Gaming has more than its fair share of problems right now. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to find new games I really want to play. Practically nothing fits my actual values. And even games which fit enough for me to just about tolerate are becoming somewhat rare. And that’s before you get to the cost of everything. Hardware, software and services. At least in the 90s and 2000s, I would describe gaming as having been pretty centrist or even centre-left in some cases. Now it almost universally comes across as right wing or even fascist. And that’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Jeffrey Epstein himself played a key role in fostering the free-to-play, microtransaction centric, greed dominated corporate hellscape gaming has become in the 2020s.

It is true that bargains in gaming do still exist, although only really in software, and only really because of the sale culture that Steam has cultivated over decades, which has forced Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo to compete (if you can say Nintendo competes on price, which is debatable). I wasn’t kidding when I talked about how Steam is responsible for almost everything good that’s happened in gaming in recent times. But outside of that, you very rarely feel these days like you got a good deal. You generally feel as if you have to fight against the rip-off system. If you buy everything on launch day, and get the deluxe edition because you know you love this particular series; and you can save a little bit by paying up front for the DLC season pass; you still feel like you’ve paid too much. I almost never feel like I get value from a full price game. Pokemon Legends Z-A a recent example of one where I did feel like I got my money’s worth on the base game. But even then, the price of the DLC left a sour taste in the mouth.

The thing is, it may not even be the case that all of those publishers are charging extortionately for the work that goes in to these titles. But that should then lead you to ask questions about the industry as a whole. Do games need to be this grand in scale? Do we need this many developers per game? Wouldn’t it make more sense to spread those developers out among more games? Clearly, something; or more likely many things, have gone very wrong to end up in this state. While neoliberalism is definitely to blame in large part, I think there’s definitely a lot more going on besides.

In this article, I’m going to briefly outline my solutions to the issues I see as holding gaming back from its full potential; and even the reasonably gamer-friendly position it used to occupy during my childhood. I’m going to categorise them as either instant fixes, more mid-term challenging problems to solve; or dream scenarios that we’ll most likely need a form of revolution in order to make reality. In the vast majority of cases, it’s pretty self-explanatory as to what the problems are; and I’ve also touched on several of these points before. Therefore, I’m only going to get into the specifics where I feel I need to offer more context.

Instant Fixes

• More affordable games.
• Phase out most free-to-play games (unless only cosmetics are paid for) – No paid unlockable characters, modes or areas. Certainly no micropayments to skip artificial waiting times.
• No paid battle passes – Paying to be locked into playing the same game for many hours to unlock what you’ve already paid for makes no sense to me. Free battle passes are ok though. They’re more akin to traditional gaming progression or seasonal challenges.
• Fairly priced DLC / season passes – I’m a casual Tekken fan. I’ve been waiting 2 years for the latest release to come down in price to a sufficient level for someone who will only play it very occasionally. At this rate, I’ll be waiting another year or two to get a fair price on the game with all the extra characters. Many of the DLC characters are core Tekken series returnees, and you can bet that’s not an accident.
• Free online play and cloud saves – Steam offer these essential tools for free. Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo can and should do the same. PlayStation and Nintendo have in the past.
• No “Pro” edition mid-generation console releases – They’re deeply unsustainable, add complication to game libraries and make the jump to the next full generation less of an exciting event.
• Longer console generations (a full decade).
• Less remakes and remasters – Let games become retro, and enjoy them as they were originally intended to be. Limit the practice to exceptional circumstances when dedicated long-time fans specifically ask for a remake for an older game. That’s how it used to be before we started seeing a deluge of remasters (because it’s relatively easy money and a sure thing for extremely risk-averse publishers)
• Fewer sequels – unless they’re genuinely necessary rather than a “cash grab”.
• More new IPs – more creativity in general.

