Within ten minutes I regretted my decision to walk to Creedon Street in the outback town of Broken Hill. At first, I thought it was the shoes. Stupid things I’d bought on the internet, they were little more than plastic-coated cardboard soles strapped to my ankles with nylon laces. The desert sand scratched between my feet and the sole, painfully reminding me I also had no arch support. There were spiky bindis the size of small tarantulas that I knew from experience to step around. They would pierce those stupid shoes – and my feet.

My destination, Creedon Street, was a site for public housing. There, families were crowded into an environment that one woman told me had been ‘set up to fail’ in the 1990s when authorities sought to move Aboriginal people out of the Sydney suburb of Redfern in time for the 2000 Olympics. As well as uncomfortable on my feet, the walk there was also boring. Broken Hill has fascinating architecture, extraordinary cultural heritage, a buzzing art scene and plentiful pubs (though fewer than the 70 it once boasted). Whether it was the day or the route I am not sure, but none of this seemed evident as I trudged. My allegorical ambitions dissipated with every boring block. I’d imagined myself like philosopher Michel de Certeau, for whom ‘walking in the city’ helped understand the relationship between our agency in everyday life, set against big structures like capitalism, which I was in Broken Hill to think about.[i]  But as the dry, hot sun seemed to suck the life from me, walking in the desert seemed more like a parody of de Certeau’s agency. I soon feared it might also be making a mockery of my own intellectual pretensions.

Like others in this age of polycrisis, I wanted to think about the historical entanglements of race, labour and environment. Historically these have often seemed at odds. We see it where workers oppose the end of coal or logging, and when environmentalists fail to acknowledge that such people have a legitimate need for a job – and when the ‘true’ working class is imagined to be white and male. By walking I hoped to think about, perhaps even to feel with my body, how race, class and environment might be brought together in everyday life, via a shared history and politics.

Broken Hill seemed a good place to do it. The town, like many outback cliches, is like one big allegory for Australia, especially for our history with capitalism. I started my walk at the Trades Hall, the pride of Broken Hill and a historical touchstone for Australia’s union movement. Like sentries guarding against the labour rabble, however, directly across the road stand seven carved white busts depicting the ‘syndicate of seven’ who founded Broken Hill Proprietary, BHP. They were visible from the front door of the Trades Hall. On this street, the main symbol of labour literally opposes seven key founders of Australian capital.

Other representations of working-class politics in Broken Hill are nearly as ubiquitous as the dust, which is perhaps not quite as red as the town’s political history. Capital too looms, as present as the massive heap of slag (the by-product of mining and smelting) towering over town. These great black piles of the debris of industrial mining are known as the ‘line of lode’. It is spectacular in a Tolkienesque kind of way, though where we might expect the Eye of Sauron there is instead a memorial to miners killed extracting lead, zinc and silver from the hill. Next to the miners’ memorial there is the empty shell of what was once a world class restaurant.

Not everyone survives capitalism.

When I finally arrived at Creedon Street, hot and irritable, there was nothing to see. It was just another street, not noticeably different to the thousands that I felt I had stumbled through.

I chided my subconsciously racist self. What did I expect, non-stop corroboree? Perhaps I was guilty of ‘poverty porn’, taking my excessively educated arse where it did not belong, seeking to exploit First Nations suffering for intellectual gain.

Face-palming, I took stock. I noticed that the street was right on the edge of town. Behind that row of public houses was nothing. Stony desert littered (charmingly, in fact) with rusting junk.

This seemed important. I’d been talking to teachers’ aids, employment centres and the local high school careers advisor, himself an Aboriginal man, who all told me that young Aboriginal people often experienced racism, particularly when they seek employment. The geography of town seemed to bear this out: the town centre celebrates labour on every corner, but when a place was built purposely for Aboriginal people to live, it was far from the town’s working-class centre.

I took this to be a symptom of what settler-colonial studies historian Patrick Wolfe called the ‘logic of elimination’.[ii] Of course, some Aboriginal people did and do work for big capital and small capital, and some were and are members of Broken Hill’s famous union movement. But any sense of the centrality of First Nations claims to land and sovereignty posed – at least in recent decades – a threat to the Broken Hill establishment, and by extension to the rest of us.

First Nations sovereignty is by definition hard for a settler colonial society to acknowledge. But it is the truth. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were here first. Sovereignty was never ceded. This is First Nations land. Acknowledging this beyond the words we use at meetings, extending it to our hearts and practice demands something like turning the still-colonial world upside down. And from the centre of the battle between labour and capital, it seems easier to push the question, and the people connected to it, to the margins.

