Top Highlights

• My personal favourite definition of capitalism comes from critical theorist Nancy Fraser, who describes it as an “institutionalised social order”4 that governs not only the accumulation of capital itself, but also the noneconomic background conditions which make capital accumulation possible. Capitalism requires a particular social arrangement whic...
• The truth was, I was afraid to work less because it would make my life feel meaningless. I had wholeheartedly absorbed the belief that work should be the centre of my life, and yet the work I had found myself doing was nowhere near fulfilling. If this had been my real job, a 9-5 with OKRs and performance reviews, I would quit in an instant. The wor...
• Our pitch decks were not meant to describe reality; they created reality. Their goal was to sell a vision: the company described in these slides could, with the right investment, disrupt this industry and capture a slice of this multi-billion-dollar market. They were marketing, not fact, and their goal was to bring about the reality they described....
• Immanuel Wallerstein’s Historical Capitalism10 —
• Computing is terrible. People think — falsely — that there’s been something like Darwinian processes generating the present. So therefore what we have now must be better than anything that had been done before. And they don’t realize that Darwinian processes, as any biologist will tell you, have nothing to do with optimization. They have to do with...