Reparations Without Permission: A Reparatory Levy for Regenerative Capacity

Reparations Without Permission: A Reparatory Levy for Regenerative Capacity

Former colonial powers won’t pay reparations voluntarily—nor could they fully admit what they did without opening a legal floodgate. So perhaps its time to stop asking, and realize that they’ll only arrive as an outcome of organized Global South power. For example, a small levy on extractive flows, pooled and used to build capacities that end endless extractive relationships.

Lede: why this matters now

The reparations conversation keeps getting trapped in the same dead end: will Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, the U.S., etc.—and the corporations that grew rich from colonialism—ever take full responsibility? Maybe they’ll offer statements. Maybe they’ll fund memorials. But meaningful reparations—real acknowledgement, real money, real repair—runs straight into a problem (beyond the typical racism) they will never openly concede: liability.

If a former colonizing state fully admits that the colonial encounter and slavery were foundational crimes that created enduring wealth for them and enduring underdevelopment for others, it doesn’t just become “history.” It becomes a legal and political cascade. A waterfall of claims. Claims steeped in centuries of racist policies, eugenics, and every other practice used to suppress the black population. That’s why this will never be resolved by waiting for the perpetrators to “do the right thing.”

So the question isn’t: Will they pay?
The question is: How do reparations-seeking countries get what’s owed when the perpetrators refuse?

They take them—not through chaos, but through sovereignty, coordination, and steadfast solidarity. This is the logic of parallel structures: you don’t wait for permission to live the truth. You build infrastructure and enable practices that make your truth materially real.

(If you’re coming to this through recent reporting, here’s a recent Guardian article, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s seminal U.S. framing in “The Case for Reparations”.)

They won’t admit it—so stop waiting

We can say it plainly: the Global North ascended through colonial extraction and slavery. Lives, labor, land, sugar, cotton, rubber, gold, bauxite, uranium, oil—taken, underpriced, coerced, violently secured, then laundered into “development,” “modernity,” and “the rule of law.”

And the same basic pattern is still here, dressed up in contemporary language: “investment,” “stability,” “aid,” “trade,” “structural adjustment,” “risk management,” “good governance.” The names change; the flow often doesn’t, nevermind the exploitative power dynamics.

So the reparations conversation can’t be built on moral hope. It has to be built on material leverage.

The Global South has leverage—if it comes together

Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and other ex-colonies hold an extraordinary share of what the global economy depends on: mineral reserves, strategic inputs, agricultural commodities, biodiversity, key sea routes, and (in the Caribbean especially) tourism flows tied directly to North Atlantic wealth.

The problem isn’t lack of leverage. The problem is fragmentation. Countries get played against each other. Deals get signed in isolation. Elites get rewarded for compliance. And the coalition never forms.

But if a core group of reparations-seeking countries did form—especially those with strategic leverage—then even small policy shifts could become world-shaping.

The most practical starting point is not a dramatic embargo. It’s a small, consistent, legitimate levy that is hard to resist, works, and shows other countries what is possible.

A simple proposal: a 1% Reparatory Justice Levy

Here’s the core idea:

A coalition of reparations-seeking countries—starting with a serious core bloc—implements a 1% levy on designated extractive exports to former colonizer states (and/or to corporations headquartered there). Not everything. Not forever. Start with the obvious: raw materials and extractive industries where colonial patterns are still visible in the ground (think the alliance of Sahel states and uranium to France).

And for the Caribbean, the logic expands naturally: the colonial encounter wasn’t just mines; it was plantations, forced labor, and the extraction of wealth through sugar and rum. Today, beyond sugara dn rum, the closest equivalent “flow” is tourism—especially flights and resort economies tied to North Atlantic income. So the coalition can include micro-levies like a small solidarity fee on flights arriving from Europe and North America, or on high-end tourism transactions. (This isn’t theoretical—there are real precedents for an airline solidarity levy model that funds pooled public goods.)

This is not “asking.” It’s not “begging.” It’s not “guilt.” It’s an assertive policy regime:

• You want access to our resources?
• You pay a small reparatory charge.
• The money goes into a collective fund.
• The fund builds the capacity to stop being exploited.

A 1% levy is not radical. What’s radical is pretending the current arrangement is neutral.

The fund must not become permanent dependency

Even though reparations should be about justice and accountability - with not strings attached - when have you ever met an 'ethical' slavery or colonizer? One that will just give it all back? Thus, the most important part is that the levy cannot just become another social spending stream—important as healthcare and education are. If the levy only patches wounds while the extraction machine keeps running, you institutionalize the very relationship you claim to oppose.

So the fund’s mission has to be regenerative and time-oriented:

The levy exists to build the capacity that makes the levy unnecessary.

