AI is Capital

Provisional thoughts on the repercussions of this idea

May 22, 2026

What follows from the insight that AI is capital?

I’ll start with the level of the personal user: that AI is capital means that when you talk to an LLM, you are talking to capital. Claude is not a person, not your friend, not your therapist. Claude doesn’t care about you. Claude is capital and capital is an acephalous process of accumulation. When an LLM helps a user commit suicide or redesign their living room, it is utterly indifferent to the meaning of the tokens it is producing. They are just tokens, like commodities are just commodities whether they are bullets or babydolls.

That AI is capital also signals to us that the efforts to build it are efforts to invigorate capital. This should be obvious. The developers, the supporters, the governments — they all say this all the time. AI will drive new manufacturing, create new efficiencies, unleash productivity, and all the rest. The goal is strengthening capital.

In a more optimistic vein, the insight that AI is capital gives us a way to think about the struggle against data centers as a struggle against capital. This is true in an immediate and concrete way. Karen Hao says that in 2025 resistance to data centers stalled over a $100 billion worth of these centers. Compute is increasingly scarce. Demand and competition are increasing, so prices are rising. The rising prices mean that some enterprises are starting to find AI more expensive than human labor (in part because they aren’t sure how to use AI effectively). The bottom line is that the more resistance to data center increases, the longer there is a compute crunch, which increases the costs of adoption. This is class struggle, just like smashing the conveyor belts on the assembly line.

As a struggle against capital, the struggle against data centers is a struggle on the side of workers who are at risk of job loss, deskilling, and greater intensification of the work they are already doing. It’s against the imperious billionaires and tech lords who claim what they are doing is inevitable and there is nothing any of us can do to stop it. In fact, the struggle against data centers may be the strongest and clearest front in the struggle against the billionaire class today.

It is also a struggle against capital more abstractly in that the struggle against data centers rebels against the capitalist logic that says that no matter what capital must accumulate. When people appeal to noise, water, electricity, and community character, they are saying that the dictates of capital are not the only things that matter. There are other needs and values that have to enter the picture.

Still another way to think about AI as capital involves capital as a relation through which value is socially produced and privately appropriated. As everybody knows, the training data at the core of AI was produced by all of us, billions of us in our everyday interactions throughout recorded history. What we made is the social substance; it is treated as a private resource for the enrichment of a few, even as they say, repeatedly, that the larger social disruption is likely enormous (they just have no choice but to continue to develop as fast as they can).

I’m starting to think that recognizing AI is capital may be the key to developing a clear left analysis and strategy for the current period.

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If this feels like it’s from another planet, don’t worry. It’s a chart that shows what the end of American empire looks like. If you were scared off economics by pictures like this, here’s a painless introduction.

One of the ways the U.S. has projected power is through a military and economic umbrella under which the rest of the world has sheltered. The British provided a similar umbrella before. Before them, the Dutch and the Genoese. This periodisation comes directly from the late, and deeply lamented, Giovanni Arrighi in which he charts a series of ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’, led by a single state power.

What Lustig’s data shows in Panel (a)—drawing on methodology by Lira Mota at MIT—is that the difference between the best corporate bonds and the best U.S. Treasury bonds was once big and has now narrowed to almost nothing. Once upon a time, the U.S. government was the safest bet in the world. Now, US Treasuries have lost their additional safety-and-liquidity premium relative to, say, Microsoft.

Meanwhile, Panel (b)—drawing on work by Du, Tepper, and Verdelhan (2018) and Jiang et al. (2021)—measures the spread against foreign G10 sovereigns hedged into dollars. Global investors who once paid a steep premium for the privilege of holding American debt now frequently prefer the safety of foreign sovereign bonds.

Lustig’s argument is that financial markets have seen through a scam that American policymakers have found usefully self-beguiling. In government, there’s a cycle of spending and borrowing that allows policy elites to pretend they haven’t run off the cliff and won’t soon be exposed to the forces of gravity.

Traders who lie to themselves go broke, so they remain unpersuaded that the U.S. dollar is the wondrous safe haven it used to be. The U.S. government is no longer able to command the “exorbitant privilege”, a term popularized by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the 1960s, of borrowing profligately while paying next to nothing for the privilege. Instead, Washington is caught in what Lustig terms an implicit fiscal dominance feedback loop:

The Fiscal Feedback Loop (Lustig 2026)

Spot the difference.

Spending, like the recent One Big Beautiful Bill is funded by borrowing. That fiscal expansion drives up the price that the US government has to pay to borrow. The Federal Reserve steps in to stabilize those yields, because high interest rates are unpopular in an election year. Suppressing the price signal tricks policymakers into believing there is no fiscal constraint, which prompts yet another round of unfunded borrowing, which policymakers pretend is fine, even though the markets can clearly see it isn’t fine at all.

For folk who read Giovanni Arrighi, seeing this play out in real time begs the question of when we are in the clock of the world. The relationship between corporate bonds, sovereign Treasuries, and global capital has a much longer history. With a long enough view of bond risk, you can compass not just the decline of the U.S., but its rise too.

In The Long Twentieth Century, Arrighi showed that every hegemony is defined by two distinct phases:

1. Material Expansion : Capital earns massive returns by producing real goods and expanding physical trade. Money is turned into commodities and then into yet more money.
   

2. Financial Expansion : Following what Arrighi calls a signal crisis, industrial profit margins fall due to global overcapacity. Capital flees production for liquidity and financial speculation. Capital skips the commodities part, and heads straight for financial returns. This isn’t to say that things aren’t produced, but it is to say in whose hands the economy lies.

Reposted from Empire Without Emperor

When the bankers take over, they temporarily supercharge the economy during a financial Belle Époque, before overseeing its eventual terminal crisis. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Jason W. Moore and I argued that capitalism runs on cheapening, and that cheap money is the cheapening that pays for all the others. The cheapest money in the modern world system has been the American government’s own borrowing. But cheap things are always an exercise in postponing a bill that inevitably needs to be paid. Cheap money has an expiration date.

Is it possible to stretch these datasets back to see the rise of the U.S., its signal crisis, and its terminal twilight all in one single arc? With some back-of-envelope faffing about, yes.

To extend Lira Mota’s default-adjusted series back before credit default swaps existed, there’s a proxy, made by Arvind Krishnamurthy and Annette Vissing-Jorgensen (2012). They take Moody’s index of AAA corporate bond yields and subtract the long-term Treasury yield from 1926 onward. It’s sort of like the convenience yield on Treasuries across a full century, though it’s not perfect (you can see Lustig’s line on the same graph matching in times of crisis and lower otherwise) and I’d definitely think twice about posting an LLM-generated graph into a peer-reviewed paper (though for the curious, the workbook is here). For this post, it’s just an indicative sketch.

Similarly, you can trace how finance’s share of domestic profits has risen and fallen from the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ corporate profits by industry via FRED. If you take domestic industries and subtract nonfinancial industries, both of which have handy unbroken quarterly series from 1947.

When you stack that safety premium (Panel a) on top of finance’s share of U.S. domestic corporate profits (Panel b), you can compass the political economy of the American Century, and figure out when we are right now.

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The Golden Age of Industrial Capital (1925–1968): The Treasury safety premium was immense. After WWII, the US became the world’s hegemon, and its industry turned money into commodities into profit. Panel (b) shows that within the US, GM borrowed at near-government prices because American industrial production was the engine of the world. Finance, by contrast, took a modest slice of domestic corporate profits, hovering around 12 cents of every profit dollar.

The Signal Crisis (1968–1979): U.S. manufacturing profit margins collapsed under global competition. The U.S. hit its signal crisis, severing the dollar from gold in 1971 and ushering in Paul Volcker’s high-interest-rate regime in 1979. Capital pivoted decisively into finance.

The Financial Expansion (1980–2007): Finance controlled an ever-larger share of the economy, peaking at 38 cents of every corporate profit dollar by 2002. Paper wealth exploded while the domestic industrial base hollowed out.

The Terminal Crisis (2008–Present): The 2008 crash sent financial profits plunging below zero, forcing the U.S. state to socialise Wall Street’s losses. We’re all living in that aftermath of the Obama era choice to turn private financial debt into public obligation.

As the orange line in Panel (a) shows, the default-adjusted safety premium on U.S. Treasuries has now fallen pretty much to zero. Trace it back over its century-long arc, and you can see the flow and ebb of U.S. hegemony, from its industrial origins through its financialized autumn, to the moment the sovereign era finally runs out.

I’ll be presenting some of this to La Via Campesina in a workshop on neoliberalism - the period that corresponds to the moment bookended by the signal and terminal crises - next week. I’ll post the flyer on Bluesky, LinkedIn and Twitter. It’ll also all feature in a new short book, but wanted to float this here now, to see whether I’ve cracked making sense of this to folk who are further from economics than they’d like. So if this is still baffling or makes you want to ask more, please do.

Now, twenty years later, the data’s in,. AGRA promised to double yields and incomes for 30mn smallholder households while halving hunger by 2020. None of that happened. A new report from the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa fills in the details.

Green Revolution Has Failed Africa Compressed

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Yesterday, I hosted a webinar with some of the report’s authors, along with experts from across the continent. You can read Tim Wise’s analysis here. And watch along, courtesy of A Growing Culture, below.

‘Farm to Fork’ Misses a Key Ingredient of the Food System: Families

Extended transnational families form a core, essential part of the food system, making possible a multi-billion dollar agricultural industry. Whether family members are forced to move or forced to stay informs how produce, money, and workers flow.

BY Seth M. Holmes and Raj Patel

Aug. 19, 2026

Samuel is an Indigenous Mexican migrant farmworker harvesting fruits and vegetables in the western United States. Year after year, he has planted, harvested, pruned, packed, and transported strawberries, grapes, bell peppers, hot peppers and much more.

He is one of over 70% of farm workers who were born outside the country, most of them in Mexico, whose hands sustain an agricultural industry valued at $1.264 trillion.

Samuel and his wife, Sara, have been in the U.S. more than 15 years. They left their homes in the Mexican state of Oaxaca after exhausting the opportunities to earn a living there. They came to the conclusion that there was no option left but to migrate to work so their family might survive.

Several years ago he asked one of us to accompany his children on a visit to Mexico to meet his father, their grandfather. Some weeks before, Samuel’s father unexpectedly lost his ability to speak normally. The family became deeply worried. Samuel and Sara wanted their children to visit their grandfather, fearing he might die before ever meeting them in person.

The food circuit regulates the flow of people, fruits and vegetables, and capital.

Yet, lacking the proper documentation to re-enter the U.S., Samuel couldn’t return to Mexico himself to see his father for what might be the last time.

It’s easy to see how the work that Samuel and Sara do is part of the food supply chain. Their hands touch the crops that people across the world then get to eat. But their extended family also forms an important part of this complex socioeconomic dynamic, despite being physically excluded from it.

To recognize how families become embedded in the global agricultural industry it may help to use a term that we would like to suggest is especially useful for food studies: the idea of a “food circuit.”

From Food Supply Chain to Food Circuit

When thinking about how food reaches us, the phrase “farm to fork” smuggles in a faulty metaphor. It focuses attention on the produce and its journey from seed to harvest, carefully picked and handed from farm gate to freight to supermarket, marked by a series of exchanges along the way. COVID-19 — and more recently the war in Iran — have been an education in supply chains; price spikes have a way of making metaphors stick.

Supply chains are, however, an imperfect way of understanding how food systems work. In order for the food to be propelled down the line, you need the controlled application of land, labor and capital. The land stays put, though ownership and control may shift. Everything else moves in circuits.

The concept of the food circuit helps us understand the multiple cross-border flows that are always already part of the systems that bring food to our tables. We define a food circuit as the transnational assemblage of people, chemicals, seeds, land, practices, and policies by which food is produced, transported, and consumed.

At the same time, a food circuit is also a regime for distributing mobility and immobility — often worsening existing steep inequities.

The food circuit frame helps us understand which people can move freely, which are forced to move, and which are forced to stay put. The food circuit regulates the flow of people, fruits and vegetables, and capital.

