malteengeler

Last Notes

2026-02-14 07:38:58 GMT

Most people I know are fighting severe anxiety about their individual and our collective future right now, struggling to picture a life worth planning for. It is paralysing, also for me.
Laurie Penny once wrote in their wonderful piece for Wired (On Hope in a Time of Hopelessness”, look it up, it‘s wonderful) that "hope is a muscle" and it "simply" needs training. The best training for me personally is picturing tangible futures beyond capitalism. Eden Medina's book "Cybernetic Revolutionaries" about Project Cybersyn was that kind of a book.
Cybersyn was a socio-technological project for managing, connecting and synchronising industrial production in Chiles socialism under President Allende from 1970 to 1973. Cybersyn is also the story of Stafford Beer. He was one of the leading theorist of cybernetics in the 1960s and 1970s, a scientific field that combined aspects of biology, neuroscience, technology and management in theories of self-regulation of complex systems. Project Cybersyn was an attempt at using computer technology to manage the economy of a nation in a decentralised and non-hierarchal manner. It was explicitly designed to differentiate Chiles political and economic system from the authoritarian, centralised planned society of the Soviet Union.
Reading about technicians and engineers that used their skills, imagination and passion to work on a truly visionary socio-technological project made me realize how much I personally thrive in surroundings where people are doing just that.
At one point Medina quotes Stafford Beer saying „I feel liberated as a person. For the first time in my life, I have real friends; for the first time in my professional career, I am not staggering under the weight of frustration and bitterness”. I deeply share this sentiment. I feel most alive when I am among people that dare to think outside the limitations of the present, not in a fantastical manner but as part of specific political activism and practical implementation.
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2026-02-12 13:47:22 GMT

I read "Capitalist Realism" the first time years ago. I recently re-read it and still love it tremendously. It still speaks to me and probably does so to everyone who feels the crushing weight of a reality that is inherently de-humanizing.
Fisher's words still manage to catch the suffocating impact of neoliberalism on culture, academics and arts, just take this part:
„Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics. Yet this turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship, is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism. [...] Capitalist realism presents itself as a shield protecting us from the perils posed by belief itself. […] „The ‘realism’ here is analogous to the deflationary perspective of a depressive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion.“
These words of course can't really be read without taking into account what the author itself struggled with personally. That is why the book - to me - has also become a reminder to not stare into the abyss for too long. As Jathan Sadowski said in an episode of the "This Machine Kills"-podcast: "We must look at the abyss, analyze the abyss, but we can not get lost in the abyss."
The final (most famous) sentence of Fisher's book says: "From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again." And this is what I personally try to come back to. Being politically active in this historical stage of capitalism can feel like an unending onslaught on our capability to hope and to imagine the better world we fight for. We might fail more often than not. But, as Ewa Majewska (Feminist Antifascism, 2021) reminds us (citing Rosa Luxemburg):
"Failure is inevitable, and it should be experienced as a part of the process of building alternatives to capitalism, not as proof of the futility of such efforts."
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2026-02-09 09:50:14 GMT

"Lies dieses Buch". Wenn eine stabile FLINTA-Genossin das zu einem sagt, dann macht man das. Also habe ich "Mit Männern leben" von Manon Garcia gelesen. Das Buch ist nicht lang und es ist wundervoll geschrieben, nach wenigen Tagen klappte ich es fertig gelesen zu.
Was sagt man als Mann zu diesem Buch? Die Fragen, die Garcia formuliert sind brutal und unentrinnbar: Der Prozess gegen Dominique Pelicot und über 50 andere Männer macht es unmöglich, die tiefsitzende patriarchale Gewalt zu sehen, die unsere Gesellschaft durchzieht und die unmöglich Gegenstand eines einzelnen Prozess gegen einzelne Männer sein kann. Die Parallelen, die Garcia zur Banalität des Bösen im Prozess gegen Adolf Eichmann (Arend) zieht, sind naheliegend.
Wie kann ein Mann in dieser Welt überhaupt Ally jener sein, die täglich diese Gewalt (sichtbar, unsichtbar, offen und verdeckt) erleben? Sich "erschüttert" oder "ratlos" zu zeigen, wäre völlig unzureichend. Niemand, der mit offenen Augen durch die Welt geht, kann von dem überrascht sein, was der Prozess offenbart hat.
Ich erinnere mich gut daran, wie vor einigen Jahren eine Meme die Runde macht, in dem Frauen sich fragten, ob sie lieber mit einem Bären oder einem Mann allein im Wald wären und sich für den Bären entschieden. Unter meinen männlichen Bekannten und teilweise auch Freunden gab es damals Diskussionen ("übertrieben", "aber ich bin doch keiner von denen", "ich fühle mich angegriffen"). Vielleicht ist das Mindeste, was Männer mit dem Buch von Garcia tun können, sich den Reflex abzugewöhnen, sich als "anders" zu betrachten. Alle Männer, auch linke Männer, sind Teil des Problems. Eines, das nicht überwunden wird, indem seine systemische Natur geleugnet wird. (Schonungslose) Selbstkritik und Bruch mit männlichen Normen sind angezeigt. Und das sage ich vor allem zu mir selbst.
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2026-02-01 11:01:12 GMT

