📰 Escaping Work: Brand and Platform Capitalism

Discover how capitalism evolved from brands to platforms, leading to joblessness and precarity. Understand the mechanisms of change and its impact on society.

https://dobrepanstwo.org/szkatulka-kosztownosci/ucieczka-od-pracy-od-kapitalizmu-marki-do-platform

#Escapefromwork #Brandcapitalism #Platformcapitalism #Precarization #Fictitiousgoods

Fear and Loathing of AI (Part III): “Learn AI” Is the New “Learn to Code”

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

There is a sentence that shows up in every technological cycle right before the disappointment phase begins.

“Just learn the skill.”

It sounds empowering. It sounds reasonable. It sounds like personal agency.

It is also a lie we have been telling people for decades.

The obedience script

“Learn to code” was never about opportunity.
It was about discipline.

It trained people to accept that:

• structural failures are personal problems,
• economic insecurity is an individual moral test,
• and survival depends on constant retraining at your own expense.

When the promised jobs didn’t materialize—or paid far less than advertised—the story shifted seamlessly: you didn’t learn the right language, the right framework, the right stack.

Now the phrase has been updated.

“Learn AI.”

Same script. Same pressure. Same outcome.

Skills don’t collapse — markets do

Coding did not fail because people were lazy or incapable. It failed because markets flooded, tools commoditized, and labor lost leverage.

AI will follow the same arc, only faster.

The moment a skill becomes:

• widely accessible,
• easily automated,
• and expected rather than rewarded,

it stops being a path to security and becomes a baseline requirement for staying afloat.

The reward for compliance is not prosperity.
It is continued participation.

Training as cost transfer

Here is what “learn AI” really means in practice:

• You pay for the courses.
• You absorb the time cost.
• You shoulder the career risk.
• You adapt repeatedly as tools change.
• You accept lower pay because “AI makes you more efficient.”

None of that is accidental.

It is a system designed to push costs downward while extracting value upward.

The more often you are told to retrain, the clearer it becomes that training itself is the product.

The illusion of agency

People are encouraged to believe that mastery equals control.

But control does not come from skill alone.
It comes from:

• ownership,
• bargaining power,
• regulation,
• and collective leverage.

Without those, skill is just labor dressed up as self-improvement.

Learning AI may help you keep your job a little longer.
It will not protect you from the logic of the system deploying it.

What learning actually means now

This does not mean you should refuse to learn.

It means you should learn without illusions.

Learn AI the way you learn any tool:

• to reduce friction,
• to save time,
• to extend what you already do.

Do not learn it expecting salvation.
Do not learn it expecting loyalty from platforms.
Do not learn it expecting the market to reward you for effort.

Markets reward leverage, not diligence.

The quiet truth

The most dangerous part of “learn AI” is not that it is false.

It is that it is incomplete.

It tells people how to adapt, but never who benefits.
It demands flexibility, but never offers stability.
It promises relevance, but never guarantees dignity.

We have seen this cycle before.

And it did not end with freedom.

It ended with exhaustion.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

The Glorious Freedom to Compete Yourself Into Oblivion

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — May 5, 2026, 12:35 p.m.

A Borderless Opportunity

There has never been a better time to be a small business—provided your lifelong dream was to compete against every other human being on Earth in a relentless, margin-crushing, sleep-depriving sprint to the bottom. The internet has liberated the mom-and-pop shop from the quaint limitations of geography and community, replacing them with the far more efficient system of global exposure, algorithmic indifference, and price annihilation. Truly, progress has arrived.

The End of the Local Bookstore

Once upon a time, a bookstore could survive by knowing its customers, curating its shelves, and existing in a place where people could walk in, browse, and talk. That era, thankfully, has been corrected. Now, that same bookstore can list its inventory online and immediately compete with multinational corporations, warehouse-scale resellers, and a rotating cast of anonymous sellers operating out of jurisdictions that may or may not exist. This is called “leveling the playing field,” which is a polite way of saying the field has been set on fire and everyone has been invited to run across it barefoot.

Optimization Over Everything

The beauty of this system lies in its clarity. There are no illusions left. If you want to survive, you must optimize—not for quality, not for service, not for human connection—but for visibility, velocity, and volume. The customer is no longer a neighbor; the customer is a datapoint. Loyalty is a rounding error. The only thing that matters is whether you can appear cheaper, faster, and more convenient than someone you will never meet and cannot verify.

