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We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information.

The file, which was linked to from a public page on Xandr’s website, contains 650,000 rows of data, each containing the name of an audience segment, the name of the supplier of the data behind that segment, a supplier ID number, and a segment ID number.

They also sometimes contain a hierarchical taxonomy, such as “Lifestyle > Visitation > Recent Retail Visit by Shopper > Lululemon.”

I can’t help but recall the story of Monowitz, the for-profit concentration camp the massive German chemicals conglomerate IG Farben built in 1942 four and a half miles from Auschwitz, after its plans to staff a rubber plant with slaves marched in from the camps each morning proved too costly and inefficient to deliver a speedy return on investment. So Farben bought 25,000 slave laborers, many of them children who were cheaper, to build a new camp next to the rubber plant, with even tighter living quarters and more inhumane treatment than the rest of Auschwitz.

And while the operation was a colossal failure in its stated goal of producing synthetic rubber, it generated robust dividends for Farben’s subsidiary Degesch, from which the SS began to purchase a special odorless version of the insecticide Zyklon B for the purposes of accelerating and optimizing its murder of those too weak to work.

“I wouldn’t let myself sleep. I felt selfish going to bed,” a former PetSmart associate told Vice. “But at my job, animals passed away so often, there was nothing you could do.”

PetSmart could not afford to treat or euthanize or even cremate its pets, even though sales jumped more than 60 percent and gross margins soared to unprecedented heights during the pandemic, because its owners had legally stolen $30 billion from the balance sheet, buying the company with a minuscule down payment, siphoning off cash and assets into its own pockets, and forcing the retailer to submit to a punishing payback plan that sucks every last penny the stores generate into usurious interest payments.

For some reason, we allow the ownership class to call this form of legalized embezzlement “private equity.”

KKR wanted to extract its own payday from a chain of group homes for developmentally disabled adults that had already been sucked dry by a Canadian private equity firm, so it slashed pay to $8 an hour and told workers that it would have them arrested for patient abandonment if they attempted to leave “early” from open-ended “shifts” that lasted as long as 36 hours.

the company broke “from the conventional economics of slavery in which slaves are traditionally treated as capital equipment to be maintained and serviced for optimum use and depreciated over a normal lifespan. Instead, I.G. reduced slave labor to a consumable raw material, a human ore from which the mineral of life was systematically extracted.”

Once upon a time, and I know Massar is old enough to remember this, everyone called them “corporate raiders.”

The term originally surfaced in the 1950s to describe a comparatively benign class of predator who stealthily borrowed money to buy up enough shares in a small or midsized company to control its biggest bloc of votes, then force a stock swap and install himself as CEO.

Drexel was a pioneer in trading what is now called “distressed” debt, the illiquid but high-yield bonds of corporations that had fallen on hard times. Milken’s innovation involved creating enough demand for those bonds to sustain a distressed-debt assembly line, linking the raiders Black called “the Robber Barons of the future” with steady access to junk bonds that Milken in turn sold to corrupt money managers. Black further optimized the supply chain by “inventing” the “highly confident letter” that Drexel would furnish to favored raiders, assuring the boards of companies they sought to acquire that the brokerage was “highly confident” it would be able to swiftly finance the buyout with junk bonds, secured by the company’s assets.

Through these innovations, corporate raiders used junk bonds in the 1980s to acquire more than 2,000 companies, approximately one-fifth of which would file for bankruptcy within ten years.

We believe it is fiscal insanity to let the country go on with this phenomenon because the whole country loses. Behind the smokescreen of doing good for shareholders and punishing stupid, entrenched management and using the magic cloak of the words “free market” a small group is systematically extracting the equity from corporations and replacing it with debt, and incidentally accumulating major wealth.

Black refused to cooperate, instead demanding a $16 million cash bonus and hastening the bank’s chaotic 1989 collapse, whereupon he proceeded to his second act as a billionaire re-raiding dozens of companies he’d junked at Drexel.

Plunderers devotes a sickening six pages to Black’s reign of terror at the luggage maker Samsonite, a bankrupt-but-healthy company he subjected to 12 humiliating years of repeated fee extractions, debt-funded dividend payments, brutal plant closings, and hideous schemes to induce employees to buy its worthless stock, which was ultimately delisted in 2003. By that point, in one of the most monumental gaslights of all time, the corporate raiders had rebranded their business “private equity,” after the very first thing they looted from every sad company they conquered.

