SILICONPHILOSOPHYSILICONPHILOSOPHYThe material, metabolic, mortal body that liberal political philosophy has pretended is a sovereign individual, that capital has tried to purchase without paying for, that optimisation culture has tried to make frictionless, and that keeps bleeding in the streets and demanding the arc be bent now, by human hands, at human cost.
Marx's estrangement applied with rigour to GenAI. Not the "Marx predicted this" gotcha — the specific mechanisms: training data, prompt labour, the attribution problem.
Full essay — coming soonA 3–5 part series on how science fiction has imagined artificial intelligence across four decades — and what that imagination reveals about us.
An ongoing series on how the engineering worldview — optimisation, solutionism, scale as virtue — has colonised every domain of modern life.
Polemical essays holding the left accountable, paired with aphoristic fragments published the week after each essay.
Every worker who has ever said 'I leave work at the office' is performing a voluntary, socially coerced, imperfect version of severance. Lumon just made it surgical.
Every essay throws off a pull-quote card. Every Mud piece throws off its aphorisms the week after. Built to be screenshotted.
A materialist cultural criticism that refuses the separations the contemporary left has accepted: theory and practice, the personal and the structural, the aesthetic and the political, the philosophical and the bodily.Read the full statement →
New essays every few weeks. The occasional polemic.