"Alex J. Wood research focuses on the implications of digital technology for power relations, working conditions, and the transformation of capitalism. He is currently researching how digital platforms reshape power relations at work and the consequences of artificial intelligence for workplace regimes.

In 2020 he published the book, ’Despotism on Demand: How Power Operates in the Flexible Workplace’ and has authored over 20 journal articles or book chapters on topics such as precarious scheduling, useful jobs and alienation, the gig economy, algorithmic management, social media facilitated labour mobilisation, online worker community, labour process theory and the transformation of workplace regimes.

[…]

The article questions the novelty and distinctiveness of algorithmic workplace regimes, arguing that such regimes are better understood as a subtype of flexible despotism that can be traced back to the 1980s."—ETUI

Contesting algorithmic workplace regimes in an era of flexible despotism >

youtu.be/REdidsHj_Fs?si=xs-rZ0…

#research #sociology #despotism_on_demand #alienation #power_relation #flexible_workspace
#obscured_exploitation #algorithms #gig_economy #flexible_workspace #labour_process #flexible_despotism #algorithmic_management #AI #workplace_regime #monitoring #evaluation #scheduling #work #bullshit_jobs #work_games #consent #automated_evaluation #technology #automated_adaptation #internal_labour_allocation #control #flex_work #workplace_control #internal_state #workplace_regime
#insecure_working_time #capitalism #Orwelian_language #blacklist #hegemony #propaganda #CCTV #personality_cult #scan_rates #pick_rates #dynamic_task_allocation #automated_performance_management #digital_direction #digital_surveillance #brainwashing #task_management #wellbeing #trade_unions

“The Horizon: Barbarism or the Leap Beyond Value”

by Fabio Vighi in Savage Minds on Substack

@uk_politics
@UKLabour
@ZackPolanski@mastodon.green
@ZackPolanski@mastox.eu
@BBC5Live
@BBCRadio4
@BBCNews
@guardian
@Independent
@thetimes

“We are entering an era of severe currency crises, capital controls, and the weaponisation of the legal infrastructure to execute the final looting of the public and private citizen alike. The legal and financial architecture is being re-engineered behind the scenes. Under the guise of securing ‘systemic stability,’ the collateral of ordinary individuals, pension funds, and public assets is being positioned to be absorbed by the clearing houses of the financial elite when the debt and derivative bubbles burst. This is the logical endpoint of a system that has moved from the ‘too big to fail’ bailouts to architectural re-engineering”

open.substack.com/pub/savagemi…

#Press #SocialMedia #Journalism #Marxism #Capitalism #EconomicCollapse #War #Nationalism #Racism #Ecocide #Collapse

Leaving you all with an excerpt from the essay, before I re-boost posts from yesterday and boost quoted posts. TY to @MaQuest , @jblue , @rooftopjaxx and everyone who shared and/or chimed in! #ABetterWorldIsPossible !

"Can Solarpunk Save the World?"

The choice, then, is clear: solarpunk, or barbarism.

by Stacey Balkan, from 2022...

"Offering an imperfect but clear-eyed hope, rather than so many apocalyptic nightmares, is a key goal of solarpunk fiction. While many critics argue that radical change will only come about following the total collapse of Earth systems—in other words, the apocalypse imagined by popular climate fiction and much recent zombie fare—it has become increasingly evident that such alarmism possesses no political utility.

"Furthermore, in a discussion about climate and energy justice, we must acknowledge that, for many #Indigenous communities, the 'apocalypse' happened long ago: during the long 16th-century, when an expanding plantation system expedited the removal and enslavement of millions of #BIPOC persons in order to accommodate the #hyperconsumption of imperial centers like London.

"Apocalypse, as a geohistorical event or literary trope, is thus not central to solarpunk. That is, solarpunk doesn’t require an environmental apocalypse, because most solarpunk practitioners understand the material legacies of #SettlerColonialism as on ongoing apocalypse.

"Consequently, solarpunk worlds are not necessarily postapocalyptic (nor set in the future), but they are #postextractivist. Responding to the ethos of #extractive #capitalism — whereby the colonized exist as 'fuel … for the sake of someone else’s good life' — solarpunk imaginaries demand a thorough dismantling of fossil-fueled modernity and the material infrastructures (and attendant cultural expressions) that occasioned our comprehensive dependence on prehistoric carbon. Quite logically then, solarpunk also rejects the techno-utopian project of saving industrial modernity via increasingly hubristic geoengineering schemes."

Full essay:
publicbooks.org/can-solarpunk-…

#SolarPunkSunday #PostCapitalism #SharingEconomy #Earth4All #SettlerColonialism #ExtractiveIndustries #TechBros

As part of my anti-fascism, I changed my domain from davidculley.com to davidculley.eu a while ago.