Black seemed to wield absolute control over the insurance commissioner—now California congressman John Garamendi—as he would countless politicians from former Connecticut governor John Rowland to former president Donald Trump, even as he inexplicably wired $188 million to convicted pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and profitably bankrupted countless companies along the way.

Regulators proved incapable of enforcing consumer protections or fraud statutes that might threaten PE profit margins. Perhaps most maddeningly, PE firms are routinely immunized from the possibility of private-sector consequences for their profiteering, as 38 state legislatures did most recently in 2020 when they passed blanket liability shields on nursing homes and hospitals for the duration of the COVID-19 emergency.

via their continued empty promises to eliminate the “carried interest loophole,” through which private equity executives avoid income tax by misclassifying their income as capital gains.

Blackstone founder Steve Schwarzman, who declared in response to Barack Obama’s empty promise in 2010 to impose income taxes on billionaires: “It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

I sometimes wonder if this is actually a war, with our loophole-enablers in elected office mere collaborationists, and the only reasonable response to the plunderers’ annexation of our every institution being some kind of armed revolution.

the executives’ defense attorneys reasoned that no company man of any race or creed would have acted differently from their clients in the face of the “Bolshevist danger.”

As Borkin would later explain, the Farben executives “were among the industrial elite of Germany, not Hitler’s black- and brown-shirted hooligans. They represented a combination of scientific genius and commercial acumen unique in a private industrial enterprise.” The reality that they also represented the most staggering and unprecedented evil the human race had ever known was somehow … not a thing.

Following his four-year sentence, the old Farben CEO would be named to the board of Deutsche Bank.

“PredPol is a company that uses advanced machine learning algorithms to tell police departments where Black people live.”

Over and over, I keep backing my way into the same story: the places where marginalized people in America live repeatedly get the short end of the stick when it comes to, well, basically everything that can be distributed geographically.

I came to the conclusion that the most serious problem facing American public education was the concentration of the most disadvantaged young people in schools that became overwhelmed with the social and economic problems of their students.

If a child has asthma, that child is more likely to be up at night wheezing and then coming to school drowsy the next day. On average, a drowsy child is not going to achieve as well as a well-rested child. It makes a tiny difference, but then you add up all the disadvantages that children who are in low-income segregated neighborhoods come to school with—asthma, lead poisoning, homelessness, economic insecurity—you begin to explain the achievement gap.

The White homeowner bought a second home in the suburb and resold it to his African American friend. When the African American family moved in, an angry mob surrounded the home protected by the police. They dynamited the home, they firebombed it. And when the riot was all over, the White homeowner was arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed for 15 years for sedition. For having sold a home to a Black family.

This notion that it’s personal choice, that we like to live around people who look like us, that it happened by accident—when we believe that, we don’t believe there is anything we can do about it. We don’t believe we have a responsibility to do anything about it. Something that happens by accident can only un-happen by accident.

But if we really start to accept and understand the history, the true history like what’s outlined in “The Color of Law”—that it was intentional action by all levels of government and private actors who were incentivized or required by the government to create segregated communities—then we see we have a responsibility to remedy it.

In Charlottesville, we talk about one particular community where a restrictive racial covenant identified the bank and the real estate agency and the developer that cooperated with the federal government, which was subsidizing the development, that created this segregated community for White people only. The bank was absorbed by a larger bank; it’s now the Virginia National Bank.

Each of those three institutions still exists today. Those successors not only absorbed the financial liabilities of the real estate agency and the banks that they absorbed, respectively, but the moral responsibilities as well.

We can change the zoning in those communities to allow for a diversity of housing types—to allow duplexes, triplexes, small, multifamily buildings on the same lots that now only allow single-family homes.

A couple of examples are a community could start or support a land trust. A land trust creates affordable home ownership opportunities in communities where prices are rising or gentrifying. In suburban, expensive communities, they can create long-term, affordable home ownership opportunities for low- or moderate-income households and prevent displacement in gentrifying communities.

