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There’s license in the arts to question very normative assumptions. The engineering approach of designing infrastructures as living systems does still give me hope for how we might rethink human systems more broadly. But I continue to feel quite frustrated with the way that engineering as a discipl…

The role of these systems is not just to reproduce inequalities, but to naturalize them. Capitalist difference-making has always required a substantial amount of ideological labor to sustain it. For hundreds of years, philosophers and priests and scientists and statesmen have had to keep saying, ov…

[...] these divisions were constantly being reinforced, since they served a valuable purpose: they helped make exploitation seem justified, even natural.

Thus it was natural for the Irish to be paid less and live in appalling slums. It was natural for women to be paid less while also performing …

It’s hard to imagine a more extreme form of the contradiction on display at Manchester than a social network of more than two billion people ruled by a single billionaire. The network of capital has become denser, and more literal, than Engels could’ve possibly imagined, while its control has becom…

Yet there was a contradiction lurking here. If no one worker could claim sole credit for a product, the owner of the factory could still claim sole ownership of everything the workers made together. Wealth was being created socially, on a new model — but still owned privately, on the old model.

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