At the point in an essay when I have written 10K words, gathered pages of notes, have come to despair as to whether there is anything here worth anything at all, considered moving to the woods and disappearing forever, when I write one halfway decent sentence and think, “Ah, this might be it!”

Workers “were designed to be competent but limited, active but docile, intelligent but ignorant…incapable of having a horizon beyond that of their task. In short, they were designed to be specialists.” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/d…

“Mass pseudo-culture…is a device invented by monopoly capital to facilitate dictatorship over a mystified, docile, debased humanity, whose impulse of real violence must be redirected into imaginary channels.” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/p…

The premise here—that we can develop shared practices to prevent being taken in by the design patterns that AI imposes—obscures the reasons those patterns exist in the first place, who made them, and what they aim to do. hbr.org/2026/02/a…

“It’s safer in the front!” crimethinc.com/2026/01/2…

“We will bury them beneath the new world in our hearts.” crimethinc.com/2026/01/2…

“Sometimes I just lay back and think about the fact that it’s whistles and car horns and crowds versus the modern gestapo….I couldn’t really wrap my head around the idea that this could work. But it does work.” margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/our-nei…

Abolition is the only way.

Patient urgency is “a sense of urgency for social transformation that can tolerate difficulties, differences, delay, objective gaps, and interpersonal strains.” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/p…

“Burnout shifted its meaning: from a symptom experienced by people struggling to change society to one experienced by people trying too hard to succeed within it.” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/l…

Tyranny all the way down. aworkinglibrary.com/writing/t…

“Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity.” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/w…

“I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life.” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/l…

“I didn’t enter this field and take this type of job only to not do the job.” gregg.io/the-only-…

“…do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it?” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/w…