It has not made me a better writer. It’s made me lazy. It’s made me love money. It’s made me see that life is more than writing, it’s lessened my chokehold on dedication. I no longer identify as an ambitious person. I identify as a person who wants to make the life that they can scrape together as comfortable as possible.

A book critic once told me, “a website could never be staffed by service people, the quality of the writing would be too low,” and I wanted to laugh. I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter.

But now that I do other work, I see it all for what it is: everything is a system. The restaurant is a system, the content management is a system, the computer is a system. Everything is so much simpler than I imagined it was. I thought I was doing an easy job, but everything is an easy job when you know the system. Other professions weren’t magic. They were systems too.

As a profession, engineering is the concrete manifestation of the bourgeois impulse to utilize science in service of maximizing profit. But how does this actually work? What is the procedure by which technical theory and practice materialize?

Engineering is fundamentally a process of mediating interplay between models and phenomena.

This essay will do two things. The first is to elucidate the fundamentally materialist kernel of the engineering process and its compatibility with a communist outlook. The second is to describe the relationship between engineering, both as an abstract process and as a profession made up of real people, to the communist project.

There is never such a thing as purely technical phenomena, except in our models. All technical matters are actually socially contingent, and social contingency is by nature political. The social context in which technologies are developed and deployed is inseparable from not only the qualitative character of that technology, but from the effects that technology has on societal matters. If to engineer is to mediate the interplay between model and phenomena, then engineering is to mediate the interplay between model and the combined socio-technical contextual specificity of this phenomena.

Engineering as a methodology thus contains a fundamentally materialist kernel, even if its present incarnation as a bourgeois science drives engineers to think and behave otherwise.

The structuring logic of the contemporary human metabolism with the non-human world, of contemporary human productive activity, is capitalism. To free humanity from servitude to capital accumulation, communists must restructure this productive activity along new lines of human wellbeing and cooperation rather than profit. This metabolic system contains and is conditioned by the planetary-scale industrial apparatus through which most goods are now produced. To restructure this global machine for human - rather than capitalist - ends, requires communist engineers. Engineers not only embody a significant concentration of the technical expertise required for this task, but also come prepackaged with a methodology that, once reformulated along the lines of its latent materialism, is amenable to this restructuring.

Complexity is expensive to manage, and when it cannot be managed solely with a machine it is managed with a worker paid to act like a machine. All labor power, no matter how skilled, is rendered interfaceable with industrial processes only when it is modeled as a commodity as manipulable, controllable, and interchangeable as any other. It is here that engineering is most deeply afflicted by what Marx called commodity fetishism: the obfuscation of social relations behind the appearance of a society comprised of relations between inhuman things, such as money and commodities.

For engineering to take on a specifically communist character its practitioners must do two things. First, the scope of phenomena to be modeled must extend beyond that which appears solely technical into the realm of social relations. Secondly the engineers must adopt as their goal the dissolution of capitalism in favor of a social system where production is a deliberate, collectively-driven process capable of modeling and accounting for phenomena

Engineers trained in the more classical7 disciplines of mechanical, electrical, chemical, and civil engineering tend to differ about whether or not software engineering is considered “true” engineering.

When faced with uncooperative phenomena (downstream software, user behavior, hardware latency, etc.) the software engineer can conjure more software to handle these contingencies at a high level of abstraction rather than implementing solutions more proximate to the phenomena itself. Instead of being forced from the model back down to Earth by the phenomena, the software engineer has the option to simply ascend higher and further. An orbital velocity can be reached where all work performed is in various stratospheric layers of high abstraction all within manipulable grasp of the software engineer’s IDE.

In software work it is the engineers who are best trained to resist the allure of intoxicating escape into deep abstraction.

My proposal is that communists should think more like engineers.

The beauty of the engineering method, of mediating abstraction and phenomena towards a desired goal, is the way that the engineer is forced to retain fidelity to the world as it exists, not simply the way we want it to exist.

Understanding the collective grievances of your coworkers,12 for instance, is not very different to characterizing a subsystem in a gas turbine.

Engineers, who sit at the apex of this technical expertise stratification, hold a very key position for any political project aiming to reconfigure society on the social-technical axis.