Challenging Problems – will take time even with widespread desire for change

• A more affordable and more comprehensive cloud gaming service for PC games (I’m thinking of GeForce Now). Nvidia’s service has a lot of things going for it. Primarily how you own your games via Steam or other stores, so you can play them on future hardware you may end up owning. However, the game selection is far from comprehensive; which it needs to be for it to be any serious gamer’s primary platform. I also think going down the “install to play” route is a mistake. Cloud gaming needs to always be easy, and it needs to be significantly cheaper than buying the hardware yourself. “Install to play” compromises the core selling point. My main hope with regard to cloud gaming now is that Valve themselves come out with their own competitor directly built into Steam. That would be a hugely significant development and would be great for gamers.
• Controllers, mice, keyboards, headsets and other peripherals must be compatible across all hardware and operating systems, and be built to last too.
• Gaming peripherals must no longer require proprietary software like Razer Synapse or Logitech G-Hub in order to function fully. We should be able to fully customise them via a web-browser on any operating system. There are benefits to downloaded software, such as being able to automatically change DPI or polling rate settings when specific games are launched. But it shouldn’t be mandatory. And the software should also be available on Linux (especially Steam OS).
• We need to have the option to choose between handheld and static “GameCube style” versions of systems like Nintendo Switch 2. The opposite of the Switch Lite concept. Why should you have to pay for a battery, screen and other hardware necessary for a handheld device, if you’re like me and always prefer to play on the TV. I wouldn’t exactly say Valve are doing this with Steam Deck and Steam Machine, since the hardware is different on both. But they are offering people the choice of a handheld or a static experience. They’re even offering in the Steam Machine a choice between living room and desktop use. They are undoubtedly catering to gamers like me more than the others. And I wouldn’t include the ROG Xbox Ally or Playstation Portal in this, because neither of them are truly doing what the Steam Deck is. The Portal is a cloud gaming and remote play device that requires ownership of a PS5. And the Xbox Ally is a Windows handheld from a 3rd party with Xbox modifications. It’s not a ground up Xbox handheld.
• Games need to stop progressing graphically for a while, in order to allow storage and other hardware components to catch up, become cheaper and store more games again. People are never going to need 8K TVs; but I imagine that is going to be a big focus of Sony and Microsoft in the next generation. Games look good enough now. PS6 needs to reset the ratio of game size to default storage space to around the era of PS4, when managing storage internally and externally wasn’t the frustrating experience it became with PS5 and Sony’s move to NVMe SSDs. And actually this gets more important over time, as we all accumilate more generations of downloaded games that we have to fit on the new systems. All of which will undoubtedly be backwards compatible, as is now the industry standard. PS4 games are no trouble because they can be stored on a standard external hard drive. I still use the same one I used with PS4 and PS4 Pro (before I realised how bad of an idea mid-generation consoles are). But PS5 games will almost certainly need to be stored on the PS6’s SSD when you want to play them. If so, that’s going to cause yet more storage related headaches for Playstation gamers in future. If it turns out that they will be playable from an external SSD, then that doesn’t really alleviate the problem, since NVMe SSDs are still very expensive if you want a useful amount of storage (aka over 2TB).
• A far better and industry collaborative method for preserving games for future generations.
• DRM-free games (all games).

Dream Scenarios – maybe in a degrowth communist world

• A unified software store for every publisher – Yes, even Nintendo. (ideally a nationalised Steam). You’d buy a game once, and own it everywhere. And you’d be automatically entitled to any future remakes or remasters of that game. And we’d eliminate the problem that often occurs now where your DLC is stuck on one platform, so you can’t move to a different platform, unless you buy the same content again.
• All consoles of the same generation would be built to equivalent specs; so as to make it seamless to release games everywhere.
• A unified cloud gaming system available on any device, and with all games from all publishers available. That is unless there’s a good reason why they can’t be. For example a niche peripheral that’s no longer available or compatible with current devices; like a dance mat or lightgun.
• All games preserved for future generations except possibly certain online only games. But even in that case, we should endeavor to preserve them, even if only for educational demonstrations rather than actual gameplay.

If we were to see even half of the things I listed in the first category implemented, gaming would be in a far more tolerable situation. Clearly at this point we can’t just sit around and hope for the best. We need to push for these simple reforms by voting with our wallets and being vocal; while also keeping a socialist gaming future in mind. We’ve become far too used to the need to own specific, expensive machines to play specific, expensive games. And we barely bring up the fact that we have to pay subscription fees for each console’s online functions. Services that not only don’t need to be paid for, but that attempt to lock us in to playing primarily on that system. They essentially bully you into picking one platform to play all your 3rd party games on.

