The Tepid Take

“A seed of professionalism” is the unspoken proverb behind my latest email address. Fifth of its kind, it followed a series of particularly ridiculous, egregious examples that did an excellent job of helping me stand out from the crowd, in exactly the wrong way, when I tried to become an adult. Begone, victoryoverdignity@ymail.com ! Farewell smoothandawsum@yahoo.co.uk ! And let’s not even speak of cledmundo@yahoo.co.uk , a childhood favourite and unexpectedly good portmanteau. I don’t have the foggiest why my young self was such a big fan of Yahoo’s email service; now I despite it. What came afterwards was a professional, name-centric address accompanied by a slightly more casual one inspired by an obscure brand of soap I liked without being as silly as the above. Both of these were Gmail accounts, the service owned and operated by Google that integrates so effortlessly with all their other services. One of these email addresses now more or less forms the glue that interfaces ever

In Postcapitalism, Paul Mason dissects the challenges facing the late capitalist system and explains how contradictions in its inner workings could lead to its total collapse. One of the key ideas he expresses is that the economies of developed countries are increasingly trying to sell things that we are not used to selling – personal care, basic errand-running, and, most pressingly, information. The sale of things that are infinitely replicable, from machine blueprints to open source software, poses a serious issue for the capitalist system. This is because these “goods” touch on the idea of “zero marginal cost”: the idea that it costs no more to produce 1 copy than it does to produce 1000, and costs for 1 copy trend towards zero as renewable energies grow more efficient. This looks a lot like the onset of what the cool kids called “fully automated luxury communism”: as things steadily require less and less labour value to produce, their costs tend towards zero, and if the theoreti

This article was originally published in CityMetric in 2019. In the early 1960s, Harold Macmillan’s government commissioned a report intended to modernise Britain’s railway system, and to make it profitable for the first time in ages. Victorian “railway mania” had generated some of the most impressive railway routes in Europe, but it had come at a cost: early investment in railway infrastructure had grown and grown, even in areas where it was economically unsustainable. The changing transport habits of the post-war period proved the final straw: by 1963, fully half the train stations in the UK only brought in 2 per cent of the revenue, with many routes running almost empty trains at a heavy loss. This problem, outlined by the report, was not controversial; indeed, it was factual. But it was the solution, proposed by the now infamous Dr Beeching, that proved so radical: closing almost half of the United Kingdom’s railway infrastructure for good. The “ Beeching Axe ” has been loathed by