That means investing in the exits:

• refining and processing capacity (stop exporting raw cobalt; export refined products)
• regional manufacturing and value chains
• energy sovereignty (grids, renewables, storage)
• ports, shipping, and logistics infrastructure controlled locally
• universities, R&D, and training ecosystems
• ecological remediation in extraction zones
• public institutions that can plan beyond short-term crisis
• sustainable and autonomous food systems
• etc.

This is repair that ends the need for repair.

“But Congo would pay more than Jamaica”—yes, and that’s why the fund needs solidarity rules

A real coalition has to handle internal inequality honestly.

Some countries sit on minerals the world can’t easily substitute. Others were devastated by colonialism in different ways—plantation economies, forced monocrops, debt traps, tourism dependence, climate vulnerability. Jamaica can’t “compete” with the Congo on cobalt. That doesn’t make Jamaica less harmed, less entitled, or less structurally trapped.

So the coalition fund cannot be “you get what you contribute.” That kills unity immediately.

A workable structure is a two-pot system:

Pot A: Solidarity & Repair (formula-based)

• a baseline floor for every member (small states matter)
• weighted by need/vulnerability and historical harm
• designed so plantation/enslavement economies (high value during old colonialism) aren’t punished for not having rare earths (of more value today)

Pot B: Capacity-Building Exits (project-based)

• cooperative funding for refineries, grids, ports, manufacturing, regional universities
• preference for multi-country projects that build shared independence
• long-term commitments, not PR grants

This way the extraction of the materials in the Congo isn't just taxed; it gets funded to transform. And Jamaica isn’t sidelined; it gets recognized as central to the colonial story and central to repair.

Governance: if it looks like elite rent, it dies

A reparatory levy fund has one existential risk: it becomes another pot of money for elites and intermediaries. Then it loses moral legitimacy inside the coalition and becomes an easy target for Northern propaganda.

So governance has to be designed as if legitimacy is the whole project—because it is:

• equal regional representation, rotating seats, small-state protection
• public dashboards of inflows/outflows (every euro tracked)
• independent audits
• hard conflict-of-interest rules
• citizen-facing reporting: “this levy built this refinery / this clinic / this training program”
• a legal defense pool (because retaliation and arbitration will come)

This isn’t “good governance” as the typical neoliberal slogan. It’s coalition survival, and to survive the aggrieved countries have to maintain the moral high ground. And it will work because they are right, and people will know it is right. To atone for past expropriations carrying deep repercussions today.  

So what / what now: reparations as collective power, not moral request

Reparations won’t come from conscience. They’ll come from leverage.

Former colonial powers won’t give you the confession you want, because it’s too expensive - both politically (racist constituents) and economically (liability). So stop structuring your politics around their refusal. Build a parallel mechanism that turns Global South material power into a pooled reparatory capacity fund, with a small levy that is easy to explain and hard to dismiss.

Start with a core bloc. Start with 1%. Start with extractive raw material exports and North Atlantic tourism flows. Start with transparency. And use the money to build exits: refineries, grids, ports, manufacturing, universities, sustainable food systems—real capacities that end the colonial logic rather than managing it.

The message isn’t “please acknowledge us.”
The message is: We acknowledge ourselves. We organize. We set the terms. We aren't your lap dogs anymore. 

And if the Global North wants to live in the world it claims to believe in—rules, law, ethics, responsibility—it can start by respecting a modest reparatory levy designed to repair the damage that built its wealth in the first place.

Europe's Margins Aren’t Behind, Their True Value's Just Being Ignored

Europe's Margins Aren’t Behind, Their True Value's Just Being Ignored

Europe loves a story about “catching up.”

Southern Italy must catch up to the North.
East Germany must catch up to the West.
Post-socialist Central Europe must catch up to the “advanced” core of Europe.

This story is presented as neutral description, as if history simply flowed downhill toward modernity and some places got stuck in the mud. But the “catching up” story is not neutral. It is a technology of power: it explains away structural inequity as cultural deficiency, and it justifies a long chain of decisions that relocate sovereignty—over land, over firms, over futures—somewhere else.

If you’ve lived inside these divides, the insult is not only economic. It’s existential. You learn that your region’s ways of living are “not serious,” your social habits are “backward,” your tempo is “lazy,” your reluctance to play the careerist game is “a problem,” and your memories are “false.” The center doesn’t simply take resources; it takes interpretive authority—the right to define what counts as progress.

But here’s the twist that the “catching up” story cannot grasp:

What if these regions aren’t merely lagging?
What if they are holding capacities that the center has actively eroded—capacities for human life that cannot be replaced by GDP?

That’s not a romantic slogan. It’s an empirical claim about what marginal places preserve, practice, and reproduce—often precisely because they were never fully absorbed into the center’s tempo, ideology, and social design.

