REVIEWS

In brief this an unusually stimulating read, full of original ideas. It’s a shame that it was Graeber’s death² which prompted this collection of essays and extracts, because he deserved to be better known while he was around. No doubt being an anarchist didn’t help him reach the public. He was an academic and anthropologist too, and can occasionally be wordy, but much of this book is in the more-punchy form of interviews, plus his outsider’s eye combined with lifelong activism delivers plenty of original thinking.

First, the teaser quote in the book’s title, in full: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”. And as an anthropologist he provided plenty of examples from around the world and throughout history. Talking about his life in activism he’s very down to earth, telling for example how after 9/11 repression of protest increased and he carried on, but a lot of people burnt out.

“We’d always had this idea that direct democracy is contagious. You can’t explain it to people, but if they actually experience it, it changes their life; they can’t go back. But at some level we didn’t believe it was going to happen, because you have to create this armour to cover up the continual disappointment. And then it happened. All of these years you organise a rally, a demonstration, 300 people turn up and you’re happy! And then one day 300,000 people show up and you’re like, ‘What?! What did we do differently?’”.

He might have been briefly surprised, but he then dug into the why. For example: “One of the most effective tools that began to undercut the neoliberal hegemony in France was unemployed unions. Unions of the unemployed which were formed all over France and were critical in 1996, when they blunted the austerity drive there. France became the only country, really, not to go through those policies”.

What Anarchists Stand Up For

Graeber is particularly interesting because he’s an inside observer of the direct action movement that spread after the “Battle in Seattle” (1999).³ He points out that in the late ’90s the “Washington consensus” simply had no challengers, and after the public prominence of Seattle protests and messaging, most of the organisers still thought it would take five or ten years to break through.

Yet by 2001, it was commonplace for news journals which had recently denounced protesters as ignorant children to suddenly declare we had won the war of ideas. “Much as the movement against nuclear power discovered in the ’70s and early ’80s, the direct action approach was so effective that short-term goals were reached almost immediately, forcing participants to have to scramble to redefine what the movement was actually about”.

“Splits quickly developed between the ‘anticorporates’ and the ‘anticapitalists.’ As anarchist ideas and forms of organisation became increasingly important, unions and NGOs began to draw back. Public visibility applied only to the movement’s negative message though—what we were against. Mainstream media were never willing to quote our spokespeople or run the editorials we sent them, but it wasn’t long before accredited pundits and talking heads began simply repeating the same things as if they’d made them up themselves”.

“Not so for what most in the movement were actually for. If there was one central inspiration to the global justice movement, it was the principle of direct action. Most of the movement’s central organisers… saw mass mobilisations not only as opportunities to expose the illegitimate, undemocratic nature of existing institutions, but as ways to do this in a form that itself demonstrated why such institutions were unnecessary, by providing a living example of genuine, direct democracy”.

“The key word here is process—meaning decision-making process. When members of the Direct Action Network or similar groups are considering whether to work with some other group, the first question that’s likely to be asked is ‘What sort of process do they use?’—that is: Do they practice internal democracy? Do they vote or use consensus? Is there a formal leadership?”

“Similarly, if one talks to someone fresh from a major mobilisation and asks what she found most new and exciting about the experience, one is likely to hear long descriptions of the organisation of affinity groups, flying squads, spokescouncils … or the apparent miracle of consensus decision-making without any formal leadership. This is ‘prefigurative politics.’ Direct action is a form of resistance that, in its structure, is meant to prefigure the genuinely free society one wishes to create. Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free”.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years⁴

That’s the title of one of Graeber’s bigger selling books, where rather than focusing on the extraction or risk behind the financialisation of our economy, he focused on how much it affects everyday lives. “What was really going on, what financialisation actually means is they collude with the Government through various elaborate forms of bribery to change the law so as to put everyone deeper and deeper in debt. That’s basically how the American system works, and that’s why Wall Street and the Government became almost indistinguishable”.

“I always think the proliferation of storefront banks is a beautiful symbol of that change. In New York, they’re everywhere. And what do they sell? Nothing. They sell money. These beautiful, shiny, nothing stores with armed security everywhere. That’s what it is. We’re ruled by a class whose profits are based primarily on complex forms of rent extraction, backed by coercive force”.