Creedon Street, by this logic, was certainly not aligned with those founders of BHP, whose profit relied on supplanting First Nations economies and claims to land. But why was Aboriginal sovereignty not, on the whole, protected by the Trades Hall?

Feeling stupid, I turned right and walked along the street, soon arriving somewhere familiar. The closest famous landmark to Creedon Street was the cemetery.

Broken Hill cemetery might be one of the most important in Australia. The burial site of revered members of the Australian union movement, the cemetery is an important monument to colonial and working-class history. Black crosses of the religious orders who sent teenagers from Ireland to serve in the outback offer a poignant memorial to what must have been an utterly dislocating experience. Artist Pro Hart’s grave is there, a massive, crazy expensive, marble thing engraved with his signature golden dragonfly – recently defaced by vandals. But the cemetery is mainly a memorial to labour. A pamphlet guides visitors to graves of historical significance to Australian unionism. Headstones list labour leaders’ CVs, while others honour the Red Flag Forever.

It is an outback cemetery, so small cages cover many graves, protecting burials from animals. Protecting the dead this way seems some sort of perversion of what sociologist Max Weber described as the ‘iron cage’ of capitalism.[iii] Capitalism failed to protect workers from the lead dust or the work that maimed, killed and riddled many with diseases, often deadly. But now, iron cages protect the dead.

The cemetery reminds us that capitalism kills.

Up on the line of lode, the miner’s memorial documents the tragedy. In 1887, capitalism killed 21-year-old Samuel Spears, who tumbled down a ladderway in the pursuit of ore that would profit BHP shareholders. Spears was already not the youngest to die since the discovery of ore on the broken hill in 1883. Just a year earlier, John Vaugh, aged 14, fell down BHP’s ore heap, to his death. The following year, 25-year-old Charles Apple died in a rock fall, 36-year-old Alfred Neiring died in an explosion of shot and Alfred Polgreen, 21, was killed by a rock drill.

Mine safety improved, largely by union agitation, supported by local medical practitioners who helped alert the public beyond Broken Hill, to the dangers of industrial mining. The resulting public pressure drove engineering innovation and safety procedures. Many safety measures were hard won by strike action, like the number of minutes workers were to wait between blasting and heading back into mine shafts newly polluted with lead-laden dust.

Such improvements were far too slow for 16-year-old Charles Shannon, who was electrocuted in the BHP mine in 1910. It did not help Ronald James who at 18 years old was also electrocuted in 1979, as was 22-year-old John Collison in 1988. Mining in the 2000s slowed to such an extent that homes in Broken Hill could be purchased on a fairly modest credit card – and meant there were no deaths to record. When mining resumed, so did death. Capitalism killed again in 2007, when 30-year-old James Symonds was crushed by machinery. So was Andrew Bray, aged 47, as recently as 2019.

Capitalism kills, and the working class unites against it.

The graves of union leaders at the cemetery not only remind us of this, but they also act as a kind of mirror image to the mock graves that union members made of ‘scabs’, who refused to join strike action, in 1909. A photograph of one of those graves reads “Here Lies Peter Corney 1909 Scab”. Imagine Peter Corney’s trepidation, seeing his own name on the tomb. His death, however, was fictional. It was a tough strategy, but one that highlighted the value of solidarity as the only path to improved working conditions, and perhaps more broadly to liberation itself. For those listed in the miners’ memorial, death was not a ploy, but a central logic of the operation. Human lives – their lungs, their broken bones, their hopes, even just their time, so precious and short as it is for us all – was exchanged for profit.

This profit was not only the foundation of big mining in Australia, but it also underpinned the fledgling stock exchanges, and large finance enterprises like Collins House in Melbourne. Added up, exploitation pays – but only for a few.

Since colonisation, a significant portion of the middle class has considered education to be the answer. In the 1990s it became economic doctrine, systematically shifting the population to ‘better’ jobs. And yet for those of us in white collar work it is little different. Capitalism colonises every moment of our lives in the name of a rewarding, and often well-meaning, career. While industrial accidents are less common for professionals, ever-increasing productivity demands and decreasing autonomy under a managerial class is also killing us slowly – if perhaps mainly spiritually – as it converts our very selfhood into profit-making stuff. Even when the surface seems cleaner, the logic on display at Broken Hill applies to us all.