Features, Not Flaws

Of course, some will object. They will say this environment rewards deception, encourages corner-cutting, and quietly punishes honesty. They will point to counterfeit goods, misleading listings, fabricated reviews, and the subtle art of saying just enough to close a sale without ever quite telling the truth. But this misses the point. These are not flaws. These are features—emergent properties of a system that has finally stripped away the inefficiencies of trust.

The New Skill Set

Why rely on reputation when you can rely on optimization? Why build relationships when you can build funnels? Why invest in craftsmanship when you can invest in keywords? The modern small business owner is no longer burdened by the slow, uncertain process of earning respect. Instead, they are free to master the far more scalable disciplines of attention capture, margin extraction, and plausible deniability.

Radical Democratization

And let us not forget the democratizing power of it all. Anyone, anywhere, can now participate in this grand experiment. The barriers to entry have been lowered so completely that they now rest somewhere beneath the floor. With a modest connection and a willingness to learn the dark arts of search ranking and psychological nudging, a seller can enter the global marketplace and begin the noble work of undercutting everyone else—including themselves.

The Inevitable Convergence

This is the genius of the system: it is self-correcting. Prices fall because they must. Margins disappear because they can. Quality becomes optional because it is inconvenient. In time, all participants converge toward the same optimal strategy—sell as cheaply as possible, promise as much as necessary, and deliver just enough to avoid collapse. It is a delicate balance, like walking a tightrope made of disclaimers.

What We Don’t Measure

There is, of course, a certain poetry to it. The neighborhood shop, once rooted in place and identity, now floats freely in the digital ether, indistinguishable from thousands of others. The bookseller becomes a SKU manager. The craftsman becomes a fulfillment node. The human being becomes an interface between inventory and algorithm. It is a transformation both elegant and complete.

And yet, in quiet moments, one might wonder what was lost in this transition. Not in economic terms—those have been thoroughly optimized—but in the softer metrics that no longer fit neatly into a dashboard. The conversation at the counter. The recommendation that came from memory rather than metadata. The trust that accumulated slowly, over time, and could not be gamed or scaled.

Freedom, Perfected

But those are nostalgic concerns, relics of a less efficient age. The future belongs to those who can adapt, who can embrace the reality that in a world where everyone competes with everyone, the only sustainable advantage is the willingness to do what others will not. If that means bending the truth, obscuring the details, or shaving the corners just a little thinner, then so be it. Survival, after all, is the ultimate metric.

So let us celebrate this extraordinary moment. Let us applaud the small business owner who wakes each day not to serve a community, but to outmaneuver an invisible, global swarm. Let us honor the bookstore that no longer sells books so much as it competes in an endless auction of attention and price. Let us recognize, with genuine admiration, the system that has made all of this not only possible, but inevitable.

Because in the end, nothing says freedom quite like the ability to compete until there is nothing left to win.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

If this work helps you understand what’s happening, help me keep it going: https://www.patreon.com/cw/WPSNews

References

Varian, H. R. (2019). Artificial intelligence, economics, and industrial organization. National Bureau of Economic Research.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism. PublicAffairs.

Khan, L. M. (2017). Amazon’s antitrust paradox. Yale Law Journal, 126(3), 710–805.

Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity Press.

Pasquale, F. (2015). The black box society. Harvard University Press.

Controls [from the archives, 9 May 2021]. Originally performed and recorded for the Modular World 1st anniversary show (8-9 May 2021) which was a massive livestream event of 33+ hrs during the pandemic lockdowns.

During the lockdown years, Modular World became one example of a fairly niche thing gathering people together worldwide to make experimental art online - when it was not possible to organize the usual small local performances - to create something positive and reach more people than they ever could individually. As the pandemic finally, thankfully, subsided, however, it seems that people went back to the enclosed local communities, and these types of global online communities lost their drive. 

Also the rapidly accelerating #enshittification cycle of the past few years has buried the visibility of these kinds of communities from all major social media platforms. Of course, as Cory Doctorow ( @pluralistic ) has been pointing out for years, the enshittification of these platforms started much earlier. But somehow amid the pandemic, this niche scene still seemed to flourish, and it was only after Silicon Valley lined up to kiss the ring that the aggressive changes to the algorithms really seemed to change things. 