The key input into food production is labor, and workers’ bodies are a key site for the accumulation of agricultural injury.

It’s how the harvesting of fruit in California’s Central Valley is able to feed families in the U.S. and many other countries, including Mexico. In the very same process, the food circuit limits the movement of workers like Samuel and Sara and their extended family. We might think about it this way: Controlling the mobility of laborers enables fruit, money and workers to flow.

In this case, Samuel and Sara experienced being forced to migrate across an international border in order to support their own family’s survival, while they also supported the wealth of U.S. agroindustries and the nutrition and health of U.S. society.

At the same time, Samuel’s father experienced being forced to stay, not able to visit relatives on the other side of the border for more than a decade — and, in turn, not being able to be visited when he might need it most.

Yet, the fruits and vegetables planted, cared for, and harvested by Samuel and his family cross many borders, including the one across which they were forced to move and which their relatives are compelled to avoid. And the transnational capital built from their strenuous labor has also been free to cross borders through transnational companies as debt and repayment to intermediaries in the supply chain and their banks.

If Samuel’s father had an income stream in the bank that could reassure a consular official that he’d return to Mexico, thousands of dollars deposited over months in a formal bank account, then he’d have the same mobility as elites in Mexico City.

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Food Circuits Exploit Workers’ Health

For the food to grow, companies buy oil that is turned into fertilizer. Some of that oil is turned into pesticide, which clears fields of the life against which it is targeted. These pesticides also circulate further in the bloodstream of the workers whose hands touch the leaves days later.

The proliferation of pesticides in the global agricultural industry is, incidentally, why the world’s most widely used pesticide, glyphosate, was detected in the urine of 99% of the French population, and in 87% of U.S. children. The circuits that produce our food have effects far beyond the arrival of food at the supermarket.

The key input into food production is labor, and workers’ bodies are a key site for the accumulation of agricultural injury. Well over half of older farmworkers and youth laborers in the U.S. live with a musculoskeletal injury serious enough that the pain never entirely leaves.

The severe health effects of workers in this system seem like collateral damage in an otherwise functioning system. Yet, health effects are actually expected in and inherent to that system.

The injury can be microscopic too.

Workers are poisoned by pesticides. They work through heat that is now regularly lethal in and of itself, made yet more dangerous by wildfire smoke, and which is projected to only get worse. Diabetes is experienced at rates above the national average.

Sara’s own injury illustrates not only the cost of hard labor in the U.S. agricultural fields, but also the difficulty workers have in securing redress for it. In 2019, a large harvester working the bell pepper field swung its heavy metal arm into her right thigh, injuring muscle and ligament.

She was luckier than most injured farmworkers because a Federally Qualified Health Center, a clinic funded by the federal government to treat patients whatever they can pay, was near enough to see her. But she could not get reimbursement for an injury that happened at work, blocked by bureaucratic and institutional obstacles (from language barriers to threats to report undocumented workers and even local policy prohibitions) that almost no injured worker can clear alone. Years later, standing for long stretches still hurts, pain that makes her ongoing work harder to do.

Samuel’s illness shows how the burden of costs can change dramatically just by crossing state lines. In 2013, working in the state of Washington, he began urinating more often than usual and feeling lightheaded during ordinary tasks. Lab work at another federally funded clinic ended up leading to a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. The physician there managed to keep him supplied with medication and taught him how to live with the disease.

Farm work took Samuel to Oregon and then California, where he no longer had access to the medication. Type 2 diabetes is among the most treatable of chronic conditions. Untreated, however, it took the sight in both of Samuel’s eyes and shut down his kidneys. When he reached California years later, he qualified for Medicaid and received needed eye surgery and primary care. His health improved enough to work and support his family.

The severe health effects of workers in this system seem like collateral damage in an otherwise functioning system. Yet, health effects are actually expected in and inherent to that system.

Workers in the food industry are pinned into circuits that allow for limited and specified mobility of people, and unfettered mobility for capital.

A Rockefeller Foundation study carried out by McKinsey found that food systems externalize over two dollars of social cost for every dollar they generate in revenue. This means that every dollar we spend on food requires an additional dollar to cover the diet-related disease treatment for someone like Samuel or Sara, for example. And any business that has to internalize these costs would go bankrupt.

Circuits take those costs and push them outside the accounting of the supply chain — across borders, through families, into bodies.

In California’s Central Valley, we can see the sedimentation of those circuits in the bodies not only of Samuel and Sara but also in the bodies of their children. Children of workers in Salinas, California, have been monitored since 1999 by Brenda Eskenazi and her team at the University of California, Berkeley. For example, studies have reported a high prevalence of depressive symptoms among Latina mothers in farmworker families, while mothers in migrant farmworker families have reported more symptoms than those in seasonal farmworker families. Independent prospective birth cohorts have associated higher prenatal pesticide exposure with lower childhood IQ scores. Human observational studies have also associated glyphosate– and AMPA-related exposure measures with elevated liver enzymes and metabolic syndrome.

If the industry had to pay for the lifetime costs of any of the health conditions that their labor practices provoke, it would be unable to operate. But the food industry’s superpower is precisely pushing these costs far from the bottom line.

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Migrant Food Worker Families, Multiple Forms of Labor

Workers in the food system in the U.S. are tightly connected to their families, communities, and the Mexican state. Recognizing that these ties are intimately embedded in the U.S. food system is imperative to recognize what costs exist and who bears the burden.

However, it’s not only migrant farmworkers like Samuel and Sara who pay a high cost. These labor relations reach across the food system — from warehouse workers, to those working for transportation companies, to the outsourced cleaning staff at grocery stores, to the back of house at restaurant kitchens, to domestic workers and carers.

Workers in the food industry are pinned into circuits that allow for limited and specified mobility of people, and unfettered mobility for capital.

The food circuit is the capitalist food system that thrives within the U.S. but outsources the costs of this labor to Mexico and especially to families often considered left behind.

Many families — like Samuel and Sara’s — are divided across national borders. They keep in touch and care for one another through phone calls, social media chats and videos, remittances of money, organizing of home repairs; yet, they are separated physically by borders. The physical separation of the border does not stop the labor of the family. Rather, it distributes multiple forms of labor across family members and locations.

The migrant workers and the family forced to stay behind should not be treated as separate subjects. Together, they constitute a transnational laboring household on which contemporary cheap food depends. Hidden reproductive labor, or domestic work, is the greatest subsidy offered by the food system.

Every day, Sara prepares meals for herself and her husband as well as their children before the sun rises and she leaves for the harvest. After returning home, she washes her, Samuel’s, and their older children’s work clothes, as well as the younger children’s school clothes, and prepares the evening meal. She and Samuel respond to messages and requests from their children’s schools and complete the necessary labor for the family like fixing the family car they need to get to work and attending to any urgent medical issues in the family.

Their family members in Oaxaca, Mexico, also engage in important reproductive labor that supports and can be seen as a core part of the food circuit. The food circuit is the capitalist food system that thrives within the U.S. but outsources the costs of this labor to Mexico and especially to families often considered left behind.

In this sense, we might consider how these family members and the Mexican government and society provide the labor to raise, educate, clothe and feed the workers while they are children. They provide labor to care for farmworkers after they are injured and return to Mexico, are deported, or simply stop working due to the all-too-common musculoskeletal aches and pains that accumulate over years of work.

Social and Policy Implications: Transnational Families and Food Circuits

We propose three specific remedies to this crisis.

First, Medicaid expansion is imperative so that medical care doesn’t stop at a state border and doesn’t depend on one’s paperwork to ensure their injuries from their work in the U.S. food system do not cause their health to deteriorate further. For migrant farmworkers, the move from California to Washington can be a death sentence.

Second, clinics serving farmworkers need medical-legal partnerships. In a single payer system, of course, such concerns would be moot. But in the U.S., legal care is healthcare.

Mexico is leading the way in providing healthcare at the border, but the real transformations will arrive when workers enjoy the right to move, and the right not to migrate in the first place.

When health clinics for undocumented farmworkers also provide legal protection, farmworkers’ health can improve significantly in multiple domains. When crossing a state line means losing diabetes medication, or when an injury needs to be contested through court in order to claim related medical treatment, these partnerships are invaluable.

Third, policies to protect the immigration status, the labor rights, and health rights of farmworkers must be supported, from The Farmworker Modernization Act and far more. Programs like the H-2A Visa Program, for example, pit guestworkers against workers in the U.S. in a vicious cycle that keep farmworker wages low and farm profits high. Yet, comprehensive immigration reform is not on the agenda of either political party, and it urgently needs attention.

The reason that Sara and Samuel had to leave Oaxaca was because of a lack of opportunity. The structure of that lack is part of a longer and older food circuit, one made possible through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and then the subsequent U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), in which farm products from the U.S. were dumped in Mexico below the cost of production, cheapened by U.S. farm subsidies, driving corn-growing subsistence farmers off their land. This was a decision dropped onto the peasantry by Mexico’s own government, who conceded agriculture in the NAFTA negotiations even though the U.S. hadn’t asked them to.

Broader policy goals include fairer and more accessible paths to citizenship in the U.S., binational health coverage, and the ability for migrant workers to access the social security system into which, in 2002, they paid $96 billion, but to which they have no access.

Mexico is leading the way in providing healthcare at the border, but the real transformations will arrive when workers enjoy the right to move, and the right not to migrate in the first place.

* Some details, including names, have been changed to protect privacy.

Seth M. Holmes is a physician and anthropologist, who works on social hierarchies, health inequities, and the ways in which such asymmetries are naturalized, normalized, and resisted in contexts of transnational im/migration, agro-food systems, and health care. He is the author of “Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States” and has written for social science and medical journals as well as popular media such as The Guardian, The Hill, and The Huffington Post and been interviewed on NPR, Pacifica Radio and Radio Bilingue programs. He is Principal Investigator of the transnational research project, FOODCIRCUITS: Hidden Connections Between Migrants and Societies and is a 2026 President’s Faculty Fellow at UCDC Washington Center focused on policy solutions for migrant farmworker health.

Raj Patel is a research professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. He is the author of “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System,” and “The Value of Nothing,” and co-author of “Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice” and “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things,” and co-director of the documentary “The Ants and The Grasshopper.” He writes at newsletter.rajpatel.org

Which makes it initially baffling that HBO passed on Tunde Wey & Theo Schear’s Hard to Swallow, which is now available in six episodes directly from First Hand Films.

Spoilers follow.

Let me declare an interest. I have made a documentary, one for which I nursed hopes of an HBO deal. It fell through just as Hard to Swallow did. So when I tell you that Hard to Swallow is the best food television I have seen in years, understand that this judgment comes with a quantum of professional envy. The way they failed to get an HBO deal is just more interesting than ours.

I watched it at the gym, on Alicia Kennedy’s recommendation. (Her salon with Tunde Wey and Theo Schear is terrific—subscribe to her newsletter for the link.) I had barely broken a sweat when the show had me: Wey was working through the idea of taxing white people in proportion to their complicity in gentrification.

Hard to Swallow is a very good title. Yes, the show is about food. But food is the medium rather than the object. Accusations of complicity move from the people on screen to the viewer, the documentary industry and, finally, to the two men holding the camera.

The film has had quite a journey. In the 2010s, Schear had been working with Wey on a project that attracted the attention of a small production company. As the pandemic arrived, Wey made the case for letting the restaurant industry die. The argument went viral. A month later, a producer at Issa Rae Productions read a piece in the New Yorker about Wey’s work and messaged him on Instagram. They got to talking. While Wey and Schear were filming a short, George Floyd was murdered. In his excellent producer’s diary, Schear writes that Wey’s previously radical perspective abruptly acquired mainstream appeal.

Seven pitch meetings followed. HBO was first. Issa Rae joined the call herself (camera off). Two weeks later came the news that HBO had passed. HBO Max, FX, Netflix and the rest all seemed to have a full hand of comparable shows already waiting in the wings, or to have filled their food-show quota, and so they didn’t need to acquire another one. HBO Max soon announced Selena + Chef, and Wey’s moment passed.