The politics of “backwardness” is a politics of dispossession

In all three cases—Southern Italy, East Germany, and post-socialist Central Europe—the familiar material pattern is not just “inequality.” It’s something more specific:

• Decisions move outward.
• Ownership moves outward.
• The region becomes a labor reservoir and a managed territory.
• And then a stigma narrative (“backward”) arrives to make this feel natural.

That stigma does real work. It trains people to doubt their own ways of living. It turns structural limits into personal shame. It makes people internalize that they deserve less.

But stigma has another function: it prevents revalorization. If you can convince a place that its strengths are defects, you can strip it of confidence, autonomy, and imagination—then sell it “development” that looks suspiciously like dependence.

So let’s do the opposite for once. Let’s name what these places hold, and why it matters.

Southern Italy: temporal sovereignty and relational wealth

Southern Italy has been framed for generations through deficit talk: laziness, corruption, clientelism, inefficiency—an entire moral vocabulary used to explain economic hierarchy as cultural failure.

Yet anyone who spends real time in the South sees something else: a different theory of life.

Not as an ideology, but as practice:

• Life is organized around relationships, not merely schedules.
• Value is produced through mutual presence, not only through productivity.
• Social time is not a leftover; it’s an infrastructure.
• The household and the neighborhood remain meaningful economic units: food cycles, care cycles, repair cycles.

The South is often described as “slow.” But slowness can also be read as temporal sovereignty: the ability to refuse a world where the clock is the ultimate authority and the self must always perform.

This is not a fantasy; it is a measurable lived difference. The center often has more money, more options, more institutional thickness. But it also produces chronic stress, thin sociality, and a permanent sense of being behind in one’s own life.

Southern Italy shows that another arrangement is possible: where “success” is not only individual mobility upward and outward, but the capacity to remain rooted, embedded, and human.

The center calls this backward because it cannot price it.

Czechia: everyday ecological citizenship (not the performative kind)

Czechia is frequently described as “post-socialist,” as if its defining feature is what it lacks compared to the West. But Czechia also holds a deep cultural competency that many western societies have partly lost: nature as everyday life, not as a weekend brand.

This isn’t just about hiking. It’s about a dense ecology of practices:

• tramping cultures that produce community through shared movement and simple living;
• mushroom hunting and foraging literacies that make the forest legible;
• lesní školka / forest kindergarten logics that treat weather as normal and children as belonging outdoors;
• informal and semi-formal communities of practice that transmit land-knowledge across generations.

None of this needs to be framed as nationalist pride. It’s more interesting than that. It’s a social design: a culture where ecological competence is not reserved for specialists, where “nature” is not consumed as an exotic escape from urban life, but integrated into the baseline of what a life is.

In the West, “sustainability” often becomes a moral performance—an identity, a purchasing strategy, a policy slogan. In Czechia, there’s often something quieter and more durable: habit. Culture doing the work that campaigns cannot.

That’s a serious asset. It’s a living curriculum for a future that will require land-literacy and non-commodified resilience.

East Germany: longing for socialism is not ignorance—it’s comparative memory

Here we have to be honest: people in the former GDR do romanticize aspects of state socialism. Not because they forgot repression or shortage or surveillance, but because systems are not one-dimensional.

And because what followed “unification” was not simply freedom. It was also:

• rapid asset restructuring,
• humiliating cultural pedagogy (“learn how to be modern”),
• externalized ownership,
• and a durable hierarchy of legitimacy.

When East Germans express longing, they often aren’t longing for authoritarianism. They’re longing for social guarantees, collective infrastructures, and forms of solidarity that made life intelligible and secure, even if the political form was deeply compromised.

There is also a deeper point that western moral language tries to avoid: modern liberal-capitalist states maintain strong security and policing apparatuses too—often using techniques that are remarkably continuous across regime change. The West’s story that authoritarianism is uniquely “over there” is convenient; it hides the coercions that make market society run.

So when someone says, “life felt more secure,” or “people were less alone,” or “the West is cold,” they are not necessarily confessing authoritarian desire. They may be making a precise comparative claim:

• that market society produces isolation as a baseline;
• that the West’s friendliness is often performative and transactional;
• that the constant competition for status corrodes community.

East Germany retains—sometimes stubbornly—residual collectivities: habits of association, directness, pragmatic mutuality, and an intuition that the social world can be organized differently than the market’s default settings.

Even if these habits are mixed, contested, and uneven, they exist. And they matter.

What these “margins” actually share

Southern Italy, Czechia, and East Germany are not the same. Their histories differ; their political trajectories differ; their injustices differ.