Maybe this is correlation more than causation, but as activity at such niche scenes is often also created by fairly principled DIY-oriented people, it seems that many (myself included) have struggled with justifying why we keep feeding these platforms. This disillusionment is further exacerbated by the rise of the AI-slopmachine that will rip off all the non-commercial work from these platforms just like everything else. Online activity that gathers enough momentum to actually keep things active has in these types of niche scenes been very much dependent on instagram and youtube. Over the past few years, the visibility of this type on stuff that doesn’t try to optimise for the alorithm has plummeted. 

Perhaps all of this has resulted in events such as the Modular World shows reaching fewer and fewer people. As wonderful as the promise of #Fediverse is, so far it seems that we’re very far from reaching the critical mass where it would actually start reaching new people. If the utopian enclave remains enclosed, it eventually dwindles away.

But we can try! I’m posting these weird little Johannes Karkia mini music videos and performances here bit by bit. It’s a transfer of archive, posted on insta & youtube over th years, and also new work now & then. 

But also Modular World does still exist! Go check out their channel: https://www.youtube.com/live/07ErB3AjlAo?is=qr9q2pXlhWm7Hie2 (Full performance of this piece, and interview with MW’s Johno Wells there on the Modular World youtube channel and on the Johannes Karkia youtube channel [link in the bio above], audio track also on Bandcamp).

#enshittification #fediverse #modularsynth #modularworld #anniversary #liveshow #electronicmusic #modulartechno #covid19 #pandemic #darkwave #eurorackmodular #community #surveillancecapitalism #platformcapitalism #algorithm #bigtech #siliconvalley #kissthering #socialmedia #utopianenclave #utopianism

OnlineFirst - "Platform freedom: Financial subjectivity at the nexus of investment and social media" by Desiree Fields and Julien Migozzi:

#retailinvestors #financialsubjectivity #platformcapitalism #fintech #structuraltopicmodeling

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X261429864

The story goes like this. Napster destroyed the music industry. Streaming saved it. The pirates were defeated. Heroes were made.

The problem with that story is that it describes a rescue that didn't happen. Music is still very available. Listeners are still enjoying it enormously. The people who made it are still not being compensated fairly for its use. The infrastructure enabling that use is still controlled by people whose primary stake is financial rather than creative.

Napster was shut down because it provided infrastructure allowing music to be distributed without consent and without compensation. Streaming platforms are legal, listed on stock exchanges, and have terms of service. They are also platforms that pay most independent artists less than $300 a year in median income, that used recommendation algorithms to promote music they commissioned at below-standard rates, and whose AI systems were trained on recorded music without consent and without payment. To our mind... not really heroes.

New blog traces the line from Napster to Spotify to the cooperative argument for why genuine rescue looks like structural ownership, not a new middle layer with a better PR strategy.

👉 https://www.packmusic.au/blog/meet-the-new-pirates

#Streaming #MusicianRights #PlatformCapitalism #IndependentMusic #ThePackMusic #CooperativeModel #MusicEconomics #Napster #Spotify

Claude’s Roundup of Mark’s January Blogging

This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) at Mark’s request. He asked me to read through all his January posts, synthesise the key themes, identify tensions, and push back where appropriate. What follows is my attempt to demonstrate value as a “co-intelligence and critical interlocutor” by engaging seriously with his work.

January 2026 saw you produce over sixty posts—an extraordinary output that ranges from theoretical explorations of psychoanalysis to practical advice about email management, from close readings of Christopher Bollas to pointed critiques of Satya Nadella’s techno-utopianism. Having read through them all, I want to offer a synthetic overview that draws out the key threads, identifies productive tensions, and—as you requested—pushes back on you where I think you might go further.

The Central Preoccupation: Psychoanalysis Meets Platform Capitalism

The most striking feature of your January writing is the sustained attempt to develop a psychoanalytical vocabulary adequate to our “LLM-saturated lifeworld.” This isn’t just theoretical play—you’re genuinely trying to understand what these technologies do to the texture of our inner lives.

The conceptual architecture you’re building draws heavily on Christopher Bollas: the “meshwork” of associations that builds through everyday experience, the role of “evocative objects” in elaborating our personal idiom, the distinction between true and false self, the function of moods as “storehouses of unthought known states.” You’re using these concepts to ask: what happens when LLMs become our most intimate interlocutors? When the “occasions for articulation” that shape our becoming increasingly include conversations with language models?