[i] De Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Berkely: University of California Press.

[ii] Wolfe, Patrick (2006) ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’ Journal of Genocide Research Volume 8, No.4, pp.387-409.

[iii] Weber, Max (1904) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Vintage Edition, 2002. The ‘iron cage’ was not what Talcott Parsons’ famous translation of weber’s ‘shell as hard as steel’. Like others I have used it here as it more evocative of what I mean, and possibly what Weber meant too.

One of the big puzzles in the last months, for those observing the politics in the US and elsewhere, is this: why is there apparently so little protest against the attacks on democracy and the rule of law, and why does it happen in some but not other cases?

I want to share a hypothesis, which has to do with perceptions of temporality and the ensuing emotional states. I started thinking about this a while ago, during the wave of climate protests in Europe. At the time, many comparisons were drawn with earlier forms of protest, e.g. in the civil rights movement, and the discussion quickly turned to what forms of disobedience (e.g. blocking roads, damaging works of art, etc.) are justified in what kinds of cases. But whereas many historical movements wanted to achieve something new, something for which there were no political majorities or that governments even refused to take seriously at the time, the climate protests concerned things that had already been agreed upon by politicians, and for which there is, according to surveys, a lot of public support. So what the protestors require is not so much a fundamental change in mentality or legislation – but rather that societies do what they had committed themselves to doing, e.g. in the Paris agreement.

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A European justice minister who does have principles!

The EU “chat control” proposal I wrote about the other day has been scuppered by Germany’s justice ministry saying forcefully that it will never support this particular form of mass surveillance. Here’s what their minister, Dr. Stefanie Hubig, had to say:

“Chat control without cause must be taboo in a state governed by the rule of law. Private communication must never be under general suspicion. The state must also not force messengers to scan messages en masse for suspicious content before sending them. Germany will not agree to such proposals at EU level. We must also make progress at EU level in the fight against child pornography. That’s what I’m committed to. But even the worst crimes do not justify the surrender of basic civil rights. This has been insisted on for months in the votes of the federal government. And that’s how it will stay.”

Brief context; at the beginning of this week it was rumoured that Germany was wavering on its opposition to pre-emptive and permanent scanning of everyone’s phones. Purportedly, the European Commission DG HOME proposal was ‘just’ to identify child sexual abuse materials, but as anyone (ok yours truly) who’s been fighting surveillance for close to three decades can tell you, blanket surveillance starts with a justification of ‘serious crime’, and quickly becomes used for trivial issues and against all perceived enemies of those in power. So, when organisations including Signal raised the alarm, lots of people swung into action, again, to let the German justice ministry know that this would not go quietly for them. The statement above is Dr Hubig saying they never wobbled at all. I’m pretty certain they did, but who knows, maybe someone in her office sent up the bat signal so people in the movement I’m part of to go to the barricades on this issue one last time. It’s certainly a play I’ve seen before.

I’ve been doing this for close to 30 years (thought tbf had v. little involvement in this particular campaign). The stakes have never been higher. Even many ‘normies’ now get how these powers will be abused and that this time it might not just be against others. It could happen to them. It hits different, as they say, when you’re staring down the barrel of a government run by AfD or the Front National.

But creating coalitions again and again to fight off stupid, dangerous nonsense is hard. Civil society and real movement politics, as so many of CT’s enduring readers know, is hard fucking work. I’m glad that we do it and that we have deep knowledge and experience of it, but I’m also exhausted. Again and again I find myself wondering, if we didn’t have to expend most our energies saying ‘No’ to this stupid, ghastly shit, and saying ‘No’ to the stupid, ghastly shit of the tech oligarchs, what might we have built instead? How productively and joyfully could we be spending our lives? Actually growing good things? Showing what can and must be done for us to live decent lives for our own purposes and in service of others, and not repeatedly campaigning so that a few less lives will be wrecked?

Don’t get me wrong. Plenty of us – indeed, growing numbers – are working on the alternatives. But if feels like we lost twenty years just trying to get tech policy and tech firms to kill fewer people, to be just a bit less egregious, and that is time we’ll never get back. Time we needed to be building and growing the technology infrastructure and human networks, capabilities and structures of feeling we so desperately need for what comes next.

I’m publishing an email I just sent to Ireland’s Minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan, on a truly hideous and anti-democratic European law that Ireland is strenuously supporting. It’s looking like Germany, which was strong on data protection, may crack and support this law, too. This week is make or break week for ‘chat control’, a proposal to insert message-scanning software on every European’s phone, ostensibly to scan for child sexual abuse material.

