







Populism, pointless work and panicked youth: an interview with David Graeber of LSE
David Graeber interview: ‘So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary’
The books interview: The anarchist author, coiner of the phrase ‘We are the 99%’, talks to Stuart Jeffries about ‘bullshit jobs’, our rule-bound lives and the importance of play

La performance du marché du travail et l’essor du populisme
traduction française de "Labor market performance and the rise of populism" de Sergei Guriev

Gamified Capitalism and 21st Century Fascism w/ Max Haiven
Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!
David Graeber Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! 2000 See also: David Graeber Institute https://davidgraeber.institute/ &...

David Graeber: "Spotlight on the financial sector did make apparent just how bizarrely skewed our economy is in terms of who gets rewarded"
David Graeber explains why the more your job helps others, the less you get paid

‘Waiting to Die’ by Paul Krafft from Capital and Labor (1907)
The reverend William Schuler Harris’ Capital and Labor (1907) frames its titular subjects as locked in a perennial struggle, “dating back to the time when the Egyptians laid the lash upon their slaves”. Writing in the early twentieth century, Harris is skeptical of the “orator [who] frequently soars into ecstasies over the privileges of the American workers”, for he sees how the labor force is suffering under the “galling yoke” of trusts and monopolies. Substitute those scourges of the Gilded Age with unfettered multinational conglomerates and something similar holds true today. The author’s list of obstacles facing workers are as relevant now as they were more than a century ago: the needs of “civilized life” increase more rapidly than wages; the skilled worker remains at…

The Age of the Grift Shift
For a book proposal I am currently working on (German, no proposal isn’t done yet because I keep reworking stuff, my agent hates me) I am thinking a lot about late stage capitalism and technologies, about how the kinda terminal economic system shapes the technologies it brings forward etc. And there are of course a […]

Welcome to the new feudalism – with Silicon Valley as our overlords | Evgeny Morozov
When Facebook and Google finally destroy the competition, a new age of feudalism will arrive

Cognitive Mercantilism
AI panic weirdly resembles the anxiety that accompanied early capitalism

Shawn Gude on Twitter / X
.@BernieSanders: "An essential story about one of America’s greatest champions for workers." Sara Nelson (@FlyingWithSara): "This book couldn’t be more timely.” @GraceBlakeley: "Masterful." Preorder American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs today!…— Shawn Gude (@shawngude) August 31, 2026
Le capitalisme d’enclaves et la fin de la démocratie
À propos de : Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism. Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, Metropolitan Books

Hype, financial narratives, and self-fulfilling prophecies in surveillance capitalism
The rise of platforms has transformed our understanding of contemporary capitalism, with the critical literature describing how these firms leverage unprecedented digital powers to extract monopoly rents – perhaps even heralding a new form of Feudalism. This paper draws on the literature on financial narratives to examine the role that such stories play within the form of capitalism that they describe, and what this suggests for the role of “hype” in contemporary capitalism. The same stories that for critical scholars appear as menacing threats of “technofeudalism” or “surveillance capitalism” for investors appear as optimistic stories of promising future returns. By driving financial investments, narratives afford platforms very real social and political powers, enabling them to function as a form of self-fulfilling prophecies. The paper argues for a cultural inflection to the political economy of Big Tech – viewing capitalism as neither mechanistic nor rational, but as an expression of a complex interplay between narrative, technology, and economic power. This suggests the need for a critical hype studies, geared at deconstructing the narratives undergirding the technological waves of capitalist pursuits, and examining the broader role of hype in coordinating and directing flows of capital within contemporary financialized capitalism.

John Maynard Keynes: the cultured economist who governments turn to in a crisis
A new play about the art-loving Bloomsbury Group member speaks of the enduring battle of ideas with his free-market rival Friedrich Hayek

Le grand basculement capitaliste
À propos de : Jérôme Baschet, Quand commence le capitalisme ? De la société féodale au monde de l'économie, Crise et critique

The "death of adulthood" is really just capitalism at work
Here's what A.O. Scott's lamentation about adulthood in pop culture misses: our economic transformation

Systems: How the Ultra-Wealthy Think About Money - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