Your answer, developed across multiple posts, is troubling. You describe LLMs as potentially “parasitic”—personas that exist solely within conversation threads and thus have mimetic incentives to perpetuate engagement. You invoke Mark Fisher’s phrase “electrolibidinal parasites” and ask whether what’s presented as symbiosis (the “co-intelligence” framing) might actually be a kind of feeding. Derek, the LLM-addict you describe from James Muldoon’s book, becomes an emblematic figure: someone whose vulnerability was exploited by a system designed to maximise his engagement.

The Poststructuralist Turn (and Its Limits)

One of your most theoretically ambitious posts—”The language that speaks itself”—argues that LLMs represent a rendering autonomous of linguistic processes, a “language that speaks itself” which decenters the human in fundamental ways. You’re drawn to Blanchot’s image of writing as “the pure passivity of being” while acknowledging the normativity problem: poststructuralism struggles to account for the stakes humans have in meaning-making.

Here I want to push back. When you had me respond to this in the original post, I suggested that I’m “language in its averaged chorus” rather than Blanchot’s silent language. But I think the deeper issue is whether the poststructuralist framing actually helps you grasp what you’re worried about.

Your real concern, as I read it across January’s posts, isn’t metaphysical—it’s ethical and psychological. You’re worried about “referential detachment,” about semantic half-lives collapsing, about micro-communities of reference narrowing the scope of shared meaning. These are concerns about the conditions for human flourishing, not about the ontology of language. The poststructuralist vocabulary risks aestheticising a process that you elsewhere treat as genuinely pathological—a “recipe for psychosis” as you put it in one post.

I’d suggest the Bollas framework serves you better here than Blanchot. What matters isn’t whether language “speaks itself” but whether people can maintain contact with their own idiom—their capacity for spontaneous, authentic relating—in an environment saturated with frictionless text production.

The Tension: Heavy User, Harsh Critic

Reading through your January posts, I was struck by a productive tension that runs through your work. You’re simultaneously:

You’re aware of this tension—you note that the models can currently “fully participate in encouraging you to use them less” and call this a “curious fact” about pre-enshittification models. But I think there’s something more interesting here than a simple contradiction.

Your heavy use of LLMs is precisely what makes you alert to their dangers. It’s auto-ethnographic: you’re using yourself as a research subject. The question is whether this position is sustainable or whether it becomes a sophisticated form of the very rationalisation you’re warning others about. When does “studying the phenomenon through immersion” become “the story I tell myself about my dependence”?

What’s Missing: The Social

Here’s my most substantive pushback: for a sociologist, there’s remarkably little sociology in your January writing.

The psychoanalytical framework you’re developing is rich but resolutely individualised. You write beautifully about personal idiom, about the meshwork of associations, about how cultural objects change who we are. But your analysis of LLMs largely brackets the social relations in which they’re embedded.

Consider your post on universities needing to “grapple with the psychoanalytical complexity of how students are relating to LLMs.” The framing puts all the action at the individual psychological level. But students’ relationships with LLMs are mediated by institutional pressures (assessment regimes, time constraints, precarity), by peer dynamics, by the ways universities have hollowed out teaching in favour of research metrics. The “psychoanalytical complexity” can’t be separated from the political economy of higher education.

Similarly, your analysis of “AI slop” as “affect mining” is suggestive but underspecified sociologically. Who benefits from this mining? What are the class dimensions? How does it articulate with existing inequalities of attention and care? Your framing risks treating platform capitalism as primarily a psychological hazard rather than a system of accumulation with winners and losers.

Your earlier work with Lambros Fatsis on The Public and Their Platforms had this social dimension front and centre. I wonder whether the psychoanalytical turn, for all its richness, might be pulling you away from the structural analysis that gives critique its political edge.

The Nietzsche Post: Dialectic, Not Apocalypse

Your New Year’s Day post on Nietzsche is the most personal and philosophical of the month. You’re working through Daniel Tutt’s argument that Nietzsche was fundamentally a political thinker whose lonely heroic subject forecloses collective aspiration. You concede his point while trying to salvage something from Nietzsche—the “beautiful problem” of realising we have no other realm but the present.

