mandy brown

At the point in an essay when I have written 10K words, gathered pages of notes, have come to despair as to whether there is anything here worth anything at all, considered moving to the woods and disappearing forever, when I write one halfway decent sentence and think, “Ah, this might be it!”

A highlighted quote from the article that reads “But simply watching work happen, without any of the creative, autonomous activity that would occur if they were doing the work themselves, gives rise to a degree of boredom and stupefaction that can be physically painful and spiritually debilitating. Anyone who has experienced the pleasure of creative work is likely to greatly resist that reduction; better to create workers who have never known such things.”

This quote from @aworkinglibrary.com, whew: aworkinglibrary.com/writing/desi... #AI #labour (via @sameervasta.bsky.social)

Designed to be specialists What kind of people are we designing now?

Workers “were designed to be competent but limited, active but docile, intelligent but ignorant…incapable of having a horizon beyond that of their task. In short, they were designed to be specialists.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/designed-to-be-specialists

Pseudo-culture Trust your own eyes.

“The programming creates a subject whose anger at billionaires who dominate and oppress is redirected towards immigrants who do neither.”

aworkinglibrary.com/writing/pseu...

Pseudo-culture Trust your own eyes.

“Mass pseudo-culture…is a device invented by monopoly capital to facilitate dictatorship over a mystified, docile, debased humanity, whose impulse of real violence must be redirected into imaginary channels.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/pseudo-culture

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consistently intensify it: In the study, employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. That may sound like a win, but it’s not quite so simple. These changes can be unsustainable, leading to workload creep, cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems. To correct for this, companies need to adopt an “AI practice,” or a set of norms and standards around AI use that can include intentional pauses, sequencing work, and adding more human grounding.

The premise here—that we can developed shared practices to prevent being taken in by the design patterns that AI imposes—obscures the reasons those patterns exist in the first place, who made them, and what they aim to do. https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it

Crossing the Line: It Really Is Safer in the Front A participant in a demonstration in Portland describes the experience of collectively crossing the line into revolt.

“It’s safer in the front!” https://crimethinc.com/2026/01/29/crossing-the-line-it-really-is-safer-in-the-front-surrounding-the-portland-ice-facility

Minneapolis Responds to the Murder of Alex Pretti On Saturday, January 24, an ICE agent murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. In response, people drove ICE and Minneapolis police out of the neighborhood.

“We will bury them beneath the new world in our hearts.” https://crimethinc.com/2026/01/25/minneapolis-responds-to-the-murder-of-alex-pretti-an-eyewitness-account

Our Neighbors in Minneapolis or: What I Saw While I Was There

“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.” https://margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/our-neighbors-in-minneapolis

Abolition is the only way.

“To have patient urgency is, I think, to know that you must plant those seeds, that you must prepare the soil, that these things cannot wait. That the future we hope for waits upon us, today.”

I think I found out about this book from you? So thank you for that!

Patient urgency is “a sense of urgency for social transformation that can tolerate difficulties, differences, delay, objective gaps, and interpersonal strains.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/patient-urgency

Burnout always comes from moral injury. There's maybe something important, too, about the fact that the burned-down buildings on the LES that inspired the word were also the places where the community garden movement in the United States was born. Guerrilla green spaces that still flourish today.

Loss of an ideal From phenomena to pathology.

“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.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/loss-of-an-ideal

Tyrannies and servilities The tyranny of government is the tyranny of the workplace is the tyranny of the home.

Tyranny all the way down. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/tyrannies-and-servilities

What books are for When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

“Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/what-books-are-for

Live at enmity with unreality “What is meant by ‘reality’?” asks Virginia Woolf.

“I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/live-at-enmity-with-unreality

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.

“I didn’t enter this field and take this type of job only to *not do the job*.” https://gregg.io/the-only-winning-move

Where there is a wall “Are not force and possessiveness very closely connected with war?”

“…do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it?” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/where-there-is-a-wall

Last call for the winter sf work/shop! Applications are due by noon EST today.

bsky.app/profile/awor...

The line and the stream. — ethanmarcotte.com “Artificial intelligence is the future,” they tell me. The thing is, futures are tricky.

“Statements about the future aren’t predictions: they’re more like spells.” https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/the-line-and-the-stream/

All on the table | everything changes Real talk about money and our collective future.

Part of changing the way we work is changing the way we contribute to each other's well being, and I see this kind of pricing model as a core component of that. If you're curious, I wrote about why I think it's important to talk about money this way: everythingchanges.us/blog/all-on-...

Fee model for the speculative fiction work/shop | everything changes A successful work/shop is a reciprocal relationship among the participants and the facilitator.

As with all my practices, pricing is on a sliding scale, and I'm happy to think with you if you have questions or want to talk out what it means to pay for things this way. everythingchanges.us/workshop/sf/...

speculative fiction work/shop | everything changes A creative gathering to imagine the future of work.

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

Everything for Everyone by M.E. O’Brien & Eman Abdelhadi On May 6, 2052, a sex worker named Miss Kelley joined with her neighbors in Hunts Point to take over a produce market and distribute the food to those in need.

Two of my faves:

M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, *Everything for Everyone*: aworkinglibrary.com/reading/ever...

Le Guin, *The Dispossessed*: aworkinglibrary.com/reading/disp...

speculative fiction work/shop | everything changes A creative gathering to imagine the future of work.

This kind of thinking is a big part of why I so enjoy gathering people together to imagine different ways of working; it's critical to talk about what's wrong with work right now. It's likewise necessary to imagine *what else*. everythingchanges.us/workshop/sf

Thingness A politics of refusal must be more than a closed door.

It’s not enough to turn *away* from screens; we have to turn *towards* something else. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/thingness

Is AI an apocalypse? Against technological inevitability

“The dominant narrative about AI in 2025 isn’t extinction, replacement, transcendence, or even innovation….The dominant narrative about AI in 2025 is inevitability.” https://theantiquarian.email/archive/is-ai-an-apocalypse/