"Bread and circuses" except the bread has never been more expensive and the circus is lining the pockets of the oligarchy.
Aaron Rupar
it's notable to me that the administration tried to frame tonight's UFC event as a "gift to Americans" but you can't watch it unless you have a paid subscription to Paramount+
Jun 15, 2026 at 1:53 AM
Pluralistic: Capital formation (14 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Funny thing about competition: there's both a pro-market and an anti-market case for a competitive system. https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/13/one-chokable-throat/#too-clever-by-half
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Humanity
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Humanity
Opinion | There Are Two Economies: A.I. and Everything Else
This is worse than putting all your eggs in one basket.
Cheyenne Burris on Instagram: "I just love bread …. And @gothgingerspice . . . #bread #funny #alt #breadhead #lgbt"
11K likes, 177 comments - garbageinfluencer on February 2, 2026: "I just love bread …. And @gothgingerspice . . . #bread #funny #alt #breadhead #lgbt".
Unauthorized Bread: Real rebellions involve jailbreaking IoT toasters
Cory Doctorow's book, Radicalized, is up for a CBC award. To celebrate, here's an excerpt.
Half-Baked Product
A fable about ovens, founders, and the second-highest priority that never gets done.
A History of Menus is a Menu of History
What do America’s earliest restaurant menus teach us about America?
Cognitive Capitalism - Public Seminar
There are broadly three ways of thinking historically about capitalism. One draws on Marx’s value theory and pretty much treats...Read More
Monopoly money: The effect of payment coupling and form on spending behavior.
Managing and resisting ‘degeneration’ in employee-owned businesses: A comparative study of two large retailers in Spain and the United Kingdom
Employee-owned businesses have recently enjoyed a resurgence of interest as possible ‘alternatives’ to the somewhat tarnished image of conventional investor-owned capitalist firms. Within the context of global economic crisis, such alternatives seem newly attractive. This is somewhat ironic because, for more than a century, academic literature on employee-owned businesses has been dominated by the ‘degeneration thesis’. This suggested that these businesses tend towards failure—they either fail commercially, or they relinquish their democratic characters. Bucking this trend and offering a beacon—especially in the United Kingdom —has been the commercially successful, co-owned enterprise of the John Lewis Partnership whose virtues have seemingly been rewarded with favourable and sustainable outcomes. This article makes comparisons between John Lewis Partnership and its Spanish equivalent Eroski—the supermarket group which is part of the Mondragon cooperatives. The contribution of this article is to examine in a comparative way how the managers in John Lewis Partnership and Eroski have constructed and accomplished their alternative scenarios. Using longitudinal data and detailed interviews with senior managers in both enterprises, it explores the ways in which two large, employee-owned, enterprises reconcile apparently conflicting principles and objectives. The article thus puts some new flesh on the ‘regeneration thesis’.
A quote from 1984
In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
America’s new oligarchy
Under Trump an ultra-wealthy clique has infiltrated government, raising concerns about democratic integrity
Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy
The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention is the scarce resource. This literature takes a particular passage in Herbert Simon’s seminal Chapter Designing Organization fo...
"ATProto could usher in one of the largest redistributions of wealth in modern history" is an eye opening and not unrealistic claim to make if we all make this thing work.
Exploring the Frontier of Feeds - The Open Garden
jshaked.leaflet.pubif there's one conclusion that the study of both labor history and imperialism converge on, it is that the richest people in the world are happy to burn money on control, power, impunity. and the "everything is about profit" version of anti-capitalism does not survive serious contact with either
Leonard Pierce
Adding to this thread: it’s a common mistake (I’ve made it myself, many times) to think of the motivations of the capitalist elites as essentially mercantilist: that is, that they are largely still motivated *entirely* by profit and loss, selling product, etc. This has not been true for a while.
