Reason Science Editor Ron Bailey (“Overpopulation Scaremongering Never Gets Old,” June 19) takes Eugene Linden to task for blaming Lesotho’s poverty on overpopulation. “That’s far too simple a story,” Bailey says — whereupon he hands his beer to Linden and demonstrates how a real pro oversimplifies things. Lesotho couldn’t be overpopulated, Bailey says, because it’s got…

Neal Stephenson. The Diamond Age: or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995). In Four Futures Peter Frase poses, as a thought experiment, an “anti-Star Trek”: a world that shares the same technologies as Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s post-scarcity communist society, but in which those technologies of abundance are enclosed with “intellectual property” barriers so…

[Di William Gillis. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society il 25 maggio 2017 con il titolo When Concerns Of Cultural Appropriation Risk Supporting Intellectual Property. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.] L’ultima ondata di panico in materia di giustizia sociale viene dalla mia città, dove qualcuno ha fatto una lista che mette alla gogna ambulanti…

Intellectual property ‘rights’ trace their origins back to copyright in literature, from which they have since expanded. With this in mind, it is fruitful to examine how authors can be compensated in the absence of copyright. Essentially, proponents of copyright in literature argue that they see no other way of compensating authors for their work. Indeed, many…

“Basic income – in both the north and the south – all depends on how we frame it. Will it be cast as a form of charity by the rich? Or will it be cast as a right for all?”[1] The above remark encapsulates the promise and the potential perils of a universal basic income (UBI): a…

Uber, the controversial corporate employer masquerading as a “ride-sharing” service, has recently stirred up more controversy with new revelations about its Greyball program for circumventing enforcement of local taxicab monopolies. Greyball maintains a database of likely local government officials. This database is populated by users who frequently open and close the Uber app near government buildings,…

The United States recently experienced its first wave of large-scale anti-immigration raids following the election of Donald Trump, who made the mass deportation of “illegal” immigrants a central part of his campaign. Although ICE officials claim that these raids targeted individuals with criminal records, immigrant rights groups dispute this claim, arguing that law-abiding people were…

Remember the Oxfam report early last year that found sixty-two individuals owned as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity put together? It’s gone down to only six — that’s right, six — in the past year: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Amancio Ortega, Mark Zuckerberg, and Carlos Slim Helu. The total wealth held…

If you keep up with right-libertarian media, you’ve probably seen more than one puff piece on how much global capitalism has improved things for people in the Third World: higher per capita GDP, longer life expectancies, and so on. But if average standards of living have gone up, according to an article at the Guardian…

Revolutionary Luxury, Bureaucratic Administration Any politics that seeks an encompassing notion of liberation and freedom must, first and foremost, be oriented towards the future, and must pursue this horizon through goal-oriented actions. This effectively sets up a feedback system, linking together the shifting and modular futurity that is assembled by those who desire it with…

The modern economy is stuck in a major rut. Productivity gains have not matched wage inflation, and productivity itself is relatively stagnant, particularly in the UK. Job provision is being increasingly concentrated in low-pay sectors, with temporary work and part-time contracts creating a modern precariat of working class individuals, students and other members of a…

With changes in work and employment patterns in 21st century there has been a precariatisation of work, where employment contracts are de-securitised, low-pay dominates and there is an increasing individuation of work-life, alongside a blurring of work and leisure. Developments like the sharing economy and the move toward a self-employment in-name-only represent a significant economic…

Marcus Brancaglione. Lessons from the Practice of Basic Income: A Compendium of Writings and Data. Edited by Bruna Augusto. Translated by Monica Puntel, Leonardo Puntel, Carolina Fisher (São Paulo, 2016). This is a collection of writings by Marcus Brancaglione. Brancaglione is President of ReCivitas (Institute for the Revitalization of Citizenship); Bruna Augusto, who edited the…

This is the second part in a series. Be sure to check out parts 1, 3, 4 and 5. As radical leftists, we tend to favor looking at the bigger picture. We favor radical change in the world around us and it is with that goal in mind and many lifetimes worth of collective analysis that we tend…

Guy Standing. The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay (London: Biteback Press, 2016). I looked forward to reading this book based on previous readings of Guy Standing’s work, based on his status as both a labor organizer and a theorist of the precariat’s role in the economy. I wasn’t disappointed….

There’s a lot of disagreement in American politics — from Berniecrats, to the centrist neoliberal establishment, to right-libertarians, to nationalist reactionaries like Trump and his followers — on TPP and other trade agreements. But there’s one thing they all agree on: calling it “free trade.” And they’re all wrong. At Reason (“The Neoliberal Era is…

If you are interested enough to read this, you might as well just watch the movie. Steal This Film is available for free on Youtube and other locations on the internet and is less than an hour and twenty minutes in length. The film was created by a group calling itself the League of Noble Peers, for the…

In what seems to be becoming an annual tradition, neoconservative grey eminence Bill Kristol tweeted in December 18, “When I first saw Star Wars in 1977, I was inclined to root for the empire. 25 years later, @JVLast proved me right.” Kristol authored a similar series of tweets in October of last year, and praised…

Erik Olin Wright. Envisioning Real Utopias (London and New York: Verso, 2010). Although this book covers much of the same ground, and does much of the same work, as autonomist and post-capitalist theories like Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth and Mason’s Postcapitalism, Olin-Wright comes from the entirely different tradition of analytical Marxism. This school approaches Marxist…

There is a general feeling in the academic world: things could be done in a much better way. But what exactly has gone wrong? I would argue the main problem is that we have allowed ‘irrational authority’ (also known as hierarchy) to take over reason and knowledge. To start, let me differentiate between rational and…