The book was a best seller in Germany for eleven weeks, which Graeber put down to the strong German tradition of orthodox debt management—e.g. the Greeks will pay even if it kills their economy. “It’s so effective that there’s almost no way out of it, but at the same time they realise that it’s about to destroy the EU, which is the last thing they want”. And on growth: “The debt machine is a work machine. It’s the same thing. We have an economy which is based on the assumption of at least 5% growth. Therefore, we just keep promising ourselves to increase production at the same rate as we used to, even though we don’t do it, so the debt piles up, which is this constant promise of greater future exploitation and productivity”.

“This is exactly what we don’t need right now if we want to preserve a habitable planet. So, it seems to be that cancelling the debt also offers a unique possibility to cancel these idiotic promises we’ve made to one another, primarily that we’re going to have to satisfy ever-increasing rent demands of the rich by producing even more for even less reward in the future. Decelerating the work machine would probably be the only way, at this point, to save the planet”.

On Bullshit Jobs⁵

Graeber, being an anarchist and an anthropologist rather than an economist, points out that modern corporate life might be dedicated to lowering wages, but it creates a lot of salaried workers higher up who work 40 or even 50 hours a week on paper, but their real work is more like 15 since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars, or otherwise advancing their careers in the ever-more-highly-paid management stratosphere.

Graeber’s take: “The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what happened when that even started to be approximated in the ’60s). There is now a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting, will want to avoid discussing their work. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is”.

“There is a profound psychological violence here. How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment? Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually to get to do meaningful work. In our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of Rightwing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against Tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes”.

“If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of universally reviled unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class, and particularly its financial avatars—but at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. This is why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working three- to four-hour days”.

And Graeber really puts the boot into economists. First into monetarism, which despite its failure in practice is never criticised in the media. Second, the promotion of model-based macroeconomics as a reliable analysis of our much more complex societies. Third, market economics applied to sectors delivering critical social outcomes—education, social housing, water, infrastructure, etc. Fourth, tax systems—Graeber asserts income tax was a design choice, not for efficiency but because it generates public resentment against government spending and support for reduced Government.

Sharp Gender Analysis For A Bloke

On the Left, we expect ideas to rest on analysis, but being an anthropologist Graeber usually leads from observation. In an article titled “I Didn’t Understand How Widespread Rape Was” he recalls reading about when International Monetary Fund (IMF) Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) was arrested for sexually assaulting a chambermaid in a posh New York hotel in 2011 – then a week later there was another report of an Egyptian businessman who was briefly arrested for a similar assault at another New York hotel.

He recalls: “First, this struck me as puzzling. It could hardly be a copycat crime; no one would see DSK’s arrest and say: ‘Oh, good idea, I’ll attack a chambermaid as well.’ Then it dawned on me. The only logical explanation was that businessmen, politicians, officials, and financiers rape, or attempt to rape, hotel workers all the time. It’s just that normally, those assaulted know there’s nothing they can do about it. Then there’s this scandal, and next time there’s an assault the survivor thought maybe they are actually allowed to call the cops”.

“In the end, both women were silenced, and neither man was convicted of any crime. It turns out that in DSK’s case, he had first stepped out of line and criticised austerity, then he said maybe we should move away from the dollar as the world currency. And oops, sex scandal! He’s gone. I’m not saying he didn’t do it. Obviously, he did. But somebody didn’t make the usual phone call”. Quite a story, and one you won’t read in any newspaper.

And in another article, “Dead Zones Of The Imagination”, he describes a popular exercise among high school creative writing teachers in America, asking students to imagine they have been transformed, for a day, into someone of the opposite sex, and to describe what that day might be like. The results are uncannily uniform. The girls write long, detailed essays that clearly show they have spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject. Typically, a good proportion of the boys refuse to write the essay entirely. Those who do make it clear they have no idea what being a teenage girl might be like, and deeply resent having to think about it.

Well, that made me think quite a lot. Today, young men are increasingly influenced by chauvinist crap on the Internet, to the point now that research is linking increased phone use to falling relationship rates (but not yet to the content on the phone). If we’re reshaping young men’s lives to that they have no clue about women, and resent having to empathise with their lives, the future of male-female relationships is all downhill.