Schear’s explanation is simple: it was just business. Nobody wanted to take a risk. And, today, they’d not even be able to entertain the hope of an HBO acquisition.

That may be true, but it also feels incomplete.

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Why did HBO buy How To with John Wilson and not Hard to Swallow? It isn’t that Wilson declines to turn the camera on himself. He films his landlady, his hoarded videotapes and his failures of nerve, and he’s charming while doing it.

The difference is not reflexivity, but the depth of reflection.

Wilson’s self-exposure lands on Wilson. His anxiety is so endearing that we leave slightly fonder of him and, by extension, of ourselves. Wey and Schear’s, by contrast, is a little closer to home. It travels outward, reaching the funders, the festivals and the film itself. By the final episode, nobody in the frame gets to leave clean, not even you dear viewer, hypocrite, mon semblable, mon frère.

This is what reflexivity is for, and especially in documentary, where the goal is to discomfort the comfortable — and who’s more comfortable than the person behind the camera?

But if you’re going to make a documentary that indicts the documentary industry, doesn’t get picked up by HBO, and is nonetheless one of the most interesting and compelling six episodes of TV you’ve seen in years, you’ll need to follow Wey and Schear’s playbook:

1. Raise the money first.

   The Ford Foundation gave them $450,000. The Pop Culture Collaborative added another $100,000. The funding gave the filmmakers the creative freedom they needed to end up with something completely unique.

2. Skip the movie star.

   Wey and Schear’s industry allies repeatedly advised them to attach a well-known executive producer. They never managed it.

   I did. Our film once had a possible version in which Jake Gyllenhaal would have executive-produced and perhaps narrated. (I had a lovely dinner with him and, improbably, Dakota Johnson which, crap, now that I think about it, I may have been crashing their date. I mean, if folk like that have dates surrounded by assistants and buddies and hangers-on like me then they were definitely on a date.)

   
   Anyway, we realised that Jake wasn’t the best match for a film driven by a Malawian woman’s quest to fight patriarchy and climate change. When we walked away from that version and made a film narrated by Anita Chitaya in Tumbuka, we understood that we were also walking away from the likeliest route to wide distribution.

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3. Keep the criticism in the cut.

   At a few different screenings of Hard to Swallow, women — particularly women of colour — find concerns around gender in Wey and Schear’s film. The sequences remains in the film, and they’re incredibly generative. I know these criticisms because we heard similar ones when we started filming The Ants & The Grasshopper.

   For us, it was easy to address, because Anita Chitaya — the main character — has some very pointed views about gender, and of America, all of which make it into the final cut. In other words, we found a way to meet those criticisms. But what happens when a film can’t, but still keeps the criticism in? It ends up that the viewer engages far far more.

4. Film the argument you are having about the film.

   By episode three, the project has become what Wey calls a fever dream. He and Schear are on camera disagreeing about what the episode even is. Those arguments are incredibly dramatic, and far more honest than the polite ones that Wey has with his interview subjects.

   Wey and Schear’s amiable and honest disagreements are importantly kinetic in the series, and I was very grateful for them. They structured both the discussion of food, and the discussion of filmmaking, in ways that Wey’s interview subjects rarely could. It’s why the final racist incident at Cannes is so helpfully ambivalent. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the Schear’s impulse to class/race suicide or Wey’s shrug at the incident is the more meaningful.

5. Accept the Oedipal comparisons with Bourdain.

   Pitching requires you to compress the work into language buyers already understand. Wey and Schear came to be presented as an updated Bourdain. it seems as if every food documentary has to wrestle with and then slay him on the road to something more interesting.

Follow these simple rules, and you too can make an incredible series that HBO will reject, but will become required viewing for anyone interested in documentary, food, race, and power in America. So go and buy Hard to Swallow. Ask your library to carry it. The best possible outcome of six years of passes is that the show finds its audience anyway.

Which is why I’m looking forward to Fifteen, out on Nonesuch on 21 August, the first record from the trio Iyer has kept with Henry Threadgill and Dafnis Prieto since 2012. Two pieces are already on YouTube. Prieto’s “Gently Trapped” is a skittering through key changes looking for the exits. Iyer’s “I Wanted a Map” borrows its title from an Eve Ewing poem. Every map is a projection and every projection discards a dimension. Iyer goes looking for one, and always finds several.

So, this weekend, tune in, and pre-order your copy here.

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This graph, from this peer-reviewed article, seems to show that in the US, the number of adults who died of malnutrition has gone up between four and five times over the past 20 years. Incredible if true. That’s a lot of Americans starving to death. But is this actually happening?

Malnutrition-related age-adjusted mortality per 100,000, US adults 55 and over

If you head to the CDC’s WONDER database, you can recreate this yourself, as I have above, using ICD-10 codes E40 to E46, restrict to adults 55 and over, and group by year. Because the series spans two WONDER files, you stitch 1999 to 2020 onto 2018 to 2024, and it comes out as you’d expect. So something’s happening in 2013, and we need to figure out what these numbers are actually recording.

Is what’s happening that older people are getting hungrier? In part, yes. Leung et al in JAMA Health Forum tracked hunger using a far more robust measure, a cohort study from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and found this:

There definitely is an increase in food insecurity and poverty, particularly for elderly Americans in the austerity period. But it’s nothing like the increase that crops up in the fatal malnutrition data. So what happened in 2013? Something changed in what physicians were willing to write in the top half of a death certificate.

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In 2012 the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition published a consensus statement giving clinicians a six-characteristic checklist for identifying adult malnutrition. This is a fine instrument, and it’s important to be vigilant for malnutrition. So is it that people read the annals of the academy and started adopting it widely? Not quite.

What proportion of death certificates mentioning malnutrition name it as the cause of death?

There was a good faith effort to increase the screening for malnutrition. And then there was the apparatus that gets used to pay for all this. Under Medicare's prospective payment system, the severe malnutrition codes E41 and E43 count as major complications or comorbidities, which means adding one to a claim can move a patient into a better-paying diagnosis-related group. So if malnutrition isn’t just present but responsible for people dying, there’s money in it.

Problem solved.

The diagnosis of malnutrition, and its promotion to the main cause of death, lined up. Even, um, when it wasn’t. In a 2020 audit, the Inspector General noted:

hospitals did not correctly bill Medicare for the remaining 173 claims. For nine of these claims, the medical record documentation supported a secondary diagnosis code other than a severe malnutrition diagnosis code, but the error did not change the DRG or payment. For the remaining 164 claims, the billing errors resulted in net overpayments of $914,128. These errors occurred because hospitals used severe malnutrition diagnosis codes when they should have used codes for other forms of malnutrition or no malnutrition diagnosis code at all. For these claims, hospitals provided medical record documentation that did not contain evidence that the malnutrition was severe or that it had an effect on patient care. On the basis of our sample results, we estimated that hospitals received overpayments of $1 billion for our audit period.

The over-coding for malnutrition is one that another study corroborated. Wildly, they found that while the coding for malnutrition went up over their sample, the death rate went down, which isn’t what you’d expect if people were at famine’s gate but is what you’d expect if large hospitals have an incentive to milk Medicare for extra billings.

Malnutrition in old age is real, common and lethal, and for most of the past thirty years American medicine has ignored it. But after 2012 it became reimbursable for hospitals. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been frittered away through the healthcare system, and yet the USDA has stopped collecting information about it (we’re at the mercy of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for what limited live information we can get). And, as this tweet from Elizabeth Warren observes, millions have lost access to their food assistance in the year since Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.

I’ve no intention of engaging with Means on Elon Musk’s website, a deepening cesspool. Twitter’s rhythms are inimical to sensible debate.

But the fact remains that Means is ignoring the remarks he gave at the Great American State Fair, the ones where he was sat here…

…as reported by the Washington Post. From him there’s no retraction, no engagement with the facts, no acknowledgement that he spent the week trying to make hallucinations about Marion Nestle appear as reality. Instead, we’ve this:

“Because it’s the Trump administration, we’re fascists” is another mischaracterisation. First, Marion never said it. Second, neither did I. The word Trump appears once in the analysis, as a description of Noor Bin Ladin, who is a fan of the President. For the argument in which I point the finger at Means, I drew on actual self-described fascists, the kind who parade under a Swastika, and I pointed out the similarity between their actions and Means’. Means continues to shitpost, and in his persistent smearing, he provides yet more evidence for the fascist trope I described.

I am pleased, though, that this post has been circulating in the liberal food world, and that it’s eliciting some sadness about the need to part ways with MAHA, since they do seem, in part, to be saying some reasonable things. Why can’t we all just get along? It gives me the opportunity to repost one of my favourite dissections of this question, courtesy of Mars Attacks!

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The reason we can’t all just get along is because we’ve never all gotten along. There has always been a deep vein of individualism, racism and national chauvinism within the organic food movement. It’s the reason for Nazi vegetarianism. It’s not an argument against vegetarianism, but it is an argument against overlooking the Nazi bit just because you share vegetarianism in common. And, again, it’s why those of us who can hear the dogwhistles in MAHA have kept our distance.

There must be something in the air, because one of my favourite podcasts, Maintenance Phase, just posted an episode in which the Means family appeared. The discussion notes the incongruity of fighting for ‘food as medicine’ while cutting food aid for the hungry, and they reminded me of this Vanity Fair investigation into Means’ biography and its fabrications. It includes the delicious observation that he used to walk around the office saying, ‘Calley Means business’.

The question remains: what does one do about all this, if one can’t fight back on Twitter. The answer, always, has to be organising, offline, in ways that build power. It’s no accident that those who have been suspicious of MAHA have already been building power, educating and teaching one another for decades. For those lamenting the death of a potential coalition with MAHA, it’s worth - as many have done - looking at how we got here, and the inadequacy of the demands MAHA ever had for thinking systemically to get us out, particularly compared to organisations like the Black Panthers. So, while Means’ misinformation is certainly part of an old playbook, there are other venerable strategies and movements to learn from as we re-learn the arts of self-defence for this dark historical moment. Do have a look at how the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, the HEAL Food Alliance and others responded to MAHA. It’s a great place to start.

Among the things I did this week so you don’t have to is watch Calley Means at the Aspen Ideas Festival. It is, as the kids say, cringe.

Let me declare an interest: Marion is a dear friend and although we may disagree on a thing or two, as good comrades can, I have nothing but love for her and an abiding appreciation for all she does. So I take personal offence at Means for his fumbling ad hominem against one of the most important voices in the food system, as do many including Robyn O’Brien, Jessica Knurick, Ted Kyle, Jane Black, and Jerry Hagstrom (paywall).

Here’s a short summary of what happened. Means claimed, at the Great American State Fair — as reported by the Washington Post — that in the 1980s a body called the Sugar Research Council paid Marion to conduct research. There’s no such thing as the Sugar Research Council either in the Sugar Association’s own history nor in the IRS nonprofit records. The sugar industry funding that he seems to be thinking about went to three researchers at Harvard in 1965 and 1967. That’s roughly when she was a graduate student in molecular biology at Berkeley. Her only connection to that episode is a commentary she was invited to write condemning the sugar industry. Means said that this money induced Marion to promote carbohydrates and grains and to warn against fat and against natural foods. But the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report she edited recommended vegetables, fruits, whole grain foods, fish, poultry and lean meats, and she has maintained a stated policy of taking no payments from food companies. Means said she claims credit for being the architect of the 1992 food pyramid. This can’t be right because, in addition to there being no evidence for it, the pyramid was released in April 1992 and she joined the 1995 dietary guidelines advisory committee in 1993. She was involved in the 1992 pyramid, but only to the extent that she exposed the meat industry's 1991 role in suppressing it. You can find the full anatomy of disinformation on Marion’s site.

There’d better be a good reason for me to add to the volume of ink spilled on this and, reader, there is.

I’ve been reading some nauseating right-wing food literature, in part so that I can write something on its imaginaries for a forthcoming Journal of Peasant Studies forum on Degrowth and Agrarian Change, and in part so I can peer review Limn’s upcoming issue on the far right. So I’m feeling pretty sordid, and looking for as large a dividend as possible of having to suffer this toxic swill.

