Eat, Pray, Spoil.

When you drive from, say, Jakarta to Semarang, and you see people with no prospects, completely disconnected from the land, hawking plastic wares by the roadside, it is hard not to believe some great crime has taken place. They are surviving by scraps in the wake of a vast colonial expropriation in the past, and on the periphery of a great maw of consolidated accumulation in the present. Likewise, when you walk through Mayfair in London, amidst all of the empty buildings and apartments, it’s hard not to feel that the city and all its churning of fictitious capital has not been built atop a sediment of labor power it has sucked out from all over the earth to produce monuments of its own magnificence.

– Thomas Meaney , ‘The Future of Magazines…and the world’, The Nation, October 27, 2025