It’s not a status quo that can continue that much longer. It’s going to get to the point where people will either get fed up of the toxic gaming trends, and stop playing. Or they’re going to be totally priced out of their hobby. Perhaps that could lead to a huge resurgeance of retro gaming, which could end up being very positive. As long as you already own the hardware that is. Otherwise cost is going to chase you down the retro rabbit hole too.

There are definitely issues in other media. DRM in e-books, music subscriptions (not all of them, but certainly Spotify is problematic); cable and satellite TV being replaced by 10 different apps with subscriptions that add up to more than you were paying before. But no other group of media consumers get shafted more than gamers. This is another reason why we need to fight back. Otherwise we’ll end up with physical music from some labels you can only listen to if you buy a specific machine, or yet another separate subscription. You’ll need two different boxes to play your movies on. It’ll be like Blu-Ray and HD-DVD all over again. Except this time, there won’t be a definitive winner. There may even be three formats. If you want to watch those exclusive films, you’ll need another box. And if you’re thinking: yeah, these corporate goons are bad; but they wouldn’t stoop as low as reinventing CDs or vinyl records in order to capitalise on nostalgia and the physical media resurgeance; think again. Nothing is off the table when it comes to squeezing every penny out of us. Sony tried to stop you ripping CDs in the early 2000s, which didn’t go well for them thankfully. But now we live in a much more brainwashed world where the majority place far too much trust in these multinational conglomerates.

Because gamers are so used to being treated with contempt by companies, we’re the guinea pigs. If we sit there and take it, the corporations will gain in confidence that they can do the same to everyone else. It’ll make the present day mess of endless streaming apps seem like nothing if they’re left unchecked and emboldened to do their worst.

As with my previous articles in this series; this one will seem very shocking if you’re used to consuming British mainstream news coverage. All you tend to see in the establishment discourse are calls for yet more military spending (where the follow up question is never “how will you pay for it?”) Along with that, you just get warmongering about Russia, and fearmongering about China and Iran.

Military spending and outdated weapons

If I was writing our military strategy right now, the first thing I’d do would be to immediately slash the military budget by more than half. The latest target the Labour government have set is for 3% of GDP. Initially due by the end of the next parliament, but it seems that they now want to pull this forward by a handful of years. The current amount is something between 2.3% and 2.5%. I would cut that to around 1% of GDP to start with, and switch focus to be on defensive weapons rather than offensive. There’s no reason to have jet fighters, aircraft carriers or tanks in the present day, when we have such advanced automated weapons such as drones and ballistic missiles. It would presumably be extremely easy to destroy an aircraft carrier or a tank these days, so to me they come across as toys, for lack of a better term. I think it’s very clear that in 2026, the types of weapons bought by militaries is led by nostalgia as much as it is by the bloodlust of warmongering (overwhelmingly male) leaders.

There’s very limited reason to have ground troops either, outside of perhaps special operatives like the SAS. Yes, it’s fun to run around shooting people in online FPS video games. But in real life, you’d logically just send in a drone, fire a guided missile, or use a sort of defensive missile system that automatically intercepts incoming fire. We can redeploy the vast majority of ground troops to do infinitely more useful jobs that aren’t going to leave them suffering with PTSD. Very much the opposite. Building renewable energy, EV buses and associated charging infrastructure. Maybe simply building homes. The types of people who end up as ground troops in the military are likely to be very capable of being trained as builders, mechanics or engineers for example. There are a lot of things they could be doing that would clearly benefit the country over what they’re doing now.

I would extend this to all troops including those stationed in overseas military bases. I would close all of the overseas bases entirely. Our military should have no presence outside of the UK. Same with the US and every other nation. Unless you wanted to go down the route of having a continental army or global alliance, which I’m not opposed to. Perhaps that would be a good way to reduce costs in the next few years even further than what I’m envisioning. It could be a decent compromise between fully getting rid of the militaries, and continuing as we are now, for people who don’t feel comfortable (yet) with my kind of strategy. But I think doing it in a continental organisation would be difficult if you have strongly differing politics within the allied countries. It would make more sense to organise it based on ideology.