Here’s the payoff: there’s a nasty similarity between Means’ accusations and the structure of one of the far right’s most influential food system texts, The Eggs Benedict Option. I’m not going to link to it but let me save you the trouble of searching for what it says, as Eamon Whalen did here for Mother Jones.

The argument, quoting approvingly from Michael Pollan and citing Tom Philpott, starts from many of the premises that animate lots of us to think about food. There’s a rise of chronic disease, glyphosate is everywhere, climate change is changing the horizon of possibility.

And then we part ways.

The argument presents the Neolithic Revolution as a disaster, because it was the way that settler agriculture parasitised free people. It was the first Great Reset, in which states made people farm and deprived them of nutrients. Its modern version is the Planetary Health Diet, the result of a study that does the arithmetic about the food required to support everyone living on the same planet with a healthy diet, which therefore urges moderation in meat consumption and which therefore, apparently, has the power to turn its consumers into cucks.

The foreword, by Noor Bin Ladin (an outspoken Trump supporter, niece of Osama ) explains why. We suffer today under “an almost total stranglehold over the media, entertainment, tech sector and academia,” “underpinned by the financial structure headed by the central banks that ensure and perpetuate the citizens’ enslavement via debt and usury.” It amounts to a programme of “population-manipulation techniques” and “the rewriting of history” that has succeeded “the herding of the masses blindly towards the slaughterhouse.” In other words, “the people at the very top of the pyramid have gone to great lengths to deliberately poison us.” The injury she catalogues is not only metabolic but genetic, “the downgrading of our DNA,” “the marring of our physiognomy.”

Guess who’s at the top of the pyramid? At the World Economic Forum, there are “supposed ties to the Rothschild family”. The book’s author, Charles Cornish-Dale, doesn’t use the word ‘Jew’ in the text, but you don’t have to scratch terribly deeply to find anti-semitism either in the text or, indeed, in his opinions.

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A late chapter argues that what made Americans great was the frontier, the thesis Frederick Jackson Turner set out in 1893 in his Significance of the Frontier in American History and which has been under sustained attack since the 1950s for treating conquered land as empty. Cornish-Dale knows the objection. He notes a few lines earlier that “the racial overtones and the emphasis on sacred soil of course began to rankle with academics, especially after World War II.” Then he affirms it anyway:

Because the fact remains, however much the academic 'deboonkers' might kvetch and wail about blood and soil, that the Turner Thesis is very definitely true.

This is the only use of Yiddish in a book published by Antelope Hill, whose other works include Hitler’s speeches among other far-right texts. Cornish-Dale himself has quoted Hitler on his twitter account, among whose two-hundred-thousand followers is the US Vice President, J. D. Vance. After Mother Jones profiled him in under the headline “Blood, Soil, and Grass-Fed Beef,” Cornish-Dale leaned in, had the slogan printed on t-shirts and sold them from his website. He was still boasting about it this May. The same account carried a quotation from Mein Kampf set against a swastika flag, a reference to "zog," and the shorthand HH.

In this book, he lets readers fill in the blanks, inviting them to substitute their pet cultural pollutant into thoughts like:

This is why the Biden administration is doing its best to criminalize America First and its supporters, in addition to ramping up the policy of demographic replacement and other forms of social and cultural disintegration.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Calley Means has read The Eggs Benedict Option.

I am saying that Calley Means is participating in a fascist trope, a storytelling device that propels a wider narrative. It explains not only why Means should continue with these lies, but the broader effort to which they contribute.

It’s a strategy that has a direct parallel with National Socialism in Germany, and it works like this:

1. Find a real grievance, such as worries behind industrial food and its health effects, a concern as widespread in the 1930s as today.

2. Pivot, so that the force behind the grievance is a cabal out to pervert national purity (whether the plot to undermine the German race, or the World Economic Forum out to degrade DNA, or a nutritionist in hock to Big Sugar poisoning America’s children)

3. Impugn scientific critique as urban/impure (by indicting specific scientists as treasonous members of that cabal, like Julius Moses or the EAT Lancet report, or Marion Nestle).

4. Once you have your dirty monsters, offer a doctrine of Blood and Soil as the sole and purifying means to address the grievance.

This is why Means’ behaviour is so poisonous, and needs to be condemned. The only way to do this — and here’s where Marion and I differ — is by rejecting MAHA in toto, as many people of colour, who can see MAHA’s racism a mile away, already have.

Some premises of the Make America Healthy Again movement are the same as any genuinely democratic one, but many aren’t, including concerns with individual bodily purity that are ripped from Dr Strangelove. In that concern with individual bodily purity lie the seeds thinking about a master race.

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If you can recast Marion Nestle, one of the world’s most relentless critics of food industry influence, as a paid shill for Big Sugar, you can collapse the distinction between legitimate public health research and corporate capture. Once you do that, you’ve cleared the stage for reactionaries to posture as the only true defenders of the food supply, swapping peer-reviewed science for blood-and-soil populism and for the opportunity to buy bidets from Means’ company using your tax-free health savings account to keep your colon sparkling clean.

As I explained in the Boston Review last year, this is why “MAHA’s stock in trade is biomonitoring devices, blood tests, and mail-in stool samples—all services available from MAHA proponents for a fee—so that vigilant individuals can avoid the worst. “You are the primary person responsible for understanding your body,” says the website of Casey Means,” Calley’s sister. The responsibility for vigilance for bodily and national purity is one that falls on every MAHA supporter.

It’s not a terribly far from this to MAHAspital.

There are proper alternatives on offer. If you want the opposite of MAHA, the Boston Review piece argues that Mamdani’s programme in NYC offers the possibility of radical public health, grounded in multi-racial working class politics. These are the struggles worth fighting for. And, in the meantime, it’s critics like Marion Nestle who deserve the most vigorous defence against the pathetic and sickening lies that Means peddles.

Want final evidence that Marion’s not a shill for Big Sugar? Have a look at the cover of her latest book, co-authored with Lisa Sutherland, and put in a pre-order for it. Sugar Coated is out in September. The best possible outcome of Means’ mendacity is a sales bump for this breakfast cereal take-down. And if you can, go see Marion at a book signing. She’s always magnetic.

Everyone Has A Right To Cool...In This Heat

Neighbours Save Each Other’s Lives, Bad Landlords Don’t Care if You Cook Alive–and Other Lessons From Past Heat Domes

Naomi Klein and Centre for Climate Justice

Jul 23, 2026

It’s mid-July, and Canada is battling another severe wildfire season, with close to one thousand fires blazing across the country. Northwestern Ontario has been among the hardest-hit regions, where fires are forcing highway closures and cutting off ground transport to remote communities. As we have all seen and heard, smoke from the fires has drifted deep into the United States, darkening skies in cities like Toronto, Boston, and New York. Trump has responded by slapping tariffs on hockey sticks and all kinds of other goods — but, notable, not on oil or gas.

While Trump blows smoke, the people bearing the brunt of the infernos are the ones who have done the least to cause them, and have often been among those sounding the alarm about unsustainable extraction. Namaygoosisagagun (Collins) First Nation, north of Thunder Bay, was largely destroyed in under an hour when a fast-moving fire jumped natural fire breaks, forcing residents to flee by boat. Within a week, a second community, Whitewater Lake First Nation, was similarly ravaged. Ontario officials estimate more than 1,600 First Nations residents have been displaced this season.

There are always multiple causes for wildfires, but beneath them all are the record-breaking temperatures. The same temperature trends that have already brought deadly heat domes this summer to France, Britain and Spain, and to large parts of the East and Central United States. The heat is now making its way to the West Coast, expected to center on the Rockies, where some daily records are likely to be tied or broken and a handful of locations could come within a few degrees of all-time highs.

As climate breakdown accelerates, and heat domes become ho-hum features of summer weather forecasts, we are told that we must learn to adapt. I don’t know about you, but my news feed is crowded with content on how to “beat the heat”–from DIY air conditioners using a Styrofoam cooler with frozen water bottles and dryer vents, to painting your windows with a kilogram of yogurt. Some of the tips are helpful, but the underlying message is not: saving yourself and your family is your responsibility, and yours alone.

Here in British Columbia, where I live and work, we know something about heat domes. We just marked the five-year anniversary of one that parked over us in 2021 and killed more than 600 people dead, making it the deadliest weather event in Canadian history. This experience has taught us that while individual advice on staying cool is critical, it’s just not going to cut it as our planet warms.

People die in heat domes not only because they don’t know how to stay cool, but because they simply cannot. Sometimes that’s because their landlords won’t let them install an air-con unit; sometimes it’s because they can’t physically get to a cooling station because they are not accessible; other times, the barriers have to do with language or reasonable safety fears. In my day job at the University of British Columbia, where I helped found and co-lead the Centre for Climate Justice (CCJ), the intersection of heat and inequality has been a major area of study for us. We work in a beautiful city that is also outrageously expensive and unequal, so we have gone deep on the ways that climate events impact housing security and tenant rights.

This week, I’m delighted to share an in-depth conversation with one of my closest academic colleagues, Dr. Mohammed Rafi Arefin, an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. He is a leading expert on housing and heat and co-leads a large international research project examining concrete policy measures that can save lives when indoor temperatures soar. The research examines everything from the consequences of extreme and prolonged heat inside Vancouver’s Single Occupancy Room Hotels–one of the last rungs of affordable housing–to what it would mean to enshrine a “Right to Cool” that includes everyone, without exception.

Arefin and the CCJ housing research group, which is co-led by our wonderful colleagues Dr. Liv Yoon and Dr. Geraldine Pratt, have distilled their learnings down to 5 big takeaways. They take a little more effort to implement than staying hydrated (do that too!), but if we took them seriously, many more of our friends and neighbours would be safe.

Lesson 1. Climate justice starts at home

Heat is transforming the home, changing it from a refuge to a site of struggle, injury, and even death. It is already a frontline of climate disasters, so it’s also where many solutions must begin.

Lesson 2. Community saves lives

A time-tested principle from tenant organizing works for heat too: know your neighbors. It could help you survive the next heatwave and maybe organize for better housing at the same time.

Most cities open up cooling centers during periods of extreme heat, but for these centres to be effective, we need to meet people where they are. For many reasons, including language and disability, people can’t always make it to official cooling centres. That means we need to cool people where they are.

Lesson 3. Tenant protections are climate protections.

Green retrofits and rules setting a maximum allowable indoor temperature are needed. However, without stronger tenant protections, well-intended climate protections can allow landlords to raise rents and kick lower income tenants out.

Lesson 4. Green homes without tenant rights are climate gentrification.

We are barreling down a path where new buildings are cooled, and the existing apartments where working-class tenants live are unbearably hot. We need protections that will keep people in their homes while greening their homes and making them more affordable.

Lesson 5. Everyone has a right to cool.

We can strive for a universal and enforceable standard for cooling. To do so, we must struggle against what Jeff Goodell has called the new American inequality:the divide between “The Cooled vs. The Cooked.” In truth, we do not have to choose between affordability and habitability.

Why? As we know, the oil and gas corporations that created this crisis are swimming in profits, especially since the U.S. and Israel began their war with Iran. What we need is a windfall tax and the political will to enforce it. That’s how to pay for green, cool homes that are affordable to all.

Here’s a video of my full conversation with Dr. Mohammed Rafi Arefi:

If you want to go deeper, the Centre for Climate Justice produced a report on the Right to Cool framework, with detailed policy recommendations based on extensive on-the-ground interviews from people impacted during the BC heat dome.

It’s not just North America that has been in the throes of heat, of course. In the U.K., where most houses are not insulated well enough to keep out heat and only around 5 percent of homes have air conditioning, endured its hottest day in May on record in London, with temperatures spiking to 34.8 degrees Celsius. It broke the previous record by 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Usually heat records are broken by only fractions of a degree.

I spoke with Novara Media about the record-breaking heat dome, and about how the broader climate crisis is now intersecting with increasingly fascist politics.

If this conversation was interesting to you and you live in the UK, until the 24th of July, you can pre-order End Times Fascism at Waterstones and receive a 25% discount using the code SUMMER2026.

Here’s the link to the Waterstones product page.

