of these programs, most did operate the basics: a free breakfast program, a clinic, and a free clothing program. The bigger chapters, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, tended to provide the widest range of community services, while smaller branches tended to concentrate on the most popular programs.