The Case for Conspiracy Theory
By the end of 2021 a great deal of unrelated material had been collapsed together in an attempt to discredit any and all points of view divergent from public health policy. Derogation and censorship have forced intimacy upon subcultures that might otherwise have remained separate. Thanks to the wholesale vilification of “vaccine hesitancy” pacifist alternative health movements find common cause with Trumpist militants and European neo-nazis. They deserve disaggregation.
Frames
Recently I had the opportunity to listen in on a 2-day strategy conference of experts on the liberation of Palestine. Most of the discussion focused on what social movements scholars call questions of “framing”.
Artisan Modern: Quality Work, Transactions, and Objects
As they have delivered work from labor and industrial logics, artisans have likewise redeemed materials from their status and calculus as “inputs”.
Direct Knowledge
What I’ve learned from a year of pitching… So one question that comes to me is that if I’m going to have to do most of the promotion anyway, why would I give the publisher 85%? For what? The imprimatur of a “real” publisher? Let’s cut out the middlemen and the gatekeepers. And for me, the freedom to write what I want to, design the presentation, and launch it promptly is as important to my creative process as getting paid.
Respect Fear
People who are afraid that their governments withhold information are factually correct. People who are afraid that government programs might sacrifice certain categories of people in service of an undemocratic notion of “the public good” are validated by historic and recent events. People who are afraid that for-profit corporations could sell known harmful, addictive, or unsafe products have plenty of case data to underlie their concern.
Anti-corporate 2.021
Those who run the company are considered to be owner-stewards. They “own” the company in the sense of having responsibility for its purpose, but they do not own it financially or legally, in that they do not have the power to sell it.
Farm and artisan industry succession
Around the world is a crisis of modernization in which younger generations do not want to inherit the farming and other artisanal work of their families. At the same time, a subculture is burgeoning of young people and ex-office workers who want to work with land, agriculture, food, and traditional production methods.
Crypto: Game, Gamble, or Gumption?
“t feels like now we’re competing with the entire finance industry… engaged in the process of trying to flip Wall Street… ”
Authenticity
What Italians do not seem to know is how profoundly revered Italian cuisine is in the US, and particularly in California. I could recognize my compatriots easily in Napoli. They were silent, faces upturned, eyes half-closed, eating the pizza as if they were receiving communion.
Electrify your Favorite Car
My anger is abating. I’m refocused on wondering how to buy as many good car bodies as possible and where to put them for a few years while the kits proliferate, mechanics streamline their methods, and countries improve their incentives.
I am an economist who knows that popular understanding of and political power over the economy is crucial to freedom and self-determination of communities. We are engaged in social movements to establish authority over the conditions which affect our lives, the power to protect our ecosystems and cultures, the control to create meaningful work, the right to eat delicious and healthy food, the information to be our own doctors, and the physical and psychological time and space to be creative.
I do not believe we need multinational corporations, supermarkets, genetically modified organisms, or for-profit healthcare organizations to achieve these things.
I am interested in indigenous cosmologies and visions of development, sustainability and permaculture, alterglobalization, participatory democracy, good work, great food, and creativity.
Love & Rage,
Amory