Not Your: Keys, Infrastructure, Land Title (???)

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

Conspiracy Theory vs. Coincidence Theory

"In essence, Mulder was the believer; Scully, the skeptic. Or rather, he was the “conspiracy theorist,” and she was the “coincidence theorist,” a term used to describe someone who rejects any conspiratorial thinking, views strange patterns as coincidences, and places blind trust in expert explanations."

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

Superhumanity - Chin Jungkwon - Play and Labor

"An extreme case of play becoming labor is players who are hired by game companies to play games as a profession. Julian Dibbell did a thought experiment with players who are engaged in this “alienated play,” in which he examined what they did after work. He thought that if they considered gaming as work, they would avoid it after work. Interestingly, however, a good number of players went to internet cafes after work and continued to play the exact same game. It was sincere play. Just as combining work and play does not spoil play, it does not spoil work either. After seeing “labor as play” at a Chinese game room, Dibbell concluded that “play can be productive.” He writes that the “digital environment can be especially effective in channeling play toward productivity,” but we should not rule out the possibility that the phenomenon can be a symptom of workaholism, where workers cannot let go of work even after leaving it.4

The logic behind the most severe criticism of gamification is interestingly rooted in two authorities of play theory. As is widely known, Huizinga clearly distinguished play from daily life. According to Huizinga, play is not daily life, and is an autonomous act that exists with its own unique order in a separate space and time, disconnected from all material interests. In other words, play does not and cannot produce material gains. Roger Caillois follows Huizinga in defining play as an unproductive activity, claiming that it is “an occasion of pure waste.”5 Although Huizinga lamented the disappearance of play and argued for its resurrection, he did not want play to become daily life and lose its unique character. Huizinga would almost certainly see gamification, where material gains are sought through play, as a clear breach of the spirit of play.

In contrast to Huizinga and Caillois, Celia Pearce argues that “neither play nor games is inherently unproductive.” She says that play and games have their own productive attributes, and they are themselves a form of cultural production, “a form of folk art.” Pearce thus denies what Huizinga considered the essence of play: the existence of the “magic circle” that distinguishes play from daily life. The nature of the capitalist society that Huizinga lived in is different than the ludocapitalist one we live in today. “The boundaries between play and production, between work and leisure, and between media consumption and media production are increasingly blurring. In the process, the sacred ‘magic circle’ … is also beginning to blur.” Consequently, reality itself becomes more and more pataphysical. “Not only do player-producers simulate simulations, they propel them out into the real world so that reality becomes the playground of the virtual.”6

Julian Kücklich calls play that has become labor in this fashion “playbor.” Modding, which gamers enjoy as a mere hobby, produces real economic value. The subculture of modding brings enormous profit to corporations by, for instance, creating new brands, prolonging product life, boosting customer loyalty, reducing the cost of research and development, and providing a pool of human resources.7 Tiziana Terranova states that this is thus a form of labor, and that play becomes “free labor” when the “knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited.” This “free labor is structural to the late capitalist cultural economy.”8 In other words, today’s digital industries are actually living off of what media consumer/producers (“prosumers”) produce through play and make available for free.

In the past, utopian socialists argued that under socialism, labor would become play. Today, their utopia is being materialized, not according to the tenets of socialism, but rather in a capitalist way. Is labor in late-capitalist society really a liberated form of labor, like play? Or so long as it takes place under the conditions of capitalism, is it still alienated?"

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

New video on UK Housing Bubble and how to end it

"I’ve just just released my latest video, on the UK housing bubble, and my ideas about how to end a housing bubble without causing a Depression. Ironically, everyone currently affected well or badly by the housing bubble--house owners, house renters, debtors, nondebtors, and the banks--benefit in some way."

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

The Orchestration Age: When Human Consciousness Meets Artificial Intelligence, Everything Changes : Mehrotra FIET, Mr Vivek: Amazon.co.uk: Books

"The Orchestration Age: When Human Consciousness Meets Artificial Intelligence, Everything Changes Paperback – Large Print, 12 Oct. 2025
by Mr Vivek Mehrotra FIET (Author)
See all formats and editions
Note: In an alignment of purpose and action, 100% of 'author earnings' from the sale of this book will be donated to charitable causes.

