Nate
LightNews LightNews
banner
natedub.bsky.social
Nate
@natedub.bsky.social
1.1K followers 940 following 740 posts
he/him - reading (SFF, philosophy) | gaming (video, tabletop) | listening (metal, podcasts from the left) - Covid is not a cold, masking shows solidarity, let's take care of each other 😷
Posts Replies Media Videos
natedub.bsky.social
Holding back from just quoting every page, gonna be pressing this book into people’s hands often - really great job of weaving together the strands of structural violence in our society that “AI” is necessarily imbricated in, along with the ideologies driving its development
Quote from Dan McQuillan’s book Resisting AI: “Neoreaction seems to manifest a pure form of the kind of thoughtlessness that already goes with Al, and a lack of emotional engagement carried to the point of pathology. Under the technocratic world order of neoreaction, people are essentially assets or liabilities, and the latter, whether disabled or neurodivergent or racially inferior, most definitely qualify as being disposable. For all its intellectual pretence, neoreaction is a glorification of existing inequalities and a wish for their intensification, based on the idea that some people are more 'fit' than others, that their privilege is built into their DNA and is demonstrated by their wealth and power. This makes for a heady mix with systems like Al, with their inbuilt tendency to emphasize and accentuate existing disparities of class, gender, race and beyond. Existing technocratic systems already embed these discriminations, but both Al and neoreaction accelerate them.”
July 4, 2025 at 4:22 PM
natedub.bsky.social
Hadn’t thought of the resonances between Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism and the models underpinning “AI” until reading Dan McQuillan’s fantastic book Resisting AI
Quote from Dan McQuillan’s book Resisting AI: “In other words, however sophisticated or creative Al might seem to be, its modelling is stuck in abstractions drawn from the past, and so becomes a rearrangement of the way things have been rather than a reimagining of the way things could be. Al has, in effect, an inbuilt political commitment to the status quo, in particular to existing structures that embed specific relations of power. The absence of different concepts leaves out the possibility of conceiving that things could be arranged differently.”
July 3, 2025 at 8:43 PM
natedub.bsky.social
Michael Parenti wrote this in 1997, people are still asking this question today, and his response is still just as true (impressive and depressing in equal measure)
Quote from Michael Parenti’s book Blackshirts and Reds: “Is Marx still relevant today? Only if you want to know why the media distort the news in a mostly mainstream direction; why more and more people at home and abroad face economic adversity while money continues to accumulate in the hands of relatively few; why there is so much private wealth and public poverty in this country and elsewhere; why U.S. forces find it necessary to intervene in so many regions of the world; why a rich and productive economy offers chronic recessions, underemployment, and neglect of social needs; and why many political officeholders are unwilling or unable to serve the public interest.”
June 29, 2025 at 9:57 PM
natedub.bsky.social
Quote from Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s book The Communism of Love: “What is absolutely indispensable in Camatte's analysis is his total rejection of the notion that Marx's work—and capital itself—is distinctly (or even especially) economic. ‘The critique of capital ought to be, therefore, a critique of the racket in all its forms, of capital as social organism; capital becomes the real life of the individual and his mode of being with others.’ This means that, when we speak of value and when we speak of exchange relations, we are speaking about the social organism, about the form of human society. We are never speaking only about how commodities are produced, labor is divided, and markets function. Capitalism is about the structure of our being-in-the-world with others, and we have to understand its existential implications in determining the purposes of our lives. So when we ask fundamental questions about capital and community, we are asking about various ways of being-in-the-world. Camatte's Marxism is very clear about this fact, and even if we do not accept his claims about real and unreal community, we must keep in mind capital's uses and abuses of the human being.”
June 1, 2025 at 4:19 PM
natedub.bsky.social
Had initially borrowed The Communism of Love from the library, but only made it to chapter one before I had to go buy it - Richard Gilman-Opalsky is an incredibly thoughtful and eloquent writer (and the ebook is even on sale currently!)

www.akpress.org/communismofl...
