Dataism
On Keynesianism, political crisis and the future that never comes.
Author Geoff Mann explains how Keynesianism, a cornerstone of mid-20th century American liberal thought, returns to the social landscape with each economic and political crisis - as panic button for the managerial class, as a means to save capital from capitalism, and ultimately as a short-term deferral of revolution for a system with no long-term in sight.
Geoff is author of the new book In the Long Run We're All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution from Verso Books.
The same tactics for hundreds of years: The state vs Standing Rock.
Dr. Sarah Jumping Eagle reports from Standing Rock on the state of Dakota Access Pipeline resistance since Obama's halting of the project, and explains how a coalition of communities affected by pollution, racism and exploitation are coalescing around water protection and challenging corporate control over a basic human and environmental right.
Sarah is a pediatrician and water protector, we spoke to her twice in 2016 from Lakota/Dakota Territory.
Largely symbolic, easily erased: Assessing Obama's legacy on labor and inequality.
Journalist Michelle Chen examines Barack Obama's legacy on labor and inequality - from the limits of neoliberal politics to address rapidly rising economic polarization, to a disastrous election strategy that silenced populist concerns from the left - and explains why Donald Trump is mobilizing Americans on the grassroots level far more effectively than the president most of them voted into power.
Michelle wrote the Labor and Trade section of Jacobin's feature Assessing Obama, and the article Inaugurating a New Movement for Dissent.
Make the Supreme Court reactionary again: Reviewing Neil Gorsuch's record.
Legal scholar Marjorie Cohn reviews the dangerous record of President Trump's Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch - from an authoritarian tendency that makes "Fascism Forever" look like much more than a high school joke, to a history of undermining worker rights, women's safety and environmental protection - and explains how the pick seems like the first shot in a right wing takeover of the judicial branch.
Marjorie wrote the article Trump's Choice of Gorsuch Endangers Civil, Human and Environmental Rights for Truthout.
Trump's border wall has already been built by the American political consensus.
Immigration researcher Karina Moreno finds a neoliberal consensus behind the border wall, ensuring that the physical border remains a symbolic site of immigration politics, and obscures the network of failed policies and private detention lobbying that enable capital to exploit the labor of vulnerable workers, and the fear of their presence within the country.
Karina wrote the recent Jacobin articles Political Theater at the Border and The Private Deportation Machine.
The rise and risk of psychometrics in political campaigns.
Mathematician Paul-Olivier Dehaye explains how Facebook Likes can be turned into a data-driven psychological profiles used to target political messaging on the individual level, and calls not for a retreat from online platforms that collect data, but towards a political framework that protects the privacy of the information gathered about us.
Paul provided research for the Das Magazin article The Data That Turned the World Upside Down posted at VICE, and wrote the Medium article The (dis)information mercenaries now controlling Trump’s databases.
Interview link via Antidote Zine
Toward (but not directly) a Thermodynamic / Information theory of history.
In a Moment of Truth, scientist Jeff Dorchen considers the way pizza is a fuel, information is energy, This Is Hell! is a growth opportunity, philosophy is a scam, the state is a bath - or an octopus maybe, or you are the octopus, or Trump is the octopus - but the real message is resist fascism and cook your rice a bit before adding the lemon and eggs.
