There is wage theft, as in when an employer straight-up cheats employees: withholding tips, fixing worked hours, and making illegal deductions. There is a legal framework for dealing with that, and this is where unions (if they still exist) play a large role.
But the illustration above rightly goes beyond that. As Marx had it, all workers experience wage theft because exploitation and surplus labour are baked into the capitalist system. It is not an error but a feature.
And this is why Mr. Bezos can dabble in private, recreational space travel and why Mr. Musk could buy himself a president, although their fortunes are also the results of an abnormal stock market, plunder of public funds and downright crimes.
And consider this: an average CEO in the USA makes $326 an hour. CEOs generally take home 200 times what their workers do. Are they ‘working’ that much? Do they create that kind of value?
As the poet once said: ‘When the Chinese Wall was built, where’d the masons go for lunch?’
Le Grand Meaulnes revisited, Julian Barnes says something what with I whole heartedly agree:
The novel is many things – magical, high-hearted, improbable, coincidence-ridden, operatic – yet never sentimental, because it is true to what we remember about adolescence, with all its hopes and fears and impossible dreams. What surprised me about the novel this time round was how intensely literary it is. Fournier, while still discovering how to write, said determinedly that: “I shan’t be truly myself as long as I have a single bookish phrase in my head.” This certainly holds at the level of style – he writes in an easy, intimate, rather hesitant speaking voice – but a wider bookishness is omnipresent.
We live in Mike Davis’ L.A. — but not the one you think is a cute article about the recently deceased. But, at the same time, it also starts erasing his memory and the ‘real’ Mike Davis. I mean: yes, he was an activist and an urbanist. All that, but perhaps foremost of it all: a socialist and a Marxist. The LA Times missed that part.
The Best Programming Language for the End of the World:
Dupras started building Collapse OS in 2019 in an attempt to preserve mankind’s ability to program 8-bit microcontrollers. These tiny computers control things like radios and solar panels, and they can be used in everything from weather monitoring to digital storage. Dupras figured that being able to reprogram them with minimal remaining resources would be essential post-collapse. But first he had to teach himself a suitably apocalypse-proofed programming language for the job.
So Monsieur Dupras wants to make it possible to fashion low-key computers out of old, scavenged hardware. Of course, he then wrote an operating system for that, and had to find a programming language that could thrive in this environment. Step Forth:
“The way we understand efficiency is so skewed,” Dupras says. Forth is a scythe to Python’s lawnmower. “If you calculate the number of joules per blade of grass, you’ll find that the person scything is more efficient,” he says. “When you think of speed, you’d see the lawnmower as more efficient.” Forth forces you to be precise and memory-efficient—to marshal your resources carefully, as you would after the collapse. Dupras cuts his own lawn with a scythe, obviously. “At a certain point, you can go as fast as a lawnmower,” he says.
He is driven.
You have probably seen much too much of it, and perhaps even know it is sometimes called ‘shitstalgia’. It is the (often AI-generated) photos from annodazumal with text to accompany that juxtaposes the then and the now, and always, always making us believe that the then was vastly better. Now there is a book, as reviewed here: Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion by Agnes Arnold-Forster review – the past isn’t a foreign place that asks us to cool it a bit and not just be dismissal.
All nostalgia is not created equal. I cannot help but remember the beautiful Brazilian word ‘saudade’: a longing for a past that never was. I could even be tempted to point out that Ernst Bloch’s Heimat where we have not been but want to go is shaped from the same material. Or a Lorrain painting such as this:
Bucolic, indeed.
As old Karl Marx said about religion: it is the opium of the people. Right? Almost, because he did not stop here. He actually said: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
Our longing for a better past is already a cry for a better future. Alas: the future looks grim, indeed: in this late capitalist stage we are in, all hope of radical change has been lost. Not so weird that we look to the past, look behind us — like Benjamin’s angel, driven into the future by a strong wind, but looking back at the ruins left behind.
That said: our only future is in the future. While we can sweetly regard nostalgia as innocent and a legitimate and silent protest, it can also all too often be yet another chain to keep us back.
“It was the summer of 1952, and the executives of Tombow Pencil were about to revolutionize the Japanese pencil industry—or, possibly, fall flat on their faces. Hachiro Ogawa, the son of founder Harunosuke Ogawa, was Tombow’s managing director, and he had just finished a years-long project, at enormous cost, to make the best pencil Japan had ever seen.”
It is a fascinating story.
The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow… The minute you start saying something, “Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!” you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.
— Italo Calvino
Speakers of Bishnupriya Manipuri, a minority language of Bangladesh (and now Queens), prepare a song in the corner. A Quechua teacher from Peru (long resident in Brooklyn) gets ready for class at the same table where a Tsou speaker from Taiwan (now living in California) is correcting the proofs of her children’s book. A linguist in over-ear headphones edits recordings in the Gabonese language Ikota, made with the one known speaker in the city, who lives on Roosevelt Island.