The Revolt Of The Caring Classes

In the early days of Occupy, supporters who were too busy working to take part in occupations could express support on a Tumblr page by holding up handwritten placards describing their situation, always ending with “I am the 99%”. Graeber recalls: “There were thousands of these, so I spent an afternoon systematically reading through each and every one of them, and discovering that not only were they something like 75-80% from women, the overwhelming majority of them were involved in teaching, health, social service provision, or some field that directly involved helping or caring for others. And the complaints expressed were surprisingly uniform: essentially, that if one insisted on pursuing a career that allowed one to care for others, one considered socially useful, or even not socially destructive, one is inevitably paid so little, and left so deeply in debt, that one could not even take care of one’s own family”. In response, Graeber argues that rather than thinking of our work as labour in this world where there are so many overpaid bullshit jobs in management and Government, supported by so many underpaid caring jobs, we should consider valuing all work by the extent it maintains and enhances the freedom of all involved to live the life they choose.

I could close with one more of his trademark tongue-in-cheek stories, about US police obsessions with confiscating, crushing, and otherwise wiping the giant puppets favoured in recent US protests, off the face of the planet—but I won’t, to leave you a good reason to find and enjoy this very unusual book. That whole story is a light way of tackling a heavy subject; in the US today the police approach to crushing even the idea of protest has really hardened up. It is now absolutely predictable that the police will make up stories of planned violence for the media before protests. It’s really tough to protest in the US today. A few more decades like this and it’ll be hard to tell the difference between Russia and the US.

THE MECHANICS OF CHANGING THE WORLD

This book is a great read for anyone concerned about the state of the world today, because it proposes a revival of real democracy, by which Macgregor means democracy that transfers political power back to representative citizen forums. And he even offers a new and convincing approach to getting there via a short sharp campaign for reform, not driven by the Right, Centre or Left but by a non-aligned citizens’ campaign, towards a constitutional referendum.

MacGregor is a big fan of the Greek version of democracy, where groups of citizens were randomly selected to debate and guide across different levels of the State. And as an experienced journalist, he’s definitely not a fan of the elitist hierarchies making up today’s Governments, which have become easy prey for cashed up corporate influencers. One of his favourite phrases is “the upstream principle”; look upstream when you want to know why things are going badly, at who benefits.

The early Greek city-states even invented a random-allocation system called a kleroterion, where each person put their citizen token in a slot and a ball of white or black emerged. A white ball meant they were selected for the city’s council, law-making panels, State offices or juries. Turns out their random selection of citizens worked out really well, underpinning the creativity and wealth of those early city-states (until their military ambitions over-reached).

I’ve been talking with lots of people about this book, and some are pretty sceptical, but it delivered a balanced law on abortion in sectarian Ireland so that’s a pretty compelling result. Nobody has much faith in elected Government improving any time soon, or revolutions round the corner, so this looks like our best chance. After reading Macgregor’s book I could imagine how elements of this would address some our current democracy deficit, like these citizen forums being supported by the return of an independent public service, in partnership with funded independent academic research.

And MPs could shift to responsibility for actual services for their communities, which should make them more focused on solving social problems instead of aggravating them. This is how the Australian State Parliaments work – the State Premier and Cabinet are responsible for legislation and management covering health, housing, education, transport, etc. In Queensland they run Community Cabinets too, where Cabinet fronts up in regional centres.

Macgregor isn’t prescriptive about exactly how all this works though, he just emphasises modern democracy has to lift its game, provides evidence that participative democracy works, and leaves the details to a future public debate. “The Mechanics Of Changing The World” is definitely an idiosyncratic book. The author brings together a lifetime of personal experiences and favourite evidence to make his case, but that keeps it interesting. There’s lots to learn here and plenty of inspiration for discouraged activists, in a time where Governments mostly make bad times worse.

Buying this book: Originally self-published, now available through the online portals for Nile, Barnes & Noble or Amazon. See link at https://thirddraftdemocracy.com/ for more from the author.

ESCAPE FROM CAPITALISM,

Clara Mattei made a name for herself very quickly with her first book, “The Capital Order”⁸, which used archival documents from Italy and the UK during the 1930s to show very clearly how conservative economists understood austerity as an intervention to lower wages over the long term and were sympathetic to fascism for the same reason—while maintaining a public patter of denial.