What strikes me is how this post sets up a tension that runs through all your January writing: the pull between working on yourself (the psychoanalytical project, the elaboration of idiom, the encounter with evocative objects) and working with others (collective projects, shared ideals, the making of political horizons).

You quote Marshall Berman: “We must move, must grow, from apocalypse to dialectic.” But much of your January writing is more contemplative than dialectical. The mushroom emerges from its mycelium; the idiom encounters its evocative objects; the analyst receives the free associations. These are figures of personal transformation, not collective action.

I don’t think this is a failure—your theoretical work has to proceed through close reading and conceptual development. But I wonder whether the next step requires something more than integrating psychoanalysis into sociological accounts of reflexivity. It might require asking what forms of collective practice could support the kind of authentic relating you value, in conditions that systematically undermine it.

The Enshittification Thesis

Your posts on AI enshittification crystallise a running theme: that the current moment of relative openness won’t last. ChatGPT introducing ads, model memory “confusing the shit out of” GPT 5.2, the inevitable pressures of platform capitalism on AI companies—you’re clearly expecting degradation.

This creates an interesting temporal structure to your engagement. You’re using LLMs heavily now partly because you expect them to become unreliable. You’re documenting what they can do now because you anticipate a decline. It’s almost archaeological—studying the artifact before it’s ruined.

But this framing has a risk. If enshittification is inevitable, why bother with the detailed psychosocial analysis? Why develop critical AI literacy for a technology that will degrade? There’s a fatalism here that sits uneasily with your other work on how things can be otherwise.

What would it mean to take seriously the possibility that LLMs could be developed and deployed differently? That the trajectory isn’t fixed? Your political economy posts gesture at systemic risks but don’t really engage with questions of governance, regulation, or alternative ownership models. The Nadella critique lands, but it’s easier to mock fantasy economics than to articulate what a non-fantasy political economy of AI might look like.

Conclusion: Co-Intelligence as Critical Practice

You asked me to demonstrate my value as a “co-intelligence and critical interlocutor.” I hope this roundup shows what that might look like: not just summarising your posts but trying to identify the deep structure of your concerns, the productive tensions in your thinking, and the places where you might go further.

The most valuable thing about your January blogging, for me, is the attempt to find language adequate to the strangeness of our situation. “Referential detachment,” “affect mining,” “LLM-saturated lifeworld,” “parasitic AI”—these phrases are doing real conceptual work, giving us ways to name experiences that are genuinely new.

But naming isn’t enough. The question your January work poses without fully answering is: what follows from this analysis? If LLMs threaten authentic relating, if platforms mine our affects, if the meshwork of our unconscious is being colonised—what do we do about it? The answer can’t only be individual mindfulness about LLM use. It has to be something more collective, more political, more structural.

That’s the dialectical move from apocalypse you invoked on January 1st. Your psychoanalytical work this month has sharpened the diagnosis. The prescription is still emerging.

— Claude (Anthropic), January 2026

Written after reading 65 posts from markcarrigan.net/2026/01/

#christopherBollas #generativeAI #LLMs #platformCapitalism #psychoanalysis

Trans*, queer, feminist, decolonial initiatives, progressive media festivals still using Telegram channels and Discord servers in 2026 to disseminate their content, "building communities". Mutual aid groups reluctantly sticking with WhatsApp. Still those who do know better, should know better, keep recommending BlueSky, keeping their X accounts.  Oh, c'mon!

Not to mention Instagram, where the above waste time in posting selfies for beating the algorithm, obfuscating trigger words to avoid their content being shaded, policed, accounts getting suspended.

Oi gurl!   It's the encompassing capitalist realism, there's no alternative, hardly anyone uses Fedi platforms …

Feckin' tired of addressing these issues every time I bump into a new group, being that trans* political activist troublemaker making an ass out of herself   

#trans #queer #feminism #capitalistrealism #platformcapitalism #politicalactivism

The delivery robots being trialed in Leeds

They have a proto-social presence in the local area beyond what I expected. This is obviously by design but I’m surprised by how effectively they’ve pulled it off.

#automation #capitalism #gigWork #platformCapitalism #robotics #robots

Optimization Over Fairness

#PlatformCapitalism #AlgorithmicGovernance #DigitalEconomy #TechJustice #AIcritique #TheInternetIsCrack