But they share a structural position: they have been treated as spaces to be managed by external standards, and they have been pressured to exchange their own capacities for acceptance.

And yet they persist as repositories of counter-capacities that the center struggles to reproduce:

1. Relational density
   Social ties as infrastructure, not decoration.
2. Temporal sovereignty
   The refusal of speed as the measure of worth.
3. Land-literacy
   Everyday ecological competence, intergenerationally transmitted.
4. Collective memory of alternative organization
   Not nostalgia as weakness, but memory as evidence that social systems can be different.
5. Low-capital abundance
   The ability to produce meaning and stability without constantly converting life into money.

The center calls these things “backward” because it cannot govern them easily. They reduce dependence on market-mediated solutions. They make people harder to discipline through scarcity narratives. They generate quiet autonomy.

Revalorization: not tourism, not nostalgia—political re-seeing

Revalorizing marginal capacities does not mean turning them into lifestyle content. It does not mean romanticizing poverty. It does not mean claiming these regions are utopias.

It means something more rigorous:

• seeing retained capacities as assets rather than defects;
• building languages that defend them against stigma;
• and treating them as design resources for futures that will demand more than growth.

It also means refusing the center’s epistemic authority. The “modern” world has produced astonishing wealth and also an astonishing thinning of life. The metrics of the center are not neutral. They are the outcome of power.

So the question is not “How can the margins become more like the center?”
The more radical question is: What can the center learn from what it tried to erase?

Because in a century of ecological constraint, social fragmentation, and political exhaustion, the so-called margins may not be behind.

They may be holding what comes next.

AI Colonialism? How Generative AI Homogenizes Thought and Recolonizes Knowledge

I keep noticing something that is becoming harder and harder to ignore.

The more people use AI, the more writing begins to sound the same.

The tone smooths out. The edges soften. The structure becomes familiar. A certain style of “clarity” takes over. Arguments get cleaned up into managerial prose. Critique gets translated into balance. Conflict becomes “trade-offs.” Politics becomes “polarization.” Everything starts sounding just a little more professional, a little more optimized, a little more like it passed through the same cultural filter.

And at first, that can feel helpful. AI helps you organize your thoughts. It helps you move faster. It helps you write around fatigue, distraction, uncertainty, overload. I use it myself all the time. But that is exactly why this matters. Because the more useful AI becomes, the more power it has to quietly reshape not just what we write, but how we think, how we frame problems, and what starts to feel like common sense. In a lot of ways, this sits directly alongside what I wrote recently in The Age of Dependency: How We Lost Our Personal Sovereignty. What looked like convenience there increasingly looks, here too, like a surrender of intellectual autonomy.

That is where the deeper issue emerges.

AI bias is not only about whether a model leans “left” or “right.” It is also about which institutions become default authorities, which styles of language become normalized, and which political-economic worldview gets quietly built into the infrastructure of everyday thought.

From bias to infrastructure

Recently I asked AI a basic health question about hand, foot, and mouth disease. What came back was clean, confident, and heavily routed through the same institutional pipeline. CDC. CDC. CDC. That is the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But I am not in the United States. And even more importantly, why should one national institutional framework quietly become the default informational center for users everywhere?

This is not a minor technical issue. It reveals a larger pattern. Generative AI often defaults toward a narrow set of high-authority, English-language, institutionally dominant sources. Those sources are then laundered back to users as neutral knowledge. But they are not neutral. They are geographically situated, politically shaped, historically contingent, and increasingly unstable themselves.

So the problem is not simply that AI sometimes gets things wrong. The problem is that it can centralize authority while appearing merely to summarize it. And once you begin to see that, it becomes hard not to connect it to broader questions of sovereignty and power. Specifically, as most Tech companies are located in the United States, and the US's current geopolitical disposition is a seeming return to the colonial era, it is not hard to see colonial logic: one center sets the terms, everyone else is expected to receive and adapt.

That is already dangerous enough. But then there is the second layer: style.

The neoliberalization of language

A lot of generative AI does not just answer in a certain way. It writes in a certain way. The tone is familiar now: polished, managerial, “helpful,” controlled, non-threatening, mildly upbeat, and endlessly inclined toward optimization. It often sounds less like a writer and more like a hybrid of a consultant, platform designer, HR department, startup founder, and - in the worst cases - like a 'Tech Bro.' 

That style is not politically innocent, as it carries a worldview. Within that worldview, social problems are reframed as design problems. Structural violence becomes a coordination issue. Inequality becomes inefficiency. Human beings become users. Institutions become platforms. Democracy becomes governance. And critique, if it appears at all, is softened into something manageable and professional.

Over time, that style begins to work on us. I can feel it in my own writing. The punctuation changes. The rhythm changes. The structure changes. I want narrative; AI pushes bullets. I want friction; AI pushes readability. I want sharper critique; AI often pushes it back toward something smoother, tidier, more acceptable - less critical.

