Brett Scott

RT @rohangrey: The thing about crypto people is that they will loudly and arrogantly decry anyone who hasn't spent ten years obsessing over…

Old factory lords were pioneers of the original business model of capitalism, which was to accumulate concentrations of tools, machines and materials - the proverbial factory - and to get workers to operate them. This is what old Marxists would call ‘owning the Means of

RT @jembendell: In London? Come learn about a #commons approach to currency and money, with me and Matthew Slater. In September we are offe…

Cast your vote! Why is Musk divorcing Trump Option 1: he's been used, humiliated and then thrown out. With his DOGE a failure, he now wants to save some face by pretending to launch a principled attack on the president Option 2: Tesla is suffering due to the association with

People often use the term ‘Monopoly Money’ as an insult to refer to a weak currency, but Monopoly Money is actually one of the strongest global currencies there’s ever been. Consider the fact that it’s guaranteed to buy you hotels on particular places on the board at exactly the

As a South African, one thing I’d often like to tell Europeans and Americans is this: in general, people in the Global South do not associate Israel with ‘jewishness’ as much as they associate it with White People Israel is backed by the USA - whose elites are white people - and

I first started encountering ‘edgelords’ when I was immersed in the crypto world from around 2011, but I soon saw them proliferating in many libertarian-tinged scenes or group Telegram chats. These were people who styled themselves as ‘contrarians’ who ‘dared’ to think

One phrase that irritates the hell out of me is ‘taxpayer funded’, this idea that somehow a state cannot pay for things unless taxpayers give it money. This is a widespread belief, but it’s obviously ridiculous given that states issue the very money that’s being given back to

All these AI companies training their machines on centuries of data and skills produced by humankind - and then reaping the profits of that - should donate large amounts of their shares to the public in recognition of this. Otherwise they're just parasitic

There’s something kinda grating about the world’s imperial hegemon putting on this ‘poor me’ act, complaining about how much it does for the world, and how hard done by it is It’s kinda grating how the world’s greatest beneficiary of goods made by other people in other countries

Probably the greatest misconception about finance is the idea that it’s all about maths and numbers, rather than about contracts, power and politics For example, I often come across people who talk about the ‘mathematical impossibility’ of paying back the interest on all debt.

The three main methods of elite wealth accumulation 1) Rent from shares and other financial instruments: you own stuff that others operate, either directly through shares, or indirectly through credit instruments. This allows a constant ‘passive income’ derived from the active

Debates about ‘de-growth’ are very heated, and the Degrowth movement is often attacked by both conservatives and left-wingers I don’t pretend to have a resolution to the debate, but let me just add something for all parties to reflect on: If you define 'progress' as growth,

As humans, we build words, and new words can be built at any time, but words can be designed for purposes beyond conveying meaning Take a word like ‘entomophagy’. It just means ‘eating insects’. This word has not clarified some previously ill-defined thing: the compound word

A monetary transaction is bi-directional: a credit moves in one direction, and a real good or service moves in the other I’ve spent a long time engaging with public perceptions of money, and one of the weirdest but most common phenomena is the conflation of those two things, and

At first glance, it looks like social conservatives in different cultures stand in opposition to each other, like Christian crusaders defining themselves in opposition to Islamic caliphates, or US hardliners seeing themselves as ‘fundamentally different’ to the Chinese

Historically, all that 'liberalism' really means is the priority of the individual over the collective, and this is why it's so open to abuse and misuse The 'priority of an individual' can refer to an exploitative factory owner (an individual) claiming he's been victimised by