This book is a philosophical exploration of what it means to be human in the age of thinking machines

Artificial intelligence can now write, create, analyse, and reason better than most humans. In this transformative moment, Vivek Mehrotra offers a radical reframe: The rise of AI isn't humanity's replacement; it's humanity's revelation."

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

Will China’s breakneck growth stumble? - UnHerd

" after spending years exploring China’s technological rise, Wang argues that one key difference nonetheless separates the two nations. While the highest offices in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are staffed with engineers, Washington is the capital of a lawyerly society — a distinction that could yet decide our century.

According to Breakneck, the rise of America’s lawyers begins in the Sixties. This narrative can be anchored in data. As Jonathan Rauch notes in The Growth of the Parasite Economy, the proportion of lawyers in the general population remained stable from 1870 to 1970. Then it doubled. This is precisely the period when, according to thinkers as varied as Tyler Cowen and Peter Thiel, the “great stagnation” begins: an erosion of America’s productive forces that set the stage for a retreat into virtual worlds and a narrowing of technological progress to advances in software"

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

Invisible Man: My Experience as a Male Trainee Clinical Psychologist in a Female-Dominated System — The Centre for Male Psychology

"Male clinical psychology trainees often experience subtle and overt exclusion, bias, and silencing, which can impede their professional development and well-being. These experiences are compounded by a lack of attention to male perspectives in training curricula, leading to feelings of marginalization and isolation (Gupta et al., 2025). This article explores these experiences through an integration of personal narrative and academic critique, highlighting systemic issues and proposing urgent reforms."

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

Left-Wing Bias Is Corrupting Sociology

"Left-Wing Bias Is Corrupting Sociology
Other social scientists have reformed. Sociologists haven’t."

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

Mamdani and Trump Have More in Common Than You Think | Compact

"Carrying forward decade-long trends, Trump has sought to concentrate more power in the executive, relying heavily on executive orders and attempting to bring independent institutions like the Federal Reserve under his direct control.

Seen this way, the sharp contrasts between ideological nemeses dissolve. This is why Joe Biden continued many of Trump’s first-term initiatives, softening them at the margins but never reversing their direction. It is also why both major US parties now endorse lower interest rates and ongoing expansions of state spending.

The obvious exception would seem to be immigration, where Biden’s admission of unprecedented numbers of migrants stands in stark contrast to Trump’s aggressive deployment of ICE. But if we take a longer-term perspective, the contrasts become less clear. During Trump’s first term, despite his forceful rhetoric on the subject, his presidency saw no net reduction in the undocumented population in the United States. Even in his current term, immigration arrests are up, but deportation numbers have remained lower than they were under “deporter in chief” Barack Obama just over a decade ago.  

Such broad continuities make sense if we understand immigration as a tool of macroeconomic management. The system allows for a reserve mass of people to be drawn in during periods of inflation as a source of deflationary pressure, and then expelled during downturns. Public opinion follows after the fact, molded to fit this executive logic. Canada’s recent top-down reversal of immigration sentiment has offered a clear illustration of this dynamic.

The result is a steady expansion of centralized power, which will attempt to manage ever more aspects of social life, and even the inner life of the citizenry. This is one way to understand the expansion of hate speech regulation in countries including Canada—but also the Trump administration’s recent flirtation with similar measures. 

Similar initiatives will continue to emerge from right and left alike, each with its own justificatory language, but the structural effect will remain the same: the concentration of power in the executive. "

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

Landslide win for Irish leftist presidential candidate; a new book recommendation

"Connolly needed a lot of things to fall into place, and one by one, they all did. The ferocity with which she stood up for Palestinian dignity drew her heaps of criticism throughout the campaign from the country’s media and political call, but clearly helped her with the public, who also approved of her social democratic politics. Her main opponent has conceded, and Connolly has won in a landslide. The Irish president is a fairly ceremonial position, though it does have some powers."

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total