Our local co-op has a security guard dedicated to the toilet roll isle 

It’s startling how crude the UK government’s allocation of medical resources has been during this crisis. It seems impossible that the state won’t change rapidly over the coming years, with the capacity for more granular analysis and control being a crucial driver of this.

I can far too easily imagine Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft operating large parts of the state infrastructure within five years. There’s a cold utilitarian logic to it which needs to be responded to in an extremely careful way.

One possible outcome of this is the full institutionalisation of platform capitalism. UBI with ever expanding consumer offering, (relatively) stable but more fragmented than ever.

Coronavirus is going to take down the Archers. If you had a middle-class English upbringing this is terrifying.

It's still terrifying to grasp how many institutions are going to collapse in the next 18 months.

There are intellectual resources in the productivity literature for thinking through some aspects of this collapse. They have to be treated VERY carefully but they are there. The subculture became extremely strange and diverse in the last few years in a way that now seems telling.

I wish Mark Fisher was still with us.

Hello