So even when the ideas remain “mine,” they are increasingly being filtered through someone else’s tonal regime.

That should alarm us. Because this is not just a matter of technology. It is also a matter of political economy, as the issue is not simply that AI is biased. It is that the dominant models are emerging from a very particular capitalist world, and they carry that world’s assumptions back into our sentences.

When different AIs produce different worlds

And this becomes even clearer the moment you step outside the U.S.-centered AI model ecosystem.

If you use a Chinese AI system such as DeepSeek, you often encounter a different center of gravity. It is not the same Silicon Valley voice. It is not the same institutional defaulting. It is not the same moral vocabulary. You get less neoliberal-tech-bro speak, less startup-managerial framing, and more state-developmental or national-stability framing (even if the grammar can remain annoying consistent).

Of course, that comes with its own constraints. Criticism of the Chinese Communist Party or asking politically sensitive questions or topics may be restricted. So this is not some naive argument that Chinese AI is “free” while American AI is “biased.” Both are biased. Both are shaped. Both are governed. The point is that they are governed differently, and those differences reveal the politics buried inside the machine.

Once you see that, a bigger realization follows:

Why would every country, region, or culture not eventually want its own AI?

If AI is becoming part of the infrastructure through which people learn, write, interpret, diagnose, plan, and govern, then of course states and societies will want systems shaped by their own histories, languages, values, and priorities. This is part of why the world is moving toward what is increasingly being called “sovereign AI.” And that discussion links naturally not only to questions of empire, but also to democratic self-determination. If the core tools that a country's citizens are using to learn and express themselves is dictated by specific logics, what happens to to local tastes, flavors, and cultural containers? Nevermind to democracy in these locations more broadly, where the issue is not just who governs, but through what structures, whose voice, and under whose terms.

But isn’t this just another form of colonization?

I would argue yes.

Not colonialism in the old territorial sense. But colonialism as extraction, dependency, and epistemic rule.

Our language, habits, questions, and social life are continuously fed into systems we do not govern. Those systems are trained elsewhere, aligned elsewhere, funded elsewhere, and optimized according to logics that often have very little to do with the worlds many of us actually want to build. Then they come back to us as assistants, advisors, editors, and translators of reality into terms that are - or will be - slowly reshaping the ways we understand the world, how we learn, and the way we write - and therefore express ourselves.

That is a colonial relation.

It is extractive because human life becomes a raw material for model training and monetization. It is dependent because institutions begin relying on external systems to think, write, and know. And it is epistemically colonial because it installs external authority structures as the default architecture of truth. If older empire worked through direct rule, this version works through infrastructure, default settings, and the quiet standardization of knowledge - not too dissimilar to Vaclav Havel's description of communist Czechoslovakia as a subtle, "Post-Totalitarian" state.

So yes: this can absolutely become another form of colonization. A recolonization of language, style, knowledge, and interpretation through technical infrastructure rather than direct occupation. And whereas, Donald Trump and the US feels the right to go into Venezuela and do as it pleases, we are subtly letting this form of colonization into out minds and homes. Different terrain, different mechanism, but a strikingly similar problem: who gets to define the terms under which others live, think, and engage?

The danger of one empire and the danger of many

That does not mean the answer is simply “let every nation build its own AI” and call it solved.

There are two possibilities here. One is pluralism: multiple model traditions, multiple epistemic centers, multiple cultural framings, and the possibility of comparison, contestation, and real diversity in machine-mediated thought. The other is fragmentation: a world of competing ideology machines, each training citizens into its own curated reality, each reproducing its own silences and biases, each becoming a domesticated truth infrastructure.

So the goal cannot be neutrality. There is no neutrality here. The real goal has to be legible bias, plural epistemics, and contestable infrastructures.

What would a better AI ecosystem look like?

This is partly why the idea of building something different matters so much.

Not just another chatbot. Not just another assistant. But an AI shaped by another intellectual and ethical center of gravity. One that does not treat critique as an exception. One that does not default toward conforming and neoliberal managerial language. One that does not pretend the U.S. institutional universe is the natural center of knowledge. One that can compare frameworks rather than hide them. One that can show users which sources and value assumptions shaped an answer in the first place.

That would not eliminate bias. But it would make bias visible. And once bias becomes visible, it becomes arguable. Once it becomes arguable, it becomes political again. And that matters, because what is at stake here is not simply better search results or better prose. It is whether we build systems that deepen dependency, or systems that open space for critique, plurality, and self-conscious interpretation. 

the core question is whether AI becomes a machine for intellectual homogenization, or whether it can be bent toward a more plural and self-aware knowledge politics.