Nuclear Weapons must go

I would retire nuclear weapons. Our current nuclear submarines don’t work, and we require the USA’s permission to fire their nuclear warheads. Not that we should keep nuclear weapons even if they did work and we fully controlled them. But the current situation is particularly absurd.

People will say that getting rid of our nuclear deterrent leaves us exposed. At the end of the day, any kind of nuclear war means the end of humanity as we know it anyway. And we wouldn’t be any more exposed than we are currently, even if the world wasn’t going to end in the process. In fact, we are about as exposed as it’s possible to be. To reiterate; we rely on a fascist dictatorship currently threatening to invade (or has already invaded) various countries, to use our broken nuclear weapons. We’re also not a part of the EU, so we’re not going to be a high priority for them to defend if it came to that. Anyone who is actually serious about national security should be talking about rejoining. And NATO is under threat due to Trump’s threats over Greenland too. I agree with Zack Polanski about NATO. In the current paradigm, I would look to replace it with a European or World alliance with countries who aren’t fascist. I think that’s only likely to be sufficient for a few years; so I wouldn’t seek to go in that direction personally. I’d want a global alliance specifically for true world peace and disarmament. But it would be preferable to the current situation at least.

Emissions of war

Militaries are never going to be sustainable. Just the idea of war powered by green energy is laughable. Destroying things in a sustainable way can never happen. This is a big reason why military emissions have never been included in national emission reduction targets, or talked about at the useless UN COPs. It is estimated that 5.5% of overall global emissions are attributable to militaries. But this crucially doesn’t include the emissions of warfare itself, or the emissions involved in clearing up the destruction and rebuilding. Nor does it include the long-term health implications of the lingering toxic chemicals remaining in the environment. Human and animal lives are just collateral damage.

I think it’s safe to assume based on the data I was able to find that we’re probably looking at closer to 10% or more of global emissions. That’s a lot. And we can cut it.

The warmongering neoliberal leaders we’ve been stuck with for decades knew that militaries will always be inherently polluting, and they didn’t care to do anything about it. We need a world where we focus only on looking after people and things, and stop putting so much energy into poisoning and destroying them.

Pacifism is necessary

In the end, a world in which militaries exist at all is a scenario where genuine climate action is practically impossible. When governments are spending significant percentages of GDP on deadly weapons, and they’re boasting about how that’s good for growth; while healthcare, education, housing and transport are all severely underfunded and struggling; where utilities are privatised, failing, and unaffordable; you know you’re dealing with a society with its priorities backwards. And I didn’t even mention climate action there. The sentence was already far too long. And it more importantly reflects the reality that the preservation of our world is practically always the last thing people think about.

Pacifism is necessary in my view. Can you imagine a world in which we actually take the climate crisis seriously, and all countries genuinely work together, while we still have militaries? I can’t.

Maybe you do think we can have militaries and deal with the climate in a serious way. Maybe you think that the issue is the size of the militaries. With smaller militaries, and a more friendly overall global perspective and desire for co-operation, we’ll be able to do it. Perhaps you’re right. I just think history suggests we would have done so by now if that was going to be the case.

Feminism’s role

There’s clearly a gendered element to this. We still live in a man’s world; and you don’t get equal and happy societies, world peace, or climate action without gender equality first. It’s the root of everything going wrong. Obviously, there are exceptions; but I would say in general that women are most often involved in nurturing and building things, and men are almost always the ones involved in destroying them.

I think this tendency is visible in politics too, where in recent UK polling, we see the far-right Reform UK polling higher among men, and the left wing / centre-left Green Party polling higher among women. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. Degrowth communism and feminism are inseparable. We need a more compassionate, intelligent society in which we prioritise all the things neoliberalism has left to rot, while dismantling the one thing they care about building up; the armed forces.

Things are already bad enough under the supposedly centrist Labour government; and the fascism of a potential Reform replacement will dramatically exascerbate the existing damage to our precious public services. More people on the left need to be willing to stand up and say the kinds of things I’ve outlined in this article; no matter how insane it makes us look in our extremely disingenuous, reactionary media. It doesn’t matter if they laugh, as long as the idea of pacifism is planted in their minds.