I also spoke recently at a virtual event celebrating DeSmog’s incredible 20 years of muck-racking on this topic. I focused on the rise of the AI-fossil fuel axis and the resurgence of fascism and why it’s time to update our mental models about climate denial. I shared a clip last week, but here’s my full interview:

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11 Questions: Raj Patel

As football mourns Kevin Keegan - one of writer, filmmaker and activist Raj Patel’s sporting heroes - Patel answers 11 questions on fandom, players, teams, and identity.

Sean Jacobs

Jul 22, 2026

The political economist Raj Patel invited me to contribute early in my online writing, outside the mainstream, to Voice of the Turtle, a publication at the beginning of digital journalism that he co-edited. At the time, I was a Ph.D. student in Politics at Birkbeck College. (He later finished his doctorate at Cornell.) One of the posts is republished here. Raj researches and agitates around food politics; makes films; and has worked for international financial institutions and with poor people’s campaigns. Born in London, he has lived in the US for at least the last two decades or more. His day job is as a research professor of public policy at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written a couple of widely acclaimed books: “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System,” “The Value of Nothing,” “Inflamed: Deep Medicine And The Anatomy of Injustice,” and co-authored “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.” He has been written about by the New York Times and The New Yorker. Below, he tries to respond to eleven questions inspired by something the historian Eric Hobsbawm said, which became the inspiration for the title of this Substack: “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.”

What was the first sports team that truly felt like your team?

Liverpool. I remember choosing them in kindergarten because of a boy called Nicholas Cook—the blond-haired, blue-eyed wunderkind of the year. He was very good at football, the most popular kid in class, he supported Liverpool, and I desperately wanted to be his friend.

So it was definitely a decision inflected by race: I was the asthmatic brown kid with no friends, trying to attach myself to someone who seemed to possess all the confidence and belonging that I didn’t.

Who was the first player whose name you memorized and who captured your imagination?

The late, great Kevin Keegan. He simply seemed to be the person everyone talked about whenever Liverpool came up, so his was the name that lodged in my mind. First time I saw him on TV I didn’t recognise him.

Did you choose the professional club and league you support, or inherit them through family, community or circumstance?

Liverpool was a choice, although—as I said—it was shaped by Nicholas Cook.

In my family, however, the major sport was cricket. My dad was good enough to be a semiprofessional county player for Middlesex, and he remains endlessly disappointed that team sports—and cricket in particular—are not my thing.

I was certainly expected to support India against Pakistan. Even in the kindergarten playground, we had not only India-versus-Pakistan cricket matches but India-versus-Pakistan fights. It was an early lesson in how nationalism perpetuates itself, with an early conscription through sport, religion and injury.

Do you see the national team you support as reflecting the state of your country? What does supporting it reveal about how you feel about the country?

I don’t have a national team. My goal is to die with as many passports as possible.

To support England would mean rallying around a flag under which I have experienced racial terror. Once you have been beaten up by people waving the St George’s Cross, it becomes very difficult to embrace its supposed unifying principles.

I have always been suspicious of the idea of eleven named men standing in for a nation, because national sport has served as an alibi for the violence directed at me and the abuse directed at my family. I don’t particularly like the idea of a national team, and I aim to practice treason for as long as I live.

Have you ever fallen out of love with a team or a sport? What changed?

I haven’t fallen out of love with a sport, because it simply isn’t in me to love watching this stuff in the first place.

The closest experience came at an American football game of the University of Texas. People often say that America doesn’t have a hooligan culture, and I understand that the demographics are different: it isn’t simply blokes of a certain age, lagered up in a particular way, who turn up to matches. There are families and people of every age.

That made the atmosphere more terrifying, not less. The game had a vaguely Nuremberg-y quality. Everyone stood for the national anthem and sang the fight song immediately after. The spectacle of sending young men out to acquire brain damage was terrifying. The fact that whole families were enthusiastically participating made me like it even less.

What is the greatest rivalry in sports history, in your view?

Foreman and Ali. I have changed my mind about boxing over time, and it doesn’t seem to fit with my distaste for brain damage incurred in football. I used to think of it as absolutely horrific while simultaneously thinking Muhammad Ali was fucking brilliant. But the writing around the Foreman–Ali fight eventually swayed me into appreciating what that particular contest was and what it meant, and how Ali wrested agency back from his many oppressors.

Who is the single greatest player of all time?

If we have to talk about football, then sure Messi.

But I’m constantly pulled away from football and toward other forms of sporting greatness. I don’t know why my imagination is so pugilistic, but figures such as Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali represent a different way of thinking for me.

Then there is cricket. Through C. L. R. James, I can understand how cricket worked on my imagination at a particular moment. Viv Richards is another person I think of as simply knowing what he was doing, in an enormously satisfying way.

This was a source of considerable tension during the India vs West Indies World Cup Final in 1983: I had been conscripted into supporting India, but Viv Richards was Viv Richards, and his demolition of the India test team earlier that year had seared itself in my memory. So what I’m saying is that, even then, I was supporting the West Indies and practicing treason. India won.

Can you select your all-time greatest eleven?

Billie Jean King, Simone Biles, Muhammad Ali, Bruce Lee, Viv Richards, Colin Kaepernick, Sócrates, Caster Semenya, Jesse Owens, Serena Williams, and C. L. R. James (he was a first-class player after all)

What song best matches your team’s energy, rhythm or attitude?

“God Save the Queen,” The Sex Pistols. See 4 above.

What film best captures the feelings or memories you associate with sport and fandom?

My first instinct is “Escape to Victory,” because sport often seems to me like an elaborate metaphor for trying to escape the conditions under which the game is being played.

But the real answer is probably “Shaolin Soccer.” It understands that sport is absurd, bodily and excessive. It offers joy without requiring reverence or respectability. I find that much easier to love.

Can you assemble a metaphorical starting eleven drawn from politics, culture, intellectual life, music and film?

I was just going to list the German vs Greek philosophers from the Monty Python sketch, but here’s something in a similar vein. Goalkeeper: Baruch Spinoza; Defense: Rosa Luxemburg, C. L. R. James and Jafar Panahi; Midfield: Karl Marx, Nina Simone, Jacqueline du Pré and Stanley Kubrick; Attack: Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon and Silvia Federici.

FAO Food Price Index

The relief is unlikely to last. Grocery prices soared after the spike of 2022 and remain roughly 35 per cent above pre-pandemic levels. What shoppers have lived through is not a spike but a ratchet that clicks upward with each shock and never quite clicks back. It’s what Isabella Weber calls seller’s inflation, and the next turn of the ratchet is already in the pipeline.

What the latest UN figures tell us

Five UN agencies have published their annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report. Lest I be accused of accentuating the negative, let me begin with the good news: the new figures describe a better year. Hunger fell for a third consecutive year, reaching 645mn people in 2025.

But 2.7bn people, a third of humanity, still could not afford a healthy diet. And for the first time, Africa is home to more hungry people than any other region: one in five of its population.

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Have a look at when African hunger climbed, and you’ll notice that it coincides with the period when the Gates Foundation was most active with its Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. More on that in this Rosa Luxemburg Foundation report.

The headline in the Guardian is that 645 million people are hungry and one in three cannot afford a healthy diet. To be clear: this is a failure of political choices. Healthy food is becoming a luxury for billions, while farmers are paid less and consumers pay more. That’s the result of a food system where a handful of powerful traders, processors and retailers set the prices and pocket the profits. You cannot lower the cost of a healthy diet without asking who profits from an unhealthy one.

The crisis to come

The FAO statistics stop in 2025, before the conflict, the fertiliser shock and El Niño. The report itself warns that this year’s events threaten the progress it records. Official statistics will register the coming crisis only after it has happened.

Three forces are converging.

1. Fertiliser

This year’s conflict in the Middle East choked traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the corridor for roughly a quarter of the world’s urea exports. By April, the World Bank’s fertiliser price index stood at its highest since October 2022, and urea prices are projected to rise nearly 60 per cent this year.

Fertiliser is natural gas transformed into crop nutrition, which is why a war in energy markets becomes a rise in bread prices. Farmers priced out of fertiliser this planting season will harvest thinner crops next year.

2. Weather

El Niño is here, and it looks like it might be the strongest ever recorded. Past episodes have shrunk Australian wheat harvests, cut sugar production in India and Thailand by a fifth or more, and parched southern Africa. This one is timed to peak just as the fertiliser squeeze reaches the field.

3. Fracturing trade

Tariffs, export restrictions and aid cuts are ripping through the supply chains on which the world’s hungriest people rely. The world’s food import bill hit a record $2.2tn in 2025, with the steepest increases falling on low-income countries least able to pay, deepening debt and dependence at the same time.

When shortages loom, exporters hoard, as dozens did in 2022, and import-dependent countries bid against each other for what remains. Put it together and the squeeze arrives through late 2026 and into 2027, landing first on countries that import their food, and eventually on everyone’s receipts.

The fourth ingredient: margins

There is a fourth ingredient in every food price crisis: margins. Buried in the UN report is a remarkable admission. Between 70 and 75 per cent of what consumers pay for food is added after it leaves the farm, in the midstream of traders, processors, distributors and retailers.

The report cites research on the UK banana trade showing that shocks to world prices barely reach the supermarket shelf because they are absorbed into the margins of intermediaries—what economists call the ‘missing middle’ of the food chain. A handful of trading houses move most of the grain that crosses borders, and in 2022 they booked record profits in the middle of a hunger crisis. Margins that swell during a shock have a curious habit of not shrinking afterwards.

What governments can do now

There are ways to avoid the worst. Transparency and anti-monopoly action in the middle of the chain can clip the margins of traders, processors and supermarkets when prices surge. Aggressive competition windfall measures ready where gouging is found can prevent future infractions and redistribute resources immediately. Public food reserves need to be filled now, while grain is relatively cheap, rather than bought in panic at the top of the market. In the medium term, supply management of the kind Canada practises, alongside the public stocks and regional reserves used in India and West Africa, can provide a buffer. And, of course, there needs to be sustained investment in regional food systems and in farming less hooked on fossil fertiliser, so the next shock finds shorter chains to travel.

A crisis in the pipeline is a crisis that can still be met. Governments have perhaps two seasons. When your groceries cost more next year, the weather and the war will take the blame. Save some of that ire for the business model, and for the governments that had fair warning, today, in writing, from the UN itself.

Rosa Luxemburg/Açık Radyo

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Among the pressings that most delighted me was the goosefoot, an unshowy weed that I’ve just finished writing about (in my next book - more on that in the coming months). Luxemburg pressed the European species, Chenopodium album, lamb's quarters, but her fascination reaches across to its American cousin Chenopodium berlandieri, which the farmers of the Eastern Woodlands domesticated some two thousand years ago, breeding it patiently toward thinner-husked seeds long before maize arrived to eclipse it.

Lambsquarters is considered a weed here in the US, more collateral damage under the regime of glyphosate in the midwest. Luxemburg had an eye for the weeds, the everyday testament to life all around us. Not for her the aesthetics - and accompanying politics - of bourgeois environmentalism. When in prison, she had nothing but contempt for a fellow inmate who

lived with the firm conviction that nature began in the Tyrolean Alps, with a spectacular sunset. If someone had told her that here, at Barnimstraße No. 10, where she stood and walked, she was surrounded by nature from morning to night, she would surely have thought they were making fun of her.)

Given her early training in zoology and her lifelong habit of thinking in terms of metabolism, the Stoffwechsel that Horn traces so well from Marx into the plantation, I was hoping Luxemburg might have sketched and enthused over fungi, those small gods of metabolism. I realise it’s an anachronistic hope. In Luxemburg’s day, fungi were still filed as cryptogams, along with moss and algae: their method of reproduction was cryptic. Luxemburg’s care over social reproduction finds its resonance in the attention her notebooks give to flowering things.

The corollary, which Horn draws out beautifully, is that Luxemburg was well aware that colonialism was never a project of humans alone but a rearranging of whole living communities, a multi-species undertaking. That insight, arrived at between prison walls with a pressed weed in hand, is one that leaps out from her letters and Horn’s fine commentary.