Quote from Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s book The Communism of Love: “…This toolness, this relation of use between men, gives men the value of things; this is as clear for the slave as it is for any man who hires out his work—his time—to another, but it is also clear for the master. This means that, from top to bottom, capitalist exchange relations—within the relations of production and socioeconomic class relations—require the toolness of people, that is, their conversion into things to be used. The relationship of such tools, not only to those who use them but to one another, is a relation governed by capitalist exchange. The logic of this capitalist relationality is of course pervasive and dominant today, in a world that is still (and no less) governed by money, governed by the logic of capital. We are together in this book right now, however, because we are interested in love as a different logic of relationality, one that humanizes instead of instrumentalizes individual persons, that views people as beings not things.”
June 1, 2025 at 3:32 PM
natedub.bsky.social
post your comfort album
Cover art for the Talk Talk album Laughing Stock, showing a bunch of different types of birds arranged in a tree's branches in the same general shapes of the continents of the world
April 23, 2025 at 6:58 PM
natedub.bsky.social
Really appreciating Torkil Lauesen's accessible historical analysis of attempts at socialism and communism, highly recommend his book (and many thanks to @upstreampodcast.bsky.social which is where I first heard about it)!

www.iskrabooks.org/the-long-tra...
Excerpt from the book The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism, by Torkil Lauesen: "In Western discourse, it is claimed that democracy and liberal market capitalism are linked together as conjoined twins. However, liberal capitalism thrives when linked with fascism, as we have seen in Nazi Germany, Franco's Spain, and Pinochet's Chile. If the development of liberal democracy is linked to something, then it is linked to colonialism. The super-profits from colonialism helped make possible the molding of 'the dangerous classes' into loyal citizens of the state, who were then allowed to vote for parliament, as they no longer posed a danger for the rule of capital. European democracy became a resource-allocation mechanism, creating welfare for sections of the Northern working class to cement capital's rule and expand empire. Within the framework of a multiparty, representative parliamentary democracy, the population of Europe has voted for colonialism and imperialism up through the 20th century. A vote for the Euro-American wars of encroachment is not a vote for democracy; it is a vote for a share of imperialist rents. The Eurocentric universalization of multiparty liberal parliamentarism as the essence of democracy not only overlooks its historical roots and how it is exercised on the global level, but it also fails to question the rule of capital in liberal democracy. It presents democracy as a purely procedural phenomenon and masks the underlying political and economic content - the exploitation needed for capitalist production and environmental destruction. However, you cannot isolate the political form of management from the laws of the economic sphere."
February 12, 2025 at 8:26 PM
natedub.bsky.social
Quote from the book Crude Capitalism by Adam Hanieh: “…there are no technical or material reasons why [these steps] could not be immediately implemented. The barriers to taking such steps (and many others) are purely social: a narrow layer of global society - extending far beyond oil companies - benefits from our current social arrangements and will resist any fundamental challenge to their position. We cannot behave as if the problem of capitalism does not exist, or can be ignored, or as if our current rulers can be convinced to take an alternative path through the sheer force of scientific evidence. This is an irrational economic system that pits the interests of a tiny few against the vast majority, and only by taking political and economic power away from the logic of the market will it be possible to build a different and better world.”
January 1, 2025 at 8:01 PM
natedub.bsky.social
Finishing my first book of the new year, Crude Capitalism by Adam Hanieh - go pick it up while it’s on sale at Verso! Extremely in-depth history of oil, the lifeblood of capitalism, written in an engaging and understandable fashion - it’s a rousing call to action.

www.versobooks.com/products/276...
Quote from Adam Hanieh’s book Crude Capitalism: “Of course, our current transport system did not appear accidentally - it emerged through concrete political and social choices that were made in lockstep with the rise of an oil-centred world. But framing the problem as one of technological salvation ignores the social and historical roots of our present predicament. And, as any lapsed believer knows, the problem with a salvation-based politics is that it defers deliverance to an unspecified date in the future, providing fervent rapture on Sunday while continuing with business as usual during the week. In the same way, the climate technologies on offer encourage a kind of political passivity, holding out the promise of far-reaching transformation delivered from above but demanding no fundamental reorganization of society or change in social behaviour. The underlying dynamics of capitalist markets continue unimpeded - endless growth, extractive economies, and individualised modes of production and consumption. This is the status quo wrapped in techno-fetishism - a pretence of action that will not avert climate catastrophe.”
