Recent-ish Reads, June 23, 2025
Capitalism, AI brain rot, and fascist weirdos... I promise these reads/listens/watches are good.
Another occasional roundup of process-relational reality out in the wilds of the internet, lovingly hand-curated by yours truly to bring the implicit to light. These five are real gooders!
More Process-Relational Economics:
Apropos of a couple posts ago, I came across an excellent hour-long film, Outgrow the System, delving into alternatives to extractive capitalism including "doughnut economics, degrowth, economic democracy, participatory economy and the Not-for-Profit World." It debuted this Earth Month on (shhhh!) PBS, and a transcript is available. One nice quote:
A common misunderstanding is that there are only two ways to organize an economy. If you're against the system we have, you're a communist. Which is like... Choosing an economic system is not a multiple choice questionnaire with two answers. It's more like picking a movie on Netflix. You know, you have everything available and you could have like an infinity of other systems. We just need to invent them. So I think today what we need is not one theory to rule them all and just to replace mainstream economics. We just need to realize that this transition we're talking about is so complex that it will require interdisciplinary thinking. We can invent whatever economy we want. Anything that has been socially constructed, can be socially deconstructed.
The Implicit Metaphysics of Letting AI Rot Your Brain:
There's a lot to be said about how much "artificial intelligence" in the context of capitalism sucks, but one under-discussed aspect is how it totally dismisses (human) process for end product, characteristic of Euro-Western map-misunderstandings of what matters. Skipping the process of writing/thinking by using AI, like skipping the process of working out by using a forklift at the gym, defeats the real purpose. Process makes us who and what we are. Outsourcing that process, even if AI were remotely accurate (NOPE), erodes our critical thinking and our humanity. This much-discussed study is just more evidence of that.
Andrew R. Chow
The Implicit Metaphysics Unifying Right-Wing Politics: (a three-fer)
Sorry about the picture for this first one, ugh. But Bill McKibben's always a great read, and a wonderfully systemic and relational thinker. In this piece, he muses about what it means to be American, arriving at shared story as the processual thing that ties it together—a story not aspirationally about power hierarchy, "personal wealth and personal salvation," or blood-and-soil loyalties, but halting progress toward inclusive democracy and pluralistic coexistence. Complexity and diversity are in some tension with unity, American or otherwise, but far less so with a process-relational understanding of diversity and interrelatedness.
Bill McKibben
"If we care about climate, we're going to have to care about trans rights.... if we care about climate, we're going to have to find ways of getting America and the whole world past all forms of bigotry so that we can work together to face an existential threat to all of humanity and the natural world." Right-wing anti-trans hate isn't a distraction, it's part of the fascist omnicause of terraforming reality into totalizing zero-sum dominance-subjugation hierarchy as per their metaphysics.
Yessenia Funes
Finally, I double-dog dare you to listen to this podcast (or read the transcript) on the creepiest people on Earth who now run the U.S. government. More than that, I dare you to interpret it through the lens of caring relationality being coded as unmasculine and impure in a racialized gender hierarchy that could not exist outside of an extreme map-metaphysics view of how the world works. These anxieties are just below the surface of everything fascists do, and map-metaphysical division and essentialism is just below that, with both sometimes cresting into plain visibility as in the plentiful receipts linked on the podcast page.
Caitlin M. Green
Looking Forward to Future Reading:
A call for papers for the Exeter University Critical Legal Conference this fall (the theme is "Surf 'n' Turf: Critical Laws of the Land and Sea," lol) includes the topic "Law and Process," and good golly would you look at that:
Dominant modes of thought presuppose things, made out of matter, bounded in space, persisting through time in their composition and arrangement, and complying (or failing to comply) with a set of putative norms that govern the categories to which things belong. Those modes of thought are substance-ontological, and substance ontology is friendly to capitalism, white supremacy, ableism, cisheteropatriarchy, and other forms of domination and oppression. It underpins the commodity form, homo economicus, essentialised notions of race and sex, disabling conceptions of the body, and comparable exclusionary norms of all kinds. This stream [of papers and conference events] foregrounds alternative modes of thought which, grouped under the heading ‘process ontologies’, view things as abstractions from processes.