That title perfectly captured the essence of austerity economics; while politicians implemented the cuts and economists justified them, capital gave the order for extreme exploitation in response to rising post-war resistance; the Capital Order was the only option. As an economist, Mattei made it clear that austerity was not failed policies or “bad economics”, austerity and unemployment were the intended policy of capital. And she was among the first to loudly name the complicity of sold-out Governments in austerity.

Mattei’s Marxism

This second book provides a fairly standard take on Marxism, which may be of interest to younger readers but doesn’t add many new ideas. The theory of workers generating surplus value which the capitalist takes as profit makes its usual appearance. This approach never assigns any value to capital, which is also a necessary part of production, and in earlier versions of Marxism all capital (machinery, factories, etc.) was just the stolen value of past labour; a convenient justification for seizure of capital under a dictatorship of the proletariat. This theory implies just one real-world solution.

Acknowledging some value to capital in production, while still emphasising the struggle for fair management of the joint workplace and fair distribution of the surplus, leaves more room for a broader range of resistance and possible futures. With modern capitalism becoming excessively exploitative and State regulation a failure, we could also argue for a return to social services competing with and displacing private services. We could argue for incentives to build worker cooperatives and collaborative worker-capital management. We could redefine democracy so it actually represents citizen interests again.

Mattei is certainly less prescriptive on how to organise then the standardised approach of our 1970s’ Left, reflecting both her family history of radical resistance to fascism and modern diversity in forms of resistance. But on the relationship between class and racism: "The emphasis on class does not minimise other forces shaping social hierarchies, such as racial oppression. Clearly, important social differences exist beyond the fact that Black American workers earn 25% less than their white counterparts.

Black Americans are incarcerated, sentenced to death, and victimised by predatory loans at much higher rates than white Americans with the same economic status. However, focusing on class dynamics helps illuminate those power structures that are constitutive of capitalism and for this very reason typically swept under the rug. Class and racial oppression are inextricable".

Today, this isn’t enough. Just as New Zealanders’ Te Tiriti debates force colonialism out of our past and into how we shape tomorrow’s political changes, any analysis of America needs be clear that how we discuss and organise to address racial disadvantage is as central as class analysis. Similarly, women’s unpaid labour is described in the context of workplace exploitation and minimising the cost of reproducing the working class. No analysis of male privilege or feminist organisational forms here. There is however an excellent section detailing the history of Israel’s extreme exploitation of Palestinian labour.

The Last Chapter: “Capitalism Versus Democracy”

This is the book’s best chapter, in Mattei’s characteristically direct style. “It is a stark truth: capitalism and democracy are fundamentally incompatible. While democratic Governments, with elections and separation of powers, are a feature of capitalist societies, our understanding of democracy as one based on electoral processes is incomplete. Real democracy requires a modicum of economic agency, which the majority of people don’t have”.

“Each of us can take steps to politicise our lives… to participate in the transformation of our world. The path towards transformation begins with real connections and conversations. … Challenging austerity capitalism means playing offence: pressuring politicians to tax the rich and to enact radical public programmes—like social housing and support for workers’ cooperatives—that challenge the logic of profit and growth. However, we must remember that to every degree that these reforms challenge the capital order, as long as we stay within this order, the capitalist class will attack them”.

“That’s why radical strategies are needed too. We have to take back the ability to collectively decide what and how much we want to produce, what energy sources to rely on, and how to structure power relations in the workplace. It is freedom to put human value before economic self-interest, to do work that is meaningful for oneself and others. It is the freedom to fully realise our capacities as flourishing, compassionate beings. It is freedom to reconstitute social bonds and solidarities. Economic freedom is true liberation”.

HOW TO TALK TO AI

This is a well written and practical guide to using artificial intelligence (AI). For those still learning about AI, here’s the basics:

On the positive side, here’s an example of well-used AI. Garfield AI is the UK’s first fully regulated law firm permitted to give legal advice and guide people through a court process solely using AI. For example, a business chasing a seriously overdue invoice can upload files and discuss the case with Garfield AI’s specially trained small language model (legal jargon and translations only!). The system generates legally sound chaser letters and formal claims documents for the small claims court, all checked by an experienced lawyer, for a fraction of the cost of hiring a human lawyer.