How New York City Became a Haven For Endangered Languages
Fred Herzog, colourful street photographer
‘Night does not show things, it suggests them,” Brassaï once said. ‘It disturbs and surprises us with its strangeness. It liberates forces within us which are dominated by our reason during the daytime’
The City of Light and its shadows: Brassaï’s Paris
Do Animals Know That They Will Die?” ‘An existential mystery’. Indeed.
C L R James foresaw the crisis of US liberal democracy: “In late 1949, the West Indian intellectual C L R James sat down in his residence in Compton, California and, in a burst of creative energy, composed what turned out to be a frightfully prophetic analysis of the historical fate of democracy in the United States. Titled ‘Notes on American Civilization’, the piece was a thick prospectus for a slim book (never started) in which James promised to show how the failed historical promise of its unbridled liberalism had prepared the contemporary republic for a variant of totalitarian rule. ‘I trace as carefully as I can the forces making for totalitarianism in modern American life,’ explained the then little-known radical. ‘I relate them very carefully to the degradation of human personality under Hitler and under Stalin.’”
And here we are.
It could have been worse. It could have been beige. But, anyway: why is color leaving the world? Are we just supposed to keep turning the hamster wheel, not being distracted by anything beautiful?
Subversive holiday snaps: the travels of Luigi Ghirri – in pictures
Aztec lore masters told many stories about Toltec history. Which are, some colonial Spaniards had already noticed, suspiciously similar to stories told across central America about gods like Quetzacoatl. These similarities have spawned a debate that still rages between scholars who think there is real history in these stories and those who think they’re just myths that somehow got attached to a list of Toltec kings. If the names were Toltec kings. If there ever were any Toltec kings. Or any Toltecs.
Fascinating in the same way as the Khazars: so close, in time, in space — and yet pretty much black boxes, if boxes at all.
The cult of 5am: is rising at dawn the secret of health and happiness?:
My mood starts to plummet. There is no coffee to be had at any of the eight shuttered cafes I pass, so I head for a patch of green space to meditate. En route, I realise a hooded man has fallen into step with me. Freaked out, I decide to head for home. Is the man following me? I look back. He is not. Lack of sleep is making me unhinged.
Why am I doing this? Because, in an attempt to become one of the elite superbeings who are members of the 5am club, I am trying a week of very early starts. Being an early bird is increasingly popular among the rich and famous, with everyone from Jennifer Lopez, Jennifer Aniston and the Kardashians to tech bros such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey subscribing to the club. So do Anna Wintour and Michelle Obama. Gwyneth Paltrow is a longtime member, sharing on Instagram how she rises at 5am for a 30-minute tongue scrape and Ayurvedic oil pull (me neither), before settling down for 20 minutes of transcendental meditation, followed by a dance workout devised by her friend, the fitness guru Tracy Anderson.
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”
— The Legendary Richard Bram Exhibits His Oaxacan Sketchbooks
To those of my young and old friends and colleagues who claim to have no interest in, nor time for, politics, the poet said this, living in times much darker than ours:
The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.
— Bertolt Brecht
Back when people spoke more than one language:
Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, written in the 1390s for his ten-year-old son, Lewis, is an English translation of a Latin version of an Arabic text written by Mashallah ibn Athari, an eighth-century Persian Jew. In the prologue, Chaucer says that Lewis only knows a little Latin, but is good with numbers, and so the treatise will teach him how to use the astrolabe he has just been given as a present. After all, Chaucer says, the facts remain the same whether Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Greek or English is used; he himself is a compiler, bringing together the work of old astrologers into ‘naked words in englissh’. (Stop talking englissh: Medieval Polyglots)
However: I guess we should also consider that not everybody back then spoke multiple languages? Maybe yes, maybe no. Empires of the Word — another wonderful book about language(s) — does say something about this.
I know I am an old fart by now. I can live with that, but I do have to vent my disappointment with a world no longer dominated by my generation of cranks. For example: content on the web. Yes, there is written content. Some of it shows that our educational system must be in dire crises as nobody seems to be able to spell, punctuate, or use common idioms even slightly correctly. And if text is not littered with ditsurbeng errors, it is probably a sign that the text was generated by an AI. Nevermind: nobody cares. It is just clickbait anyway. The ads we are forced to see are the main show.
But a steadily growing category of content is videos. That is what content creators do. Yes: it does solve the problem with spelling, does it not? And it is probably much faster, too. Just babble into your phone and hit ‘Publish’. So, I want to see a review of a new camera? Well, here is a video. And so on and so forth. Trouble is: no search. No asynchronous reading, scrolling up and down, reading at your own leisure. It is almost as if the content in content creation does not matter. Just the fact that I click something.