I thought it merely a symbolic gesture, but maybe it's not so symbolic after all.

The top-level domain .com is controlled by Verisign, a greedy US company. Depending on US companies is problematic as can be seen by what happened to the Italian anti-fascism collective.

Verisign also lobbied hard so that they're allowed to increase their prices by 7% every year in 4 out of 6 years. A few years ago it had cost only $9 to renew your .com domain. Soon it'll already be at $15 a year.

Maybe 7% doesn't sound much per individual domain, but consider there are millions if not billions of domains that need to be renewed every year. This is a cashcow for Verisign. They make their profits through quantity. They provide nothing at all in return for their price increases. Verisign is a leech.

Meanwhile a .eu domain costs $5 a year. There's no monopoly on the .eu top-level domain. The EU Commission chooses from a pool of applicants every few years and the current mandate is given to a Belgian company.

I'm not a commercial entity. I don't sell you anything. I'm a person within the EU with a personal homepage. I'm aware the EU has its problems too (Europ€an value$), especially at its borders, but for now the .eu TLD represents me better than the .com TLD.

Cutting your dependencies on US companies is not merely symbolic as can be seen by what happened this week to anti-fascists worldwide.

#fascism #capitalism #WebDev

Benjamin Sonntag-King

2026-08-28 07:27:07

The domain names of
autistici.org / inventati.org (and noblogs.org) are now suspended.
.org being managed by a US entity they were forced to suspend them due to Autisti (the oldest leftwing Italian collective doing web and mail hosting) being declared a terrorist organisation by Trump

Even for WikiLeaks they didn't do that

The US are clearly a fascist state now....

And all your links to your blogs are now dead 😭🥴

(Editing so everyone knows: maybe not. They were dead a few hours ago but not anymore)
(subedit: autistici.org still dead, the other are fine for now)

When the #Shortage is the #Strategy

source: nooneshappy.com/article/when-t…

#Prices keep rising — but not because things are hard to make. Companies found a trick during the #pandemic: limit #supply, raise prices too high, and never lower them again. Economists call this "rockets and feathers" — prices shoot up fast, then fall slowly. Since 2020, corporate profits have surged while #wages barely moved. S&P 500 profit margins hit an all-time high in 2026. CEOs openly admit they won't cut prices first — that would start a price war. Many industries have been caught fixing prices: car parts, drugs, eggs, even rent-setting #algorithms. When the Supreme Court struck down #tariffs, companies got $166 billion back — but prices stayed high. The #money went to #profits and executive bonuses. What can you do? Buy less, buy later, compare real costs, avoid brand markups. In Croatia, a #consumer #boycott cut retail sales by 53% in one day and forced #price cuts. Companies only fear one thing: that we stop paying.

#capitalism #profit #finance #economy #news #politics #company #problem #society #system #matrix #fail #inflation #justice #oligarchy

People often wrongly equate free markets and capitalism and democracy.

Free markets are millenia old. Your cat gave birth to nine kitten, but you don't want ten cats? Trade three kittens for one puppy. Trade three goats for one cow. Markets came thousands of years before capitalism started roughly around 1500. Of course trading goods is inconvenient, that's why money was invented.

Capitalism now means accrual of wealth for those few who control the means of production—infinite growth—but it arguably started as a new belief and trust in the future. Which enabled the credit system.

Until roughly 500 years ago, people believed that God put everything important into the Bible, and conversely nothing that isn't in the Bible can be important. The Bible never changes, thus the world can never change. This is what people believed. So why should I lend you money to enable you to explore your invention if I believe you'll never make the money back after spending it? Let alone turning it into more. At least not without robbing someone else. The world was a zero-sum game. Lending you money (giving you a credit) was a losing game for me. The world was stuck, without systematically/scientifically striving for innovations.

At some point, that mindset started to shift. People developed a trust in the future: If I give you money, I'll not only get it back, but I'll get it back double and triple.

The idea was that people shouldn't waste every gain because (according to the Bible) you can't do anything with your gain anyway other than waste it. Instead, you should invest it back into yourself to make more. And more.

We all can see today where that has brought us: infinite exploitation of finite resources, and brutally unequal distribution.

Socialists don't criticise the trust that the future can be better. The world doesn't have to remain unchanging like the Bible. But we need to take the next step. That's why some Marxists say that #capitalism has to preceed #socialism. Skipping capitalism is, according to some, the reason why socialism in the Soviet Union failed.

Democracy—political power resides with the people—is of course completely independent of that. The notion that anticapitalism is antidemocratic is vile misinformation.

🧵⬇️