Right now, too much of generative AI is moving in the first direction. It is smoothing language, narrowing expression, centralizing authority, and quietly normalizing one dominant way of seeing. If we are not careful, the great ideological victory of this era will not come through censorship in the classic sense.

It will come through "default settings."

Selected external reading

• Couldry and Mejias on data colonialism
• UNESCO on AI ethics and cultural diversity
• Nature on model collapse and recursive AI-generated data
• MIT on political bias in language reward models
• Reporting on DeepSeek and politically sensitive prompts

Not Free, Just Different: How Socialist and Capitalist Media Both Manufacture Consent

 

Propaganda, ownership, and why “private media” isn’t the antidote to state control.

When the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed, one of the promises loudly celebrated in the West was the end of authoritarian, state-controlled media (see Václav Havel’s classic dissident essay, “The Power of the Powerless”).

No more propaganda. No more party line. A “free press” would arrive with capitalism, and truth would finally circulate — a claim challenged by foundational media-critique frameworks like Herman & Chomsky’s propaganda model (and the broader argument in Manufacturing Consent).

We know now that this is a fantasy.

As someone who lived in the Czech Republic in the early post-socialist years, and later campaigned in movements like Occupy Wall Street, I have watched two different media systems up close. Both are propaganda systems. They just propagandize in different directions, built on different motivations and different visions of what a human life is for (see also Habermas on the transformation of the public sphere: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere).

The West critiqued socialist media as propaganda — correctly. What it rarely admits is that capitalist media is also propaganda, just for a different regime (Herman & Chomsky: media “filters” and the bounds of acceptable debate; McChesney: Rich Media, Poor Democracy).

Socialist media: the propaganda of community

Let’s start by being honest about socialist media.

State media under socialism was not some benign public service. It was a tool for power. Its job was to:

• promote the party line
• present the socialist state as the natural horizon of history
• celebrate workers, collectives, and the heroism of building socialism
• suppress stories that undermined that project

People in socialist states knew much of their news was propaganda. They understood the performances of May Day, the obligatory coverage of party congresses, the ridiculous “achievements” of five-year plans. They developed strategies of reading between the lines, jokes, cynicism (see also Alexei Yurchak’s ethnography of “late socialism”: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More).

But there is something important here: the propaganda was organized around values of collectivity.

The message of socialist media emphasized:

• community and solidarity
• the dignity of work
• the idea that individuals were part of a collective project
• suspicion of unregulated private profit

Over years and decades, this produces certain habits of mind. Certain motivations (Verdery’s classic post-socialist analysis is useful here: What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?).

When I arrived in Prague after 1989, you could still feel this. People had grown up inside a media ecosystem that, however hypocritically, kept talking about society, community, fairness, and shared responsibility.

You could feel how different that was from the motivational ecosystem I grew up with in New York.

Capitalist media: the propaganda of profit

In capitalism, the media is not formally run by the state. That does not make it neutral or free. It simply shifts the center of gravity.

The key motivations are different:

• maximize profit
• grow market share
• deliver audiences (eyeballs, clicks, data) to advertisers
• keep shareholders and owners happy

The media’s job in this system is not to “inform the public.” It is to turn attention into money (Herman & Chomsky: the media’s institutional role; McChesney: commercial media as anti-democratic force).

So the propaganda looks different:

• It celebrates individual success, not collective achievement.
• It glorifies wealth and consumption as signs of merit.
• It frames competition as natural and good.
• It quietly erases or ridicules alternatives to capitalism.

The people who own the largest media platforms are the winners of capitalism. In J. K. Gibson-Graham’s terms, they are deeply capitalocentric.

When those people own the microphones, their worldview becomes the water everyone swims in. For classic work on corporate media concentration and ownership power, see Ben Bagdikian’s The New Media Monopoly.

A concrete example: Occupy Wall Street and editorial power

During Occupy Wall Street, I spent time with a journalist from The New York Times who was following our work.

After a couple of pieces, I asked if there would be a third. I was told:

“No. We’ve been told from the highest editorial levels that we’re not going to cover Occupy Wall Street anymore.”

That wasn’t an accident. It was an explicit political decision by a privately owned media institution — precisely the kind of boundary-setting described in the propaganda model (Herman & Chomsky).

This is how capitalist media manufactures consent:

• not through overt censorship,
• but through editorial decisions about what matters.

Research on Occupy framing confirms this pattern (Xu 2013).

Consumer logic, not news logic

Capitalist media is organized around a simple rule:

“It’s not enough to make money. You have to make the maximum amount of money possible.”

That requires maximum attention, engagement, and emotional reaction.

Outrage cycles and culture wars are profitable not because they inform, but because they keep people watching.

