mandy brown
Thinking about reading, work, and technology. Helping people do their best work despite the ravages of capitalism at everythingchanges.us.
Posting from https://aworkinglibrary.com/thinking/. I log in about once a week.
- “It’s safer in the front!” crimethinc.com/2026/01/29/crossing…
- “We will bury them beneath the new world in our hearts.” crimethinc.com/2026/01/25/minneapo…
- “Sometimes I just lay back and think about the fact that it’s whistles and car horns and crowds versus the modern gestapo….I couldn’t really wrap my head around the idea that this could work. But it does work.” margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/our-neighbors-in-…
- Abolition is the only way.
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- Patient urgency is “a sense of urgency for social transformation that can tolerate difficulties, differences, delay, objective gaps, and interpersonal strains.” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/patient-urgency
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- “Burnout shifted its meaning: from a symptom experienced by people struggling to change society to one experienced by people trying too hard to succeed within it.” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/loss-of-an-…
- Tyranny all the way down. aworkinglibrary.com/writing/tyrannies-a…
- “Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity.” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/what-books-…
- “I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life.” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/live-at-enm…
- The winter sf work/shop has now SOLD OUT! What a privilege to gather with an amazing group of people and dream of better days. I'm SO looking forward to it. I'm planning to offer the work/shop again in the spring, so get on the waitlist to be the first to know when applications open up again.
- Very much looking forward to this next speculative fiction work/shop—it is so invigorating to spend time in community with people who are unwilling to accept that work is merely what is given to us. We get to make and take our work, too, now as much as ever. everythingchanges.us/workshop/sf
- “I didn’t enter this field and take this type of job only to *not do the job*.” gregg.io/the-only-winning-move
- “…do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it?” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/where-there…
- Last call for the winter sf work/shop! Applications are due by noon EST today. bsky.app/profile/awor...
- Very much looking forward to this next speculative fiction work/shop—it is so invigorating to spend time in community with people who are unwilling to accept that work is merely what is given to us. We get to make and take our work, too, now as much as ever. everythingchanges.us/workshop/sf
- “Statements about the future aren’t predictions: they’re more like spells.” ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/the-line-and-…
- Seeing some very fun and sharp applications rolling through for the sf work/shop! So excited to join all of you. Applications are due Monday by noon EST. everythingchanges.us/workshop/sf
- It’s not enough to turn *away* from screens; we have to turn *towards* something else. aworkinglibrary.com/writing/thingness
- “The dominant narrative about AI in 2025 isn’t extinction, replacement, transcendence, or even innovation….The dominant narrative about AI in 2025 is inevitability.” theantiquarian.email/archive/is-ai-an-ap…
- Thinking about the big ruptures in our work and what it means to notice them, acknowledge the (very reasonable!) fear they inspire—then put one foot in front of the other anyway. everythingchanges.us/blog/walking/
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- Very much looking forward to this next speculative fiction work/shop—it is so invigorating to spend time in community with people who are unwilling to accept that work is merely what is given to us. We get to make and take our work, too, now as much as ever. everythingchanges.us/workshop/sf
- Inviting people to refuse a technology requires both models and support for alternatives. Instead of cars, protected bike lanes and a community of cyclists; instead of social media, third spaces and communal practices; instead of AI, work that is autonomous and dignified, etc., etc.
- Agree with the point about offering alternatives here, but will add: much “popular” tech is terrible for people and society. Guns, cars, Facebook, AI—all very popular, all diabolical. Popular tech is routinely a horror. anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-…
- Bob Black’s *Abolition of Work* has hit hard every time I’ve read it, but it hits a little harder every year. theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-t…
- “Work is usually imagined in terms of the ego and his muscles….But the dream-work and the work on dreams returns work to the invisible earth, from literal reality to imaginative reality.” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/psychology-…
- “AI is an agreement machine, which is anathema to learning and critical thinking.” 404media.co/ai-is-supercharging…
- “I have good news for you, though: assholes are a minority. People of conscience, people with good will and good intentions have always outnumbered psychopaths and sycophants.” okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-d…
- Among the many privileges of the work that I do these days is being able to walk alongside people as they make big, terrifying transitions in their work and lives.
- I want to posit that one of the things we mean when we say we’re “procrastinating” is that our own sense of what matters has diverged from what our boss or company is concerned with. That is, procrastination is often a political conflict, not a personal failing.
- “To be a Luddite today is to refuse the fatalism of techno-inevitability & to demand that technology serve the many, not the few. It is to assert that questions of labor, agency & justice must come before speed, efficiency & scale.” brookings.edu/articles/we-should-…
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- I’ll be opening a winter cohort of the sf writing work/shop soon, get on the waitlist if you want to be the first to find out! Space will again be very limited so that everyone can fully participate. everythingchanges.us/workshop/sf
- Whatever your company’s rating systems, you and your colleagues are all five out of fives at being human. Act like it: everythingchanges.us/blog/re-views/
- Digging for the kind of knowledge that you feel in your bones, that gets under your fingernails, that can’t be lifted away and perverted by a thieving bot. aworkinglibrary.com/writing/undersense
- Olga Tokarczuk’s *The Empusium* is subtitled “A Health Resort Horror Story,” but somehow that undersells it. The book is smart, fun, and subversive, exactly as all horror stories should be. aworkinglibrary.com/reading/empusium
- “It is about a world that positively blooms around us because we are committing to the quiet and constant and careful work of tending to it.” terminal.ahumanfuture.co/posts/2025-10-17/th…
- After a few days with time spent in a car (unusual for me!), I’m noticing how being in a car makes the rest of the world seem insubstantial, lacking solidity. Everything moves out of the way for you. Nothing is reliably there except you and your companions.
- “We should dissociate ‘work’ from the Herculean labor and return the idea of work to the example of the dream, where work is an imaginative activity, a work of the imagination such as takes place in painters and writers.” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/an-imaginat…
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- “We were angry. Our anger was old, atavistic. We were angry as all civilized men who have ever been sent to make murder in the name of virtue were angry.” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/we-were-angry