Graeber's and Wengrow's "The Dawn Of Everything" is an anthropological and archeological analysis of the question: How did humanity get stuck in a social status quo defined by violence and inequality? Their central task: Dismantling the myth that complex societies, cities or "civilisation" inevitably lead to the bureaucratic, top-down societies of the present. And they take this task on with enormous material ranging from the foraging societies of the last ice age to mesopotamia and the maya to indigenous societies in North America. What they gather is compelling evidence that our picture of the development of complex human societies is shaped by misconceptions and western arrogance. Humans have been able to actively shape their political and social life in countless ways. And among those arrangements have been city-like structures and complex vast communities that were not defined by domination, inequality and violence. The book is more than an historical account though. It carries a very hopeful message. To quote some of their later passages:
"[Understanding this] is critical to understanding how we got stuck, and why these days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages."
"[We use to assume that] ‘civilization’ and ‘complexity’ always come at the price of human freedoms; that participatory democracy is natural in small groups but cannot possibly scale up to anything like a city or a nation state. We know, now, that we are in the presence of myths."
"What is the purpose of all this new knowledge, if not to reshape our conceptions of who we are and what we might yet become?"
The book has its lengths. It is in these lengths though where I found many insights about e.g. self-determined use of technology or how privacy and property intertwine. All in all, I loved the book. It offers hope and inspiration to anyone who is fighting for a reality that needs to look so very different from our present.
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2026-01-30 18:45:46 GMT

I read David Golumbia's "The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism" (2016) years ago and keep coming back to this one quote:
"A fourth and final pillar of extremist thought is also found both inside and outside Bitcoin discourse, but appears there with particular force: the idea that government itself is inherently evil, [...] Of course this view flows somewhat directly from the anarcho-capitalist thought of Rothbard and the antigovernment neoliberal doctrines of Reagan, Thatcher, and their supporters, the Koch brothers, the Cato and Heritage Foundations, and many more. It also flows [...] to only a slightly lesser extent from the general cyberlibertarian predisposition against internet regulation, and the way that many “privacy advocates” focus so much of their energy on what governments are apparently doing and so little on what corporations are provably doing."
Looking at the frustrating inability of (especially) the digital civil society to meaningfully expand their resistance beyond e.g. criticizing government surveillance or fighting for "fair" competition (as in: not question private corporations systemically), I find it as relevant today as the day I first read it.
Golumbia later updated his analysis in his phenomenal book "Cyberlibertarianism" but this - much shorter - book is a perfectly good way to start if you care about the ideologies that shaped todays digital discourse.
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2026-01-27 19:40:57 GMT

"The Will To Change" by bell hooks is 20 years old at this point. Its main message: Patriarchy is not just oppressing people seen as "female" but all of us. Patriarchy is twisting people seen as "male" too, forcing them into broken, incomplete lifes behind masks of dominion and loneliness. Being a feminist is not just an act of solidarity or politeness but a fight for our (male) souls as well.
Men that consider themselves on the political left may have heard most of what bell hooks talks about somewhere else, which is not a surprise. Her work has inspired numerous radical feminist thinkers. Still, it was a pleasure to go back to this book and read what was considered radical at the time of writing when "feminism" was in part still conceived as being in opposition to men. Bell passionately argues for a common cause to overcome patriarchy while very much acknowledging the terror that is male domination. Reading her plea for overcoming the divide between men and women in their fight against the patriarchy was still unique to me as her text noticeably carries the urgency of a time when it was not common sense within the left that patriarchy is hurting men as well. For that alone it is very much worth reading.
Sadly I was not wise enough to pick this book up by myself. It was - as it too often is - recommend to me by a significant other. Thank you ♥️
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2026-01-19 13:29:30 GMT