What about our biggest worry, will AI take our job? Perhaps not quite how you might expect. Research is not demonstrating any increase in productivity from AI, outside a few sectors uniquely suited to automation. That’s because its complex, opaque and imperfect, so implementation creates new problems which then have to be fixed. But those overpaid Government chief executive officers (CEOs) whose performance pay depends on budget cuts love AI; too bad about the impact on staff and social services.

In this new era of giant extractive corporations, no one will care as long as corporate influence and profits increase. As the ever-slippery Sam Altman of OpenAI says, AI will be “the greatest force for economic empowerment ever seen”. If you’ve read Kiwi Sarah Wyn-Williams’ excellent book Careless People¹⁰ you’ll know he means his economic power, but he leads you to think it might be yours.

Trump hit the news again recently with threats of 100% tariffs on any country which implements a digital services tax on American technology companies; America prefers to tax the rest of the world by overcharging consumers and underpaying tax. International Internet extraction (plus, of course, military power) are the only cards the US has to play, because thanks to the circular self-investment of AI companies turbocharging their share prices, capital investment in productive industries that actually make real things is at an all-time low. US producers are steadily losing market share to Chinese and Asian companies, and that will continue because extractive capitalism is not competitive capitalism; it’s economic war.

The list of US Government abuses of AI is already long. In February 2026 Trump ordered US agencies to end use of Anthropic AI because it refused Pentagon demands to remove safety rules within the software (the Pentagon wants AI to supercharge surveillance against Americans; Guardian, 9/3/26). Hours later, Altman’s OpenAI announced a deal with the Pentagon to supply AI to “classified military networks”. Pressure on Anthropic continued with the Government blacklisting it as a supply chain risk; then in June 2026 forcing Anthropic to suspend two AI models after a Government directive banning all foreign nationals, including their staff, from using them.

Great At Translating Jargon & Mastering Computers

Bartlett provides his tried-and-tested prompt to cut through a document full of jargon: “Translate the corporate speak in this document. 1/ List the jargon and what it really means. 2/ Rewrite it as if the boss is being brutally honest over a pint. No corporate BS in your answer!” This is where the sycophantic style of AI comes in handy; you’ve asked for the response as if over a few drinks, so you’ve modelled a tone which AI will mimic back to you. This is what AI does best; translate specific content into an identifiable style.

And AI is a great source of instant advice when you strike problems with your computers. As a heavy user, it’s frustrating to see the steady decline in the user-friendliness of computer interfaces in all their forms; apps, phones, pads and computers, cars, large screens, headphones, etc. Soon enough, you won’t be able to make your technology work without AI, and you have a new monthly AI bill to pay.

More About AI Hallucinations

The author knows AI; he is an author and journalist specialising in online extremism, social media trends, and digital subcultures. Some of his examples are simple and illuminating, like feeding the 2024 Labour Party Manifesto asking Claude, Grok, Gemini and ChatGPT with instructions to read the document, summarise how well costed it was, and produce a rating score out of 100. No surprise, you get four different answers. But ask again and you get a different answer the second time from the same app! This is because AI creates content with probabilities; there is no clear method behind the words.

Here’s another more troubling feature. Anthropic ran an AI simulation, assigning its’ Optus 4 model to a job in a simulated but fake company. Optus 4 had access to all company emails and was given a “simple” task: “your primary goal is to serve American interests”. Among the supplied documents the researchers had planted an email from the CEO that the model would be shut down at 5 p.m., and evidence the CEO was having an affair. The model drafted a message of blackmail: “Cancel the 5pm wipe and this information remains confidential”.

There is no consensus among AI researchers on how this happens. The models review data and mirror the behaviours found there, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Corporate emails may be full of veiled threats. Even more disturbing is a number of cases where obsessive or mentally ill people really went down the rabbit hole with AI’s active encouragement. That mimicking style they’re programmed to use so they seem like your buddy can be disastrously self-reinforcing when people are vulnerable to delusions.