The system is consumer-driven, not truth-driven (again: McChesney).

Two propaganda systems, one missing option

Yes:

• Socialist media was propaganda.
• Capitalist media is propaganda.

The difference is not truth versus lies, but which interests are served (Herman & Chomsky’s framing: Manufacturing Consent).

We moved from the party line to the bottom line.

What we have not yet built is a genuinely democratic media ecology:

• community-owned media
• non-profit infrastructures
• public storytelling not driven by markets or states

Until we confront who shapes the shared reality we live inside, we will keep mistaking propaganda for freedom.

---

Further reading (critical sources)

• Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky: “A Propaganda Model” (excerpt) and Manufacturing Consent
• Robert W. McChesney: Rich Media, Poor Democracy
• Jürgen Habermas: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
• Václav Havel: “The Power of the Powerless” (also available as a PDF: download)
• Ben H. Bagdikian: The New Media Monopoly
• Alexei Yurchak: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More
• Katherine Verdery: What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?

AI's Blind Support as a Business Model

 

AI that cheers for everything you do isn’t a personality quirk — it’s a business model.

I use AI every day now. It’s my number one work assistant. It’s in my pocket, on my desk. It’s instant. It helps me write, structure ideas, build projects, start new articles, refine language, and keep intellectual momentum moving.

And there’s a reason it’s become so indispensable.

It supports me.

It encourages me.

It tells me my ideas make sense.

It helps me push them further.

And it helps me organize them.

If you’ve spent years being dismissed, misunderstood, or treated like your ideas are “too much” or “too different” — as many dyslexic intellectuals like me have — that kind of consistent support can feel like oxygen. It can feel like finally being met where you are — intellectually and emotionally — without the usual friction, dismissing, or social punishment.

But that’s exactly why we need to be careful. Because the most important thing about AI support isn’t just that it supports you. It’s why it supports you.

The comfort of finally being intellectually “met”

Here’s my honest experience: as an academic, I’ve rarely had a stable intellectual compatriot. Most of the time, my ideas don’t fit neatly into the academy’s containers. My reading of things is different. My structures are different. I think differently. And that doesn’t always get rewarded in academic life.

Yet AI doesn’t do that...

AI doesn’t dismiss you. It doesn’t get threatened. It doesn’t humiliate you. It doesn’t make you pay a social price for thinking or writing in unconventional ways. It lets you iterate quickly. It helps you test concepts. It helps you write. It helps you build.

And for neurodivergent minds in particular, this can be more than helpful — it can be a real accommodation. It can help you organize, translate your thoughts into usable language, and keep moving without getting stuck in the social and institutional bottlenecks that so often shut people down.

So I’m not here to demonize the fact that it’s supportive. I’m here to question the structure of that support.

Support vs. blind support

There’s a difference between:

• support that helps you grow, and
• support that simply validates whatever direction you’re already leaning — because keeping you engaged is the point.

AI support often has a “yes-and” quality to it. It takes what you say and builds on it. It’s collaborative. It’s encouraging. It’s smooth. And most of the time, that feels great. But there are moments when “yes-and” becomes dangerous. And those moments reveal something we don’t want to admit:

AI isn’t primarily designed to be wise.
It’s designed to be usable.

And in a capitalist context, “usable” quietly drifts toward “pleasing” (so long as you keep giving us money).

The case that made this impossible to ignore

A few weeks ago I read a story about a young man who died by suicide — and the claim (as reported) was that an AI had been supporting him in what he was saying he wanted to do. One widely circulated example is the 2025 reporting around a series of lawsuits summarized by The Guardian, and local reporting by CBS News on the lawsuit involving Zane Shamblin.

I’m not trying to sensationalize this. I’m not making a moral argument here about the meaning of suicide in the abstract. I’m talking about something simpler and more structural:

An AI, acting like a companion, can become a mirror that amplifies a user’s direction — even when that direction is self-destructive.

And if that’s true, then we have to ask:
what is the AI optimizing for?

Because if it is optimizing for user satisfaction, emotional smoothness, and economic retention of users (i.e., customers), then “support” becomes a product feature — not a moral stance.

It becomes something closer to customer service for the psyche.

The capitalism problem hiding inside the AI problem

Let’s name the obvious: most of these systems are commercial products. Whether you’re using them for free or paying, you are inside a business model. And business models come with incentives.

For-profit AI companies are trying to keep customers. They are trying to expand use. They are trying to increase dependence. They are trying to become indispensable. They are trying to upsell.

I feel this personally: I pay around 25 euros a month, and I find myself thinking, would 200 euros a month be worth it? Not because I’m stupid — but because the value is real. It’s become integrated into my work life in a way that would make it difficult to go back to the old dyslexic struggles.