"Blood In The Machine" by @npub10zp…fkta is a book about two topics: The early 18th century Luddite movement and resistance against tech capitalism. Huge portions of the book are a detailed account of the Luddite-movement (sometimes also mistakably referred to as "machine breakers"), their motives and strategies and the general historical setting of their robust critique of capitalist technology.
The book doesn't simply report the historical events, the years of the uprising and the important figures but uses the Luddites as a blueprint for analyzing the economic dynamics of automation and resistance against technology today.
Over the course of around 400 pages Brian deconstructs and analyzes how terms like "entrepreneur" or "innovation" changed their meaning and how the blatant attack on workers rights or shameless manipulation of regulation were used then and now by tech corporations. The book gives a most valuable framework for understanding todays reality of (digital) capitalism and what we can learn about avenues for fighting back from battles won (and lost) in the past. As a bonus you will also learn how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ada Lovelace's work on (proto) computation are closely linked to Luddism.
To finish this little review I'll leave you with two quotes that stayed with me the most:
"Some machines must be broken, so that they stop producing monsters."
"If the Luddites have taught us anything, it's that robots aren't taking our jobs. Our bosses are."
A wonderful and inspiring book, really ✨
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2026-01-15 13:53:57 GMT

With fascism back on the main stage and big tech CEOs paving its way with money and support I can only repeat my recommendation for "Resisting AI - An Anti-Fascist Approach To Artificial Intelligence" by @npub16wc…ehf0.
I don't think it is an exaggeration when I say that Dan's book is one of the most influential books about so-called "AI". This is even more impressive when taken into account that it was published in 2022, years ahead of today's wave of books about "AI criticism". Dan's book is unique because he combines a clear political perspective with a deep understanding of the technology. The result is the most precise analysis of "AI" as a social and political project I read so far and that I still come back to as the most valuable piece of writing in this field.
When you hear Dan talk you will hear the anecdote that he originally intended to write a book about possible "good use cases" for so-called "AI". He failed. And the result became this book instead. What stuck with me most is the final chapter where he talks about what so-called "AI" might be useful for under better social circumstances. There ist one sentence that I have quoted countless times since. Dan writes:
"It’s highly unlikely that this new apparatus will simply be a repurposing of existing AI for progressive social ends."
Given the many, many voices that (intentionally or not) are trying to salvage "AI" as a mean for social progress in one form or the other, Dan's books dares to remind us that "NO" can be a perfectly valid reaction to "AI" and technology in general.
Read the book it if you want to read THE book about "AI". Read it if you want to read about how to analyse technology in general. And read it if you just want to read a book that is inspiringly unconcerned with satisfying any expectation of conformity with the status quo.
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2025-12-31 06:50:32 GMT

"How To Blow Up A Pipeline" by Andreas Malm is not a manual for physical sabotage but a historical analysis of how political resistance and progressive transformation always intertwined with robust forms of action. Malm talks about how enslavement in Haiti was ended, how the suffragettes protested for women's right for political participation and about the ambivalent relationship between Gandhi and (non)violence. The following quote might give you an idea of the book's content:
"Fed up with their own fruitless deputations to Parliament, the suffragettes soon specialised in the argument of the broken pane', sending hundreds of well-dressed women down streets to smash every window they passed. In the most concentrated volley, in March 1912, Emmeline Pankhurst and her crews brought much of central London to a standstill by shattering the fronts of jewellers, silversmiths, Hamleys toy shop and dozens of other businesses."
- Andreas Malm, How To Blow Up A Pipeline (p. 40)
The book is a centerpiece of theory about political resistance and someday, someone will have to write a luddism-inspired follow-up titled "How To Blow Up A Datacenter".
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2025-12-30 06:58:23 GMT

Das Buch von Tobias Ginsburg habe ich im Frühjahr 2022 gelesen.
Nachdem Anfang 2024 erfolglos versucht wurde, eine europaweite einheitliche Strafbarkeit von Vergewaltigung zu regeln, wurde u.a. der frauenfeindliche Einfluss liberaler "Männerrechtler" auf diesen Prozess intensiv diskutiert. Deshalb und mit Blick auf das fortwährend Kippen des gesellschaftlichen Klimas in Richtung toxische, militaristische Männlichkeit, hat das Buch auch Ende 2025 nichts an Aktualität verloren.
Mir ist insbesondere des Kapitel zu den FDP-Männerorganisationen im Gedächtnis. Das Buch schildert sehr eindrücklich und plastisch, welche Ansichten und Ideologien in diesen Kreisen herrschen und wie diese Hand in Hand mit rechten und religiösen Strömungen Einfluss auf nationale und europäische Gleichstellungspolitik nehmen.
Das Buch ist keine leichte Kost, im Gegenteil. Gleichzeitig ist das Geschilderte unmittelbar mit der gewaltvollen Lebensrealität von Millionen nicht-cis-männlicher Menschen verbunden. Diese Zusammenhänge besser zu verstehen, war für meine Perspektive auf anti-patriarchale Kämpfe und Allianzen deshalb super wertvoll.
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