(I say ‘ostensibly’ because I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen a draconian surveillance introduced “for investigating serious crime only” that is used within a few years to check if people are putting their bins out on the right day or sending their kids to the school in the right catchment area. Oh how fondly I remember the time, fighting the UK’s appalling, Labour-introduced surveillance regime in the early 2000s, when we scored a victory to reduce the acceptable reasons for broad surveillance to investigating murders and such, only for the Home Office to say ‘well, we can’t collect the data for use on less serious offences, but if we’ve already got it sitting there for the serious crime, nothing says we can’t use it for everything else, and boo to you too!)

Nowadays, I rarely use arguments of principle, because few justice ministers really have any. Nowadays, I try to have them imagine what it would and will feel to be in the maw of the monster they’re feeding. Sooner or later, we all will.

Dear Minister O’Callaghan,

As you may know, on 13-14 of October, EU governments will vote on the EU’s new Chat Control legislation (EU Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse (CSAR)).

As an international technology policy expert with over twenty years of experience, this is by my count the fifth time I’ve been through the encryption debate. Yet again, misinformed governments are attempting to destroy end to end encryption for everyone, based on the obvious and proven fallacy that you can weaken encryption to allow government access without destroying security for everyone.

Do you use a mobile phone, Minister? I expect you do, and I also expect that you take reasonable steps to ensure the privacy and security of your communications. If, however, you vote for the “chat control” proposal, you will break the secure, end to end encryption you personally rely on. And not just once, but for good. When it’s gone, it’s gone. And all of our security goes with it. [click to continue…]

(I wrote this piece a week or so ago, meant to do a bit more work but haven’t got around to it. Hence slightly dated allusions)

The culmination of Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK was a press conference at which both American and British leaders waved pieces of paper, containing an agreement that US firms would invest billions of dollars in Britain.

The symbolism was appropriate, since a central element of the proposed investment bonanza was the construction of large numbers of nuclear reactors, of a kind which can appropriately be described as “paper reactors”.

The term was coined by US Admiral Hyman Rickover, who directed the original development of nuclear powered submarines.

Rickover described their characteristics as follows:

1. It is simple.

2. It is small.

3. It is cheap.

4. It is light.

5. It can be built very quickly.

6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”)

7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components.

8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

But these characteristics were needed by Starmer and Trump, whose goal was precisely to have a piece of paper to wave at their meeting.
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I have a long-standing pet peeve about the conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech, especially in the context of (purported) campus debate. In order to illustrate why one should not conflate academic freedom and freedom of speech, I introduce two uncontroversial theses about each.

Thesis [I]: lying and deception are protected features of political speech under most contemporary ‘free speech’/‘freedom of expression’ doctrines/legal standards; they are seen as occasionally necessary in politics, and sometimes (even if rarely) lauded by public opinion. By contrast, thesis [II]: lying and deception in scholarship and education are wholly incompatible with academic freedom.

I’ll take [I] as common ground. And before you are worried that I am setting a trap for you, even if you accept [I], you are not required to sign up for Platonic skepticism (here) — which holds that democratic political speech is usually in the realm of opinion, not truth — about political discourse.*

You may have doubts about [II]. You may, for example, think that lying and deception are permitted when used instrumentally to discover truth, say, in a social psychology or a behavioral economics experiment. Since the replication crisis, I won’t concede such examples because the nay-sayers (mostly my friends from experimental economics) turned out to be prescient: those scholars used to lying to their subjects also got in the habit of less than forthright truth-telling to each other and the wider public. And while I grant that lying to subjects probably didn’t cause the replication crisis in social science, it was, in fact, manifestly part of a more general corrosion of academic norms.

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A while back I wrote a series of posts about the 1998-9 Kosovo conflict.  If you’re interested, here they are:  Prelude to War,  The Serbian Ascendancy, Things Fall Apart, And So To War.  This post continues that story up to the unsuccessful Rambouillet peace conference of February-March 1999.

So by early 1999, the Serbian province of Kosovo was the scene of an ugly guerrilla war.  Civilian casualties were mounting rapidly.  There were bombings and curfews and disappearances.  Over 100,000 people were already refugees, and the situation was clearly going to get worse and not better. 

There was a concerted effort to solve the problem by holding a peace conference in the spring of 1999. This was the Rambouillet Conference, and its goal was to produce a peace agreement between Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians. It failed, leading directly and immediately to the Kosovo War.