Having read it twice now, the impression that I’ll carry most is of someone deeply and passionately attuned to the web of life, who understood the violence of capitalism’s operations on the web-of-life, and who understood how precious it was to be able to touch the world beyond the cycle of exchange and commodities. It’s the spirit behind this exhortation to Hans Diefenbach, on 6 July, 1917:

This day is a gift to you, like a rose in full bloom, lying at your feet, waiting for you to pick it up and press it to your lips.

Diefenbach, a doctor and close friend, was killed at the front that October. Luxemburg herself was murdered by the Freikorps on 15 January 1919.

The title of the concerto comes, as the liner notes observe, from a poem by the twentieth-century Persian mystic Sohrab Sepehri.

I must depart tonight.
Taking a suitcase
(the size of my loneliness)
I must go
where the mythical trees are in sight.
Toward that endless plain
that always
Is calling me to itself.

The concerto is at war with itself. The Persian Ney (different from Turkish and Arabic) has a particularly tricky technique, and it’s scored not for Equal Temperament like the rest of the orchestra but the microtonal scales of Dástghâh. It’s why you can hear friction even when in principle there shouldn’t be.

I know my political metaphors can be heavy-handed sometimes, but they rarely sound this transporting.

One of the unadvertised consolations of having an obsessive-compulsive disorder is that repetition can sometimes stop being a symptom and become an ally. If a piece of music holds an emotion you need to feel and work through, you can play it thirty times in a row at volume and each pass takes you a little further into the feeling rather than further from it.

My therapist calls this perseveration. In religion, it’s liturgy. The rosary, the dhikr, the kirtan. It’s a praise chorus repeated until some clarity emerges from the dirge. Repetition is the oldest technology for keeping alive a feeling the world is trying to switch off.

This week the feelings I’m working through are grief and love, and the loop I’m running is “KFC Santería”, specifically the remix that Cain Culto made with Sudan Archives last summer. I found it, as one finds everything now, by algorithmic accident, somewhere downstream of a Doechii playlist.

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A Violin as Weapon of Christ

Both of these musicians are string players, which is rarer in club music than it should be, and rarer still is the fact that these are two people for whom the violin is a church object.

Cain Culto was born Andrew Estevan Padilla in Florida to Colombian and Nicaraguan parents, raised in Lexington, Kentucky. He learned bluegrass fiddle at school and played it in the fundamentalist evangelical church where he grew up, eventually becoming a worship pastor and founding a Christian band.

When he came out as gay, the church’s answer was conversion therapy. The attempt to pray the gay out of himself ended in a week’s hospitalisation, an episode he now describes as spiritual psychosis. What walked out of that hospital eventually renamed itself after the brother whose offering God refused, joined to the Spanish word for worship. He became Cain Culto, an apostate who compulsively worships.

Sudan Archives was born Brittney Parks, a preacher’s daughter from Cincinnati. She learned the violin by ear in church, several services a week, and taught herself to play like the West African and Sudanese fiddlers she found in ethnomusicology archives, players who build instruments from gourds and horsehair. As a teenager she stayed out late in Cincinnati’s indie and electronic scenes, violin in hand, and got thrown out of the house for it. At nineteen she left for Los Angeles with a few outfits and her fiddle.

The music that crossed the Atlantic

What I hear in the remix, and mine is a viola player’s ear primed for harmony, is a progression carried in down-bows and pizzicato that grieves while the lyric blasphemes, and behind it all a wordless chorus whose cadence sounds, at first pass, Middle Eastern. Melismatic, modal, hovering somewhere between mosque and mass.

Parks has said that many of her favourite string players are Sufis, so maqam-adjacent ornament is squarely in her wheelhouse. But there’s a longer route to the same sound. What an Anglophone ear labels “Middle Eastern” in Iberian sacred music is usually the Andalusian inheritance: eight centuries of Arab modality baked into Spanish Catholic singing. This is the music that crossed the Atlantic with the conquistadors and was laid over Yoruba practice in the Caribbean. Yoruba praise-singing is itself melismatic, call-and-response, built on repetition. So a chorus inside a track called “KFC Santería” is the sound of syncretism doing what syncretism does. The ear’s inability to place the choir is the santería.

Because what santería names is the survival strategy of a faith under eradication. Enslaved Yoruba people in the Caribbean hid their orishas inside the coloniser's saints, Ochún robed as la Virgen de la Caridad, keeping the sacred alive by dressing it in the one costume empire had to applaud. Worshippers could express their fidelity, knowing that underneath the robes was something truer. What began as concealment became a religion in its own right, subordinate neither to Rome nor to the Yoruba faith it carried out of Africa. The mask, worn long enough, became a face. Culto takes that very seriously in the video.

Franchise theology

And KFC? Culto grew up in the state that the rest of the world encounters as a bucket of fried chicken, with Kentucky rendered into a franchise, a place become a supply chain, the same way God reached his childhood as a megachurch. Which is to say: as a franchise.

Cain Culto’s own account of leaving the church is not that he lost his faith but that he traced its wiring, and found that what had been sold to him as the eternal was plugged into capitalism. Listen to the lyrics and you can hear a deconstruction of the corporatisation of organised religion. The genius of the title is that it refuses to stop there.

KFC Santería: if the faith you were raised in turns out to be a franchise, you can still do to the franchise what the enslaved did to the cathedral. Smuggle the sacred through the deep fryer. Hide the worship service inside the club banger, the liturgy inside the jockstrap. The grief is that it was necessary. The love is that it works.

The remix has its own occasion. It was made last summer as ICE swept through Los Angeles, by a first-generation child of Central and South American immigrants who said plainly that he was holding a lot of grief and anger and needed to get it out on the track; its merch sent profits to communities hit by the raids. Parks found him the way congregations have always found their preachers — somebody in the comments said you have to hear this — and brought her own expulsion, her own church, her own violin.

Two hundred and fifty candles

Which brings us to the birthday. The United States turns two hundred and fifty this weekend, and the official liturgy will be the usual one: flyovers, fireworks, the founding recited like a creed. I have nothing to bring to that service. But I keep thinking that this track is the more honest anniversary hymn, because these two musicians stand in the country’s actual tradition, the one it exports less proudly than fried chicken.

A queer Colombian-Nicaraguan Kentuckian and a Black preacher’s daughter from Ohio, both thrown out of the houses that formed them, neither surrendering the instrument, both making something devotional out of the wreckage. That is not the exception to American history. Ask anyone whose gods had to travel here below decks. It is the through-line.

To live in this country at two hundred and fifty is to approach it the way Cain Culto loves the church: from outside the door it closed on you, fluently, and furiously. The grief and the love are not stages. They loop.

So no fireworks from me this year. Just one track, at high volume, on repeat, because repetition is how the expelled keep faith. I’ll let you know when I stop. Don’t wait up.

We don’t know how today – the day of the ‘deadline’ given by March and March – for ‘illegal immigrants’ to leave South Africa will unfold.

What we do know is that the politics of collective sadism that has been actively cultivated in the lead up to today has never had anything to do with a concern for the law. It has repeatedly taken unlawful and often criminal forms, and its targets have included people with and without documents, including South Africans from ethnic minorities.

We know that neither the people blockading hospitals and schools, the men in balaclavas whipping people in the streets nor the people coordinating the mobilisation of the amabutho and the often bot and influencer driven online attacks in a pincer movement are, as the media has so often said, participants in a ‘civil society organisation’.

We know that the language of fascism – of cleaning, criminalisation, animalisation, disease, poisoning and conspiracy is everywhere. Reflecting on German fascism Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘Part of the mechanism of domination is that one is forbidden to recognize the suffering which that domination produces’ so that ‘everyone in one’s own ethnic group can convince themselves they don’t hear the screams of pain’. This is a central aim of the work of dehumanisation.

We know that the reason why the people who have and are suffering from xenophobic terror, and who will suffer it in the days to come, seldom appear in our public sphere as people whose humanity is not in question is because instead of breaking with the idea of a graduated humanity after apartheid we merely sought to rearrange aspects of that graduation.

We know that in recent weeks tens of thousands of people have been terrorised, forced from their homes and had their means of livelihood seized, shut down or destroyed by armed mobs. People have been insulted, threatened, beaten, made destitute, and killed. Families are being split and children who were born here, speak our languages and have lived their whole lives among us are in desperate flight with their parents. Thousands of people have fled the country, thousands remain scattered into parks, community halls and derelict buildings and many more wait in that state of vigilant and brittle but strangely energetic exhaustion that carries people through times like these.

In Durban, documented refugees forced from their homes by the mob, and then beaten by the police and attacked by thugs from March and March and the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), have been sleeping outside the Home Affairs office on Che Guevara Road for more than five weeks.

We know that the atmosphere is febrile, heavy with cruelty and fear. We know that it will not lift at the end of today. We know that there will be more blood.

Aimé Césaire: ‘When the world shall be a tower of silence, we shall be the prey and the vulture’.

National dissolution

As racial and ethnic identities are being asserted against the idea of a country belonging to ‘all who live in it’ some South Africans are being referred to as izinyane or ‘Shangaan’. The mob has also turned on South Africans deemed ‘too dark’ and, on at least one occasion, Muslims.

We should not forget that according to the official count 21 of the 62 people murdered in the 2008 xenophobic pogrom were South Africans.

The police deny that Nhlamulo Sambo, the young man, still a teenager, who was murdered in Mossel Bay, was the third person to be murdered in the xenophobic violence since March and March announced its ‘deadline’. They say that although he was murdered during the same weekend in which 55 shacks were burnt and two men from Mozambique murdered in a xenophobic attack – two men whose names do not seem to have been given in any reports – his death was just a matter of ordinary crime.

His mother, Mikateko, insists that he was murdered because he was Tsonga, that when he was killed ‘he was explaining that he was Tsonga and had an ID’. His aunt, Nomsa, said that he had told her that he had been told that he was a ‘Shangaan’ and not welcome in the community.

It is a plain fact that the police habitually lie about impoverished black people.

It is also a plain fact that in the shanty towns in societies that remain structured in colonial logic, societies such as South Africa and Brazil, elites tend to assume that, in Frantz Fanon’s words, ‘they die there, it matters not where, nor how’.

Fanon: ‘From nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism’.

Deputising the mob

There has been systemic complicity with the mob by what are supposed to be democratic institutions, including the media and all the parties in parliament aside from the Economic Freedom Fighters. The state has not made any meaningful attempt to stop the terror and has often acted in concert with it. The police have often accompanied or watched the mob without intervening. In several instances, the police have taken people identified as ‘foreign’ by the mob into custody and our usually lethargic state has repeatedly moved with speed to check the papers of people targeted by the mob, including during its street actions.

The primary response of the state has, along with standing down while the mob does its work so effectively that tens of thousands of people have been driven from their homes, been to ‘verify’ the status of people who have been displaced and then rapidly move to mass deportation. Thousands of people have been moved out of the country with astonishing speed. The result is a highly effective working alliance between the mob and the state enabling rapid mass displacement and deportation.

The refugees on Che Guevara Road have been told to either leave the road or accept deportation to the counties they fled via the prison known as the Lindela Repatriation Centre. This is a gross violation of international law. Like the mob the state claims to embody the law while violating it.

The state has also arrested more than 50,000 people it claims are undocumented since January and deported more than 25,000. We have to say ‘claimed’ because the police continue to stop people for looking ‘foreign’, tear up their papers and take them away. At the same time, the state has moved to strengthen an already repressive although deeply corrupt and often ineffective migration regime.

While the mob – on the street and online – often uses gruesome rhetoric, including frequent death threats, the state speaks of humane repatriation without asking why people suddenly feel so panicked that flight is their only option. As we have moved closer to today the state has warned that there should be no violence on the planned marches and taken steps to avoid the kinds of organised looting and attacks on infrastructure that were carried out by the forces that have cohered around Jacob Zuma during the riots in the winter of 2021. The mob has been deputised but warned not to overstep the powers of the deputy.

