We must not work for war. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/into-the-gap
“We would be much better served by teaching many more people how to think rigorously and reason about abstractions (and they would be much better served, too) than we would by just plopping them as-is in front of LLMs.” https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2026/apr/09/llms/
“New choices are hard. But they’re still yours to make.” https://dansinker.com/posts/2026-04-30-cave-of-time/
“The passion for, devotion to, and identification with work would be diminishing if everyone were able to work less and less.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/correct-attitude
The choice to cut parental leave is not properly understood as cost-cutting or simple leverage in a bad economy; it’s opposition to gender equality and we should talk about it as such. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/apr/28/parental-benefits-slashed-deloitte-zoom-impact
Becoming automatons: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/automation-conformity
Chewing on something here about how tools for professionalizing work (Kanban, etc) can also be used to abstract and make distant the ethics and consequences of that work. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying
You have to refuse to read the proposal from the person who also hasn’t read it. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/mouthwords/
“There is something that learning is for, that thinking is for, that work is for, and that you are for, the discovery of which belongs to you.” https://medium.com/center-on-privacy-technology/an-open-letter-to-georgetown-students-in-response-to-recent-announcements-about-generative-ai-8869dcd523ef
“What must be done is to bring the future into the present, to make power tangible now by means of actions which demonstrate to the workers their positive strength.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/reformed
“I’ve worked really hard to set myself up with a life and career in which I can ‘me’ as much as possible.” Lovely piece from good people thinking about doing good work in these trying times: https://www.talkscratch.com/the-group-chat-how-we-get-by/
Every time they bomb a school, a place of worship, a family picnicking on the beach, a wedding, a hospital, a shelter, a refugee camp, the wrong house, the wrong building, the wrong block, they say the same thing: it was a mistake. The mistake is to believe them.
More and more convinced that the technocrats’ assertion that “AI” will take all of our jobs is a projection of their fear of a general strike.
“We cannot meaningfully separate the everyday use of ‘AI’ platforms from their application in death and war.” https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/propellant/
At the point in an essay when I have written 10K words, gathered pages of notes, have come to despair as to whether there is anything here worth anything at all, considered moving to the woods and disappearing forever, when I write one halfway decent sentence and think, “Ah, this might be it!”
Workers “were designed to be competent but limited, active but docile, intelligent but ignorant…incapable of having a horizon beyond that of their task. In short, they were designed to be specialists.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/designed-to-be-specialists
“Mass pseudo-culture…is a device invented by monopoly capital to facilitate dictatorship over a mystified, docile, debased humanity, whose impulse of real violence must be redirected into imaginary channels.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/pseudo-culture
The premise here—that we can develop shared practices to prevent being taken in by the design patterns that AI imposes—obscures the reasons those patterns exist in the first place, who made them, and what they aim to do. https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it
“It’s safer in the front!” https://crimethinc.com/2026/01/29/crossing-the-line-it-really-is-safer-in-the-front-surrounding-the-portland-ice-facility
“We will bury them beneath the new world in our hearts.” https://crimethinc.com/2026/01/25/minneapolis-responds-to-the-murder-of-alex-pretti-an-eyewitness-account