Longer forms
Columns
When the daily dispatch wasn't enough. Opinion, analysis, long argument.
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June 10, 2026
Selling Shovels to Yourself
When the chipmaker funds the lab that buys its chips, the revenue is real but the demand is a loop. A column on circular AI financing, the capex bubble, and whose pension is holding the bag.
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June 8, 2026
The Thirst of the Machine
A data centre is a claim on a watershed and a power grid, dressed up as a cloud. A column on compute as the enclosure of physical commons, and why Quebec's hydro is the real frontier.
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June 6, 2026
The Ghost Shift
Every model that looks autonomous is standing on a hidden workforce of annotators, raters, and moderators paid by the task. A column on the human labour inside the machine, and who is kept off the org chart.
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April 21, 2026
Open Weights, Closed Gates
Meta's Llama is open the way a company town is open. A column on commons-washing, strategic loss leaders, and the difference between a public good and a loss-making marketing expense.
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April 18, 2026
Prompt Engineering Is Piece-Rate
Every generation of capitalism produces a new layer of 'skilled' labour that is actually piece-rate work with a prestigious job title. A column on how AI freelancing reinvented the putting-out system.
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April 15, 2026
Who Buys the Slop When the Worker Is Fired
Henry Ford paid his workers enough to afford the cars they built. The AI economy is firing the same customer. A column on the consumer demand problem nobody in the pitch deck wants to address.
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April 12, 2026
UBI as Hush Money
Universal basic income, as pitched by Silicon Valley, is not a floor. It is a severance package for the working class. A column on the political economy of the billionaire's favourite welfare program.
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April 9, 2026
The Luddites Were Right
History remembers the Luddites as fools who feared machines. History is wrong. They feared the owner of the machine, and the owner vindicated them. A column on what the original machine-breakers actually wanted.
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April 6, 2026
The Rent Is Too Damn Inference
The generative AI economy is a landlord economy. Every prompt is a rent cheque. A column on per-token pricing, API lock-in, and the enshittification curve.
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April 3, 2026
Primitive Accumulation for the LLM Age
The scraping of the public web was not a bug. It was the opening move of a classic enclosure. A column on how the training corpus became private property.
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March 31, 2026
The Three-Company Town
AI is not a market. It is a three-company town, with NVIDIA as the landlord and the hyperscalers as the company store. A column on the antitrust problem that nobody is treating as an antitrust problem.
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March 28, 2026
Who Owns the Weights
Model weights are the factory floor of the 21st century, built from scraped public labour and held as private property. A column on the enclosure of intelligence.
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March 25, 2026
Scab in the Machine
The AI scab does not drink coffee and does not cross a picket line. It scabs by default. A column on how capital learned to break strikes without a body.