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Art cannot by itself change the world. It can provide insight and perhaps an epiphany — but it does not change the relations of power in the world. For that, one needs organizational power and struggle.

But art at the same time must be free to engage with contradictory consciousness without a pr…

Antonio Gramsci in his prison notebooks has a theory of elaboration, which I think is very important. Gramsci argued that people in a capitalist system absorb ideas from a variety of sources — family, education, media, workplaces — and that the totality of these notions forms what he calls “common …

No, I don’t think that can work. These markets tend toward monopoly. They’re easy to capture because you get tremendous network effects, which basically means that whoever is bigger gets the whole game, because all the users have tremendous incentives to go to the largest network. All the smaller n…

Exactly. It is a long-term phenomenon but surveillance digital technologies have enhanced its power by orders of magnitude. So in 2012, Obama did wonders with this approach in galvanizing his supporters and shaking them down for contributions. It only took another election cycle for these technolog…

[...] these companies then undertake this very close surveillance, which then becomes available to the highest bidder for commercial purposes.

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[...] alongside this centralization of control there is also the fact that journalism itself is dying. The internet hasn’t caused its death, but…