State of Steel
If you want to build anything, homes, transport, wind turbines, you need steel, and no serious industrial strategy can survive while leaving its production to the whims of absentee capital.
The rest of the blog
If you want to build anything, homes, transport, wind turbines, you need steel, and no serious industrial strategy can survive while leaving its production to the whims of absentee capital.
Harry Mulisch’s The Assault is not about what happened in 1945, but about the slow, bitter process by which a man and a society, learns what it meant.
Starmer’s blast furnace moment isn’t a rebirth of industry but a reckoning with decades of privatisation, managed decline and the quiet collapse of economic sovereignty.
A brutal, brilliant novel that exposes the violence of care, the politics of desire, and the limits of our empathy.
Nicolas Padamsee’s autofictional state-of-the-nation novel confronts the vacuum left behind by liberalism’s collapse. David Peace gave us the ghosts; Padamsee gives us the afterparty, the silence, the scroll.
On Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance and Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy
The idea that work is a moral duty rather than a means of survival is so deeply ingrained we rarely question it. But as technology advances and work becomes more precarious, exhausting, and intrusive, it is worth asking why productivity remains the measure of a person’s worth.
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni’s Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis, recently published by Verso, is more than a critique, it’s an intellectual war machine. They chart how the CCC has reshaped the global economy, from Amazon’s AI-driven logistics empire to the speculative bubbles propping up Tesla and Google. They expose how Big Tech’s far-right accelerationists, from Andreessen to Thiel, are using crisis to rewire the state itself. The choice, they argue, is stark: biocommunism or extinction.
Choice is meant to liberate us, but what if it does the opposite? In the shift from physical to digital media, the promise of having everything at our fingertips has eroded the way we engage with culture itself.
The inexorable march of technological progress casts a shadow over humanity’s future, as artificial minds made for war threaten to surpass and subjugate their mortal creators.