Detroit Techno’s Dance with Death
As automation ravaged Detroit, black musicians created a new sound that merged human and machine. With it came a vision for working-class self-organization in the Motor City.
29 Articles by: Gavin Mueller
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Gavin Mueller is an assistant professor of new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam and the author of Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job.
Microsoft and the Yeoman Coders
Microsoft’s purchase of Github is the latest chapter in capitalism’s oldest story: the absorption of artisan labor into the circuits of capital.
Bad and Bourgeois
The super-rich talk to one another about a rising tide lifting all boats, all the while arming their yachts ahead of potential crisis.
Droning On
Neither Zuckerberg nor the Pope, but international digital socialism.
Shackling the Masses With Drastic Capitalist Tactics
We should denounce ruthless and wild compradors like Wu-Tang superfan Martin Shkreli, but also understand the cold world in which they operate.
It’s All About a Salary
The new biopic Straight Outta Compton is more mixtape than manifesto.
Another Jurassic World is Possible
Jurassic World wrongly blames the sins of sequels on the audience.
Liberalism and Gentrification
Gentrification isn’t a cultural phenomenon — it’s a class offensive by powerful capitalists.
Chicken Littles of the Right
If the Right wants to cry about class warfare, we should give them something to cry about.
Revenge of the Nerds
No act of consumption is completely passive, but even the most active types of consumption form a shaky ground for serious left politics.
Silent Majority Music
To put it most unkindly, trap music is adult contemporary for the prosumer age.
Just Flip the Switch
The trailers for Elysium promised a class-struggle masterpiece, but for all its triumphs the film’s politics don’t quite measure up.
Sympathy for Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman takes up the banner of the Luddites. Here’s what he gets wrong.
The Rise of the Machines
Automation isn’t freeing us from work — it’s keeping us under capitalist control.
Art without Humans
Those DJs lost. Serato is everywhere, and it happened with less resistance than one might have expected. Maybe it’s because many DJs are interested in exploring new technology; maybe it’s because they aren’t organized as a labor force.
Sex House and the Refusal to Fuck
The problem for reality TV is that real life is too dull to make compelling TV, but compelling TV is obviously contrived.
Gimme the Loot
From Blackbeard to Kim Dotcom, has piracy been a radical force?
