2025-06-01

• Read: [[The Case for Digital Degrowth]]

2025-05-31

• [[Capitalism creates and shapes desires]].

• [[Capitalism tends towards the commodification of everything]].

• Jammed: Pretty in Plums by Shida Shahabi

2025-05-30

• Read: [[Repairing Our Way out of Commodity Fetishism]]

  • [[The desire for new things is essential to the continuation of the capitalist system]].
  • [[Commodity fetishism disconnects us from where objects come from]].
  • [[Repair reconnects us to the materiality of objects]].
  • [[When we repair something, we think about its history and provenance]].
  • [[Repair undercuts commodity fetishism]].
  • [[Repair is anti-capitalist praxis]].

• Bookmarked:

  • Fixing as Repair – Fixing Futures
    • tags: [[Repair]].

• [[compost.party]] is fun.

  • A website running on solar power on an old phone.

2025-05-29

• [[Bookmarked]]:
  • Repairing Our Way out of Commodity Fetishism
    • h/t: [[Panda]].
    • tags: [[Repair]]. [[Marxism]]. [[Commodity fetishism]].
  • Global data empires: Analysing artificial intelligence data annotation in China and the USA
    • tags: [[AI]].
  • Our Mutual Friend: The BBC in the Digital Age | Briefing | Common Wealth
  • The Home Office’s new "ChatGPT-style" LLM tool is riddled with mistakes that could mean life or death for people seeking asylum - Foxglove
    • tags: [[AI]]. [[LLM]]s.
  • Why capitalism is fundamentally undemocratic
    • tags: [[Capitalism]]. [[Democracy]].
  • OpenAI explores platform to rival X, following $40B funding round
    • tags: [[Platform capitalism]].
    • See the point from Nick Srnicek about platforms all converging towards each other…
  • International Civil Society’s Tech Stack is in Extreme Danger
    • tags: [[Big Tech]]. [[Reclaim the stacks]].
  • Criminal Court: Microsoft’s email block a wake-up call for digital sovereignty
    • tags: [[Microsoft]]. [[Digital sovereignty]].
  • Negatechnology | POST GROWTH TOOLKIT
    • h/t [[Panda]].
  • We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard….
    • tags: [[AI]].
  • Livin’ on repair: The workshops, garages and cafes of Berlin’s thriving DIY s…
    • tags: [[Repair]]. [[Berlin]].
  • Apple launches Self Service Repair for iPad, expands repair programs - Apple
    • tags: [[Apple]]. [[Repair]].

2025-05-28

• In the latest episode of ‘Neil tries to update something related to Emacs’ (see [[2025-05-27]]):

  • I thought that I might be able to process org-roam.db on my laptop, as that is faster, and then sync it to my phone.
  • Two problems: firstly, it doesn’t work. Not sure why but it must be checking something else other than version to check whether it needs processing. Secondly: the DB contains links to file locations, which are different between devices. So, ultimately a no go anyway.
  • Ho hum. I’ll need to think of a way of doing a full update of org-roam.db on my phone somehow without it taking an eternity / bombing out.
  • At least I have an updated Emacs on my laptop!

• Later: I fixed it by moving the files out of the org-roam dir for the project, then moving them back in and processing then in batches of 1000 at a time.

  • Still took ages, but didn’t crash and I just let each batch run while getting on with something else.
  • I also learned that the slowness is probably down to me having the files on the shared storage rather than on termux’s home. See e.g. https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/2174

• Going to start moving some repos from Github and Gitlab to [[Codeberg]].

• [[Four in five Britons want the government to do more to support repair]].

2025-05-27

• Liking [[elfeed]] so far.

  • A bit more setup to do though. [[Setting up elfeed]].

• Found this rather excellent-looking site referencing some of my some of my info on how to publish your site with org-publish: https://drollery.org/build/

• As part of the above saga of updates, I will now endeavour to update org-roam to 2.3.0 on spacemacs on my laptop.

  • That will involve updating packages.

• Found this rather excellent-looking site referencing some of my some of my info on how to publish your site with org-publish: https://drollery.org/build/

  • That means I should probably also update spacemacs itself.
  • One or both of those will probably break something.
  • Yeah, already failing when trying to update packages. Sigh. Try to update spacemacs first then.
  • Now: error message that I need at least emacs 28.2. I’m on 28.1. Sigh.
  • Tried it from flatpak. That still doesn’t work.
  • I’m going to try building from source. That worked once before…
  • OK, it wasn’t that bad to be honest. The compilation, at least. Took about 10/15 minutes?
  • Now installing 305 packages… annoyingly you can’t just leave it unattended, as occassionally it asks to compile something.
  • Miraculously, that seems to have worked!

• I should find out if there’s a way of pinning packages to particular versions in both Doom and spacemacs, so that:

  • (a) I can make sure they don’t randomly update and break at a time when I don’t have time to do anything about it.
  • (b) I can make sure they’re always on the same version between mobile and laptop.

2025-05-26

• I am [[setting up elfeed]].

  • With it I can manage my feeds in an org file, view them in Emacs, and sync the status between devices with syncthing.
  • Now that some interesting people have moved from X to BlueSky, I can use the BlueSky RSS feeds to follow them.
  • elfeed-org makes it easy to add feeds and organise them. I’m trying Ton’s way of organising feeds to begin.

• All good. But, I had to upgrade Doom. Which upgraded org-roam. Which meant the org-roam DB needed upgrading. Which takes an eternity on my phone. So it’s effectively broken for me until I can solve that. Great.

