We are looking for new scientific recipes, new ideologies, new control systems, new institutions, new instruments to eliminate the dreadful consequences of our previous recipes, ideologies, control systems, institutions and instruments. We treat the fatal consequences of technology as though they were a technical defect that could be remedied by technology alone. We are looking […]

Here’s a problem: reformists end up playing by oppressor’s rules, forming factions, and marginalizing minorities; revolutionaries become zealots who need to convert an army before they get anything done.
Here’s the underlying problem: change is slow, because people change slowly. Reformists want change that requires the consent of the very people responsible for why things are […]

I’ve added an essay I wrote a while back to the Library page. It uses postmodern theory to critique organizational, and follows yesterday’s post with a more intensive academic analysis of institution.
It’s quite long. If you read it, please comment.
>A Postmodernist Account of the Organization

I want to continue to expound Abandonist political theory as introduced in this post. In particular I want to develop my statement that the abandonist renegotiates power through circumvention, not through competition.
Reformists cooperate. Revolutionaries compete. Abandonists circumvent.
But cooperate with what? Compete with what? Circumvent what?
The answer is institution–and this is tricky to define, but I […]

Modern society has a predilection for centralization–the consolidation of resources. This has clear roots in Enlightenment thinking: use natural science to discover and build on the best ways to do things, and ultimately strive toward perfection. This crippling singularity does not reflect the complexity of the human experience.
There is no best form of government. There […]

It’s happening a lot more these days, this blurring of the lines between dystopian fantasies and the world I see around me. I used to absorb those works of fiction which let me bathe in the tragic absurdity of what the world could become. It might even have seemed remotely realistic, but it was still […]

There was a time when I was ignorant of oppression; a blissful childhood spent aloof to the suffering in the world. My eyes began to open in my adolescence, and my identity shifted. Naively, I thought we could use the system’s own channels to reform and ameliorate oppressive conditions. I slowly became disillusioned with this […]

So, I just saw the new movie adaptation of Ironman. If one can look past the racism and sexism that Hollywood seems incapable of transcending, it offered a fairly intriguing story. The narrative is well-rounded, with enticing action sequences that are by no means the central focus of the movie. By the end, some important […]

Why do we live in cities? This is not the same question as why did cities form? the answers to which lie in theories and historical analysis. To answer our question we have to look inwards. Unless you’re reading this blog at the library (anybody?), you are not broke. You own a computer. You have […]

This is a very long post. If you get all the way through it, there is a treat at the bottom just for you.

Somewhere lying on a desk in the back of our cultured minds is a definition of property. We read it once, and can’t recite it verbatim, but we have a good idea […]