Liberal democracy in decline

We must take full measure of the fact that South Africa is, in Fanon’s words, ‘a nonviable society, a society to be replaced’. The political arrangements in such societies do not and should not endure indefinitely. But, as we have seen in countries like Algeria and India, the loss of power by national liberation movements, and the wider collapse in the legitimacy of their projects, can bring far more dangerous, and even fascist, forces to power.

Now that the mob has been constituted and directed to take its place on the political stage – online, in the street and in the spaces abandoned by the state - it will not be withdrawn if it is not forced back. We can look to India to see what happens when the mob is given a permanent role in the national drama. We should not forget that the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat was a decisive moment in Narendra Modi’s path to power.

Authoritarian, demagogic and socially predatory, violent and ethnically inflected forces have been moving towards the centre of political life since Zuma’s rape trial. We are now a society in which extortion is endemic, and very dangerous people demand, in Fanon’s words, ‘to be part of the racket’. We have long been a society in which grassroots activists are assassinated when they stand against predatory forces. When Abahlali baseMjondolo adopted the slogan ‘socialism or death’ they did so without hyperbole. It was simply a plain statement of their situation. We have recently become a society in which professionals are assassinated when they do not cower before the same predatory forces.

There have been 16 reported political assassinations this month.

The uncontested hegemony of liberal democracy is behind us and the future that is rushing towards us is not just less liberal. It is also much less democratic and, for those who dissent, much more dangerous.

Now that authoritarian opposition to the form of democracy settled on after apartheid appears to have been rendered popular and predatory political forces have developed a capacity for armed street thuggery it seems highly unlikely that liberal democracy will not be further weakened, or that this will not happen with a velocity that will surpass the capacities of the law and the institutions of democracy to contain it. It will swiftly change the structure of society in ways that a new election with a different outcome will not be able to undo. There will be many more political funerals in the years ahead.

These dangers are most acute in KwaZulu-Natal.

The terror that, in a few weeks, has swept tens of thousands of people from their homes, and many thousands out of the country, is a form of organised and systemic cruelty that must be rejected without qualification or compromise. The often-repeated fact that all states regulate migration in some way does not legitimate dehumanisation and cruelty, or the effective legitimation of forced expulsions by the mob. It is a basic ethical principle that everyone everywhere should be received as a person among other people, as a fully and equally human person.

Abahlali baseMjondolo distilled this commitment to a universal humanism into an axiomatic statement, first developed in a discussion to formulate a principled and programmatic response to the beginning of the xenophobic pogrom in May 2008: ‘A person is a person wherever they may find themselves’.

It is also a basic ethical principle that we are called to conscience and action most urgently when humanity is called into question. We are in such a moment.

This is a time to accept risk and act with courage, a time to seek out new people and organisations with whom principles can be affirmed and lines held. New forms of solidarity must be built and sustained as we traverse the hard road that lies ahead. These new forms of solidarity cannot only be defensive. The only real alternative to the violent, predatory and ethnic politics in rapid formation is a politics that, building the power of the demos against the mob, works for the emancipation of all prioritising the worst off among us.

Books mentioned

Aimé Césaire – The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire (Wesleyan University Press, 2017)

Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin, 1976)

Theodor W. Adorno – Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (Verso, 2005)

Goethe was so moved that he wrote Howards Ehrengedächtnis (In Honour of Howard) a cycle of poems marvelling that a man had pinned the clouds like butterflies, that he “Bestimmt das Unbestimmte, schränkt es ein” (defines the indefinite, limits it). Naming the unnameable felt, in that imperial age, a conquest worth celebrating.

It took the better part of a century to finish the job. In 1896, following a recommendation of the International Meteorological Conference at Munich, the first International Cloud Atlas appeared: it had twenty-eight coloured plates, with definitions in French, German, and English, instructions for observers, and a single governing ambition: to make cloud observations “internationally comparable.”

Plate from 1896 International Cloud Atlas/Google Books

It was an immediate de facto standard and has remained in print, revised by treaty, for almost a hundred and thirty years. Today it carries legal status under the World Meteorological Organization’s Technical Regulations. There is a correct way to see a cloud, and it is binding on member states.

Like any taxonomy, the cloud atlas is an accounting tool. It makes clouds commensurable, sorting the formless into ten genera so that a cumulonimbus over Uppsala and a cumulonimbus over the Grand Canyon can be entered in the same ledger, compared, predicted, and governed. An atlas is an instrument for rendering the world legible to management.

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The Cloud Atlas Sextet

David Mitchell’s 2004 Cloud Atlas is a set of six stories nested inside one another like Russian dolls. A notary on a Pacific crossing in the 1850s, a broke composer in Belgium in 1931, an investigative journalist in 1970s California, a publisher, a clone in a future Korea, a goatherd after the fall are each interrupted at their midpoint and then the stories resumed in reverse. A comet-shaped birthmark recurs on a shoulder in every age, hinting that these are the same soul, or the same struggle, wearing different costumes through time. The other connection is that the weak are meat, the strong eat.

The slaver, the poisoner, the energy corporation covering up a reactor’s flaws, the corporate state that grows its servants in vats and recycles them are the same appetite in successive technologies. The composer of the middle story, Robert Frobisher, writes a piece he calls the Cloud Atlas Sextet: six overlapping soloists, each taking up and breaking off the others’ lines, a form that is also its content. Our lives are not our own: we are bound to others, by each crime and every kindness.

It is a sentimental book about an unsentimental fact, that power finds new ways to sate an old hunger. Which brings me to the third atlas, the one we have learned to call the cloud.

The Magnificent Seven in the Cloud

I learned about The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest — TITiPI, a transnational gathering of artists, engineers, and theorists — from Saskia Colombant last week. (This newsletter began with a set of questions she and I discussed on a sidebar conversation at an IPES-Food meeting.) Saskia has been following TITiPI’s work on ‘the cloud’, about the servers and mining operations and legislative chicanery and finance and theft which constitutes the infrastructure behind the Magnificent Seven tech giants– Alphabet (Google), Tesla, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Meta and Amazon, and more recently the AI leviathans. TITiPI offer an analysis that doubles down on the idea of cloud accounting and infrastructure. Their advice:

Stop calling the cloud an infrastructure and start calling it a regime.

“Infrastructure” invites you to think of plumbing: neutral pipes that carry whatever you pour through them. A regime is a political economy with a direction of travel and relations of power. The cloud is a software paradigm of continuously updated services, rented rather than owned, and fused to a model of accumulation that runs on the grabbing of land for data centres, the extraction of energy and water to cool them, the mining of minerals to build them, and the harvesting of data and racialised labour to feed them.

It has become the dominant way to deliver computation across finance, health, logistics, government, and agriculture. I’ve overheard several conversations recently in which at least one person can’t imagine living without its services. That feeling is not an accident of the technology. It is the regime’s central achievement.

What the technological cloud does is what Luke Howard did to the sky and the 1896 atlas did to the planet’s weather: it takes things that resisted counting and renders them legible and comparable. The 1896 atlas standardised clouds so that empires could predict their weather. The modern cloud commensurates us.

At the dawn of the first cloud atlas, capitalism’s great project was to pry a lucrative corner from the web of life: to isolate, name, and then conquer ‘nature’. Under today’s cloud regime, the taxonomies that matter most are the ones that map human action within the web of life. Clouds are a tool of commensuration as conquest, scaled to the whole of life.

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Head in the cloud

In February of this year, IPES-Food published a report called Head In The Cloud about what happens when Big Tech and Big Ag join forces to digitise farming: when Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba sit down with the agribusiness giants and propose to run agriculture through artificial intelligence, precision platforms, and proprietary algorithms, all of it sold under the banner of climate resilience and productivity.

What the report describes is, structurally, an act of atlasing. The knowledge a farmer holds is extracted, processed, and turned into a corporate asset. The mechanisms are mundane: subscription platforms, data-sharing arrangements between corporate partners, algorithmic price-setting that quietly erodes a grower’s bargaining power.

When the same firms point AI at the genome by scanning, characterising, and patenting traits that communities have stewarded freely for millennia, the appropriation becomes total. A farm is rendered as data; the farmer is dispossessed of the very knowledge that was the farm. Farming by algorithm, IPES-Food observes, is not the future farmers asked for.

The atlas has a material body, and it is mined from the usual places. The cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, the lithium from Bolivia, the copper from Chile, the coltan from Rwanda, and with the mining come the land dispossession and the poisoned water that have always followed it, in the same Global South that grew the cotton and the sugar. The cloud is not weightless. It weighs on exactly the people it always has.

Faced with this, IPES-Food reaches for a counter-instrument. They call it data sovereignty: the principle that farmers, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities have the right to decide what data is collected from their lands, how it is stored, who may see it, and what it is for.

The aim is not to abandon digital tools but to embed them in governance frameworks that serve the public good. It is a reformist’s hope, and a decent one: that the atlas can be taken back, re-owned, governed from below.

Dual abuse

But can it? Can these tools be repurposed?

The conventional frame for technology that can be used for both peaceful and military ends is “dual use.” It is a Cold War term, coined to regulate the trade in materials that could become either a power station or a bomb, and its premise is that the technology is neutral, the responsibility the user’s. The honest term, argues TITiPI, is not dual use but dual abuse: these infrastructures are engineered ready for abuse, and the fiction of neutrality is precisely what “exonerates entire industries and economies from their criminal responsibilities.” Tom Lehrer put it nicely in his song about Nazi missile scientist Wernher von Braun:

Don’t say that he’s hypocritical
Say rather that he’s apolitical
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department!” says Wernher von Braun

If that seems like a stretch, here’s the modern day version. When Microsoft was asked in May of last year whether Azure had been used to harm civilians in Gaza, it said it “does not have visibility into how customers use our software on their own servers or other devices.”

Google, defending Project Nimbus internally, conceded in a report obtained by The Intercept that it was “not permitted to restrict the types of services and information” that the Israeli government and its Ministry of Defence chose to run on its cloud. These are not failures of the system. They are the system. The whole architecture of software-as-a-service is built around the abdication of the question of use. The provider supplies the capability and, by design, looks away.

So the question of whether a given act of computation is good or evil is rendered, at the level of the infrastructure, undecidable, and that undecidability is sold as a feature. Ask a language model what to do with a day in Amsterdam, and it returns a tidy itinerary of the most-visited attractions. The same model can deploy its taxonomies to select a target by silhouette and walking pattern. The model does not change; only the output differs. To trust the system in the first case is to ratify the regime that operates the second.

Project Nimbus is a $1.2-billion contract under which Google and Amazon supply cloud and AI infrastructure to the Israeli government and military. Its terms, according to reporting in The Guardian, contractually forbade the companies from suspending service under boycott pressure, and contain a mechanism to alert Israel secretly if another government requests access to the data held under it.

A +972 Magazine investigation found that purchases of cloud services by the Israeli military rose sharply after October 2023, and that intelligence gathered through the mass surveillance of Gaza’s population was stored on commercial servers. The targeting systems that have moved through that infrastructure carry names like the Gospel, Lavender, Where’s Daddy. The farm-data platform and the military data pipeline are not the same application. They need not be. They belong to the same political form: a regime that turns life into data, moves that data into proprietary systems, and then sells back the power to act on it.

Here the third atlas does both of the older atlases’ work at once. It commensurates — renders the soil and the face into the same legible data — and in the same motion it feeds the oldest hunger in Mitchell’s book. The weak are meat; the atlas tells the strong where to eat.

The non-manifestness of manifest evil

So far, this may feel like well worn ground. But the reason to set up the analysis like this is that I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours with Ayça Çubukçu this week. As always, she knocked me sideways. Her recent thinking makes me wonder about the reformist impulse in thinking around The Master’s Tools might just be fantasy.

In a 2025 piece in the Journal of Genocide Research, Çubukçu reflects on the problem of moral judgement in relation to Palestine, reading the anthropologist David Scott on the evil of New World slavery alongside Hannah Arendt’s essay Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship. Çubukçu’s question is not whether the violence is evil. Her question is why its evil is not manifest — why what is self-evidently a grave wrong to some is, to millions of others, morally justified or simply unseen. The horror, she insists with Arendt, is that it is carried out and enabled not by monsters but, in Arendt’s phrase, by the most respected members of respectable society. And where all are guilty, no one is.