Does an unsuccessful peace conference from the previous century hold any lessons?  Or is this purely of academic interest?  

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I’m in the midst of doing research, teaching, and outreach activities on a set of questions around economic growth and its relationship to what we value. My research team has Tim Jackson visiting tomorrow, who will give a talk on postgrowth economics and also talk a bit about his new book, The Care Economy. The main claim of that book is that the economy should not be about welfare understood as GDP per capital, with the corresponding economic policy goal being economic growth. Rather, the economy should be about people’s health (using the WHO definition, which I interpret as ‘well-being’), and hence economic policy should be about what we do to preserve and improve our health, which is care – care for ourselves, for others, for the planet including its ecosystems that allows us to live well.

Now, contrast this with the first “mission” taken from the election manifesto of the Dutch VVD, which is the Dutch right-wing party, which sees itself as the defender of classical liberal values, democracy, rule of law and so forth. (note aside: many critical commentators see the VVD increasingly as a populist extreme-right party, but I won’t look into that yawning gap now).

The first mission of the VVD is: Radical Economic Growth. [click to continue…]

A trolley problem, some personal stuff, a bit of Islamic jurisprudence, and then the Honda. 

1)  Trolley time.  Let’s start with the trolley problem.  People proposing trolley problems often do them in two parts.  First, there’s the anodyne one with the easy answer:

A trolley is rushing down the tracks towards a group of five people.  If it hits them, they will die.  If you pull a switch, you can divert the trolley onto a different track.  There is one person on that track, and they will die instead of the five.  Do you pull the switch?



And of course you answer “yes” and then you get sucker-punched with something like this:

Five people are dying of organ failure, from different organs.  If they get transplants they will live out their normal lives,  Without the transplants, they will die.  In front of you is a healthy person who has the organs that they need.  If you kill the healthy person you will save the five.  Do you kill them?



Okay so on one hand trolley problems can be a legitimate tool for exploring values and morality.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff you can unpack with them. But on the other hand these little bait-and-switches can be, frankly, very irritating.  They’re set up to put our rationality at war with our intuitions, emotions, and habits of thought. 

Yes, that can sometimes be a useful or at least informative exercise.  But for most of us, the likely response is going to be less “Hmm, maybe deontological ethics are more appropriate here than a simple utilitarian analysis” and more “Oh, ffs.  Now you’re just being ridiculous.”



We’ll return to this shortly.  First, a short digression on living green.

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You’ve probably heard of the “Peter principle”: that employees get promoted until they reach a job they are no longer good at. And in political philosophy, there is a famous dispute between (the camps of) John Rawls and Jerry Cohen about the appropriateness of people in a just society being motivated by money. Last week, reading around about why on earth we organize work life the way we do, I had a eureka moment about how these two are connected.

The Rawls-Cohen debate is about whether within the institutional framework of a just society, it is justified to use monetary incentives – and the ensuing inequalities – in labor markets (and one can add, for the sake of argument, motivation by status, which is usually intertwined with money, even though Carens had famously argued they could, theoretically, be separated). This allows for an efficient labor market allocation that can ultimately benefit the worst-off members of society, some in camp Rawls would say. It is incompatible with an ethos of justice to require a high wage for making a societally useful contribution, Cohen and others would reply (and those are, of course, not the only arguments in this debate).

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This weekend has been dedicated to the “reconstitution historique” of 1653 in Pézenas, when the États generaux of Languedoc met in what is now a small town but was then the seat of the Prince de Conti. So, a capital city back then and also a place where Molière used to hang out. There have been processions, music, acrobats, the whole works.

I’m working on a first draft of a book arguing against pro-natalism (more precisely, that we shouldn’t be concerned about below-replacement fertility). That entails digging into lots of literature with which I’m not very familiar and I’ve started using OpenAI’s Deep Research as a tool.

A typical interaction starts with me asking a question like “Did theorists of the demographic transition expect an eventual equilibrium with stable population”. Deep Research produces a fairly lengthy answer (mostly “Yes” in this case) and based on past interactions, produces references in a format suitable for my bibliographic software (Bookends for Mac, my longstanding favourite, uses .ris). To guard against hallucinations, I get DOI and ISBN codes and locate the references immediately. Then I check the abstracts (for journal articles) or reviews (for books) to confirm that the summary is reasonably accurate.

A few thoughts about this.

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