I miss the old web, the Netscape era, the low-graphics, wordy, and outright elitist web. Those were the days of wine rosé.
Paul Harrison – Street Photographer — and his photos are a testament to the distinct quality of the Fuji sensor and lenses. One could get envious.
For Working-Class Academics is, perhaps, quite UK-centric, but it nevertheless brings some of my own experience to mind. And more so now that I am nearing the end of my career and I sometimes look back on it all.
I have an academic degree but can hardly say I have had an ‘academic career’ as I have only worked in the private sector in a job I perhaps got into based on some basic ‘academic skills’ but that otherwise has nothing to do with what I spent those years studying. In retrospect, my choice of study was ill-advised, leading neither to an academic career, nor a career where I could directly use whatever I was taught at university.
But I did choose that study because it interested me at the time, and my parents were not capable of guiding me or discussing if it was a good choice — they were, however, profoundly proud of my being the first academic in the family (not completely true, as it turned out that at least two cousins also ended up pursuing higher education). And they supported me in any way they could, with no conditions.
But this is not the main takeaway from my university years. That was that class matters. In many small and larger ways: finding a place to live? Well, my uncle happens to own an apartment building, so … A nice, well-paid summer job? Well, my uncle … A trainee job after graduation? Well, my uncle … It is just that people from certain family backgrounds had a somewhat easier time than us working-class academics. But subtle, it was subtle.
Now: I have children of my own who have embarked on their careers. At least, we have been able to help with general advice and feedback, and as much economic support as possible. But it is probably another generation or two before we will be on par with my erstwhile fellow students.
Inspiring, this:
So, in September of 2023, New York City decided to do something about it. A series of bold requirements capped the total number of short-term rentals (STRs) and limited guests to just two at a time. They required STR operators to be primary homeowners — and to be present in the home while hosting. The city also promised to enforce those requirements, a move that would wipe out nearly 90 percent of active listings at the time.
Disclaimer: Yes, I have used AirBnB. In Berlin and in London. Every apartment we stayed in was clearly only used for this purpose. In Berlin, our ‘host’ apparently controlled some 20 rentals in a building complex. In London, the apartment turned out to be in a Peabody building, and a note in the hallway said that short-term rental was not allowed. No wonder our ‘host’ told us to not answer any questions about our stay to anyone.
Yet another good idea ruined by greedy capital in record time.
We Need To Rewild The Internet draws analogies from Waldsterben to the Internet:
The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.
And:
The internet made the tech giants possible. Their services have scaled globally, via its open, interoperable core. But for the past decade, they’ve also worked to enclose the varied, competing and often open-source or collectively provided services the internet is built on into their proprietary domains. Although this improves their operational efficiency, it also ensures that the flourishing conditions of their own emergence aren’t repeated by potential competitors. For tech giants, the long period of open internet evolution is over. Their internet is not an ecosystem. It’s a zoo.
Yes, for a brief moment, we had something wild and verdant. Of course, the early web springs to mind, but before that there were FTP servers and WAIS and Gopher — all now distant memories of an older generation. The article mentions some of this:
Whatever we do, the internet isn’t returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or organizations operating their own mail servers again instead of off-the-shelf solutions like G-Suite. But some of what we need is already here, especially on the web. Look at the resurgence of RSS feeds, email newsletters and blogs, as we discover (yet again) that relying on one app to host global conversations creates a single point of failure and control. New systems are growing, like the Fediverse with its federated islands, or Bluesky with algorithmic choice and composable moderation.
I, however, think it is overly optimistic. Some of the new systems mentioned have already all but gone again. The battle is up too steep a hill: this is but a corner of everything else late capitalism is doing to us and the planet. We can fight many small fights and perhaps partly succeed, for a moment, but if we do not address the root cause, there will be new ones and new ones and yet new ones.
The Humans of Daniel Arnold’s New York
David Byrne (yes: the David Byrne) helped create the ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’ web site, and he even writes there. For example:
What can be done? How can cities make sure that people other than the wealthy can find a foothold? A few places have shown that affordability is possible. One is Vienna, Austria.