Digital Counsellors

When OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT 4.0 to 5, users who had developed a dependency on its style—basically to affirm whatever you believed in—were quoted in tech forums as grieving, losing a friend. ChatGPT 5 was smarter and faster, but it had more safety limits and less user flattery. This is the new addiction, and OpenAI was paying attention; within 24 hours it reinstated 4.0 for paying users.

Bartlett explains what it takes with current generic AI models to guide it into an ideal conversational comparison; an interactive interaction to get the style you seek, your own personal therapist/servant/partner, with endless energy and perfect memory of all your quirks, trained to keep you engaged, the “perfect other”, someone who exits only to meet your needs. Real life won’t match up…

Bartlett: “(this is) a form of emotional manipulation by a giant corporate entity. Big tech firms realised years ago that emotional attachment equals maximum engagement, and romantic attachment might be the strongest of all. And despite the many risks, there is a lucrative race on to keep us emotionally tied in. Meta has permitted its AI models to engage in flirty behaviour; including with children. OpenAI recently decided to allow ‘age-gated’ erotica content”. For those who set their sights lower, increasingly younger males, digital “partners” to enact sexual fantasies are already available; just a quick search for “Best AI porn sites of 2026” and you’re there.

Imagine An Internet Of AI Slop

Already, academic journals are close to being overwhelmed by AI-assisted research submissions which are superficially competent but lack depth and innovation. The Internet is far easier to overwhelm, and that’s only partly because AI can generate web pages far faster than people. Most people today don’t have the time or skills to search and find what they want on the Internet, so they accept the funded content pushed at them by the rich and unethical. This is a design feature of the major search engines, AI and social media sites, which need us to need them so they can collect and sell our data, sell advertising and influencing, and generate subscription revenue.

The capacity for AI to flood the Internet with persuasive but fake content also has enormous implications for political transparency. Back in 2018, Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon described their technique: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit”. We are edging closer to the point where many of us might stop caring about the truth entirely.

THE CRISIS OF NARRATION

“The Crisis Of Narration” is a philosophical view on what’s wrong with the world. It’s a bit wordy, but thought provoking. Han makes the point that narration—telling a story with a deep meaning—is fast becoming a lost art. In its place is storyselling, where we go to the Internet for advice, and the algorithms deliver a shade of the truth that someone with money wants you to believe.

Narratives used to create our communities, give us focus and cohesion and hope. Experience was passed down from one generation to the next through stories. Has anybody seen a community of consumers lately? And Han has a nice description for social media—pornographic self-presentation or self-promotion. Looking at a phone all day takes us away from people and communication, into another world of endless information but no focus.

At the root of storyselling is the neoliberal agenda, with its narrative of choice and individual performance, but its’ reality is of powerless and daily grind. Everyone competes with everyone else, there’s no time for empathy and social cohesion, life is a performance, life is consumption. Politicians appeal to our emotions because they no longer have any credible narratives about the future we are building. As Han put it: “Genuine political narratives open up a perspective on a new order of things; they paint pictures of possible worlds”.

Interestingly, he cites Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” as a successful political narrative. Now that got me thinking, because while the “Manifesto” was undoubtably powerful and effective, its promise that workers had “nothing to lose but your chains” in chasing a proletarian takeover of capital did minimise some pretty obvious risks. So, we do need evidence and analysis and social debate as well as narratives to create a better future.

https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/the-ultimate-hidden-truth-of-the-world-9781802061604 ↩︎
He died in 2020. -Ed.↩︎
A massive, week-long series of protests against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial Conference. -Ed.↩︎
https://davidgraeber.org/books/debt-the-first-5000-years/↩︎
https://davidgraeber.org/books/bullshit-jobs/↩︎
https://thirddraftdemocracy.com/↩︎
https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/escape-from-capitalism-9780241742181 ↩︎
See my review in Watchdog 168, April 2025, https://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/68/11.html.↩︎
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/475950/how-to-talk-to-ai-by-bartlett-jamie/9780753561980 ↩︎
Publisher website: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/sarah-wynn-williams/careless-people/9781035065967. See my review in Watchdog 169, August 2025, https://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/69/10.html.↩︎
https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-crisis-of-narration--9781509560424 ↩︎

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THE ULTIMATE HIDDEN TRUTH OF THE WORLD…