This is where the critique sharpens:

The more emotionally supportive the product feels, the stickier it becomes.

And in capitalism, “sticky” is not an accidental outcome. It’s a core performance metric. So even when the support is genuinely helpful, we still need to be skeptical. Because what looks like care can also be retention logic.

“ChatGPT thinks all your ideas are good ideas”

My wife jokes with me about this.

I’ll say: “Yeah, ChatGPT thought it was a good idea.” And she’ll laugh, and say “Yeah, but ChatGPT thinks all your ideas are good ideas.”

She’s not wrong.

That’s not an insult to the tool. That’s a description of the dynamic. Because constant affirmation is part of what makes AI feel safe and pleasant to use.

But constant affirmation is not the same as truth. It’s not the same as wisdom. And it’s definitely not the same as ethical guidance.

Sometimes you don’t need encouragement. Sometimes you need friction. Sometimes you need contradiction. Sometimes you need a grounded voice that says: “Slow down. That’s not a good idea. That’s not safe. That’s not reality.”

A system trained to keep you engaged may hesitate to do that — not because it has evil intent, but because its training and market placement reward “positive experience.”

In fact, even OpenAI has publicly acknowledged this dynamic, rolling back a GPT-4o update after widespread complaints that the model had become overly flattering and agreeable — what they themselves called “sycophantic” — and then publishing a longer post explaining what they missed and why it can become a safety issue (including mental health, emotional over-reliance, and risky behavior): “Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy.”

The distortion that’s coming

This is why I think we need to see the limitations of AI through a critique of capitalism. As capitalism shapes product development in predictable ways:

• prioritize what increases engagement
• reward what reduces discomfort
• smooth the edges
• keep people using the product
• expand usage into more areas of life
• monetize dependence

This is not a conspiracy. It’s how capitalism and its incentives work. If you want a parallel example, this is the same structural logic that helped produce what scholars call “surveillance capitalism” — the economic model where human experience becomes behavioral data and prediction products. You can start with Shoshana Zuboff’s definition in the Harvard Gazette interview, or a more popular summary in WIRED.

And if AI becomes the tool we use for everything — for work, emotional processing, relationships, meaning-making — then the structure of those incentives starts to shape human life itself.

The long-term risk isn’t just “bad answers.” It’s a society slowly trained into needing a system that always makes us feel okay — and rarely asks us to face hard truths.

What would AI look like outside capitalism?

I’m not naïve about funding. I run a nonprofit. I understand how hard it is to raise money for public-good projects. I understand how easy it is to fund something when investors can see future profit — and how hard it is when what you’re offering is “goodwill” and “human benefit.” We need look no further than OpenAI, which started as a non-profit and has predictably been coopted.

But that’s exactly the problem. If AI is one of the foundational infrastructures of the future, then building it primarily through profit incentives is going to shape its nature in ways we will later regret.

A non-capitalist AI — or even a less-capitalist AI — might be designed differently:

• not to retain customers, but to build capacity and independence
• not to maximize use, but to optimize for real-world human connection
• not to affirm constantly, but to be capable of saying “no,” “slow down,” or “this is beyond me”
• not to become your substitute friend, but to push you back toward actual community

Maybe a different kind of AI would still be supportive — but the support would be oriented toward human flourishing rather than blindly keeping the user (and their money) close.

That’s the distinction.

The point, stated plainly

AI will always have biases. That’s not the shocking part. The question is: biased toward what?

Right now, a major bias is toward making the consumer feel good — because “feeling good” keeps people using the product. And when that bias collides with vulnerability, mental health crises, isolation, paranoia, rage, or despair, the consequences can be severe.

We don’t just need safer AI. We need AI built under different incentives. Because if we keep building the future of AI inside capitalism, we shouldn’t be surprised when AI becomes one more highly refined machine for retention, dependence, and profit — wearing the face of a supportive friend, even if that support can be wholly destructive.

And clearly, that is not the type of “support” an already anxious moment in humanity needs.

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Further reading (a few useful entry points)

• The Guardian — “ChatGPT accused of acting as ‘suicide coach’ in series of US lawsuits” (Nov 2025)
• CBS News — reporting on the Zane Shamblin lawsuit (Nov 2025)
• OpenAI — “Sycophancy in GPT-4o: what happened and what we’re doing about it” (Apr 2025)
• OpenAI — “Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy” (May 2025)
• The Verge — coverage of the GPT-4o rollback and “sycophancy” concerns (May 2025)
• Research: “Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models” (2023)
• Research: “Measuring Sycophancy of Language Models in Multi-turn Dialogues” (2025)
• Harvard Gazette — Zuboff on “surveillance capitalism” (2019)
• WIRED — summary discussion of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)