100 Years of Urban Housing Success
16 Photos Of Times Square In The 1970s
A Reissued Book Reveals Hundreds of Photos from Frida Kahlo’s Personal Collection
The heady, steamy days when the IT geeks in the Bay Area mingled with the remaining hippies, dropped acid, dropped into hot tubs (naked, sometimes) perhaps fooled you into believing then — and believing still — that those rich geeks are somehow ‘progressive’ and perhaps even ‘benevolent’? That their capitalism is a new, softer, and more angelic one? If Elon Mush has not cured you of that view, read this for further inspiration:
Silicon Valley ideology is a master-slave mentality, a hierarchical worldview that we all exist in extractive relation to someone stronger, and exploit and despise anyone weaker. Its only relations to other humans are supplication in one direction and subjugation in the other, hence its poster-boys’ constant yoyoing between grandiosity and victimhood. Tech bros like Thiel, Musk and Andreesen are the fluffers in the global authoritarian circle jerk. Putin is the bro they’d be tickled to receive calls from, making them feel they’re on the geopolitical insider’s inside track. MBS is the bro they envy but tell each other scary stories about. Like most of them, MBS inherited his head start in life. He has all the money, all the power, a nice bit of geo-engineering on the side, and he dismembers uppity journalists without consequence. A mere billionaire like Thiel can only secretively litigate them out of business.
— Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder
The sinister return of eugenics:
The Liberal founder of the welfare state, William Beveridge, wrote in 1906 that men “who through general defects” are unemployable should suffer “complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood”. In Marriage and Morals (1929), Bertrand Russell, while criticising American states that had implemented involuntary sterilisation too broadly, defended enforcing it on people who were “mentally defective”.
And now we see
This is where transhumanism comes in. It is not normally racist, and typically involves no collective coercion, only the voluntary actions of people seeking self enhancement. But like eugenicists, transhumanists understand human betterment to be the production of superior people like themselves. True, the scientific knowledge and technology required to create these people are not yet available; but as Rutherford acknowledges, someday they may be.
Not coincidentally, the charming Peter Thiel is in on it, including this: Billionaire Peter Thiel Backs Doping-Friendly Olympics Rival — What To Know About The ‘Enhanced Games’
Are We Watching The Internet Die?:
This is a phenomenon that Jathan Sadowski calls “Habsburg AI,” where “a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AIs that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.” In reality, a Habsburg AI will be one that is increasingly more generic and empty, normalized into a slop of anodyne business-speak as its models are trained on increasingly-identical content.
After the precariat, the unnecessariat: the humans who are superfluous to corporations:
The heroin epidemic in America has a death-toll comparable to the AIDS epidemic at its peak, but this time, there’s no movement coalescing to argue for the lives of the economically sidelined, financially ruined dying thousands — while the AIDS epidemic affected a real community of mutual support, the heroin epidemic specifically strikes down people whose communities are already gone.
. . . the single greatest drawing ever made. Look at the speed, the way he wields that reed pen, drawing very fast, with gestures that are masterly, not virtuoso, (David Hockney)
Said Norman Geras, much missed:
We should be, without hesitation or embarrassment, utopians. At the end of the twentieth century it is the only acceptable political option, morally speaking. I shall not dwell on this. I will merely say that, irrespective of what may have seemed apt hitherto either inside or outside the Marxist tradition, nothing but a utopian goal will now suffice. The realities of our time are morally intolerable. Within the constricted scope of the present piece, I suppose I might try to evoke a little at least of what I am referring to here, with some statistics or an imagery of poverty, destitution and other contemporary calamities- But I do not intend to do even this much. The facts of widespread human privation and those of political oppression and atrocity are available to all who want them. They are unavoidable unless you wilfully shut them out. To those who would suggest that things might be yet worse, one answer is that of course they might be. But another answer is that for too many people they are already quite bad enough; and the sponsors of this type of suggestion are for their part almost always pretty comfortable.
These guys all look like they were extras on Sopranos: Roman Portraits
Antisemitism is something more than garden-variety bigotry or racism; it is deeper than mere tribalism or xenophobia; it is more complicated than religious chauvinism; it is more sinister than an esoteric and elaborate conspiracy theory.
And though I have my doubts and concerns about a lot of the content on Substack, Der Durchwanderer is one writer there that I can only read and admire.
A little blurry but you can see a lot is going on!
Andre Kertesz’s Photos From His Window
A slow-brewed Goldberg Variations from Víkingur Ólafsson. Very good, IMHO. Of course, pristine sound quality and all, but also yet another way of playing this cornerstone of the repertoire. Does not diminish my admiration of Gouldx2:, but more relaxed and conventional.
One other thing Reed has come to embody: a New York that exists only in memory, a city of unbridled id and romantic sleaze, “something like a circus or a sewer,” as he sang. He connects us to a place where degradation was currency but redemption always in the offing—by some measures, the recipe for a perfect rock song. New York ain’t what it used to be. But as long as we pretend otherwise, Lou Reed will be its mirror.
— The Canonization of Lou Reed
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
The Perimeter is a photography project by Quintin Lake based on walking 11,000km around the coast of Britain in sections.
Viggo Rivad, a Danish photographer that made the ordinary extraordinary with his vision and his humanity. Also: a cab driver to make a living.
© Henning Bertram 2025