I think the best way of understanding class is as a process. Harry Braverman says that although we tend to resort to a shorthand when describing the working class, in fact, when you look closely, you're always looking at something more fluid than solid — ­the constant transformation in both the forces and the relations of production.

That's to say that although there is a hard, non-negotiable conceptual core of what it means to be in the proletariat, there is a wide belt of contingency around that. Take unemployment — this is a classic intervention over the last couple of decades: to explain un- and underemployment, as an important part of global proletarian experience, the forms of contingent attachment to the labour market.

And it's once you allow for these kinds of empirical and to some degree, conceptual flexibilities around the harder Marxist core of class analysis that you also gain new tools for thinking about the relationship of gender and class of race and class.

But it does require new forms of empirical investigation, it requires conceptual adjustment, it requires Marxists to take on insights from feminism, most importantly in this case. Then the reason these things become controversial is that it then raises new questions about political agency and possible sites of solidarity, which I think is what's generative about this approach of describing.

It seems to me that it's actually quite difficult to see how that that could be from a reading of and fidelity to Marxism; how it could be that you could imagine a kind of stable ordered concept of class? It seems that the whole dynamic of the transformation of the forces and relations of production and the genesis of the industrial reserve army, once you begin to really flesh that out sort of sociologically and empirically in a way that Marx only sort of does, requires this sort of openness.

Both gender and race are phenomena of the material base, if you want to use a base and superstructure metaphor, that's to say, they are forms of organisation of the forces of production, or of one force of production in particular — labour power — which they render available in particular forms for which they set the cost of reproduction, and at particular levels, again, all contingent, contested, all of that.

It’s for this reason, with a few further theoretical steps that you’d need to fill in, that service work in general including housework (we can see housework as an unwaged subset of service work) is resistant to productivity increases and is therefore typically relegated to the margins of the capitalist mode of production: either entirely non-commodified as in the home or only partially incorporated into the money economy by means of state subsidy.

And to show that from any given kind of point in the development of capitalism there are not necessarily immediate possibility of social transformation, but that the material bases are always developing in ways that can give rise to struggle. Those struggles can be generative and can take you somewhere. And that this is as characteristic of a post-industrial service economy as it was of an industrial economy although differently so.

Less generously, I suppose, I would say that the conflation of those three points that I just laid out — the collapse of the strategic and the material questions into a f humanistic question — bespeaks a kind of nostalgia. And nostalgia in general seems like completely at odds with Marxism.

Because it does seem to me that institutions of social reproduction don't analytically pre-exist the capitalist social relations that are around them. They are produced in and around and through the kind of development of capitalism in ways that permeate them much more powerfully than I think that kind of shorthand analysis would suggest.

This is speculative, but it seems to me that the ongoing decomposition of normative gender that we can all see around us, is in some ways, a kind of automatic development, or rather a kind of mechanical development almost, of the ways in which the capitalist mode of production is not able to reproduce itself that effectively anymore through a strictly gendered division of labour.

There is a wider variety of genders that are becoming kind of possible and needed, but that's extremely politically fraught and contested. This argument is to link the question of how human beings are gendered and gender themselves to the question of the division of labour.

But nevertheless, as I always tell my students, it used to be that in many shops, when a manager entered the shop, the workers would all put down their tools and stop working, that you would not work while the manager was looking at you.

When I have worked in workplace organising this was always the thing I tried to find out about workers and about their jobs and about their relations with each other. What are those little moments where they have identified just a tiny sphere of autonomy, a tiny practice of resistance? Do they talk about that with each other? Do they share those? And often you find that they do. You know, “Hey, I found a way of listening to music while working in the warehouse, if the boss doesn't know. I have a hat on over my earbuds”, things like that.

And certainly, in the care economy, which I study, there's a perverse way in which that goes the other way, where workers actually have to break the rules in order to make sure patients are taken care of sufficiently. Because management is sort of tacitly expecting and banking on workers own kind of, let's call them democratic practices.

I’m always trying to get people to recover the term “busting the rate” for when you go too fast. In graduate school, I used to say to people who finish their PhD too fast “What are you doing? you're busting the rate! We take seven years in this shop!”.