January 1, 2025 at 7:43 PM
natedub.bsky.social
Reading Andreas Malm and Wim Carton’s latest book Overshoot, and am really appreciating its relentless driving home of the actual monstrosity of capitalism in general and fossil fuel extraction in particular:
Passage from the book Overshoot: “As 1.5C was in the wind - and shortly behind it, 1.7C … - the demon that held the world in its grip was value in general and self-expanding value in particular. This was the force that piled up assets that must not be stranded and produced ever more value that must not be destroyed, like the pharaoh made pyramids arise in Egypt. It ran the world out of control. This is the truth intuited in the pages of fossil fuel fiction, from Munif to Kelly, when they describe the demonic and monstrous character of the machinery. And rarely have the demonological passages in Marx himself been more apposite: there is ‘a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power, at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members, finally bursts forth’; fixed capital is an ‘animated monster’, capitalist wealth a ‘monstrous objective power’, capital ‘a Moloch demanding the whole world as a sacrifice belonging to it of right’. As David McNally has stressed, these passages should not be read as mere rhetorical flourishes. They should be taken deadly seriously.”
December 11, 2024 at 6:06 PM
natedub.bsky.social
A sticker with an illustration of a poppy and the text “Genocide apathy, pandemic apathy, climate apathy, all have the same root”
June 2, 2024 at 11:51 PM
natedub.bsky.social
Got blocked for this reply, which really makes clear that the intention behind the original post wasn't really ever about any purported data quality, was it?

Stop minimizing Long Covid, and start thinking about people other than yourself.
screenshot of Bluesky post and reply Original Bluesky post: "FYI, that post claiming a chart shows you have a 38% chance of developing long covid after 3 infections is flat-out wrong. The chart does not even purport to show that. And that is not what the data says either." My reply: "Good to know - let's all continue (or get back to) masking up and protecting each other from whatever the % chance of Long Covid ends up being if/when it's accurately determined down the line."
January 5, 2024 at 6:34 PM
natedub.bsky.social
A social media post by @salamasinamusic that says, "If our immune systems were a muscle, old people would have the strongest immune systems and in addition to chicken pox parties, we would have rabies and AIDS parties but we don't bc that's ridiculous. Your immune system is NOT a muscle and Covid WILL fuck it up."
January 4, 2024 at 3:14 PM
natedub.bsky.social
Tech bros mostly think what their tech bros tell them to.
Image of Paul Graham tweet that says "College students mostly think what their teachers tell them to."
November 3, 2023 at 2:02 PM
natedub.bsky.social
Started this one this week, and have read the Poe, Stoker, and Bierce contributions so far - recommended!
Cover art for Shadows of Carcosa anthology from New York Review of Books
October 20, 2023 at 4:51 PM
natedub.bsky.social
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
October 17, 2023 at 3:59 PM
natedub.bsky.social
I have this edition of it and it's my absolute favorite - it's even got the rough-cut pages which I will always advocate for (makes turning the page so satisfying and I'll brook no arguments 😂)
Image of cover art for Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Moby Dick
October 5, 2023 at 8:05 PM
natedub.bsky.social
So happy to have snagged a copy of @bcmerchant.bsky.social ‘s new book at the local library, looking forward to learning the history of the Luddites and the parallel issues we face with technology today!
Photo of Brian Merchant’s new book, Blood in the Machine
September 30, 2023 at 5:23 PM
natedub.bsky.social
Along with my cosmic horror reading for spooky season, I figured this was an appropriate nonfiction companion for the month - I definitely don't know enough about the history behind this and am looking forward to finally deep-diving into it.
Image of book cover for China Miéville's nonfiction account of the Russian Revolution, October
September 29, 2023 at 2:52 PM
natedub.bsky.social
Cosmic horror month has begun, I’m ~100 pages into this one and loving it (many thanks to @stephenking.bsky.social for his spoiler advisory in the intro, I’m saving that for after I finish these tales)
September 28, 2023 at 1:47 AM