2025-05-25

• Trying out [[using filetags for marking nodes in org-roam as Zettelkasten main notes]].

  • My org-roam garden is a bit of everything, not only what you’d call Zettelkasten notes.
  • Perhaps not good practice - I don’t know. But it is what it is.
  • It’s useful at times to search only for main notes. filetags will let me do that.

• Interesting to see some [[org-roam]]-likes keeping the idea alive (and making it faster): https://org-roam.discourse.group/t/rg-roam-minimal-org-roam-with-zero-config-no-sql-depends-only-on-ripgrep/3803/2

  • org-node, orgrr, and org-mem all look useful.
  • Yet, what’s this, I also see the first new release of org-roam in 3 years, too: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam/releases/tag/v2.3.0
  • Interesting! Not sure when I’ll have time to do anything about any of this. Hopefully I’ll be able to update to 2.3.0 with minimal disruption.

2025-05-24

• Very excited to learn of the [[Digital Degrowth]] book by Michael Kwet (author of [[Digital Ecosocialism: Breaking the power of Big Tech]]).

• Also excited to learn that [[Kai Heron]] and [[Keir Milburn]] and [[Bertie Russell]] have co-authored a book: [[Radical Abundance]]: How to Win a Green Democratic Future.

• [[Listened]]: [[ACFM Trip 48: Political Commitment]]

2025-05-23

• [[Bookmarked]]:

  • Review of The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life by Kristin Ross
    • tags: [[Paris Commune]]. [[Communes]].
  • Review of Josh Simons’ Book "Algorithms for the People – Democracy in the Age of AI"
    • tags: [[digital ecosocialism]]. [[AI]]. [[Algorithms]].
  • Beyond the New Municipalism: Towards Post‐Capitalist Territorial Sovereignty in the Case of Hernani Burujabe
    • tags: [[new municipalism]]. [[Post-capitalism]]. [[Territorial sovereignty]].
  • Techno-feudalism or Platform Capitalism? Conceptualising the Digital Society
    • tags: [[platform capitalism]]. [[technofeudalism]].

• Read: [[Another Now]]

  • Hmm, take back my original comment a bit (see [[2025-05-18]]).
  • It’s taken a turn into pretty dry dialogue as a vehicle for exposition of the ideas. Earlier on it felt a bit more… dynamic.
  • Still, the ideas are interesting nonetheless.

• Read: [[Techno-feudalism or Platform Capitalism? Conceptualising the Digital Society]]

  • Good look at various claims that current Big Tech platforms have ‘killed’ capitalism and turned it into something worse ([[technofeudalism]], [[vectoralism]], etc).
  • [[Jeremy Gilbert]]‘s opinion is no, it’s still capitalism, rather a new ‘[[regime of accumulation]]‘ - i.e. [[platform capitalism]].
  • Fine. But it all strikes me as a bit internal nitpicking. Does it actually help us do anything about it?
  • I think the argument would be, yes, you kind of need to understand precisely what it is in order to counter it.
  • Maybe.

• [[Fordism]]. [[Post-Fordism]].

2025-05-21

2025-05-18

• [[Read]]: [[Another Now]]
  • Fiction by [[Yanis Varoufakis]]. Really enjoying it so far. The plot is obviously a bit forced, a vehicle just to share his political ideas. But it’s a fun way to explore those ideas.
  • The 80s and [[Thatcherism]]. [[Miners’ strike]]. [[Wapping dispute]].
  • [[Anarcho-syndicalism]].

2025-05-17

• Finished [[Platform Capitalism]] (audiobook).

  • I’ll need to give it another listen, as not all of it went in - listening while distracted.
  • But seemed good. A lot more academic than [[Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism?]]. The latter was more engaging, but (maybe?) less rigorous. I appreciate this book’s succinctness.
  • Some things that stuck out from this listen:
    • It has a good historical overview of where platforms came from and how they came to dominate.
    • It has a useful typology of platforms.
    • Platforms primarily gain their advantages from data.
    • Trying to force platform capitalists to respect privacy is impossible - it’s part of their DNA.
    • Over time platforms try to control the whole stack.
    • Over time, platforms slowly converge to offering the same services.
  • There’s a tiny bit at the end on possible ways to counter platform dominance. Very small, but worth noting.

• [[Public platforms]].

2025-05-14

• [[platform capitalism]].
  • It’s all about the [[data]].

2025-05-11

• [[Bookmarked]]:
  • Nature and other dangerous words: Marx, method and the proletarian standpoint in the web of life | Dialectical Anthropology
    • tags: [[Cheap Nature]]. [[Capitalocene]]. [[Ecosocialism]]. [[Jason W. Moore]].

2025-05-10

• Learned about [[chezmoi]] from [[Flancian]]‘s note about it yesterday.

  • Looks good and something that would be handy to me in principle.
  • I’m currently keeping my dotfiles just in a git repo.
  • However, it also looks like a new thing to learn and set up. So it’ll have to wait for now. But good to know about.
  • It looks like people are using it with Termux successfully, so that’s useful.
    • e.g. https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/issues/24304

• Learned of the existence of the native [[Linux Terminal app for Android]].

  • h/t: https://github.com/orgzly-revived/orgzly-android-revived/discussions/562
  • However, it don’t believe it will ever be available for my Pixel 5a.
  • So I’ll be sticking with [[Termux]].

• [[Bookmarked]]:

  • Are we heading for another world war – or has it already started? | World news | The Guardian
    • tags: [[World War III]]