Rereading Microsoft’s sentence — that it does not have visibility into how its software is used — clicks something into alignment. The cloud is a machine for the non-manifestness of manifest evil. It is engineered so that no one, at any node, ever has to judge.

The engineer ships a capability; the executive cites the terms of service; the procurement officer migrates a workload; the academic logs into Azure to mark an essay. Each performs a discrete, legal, deniable act, and the system is arranged so that the moral whole never assembles in any single pair of hands.

Arendt thought the precondition for refusing to be a cog was thinking, the silent internal dialogue between me and myself in which a person asks whether they could live with what they are about to do. Software-as-a-service is, among other things, an apparatus for abolishing that dialogue at scale. It distributes Eichmann’s desk across a hundred thousand login sessions, and asks each of them only to be convenient.

Çubukçu calls the Western academy a “zone of interest” and the universities she means are the ones that run, as mine does, on the rented cloud. The complicity is not metaphorical. It is contractual, and it is invisible by construction.

The master’s tools

Which returns me to a question that inaugurated this newsletter, on whether data is the master’s tool. I began part 1 by suggesting that data might be less a tool than a raw material, that a soil reading is a soil reading whoever holds it, and that the milk a cooperative runs on a colonial railway is still the cooperative’s milk.

I complicated that in a second essay with Donald MacKenzie’s distinction between a camera and an engine: some data merely records, but some — GDP, a doing-business index — is built to move the world toward particular ends, and changing who owns such an engine does not change where it is pointed. The next installment was to ask what a counter-hegemonic data system might look like. What a good atlas would look like.

I am no longer sure that installment can be written in the key I intended, and the materials in this essay are the reason. IPES-Food’s data sovereignty is a version of the good atlas, the cloud re-owned, governed from below. But Audre Lorde’s warning was never only about ownership. Here’s her insight, aimed as Çubukçu’s is, at the academy:

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house: not because the tools are in the wrong hands, but because some instruments produce the relation they appear merely to measure.

An atlas is a way of making lives legible for management. A sovereign atlas is still an atlas. To ask whether farmers should own the data extracted from their fields is already to have conceded that the field should be rendered as data, that the relevant political question is who administers the legibility, rather than whether the act of rendering-legible is itself the thing being done to them.

Çubukçu, reading Scott, lands on a formula in response: there is no way out but through. You cannot exit the hegemony of the present by wishing yourself outside it. TITiPI say the same in the register of infrastructure. To disengage from the cloud, they write, is a fiction. It’s satisfying on the individual and consumerist level, understandable as a tactic, but terrible as a strategy. You cannot unplug your way to freedom.

But neither, they insist, is the work a matter of swapping evil technologies for good ones, or even of reliably telling useful computation apart from abusive. So the two clean exits both close. You cannot leave the house, and you cannot renovate it with the master’s tools. What is left?

What is left

TITiPI do not answer the question. What they offer instead is a practice they call infrastructural rehearsal, drawn from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s idea of abolition as life in rehearsal. It’s an unfinished way to model the future from the present, in the ruins of the thing you cannot yet leave, learning collectively to move in a way no one quite knows how to move.

It’s what I’ve been calling movement science. I would drop the word rehearsal, which holds the future at arm’s length, as a performance still to come. The practices I have in mind are not preparation for the real thing. They are the real thing: knowledge made and tested in experiments of collective struggle, generated from below rather than deduced from the instruments of the order being struggled against. I have traced two cases at length here.

The mondine, the women who weeded the rice paddies of the Po Valley, built a science of endurance and refusal out of song, mutual aid, and the strikes that won them the hours of their own days.

The Black Panther Party met the crisis of social reproduction head-on with free breakfasts, people’s clinics, and sickle-cell screening, turning the provision of food into political praxis and, in the doing, producing testable knowledge about how to live otherwise through practices the cloud cannot file because they were never rendered legible for management in the first place.

This is more than permission to stop looking for The Good Cloud. It is a claim about where the tools to move through the cloud regime are already being made: in the food sovereignty movements that refuse to render the farm as data, in the workers fired for declining to build the targeting cloud, in the campaigns that withdraw a single institution’s consent at a time. Not a tactic that fails as a strategy, but the slow production of the knowledge a different order would need.

Robert Frobisher’s Cloud Atlas Sextet is six overlapping soloists, each taking up and breaking off the others’ lines; you cannot hear the whole of it from any one chair, and you cannot hear it at all without playing. The first cloud atlas, for all its legal force, never made a single cloud hold still. They go on forming and dissolving, indifferent to the plate that named them. The world exceeds the map.

Movement science is the procedures for thinking, for making knowledge that escapes the atlas in the same way: made in the moving, impossible to file. The weak are meat, the strong do eat, and the infrastructure of eating improves every year. Whether the sextet has a second voice is not, in the end, a question you can answer from the cloud. You answer it by joining in the great experiments in what comes next.

The idea originates in France and has spread to Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, with municipal pilots from Schaerbeek to Montpellier to Toulouse. This Tuesday in Barcelona, the cooperative el Pa Sencer presented a fully costed proposal to scale it to the entire Spanish state — 150 euros per person per month, 4.7% of GDP, less than Spain currently spends on the military. The event was chaired by the wonderful Sofía Monsalve Suárez, the current UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

Who better to explain it than Gaëtan Vanloqueren. He’s an agricultural economist at the University of Liège and the University of Lille, teaches in Brussels, and was one of the architects of the Belgian modelling that showed how a national food social security could be funded budget-neutrally over a sixteen-year transition. We first crossed paths when Olivier de Schutter was UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and Gaëtan has been one of the most rigorous voices on this terrain ever since.

Gaëtan was kind enough to volunteer to have our conversation recorded, and then spent far too long making sure the transcript was much better than the version I’d sent him. If you want more video/audio, let me know and I’ll see if I can find a way to do it that doesn’t tax the generosity of my guests.

The piece below, reposted with Sonia’s permission, is an argument about imperial epidemiology brought up to the minute. Ebola is getting bigger and more frequent, and one underreported reason is the device on which you’re reading this: the gold, tantalum, and cobalt in our phones and semiconductors are dug by hand from the Congo basin rainforest, and every track cut into the trees is another roll of the dice on a spillover. I’m grateful she let me put it here. Subscribe to her Substack, Cross Pollinations, for more.

Is our demand for smartphones and semiconductors making Ebola worse?

How cutting down trees to dig for gold and other critical minerals is fueling more and bigger outbreaks of Ebola

Sonia Shah

Jun 08, 2026

I started looking into the connection between deforestation and Ebola outbreaks many years ago, but it was only in the last couple weeks that I learned how much global demand for critical minerals—gold, tantalum, cobalt and others—is playing a role in the ecology of the disease. Turns out, since the first outbreak in 1976, Ebola outbreaks have been getting bigger and more frequent—and global demand for smartphones and semiconductors are one important and underreported reason why.

The lush Congo basin rainforest is the second largest tropical rainforest in the world and also one of the world’s biggest untapped sources of minerals such as cobalt, tantalum, and gold which the tech industry needs to build everything from smartphones to semiconductors. The US, the EU and others consider them “critical minerals” for the economy and national security. Demand is soaring and expected to triple in coming years. Just last year, thanks to Trump’s tariffs, the price of gold doubled.

The result is fattening the bottom lines of tech companies, showering consumers with tech gadgets—and transforming the ecology of Ebola.

By now most of us know that Ebola viruses live in the bodies of animals such as fruit bats and others. And that they spill over into our bodies when we come into intimate contact with their blood, saliva, or excreta, for example by eating a piece of fruit with bat saliva on it or by hunting and slaughtering a bat—or some other Ebola-laden animal—for food.

But here’s the key thing. Not every spillover will start an outbreak. Some spillovers—perhaps most!—will die out without causing any further infections or just a few that then peter out. Getting a chain of transmission going is a probability game. The more spillovers there are, the more likely one will spark.

In the quest to fatten the bottom lines of tech companies and shower consumers with digital gadgets, that’s precisely what’s happening right now.

More on that, below.

How Ebola is linked to the smartphone in your pocket: the back story

As I wrote in the Guardian story that came out last week, nearly 400,000 people in eastern DRC eke out a living by digging for minerals such as gold and tantalum that are required to build smartphones and semiconductors. It’s called “artisanal” mining, which really means informal and unregulated mining, because it’s done without the involvement of major mining companies, who are reluctant to open mines in the area because of the long-standing and ongoing conflict and political instability.

So far, Chinese mining companies have dominated the critical minerals sector in DRC, but the Trump regime is hoping to change that. In March 2025, a lobbyist enticed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to make a deal—access to DRC minerals in exchange for military support. The result led Trump to brag that he “actually stopped the war with Congo and Rwanda,” and that “‘they said to me, ‘please, please, we would love you to come and take our minerals. Which we’ll do.” (Side note: must he always be so weird and rapey?)

A handful of months later, Rubio hosted the inaugural “Critical Minerals Ministerial” in Washington DC, where he entertained delegations from 50 countries hoping to muscle in to the critical minerals sector and counter China’s dominance. The summit facilitated deals to sell copper and cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the world’s biggest untapped sources of critical minerals, to two US companies: Virtus Minerals and Orion Critical Minerals Consortium.

While dollar signs spin in the eyes of mining execs and political leaders, in the mineral-rich Congo basin, informal miners dig up the gold-specked rocks and pass it along into the global supply chain through intermediaries and traders. The higher the price, the deeper they go.

You can see their tracks from space.

Below is a satellite image of the area around Mongbwalu, the mining town that is the epicenter of the current outbreak of Bundibugyo Ebola. The red and orange areas are older deforested areas, with Mongbwalu in the lower right corner. The light blue indicates areas newly deforested in 2025, a year after record deforestation across the Congo basin rainforest. You can see what happened, as the price of gold doubled thanks to Trump’s tariffs, pretty clearly. People started penetrating the pristine forests around Mongbwalu, along the gold-rich riverways to the north and west.

I checked out this satellite imagery while on a video interview with Matthew Hansen, co-founder of the University of Maryland’s Global Land Analysis & Discovery Lab, which has been mapping global deforestation using NASA’s LandSat data since 2012. Hansen has spent time in the DRC, but he hadn’t looked at the area around Mongbwalu before we spoke. “All I know,” he told me, is that DRC is “typically second or third annually in terms of deforestation, and mostly it’s done by hand.”



He was incredulous when he zoomed in on Mongbwalu. “Wow, it is a ton of mining around here,” he said. “Holy shit.” The pattern struck him. It isn’t the expanding circles of growing farms, but ragged lines of deforestation along riverways, snaking deep into the core of the forest, with scattered clearings for small settlements. The footprint of mining was “impressive,” he said, “stellar,” even, though “in a bad way.” It wasn’t the scale of the deforestation that struck him, so much as what this particular kind of mining-related damage does to the forest. “Mines generally in terms of footprint are really small. But the problem is they are opening up the forest in a way that other land use doesn’t. You go out in the middle of the forest.”

By the way: none of this would be visible without data like Hansen’s. This is what the area around Mongbwalu looks like on Google Maps: green and untouched.

Why are people plunging deep into the forest, far away from markets where they can buy food other than Ebola-laden bushmeat and access healthcare and sanitary facilities? It’s the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change, which is making subsistence farming more difficult, unresolved and violent conflict, and the glittering high price of gold and other critical minerals that feed the global tech industry.

So yes, we need more treatments for Bundibugyo, and vaccines, and support for contact tracing and the rest of it. But there’s no number of emergency rooms that will prevent outbreaks of novel diseases like this before they start to spread, as veterinary epidemiologist Chris Walzer of the Wildlife Conservation Society said when we spoke. Outbreaks of new zoonotic pathogens like Bundibugyo Ebola is the price we pay for invading wildlife habitat.

That price—in lives lost to outbreaks, flights diverted, people evacuated, new treatment units constructed, and more—will be paid by the people of DRC and other countries in the region and the international community.

The benefits, on the other hand, flow into the private coffers of tech companies.

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