I don’t necessarily think the Greens have to go as far as I’m going. I think you need a more extreme flank and a more mainstream friendly party like the Greens are right now. Roger Hallam is definitely right about that. But I do think Zack and co need to seriously challenge the bloated military budget as a starting point.

There is a real threat of fascism materialising; with their toxic politics being amplified daily by a media that is clearly biased towards misinformation, hate, pollution, destruction and division. We can’t let the bullshit warmongering narrative go unchallenged, and we have to offer a totally different perspective. Let as many people as possible know that things don’t have to be this way. The military doesn’t have to keep growing. It can shrink and change. Or it can disappear entirely if we want.

Similarly to how Labour are more scared of the Greens than Reform; they’re also more scared of peace than they are of war. Think about that.

In my previous story about energy, I briefly touched on housing, because obviously it overlaps with energy in terms of solar roofs; and in terms of efficiency standards for heating and cooling etc. But now I’m going to go more in-depth on the type of housing policy I’d be pursuing. Obviously, this is extremely to the left of the UK establishment, and I’d probably get locked up at this point in authoritarian Britain if they find my blog. I think I’m joking about that anyway…

Ban landlords (and second homes)

The first and most urgent step the country desperately needs in my opinion is to ban private landlords. The rent is insanely high in the country and bears almost no relation to the wages working class people are earning. We need to get rid of private renting as a category. It’s not acceptable for rich people to be able to buy more than one home, and get their tenants to effectively pay the landord’s mortgage for them. It’s a disgusting practice and needs to end. The only renting that should be going on in the country (and world) is social renting.

We must force all landlords to sell their properties to councils. My instinct would be to force them to do it for below market rate (for the first rental property where they’re not the owner-occupier). But perhaps we could have a sort of “housing amnesty”; during which time, landlords could come forward, and get a better deal or some other benefit. This would be for the first property though (and apply to all second / holiday homes as well). For any additional properties, councils would just seize them. I don’t think landlords deserve to get paid back for all the properties, considering all the rent that they’ve effectively stolen from their tenants over the years. The value of one property would be more than generous in my view.

Nationalise the house builders

Every time I see a story in the local news about a new proposed development; or even “sustainable” communities from centrist outlets like Everything Electric (formerly Fully Charged), I’m almost never impressed. Most of the time, I’m dismayed at the idiotic designs of the average new build estate. The homes are all unsustainable, old fashioned and car-dependent. Worst of all, they’re totally unaffordable for the vast majority of people.

Some supposedly sustainable developments I’ve seen are still car-dependent; consisting of detached and semi-detached housing, with garages and built-in EV charging. Yes, that sounds good to most people on paper these days. But it’s really not and here’s why. It’s firstly not affordable, and creating new car-dependence at this point is insane. We need to be moving away from car ownership, EV or otherwise. The vast majority of these developments or new towns don’t have well thought through public transport plans. They’re often not built around a train station. The bus routes don’t exist or the service is poor. There’s usually no cycling infrastructure provision, and if there is, it’s patheticlly poor. You need centralised government planning to make sure this stuff is done well. And you need experts on sustainability, local ecosystems, public transport and active travel involved at every stage of the process. Ideally leading the process rather than just consulting. As far as I can tell, these things are practically never properly considered. The only development I can think of that did a decent job is Eddington, near Cambridge. And that is led I believe by Cambridge University, so you’d expect some smart planning there.

These bad decisions are hard to fix once the houses have been built. It locks in incoherent design in the country for decades to come, which will make things so much harder for future governments than they need to be. Especially when they’ll be desperately trying to reduce emissions and car dependence by then.

We also need to move away from large, detached houses. And not just because they’re expensive. They’re also very space inefficient obviously. We need to be building density. I’m lucky enough to have grown up in a detached home. Since 3 or 4 years old anyway. I can’t remember before that when apparently we lived in a semi-detached. If everyone in the country lived in a detached house, we’d run out of room. It’s an inherently unfair form of housing if you want an equal society. There are benefits of detached houses though. There’s no doubt about that. Certainly the biggest for me is having a garden. You have the ability to make your own space a haven for nature, which I really appreciate. The other benefit I feel in my own life is the ability to play music out loud without annoying your neighbours. The biggest benefit for most people would probably be having freehold over the land. Avoiding leasehold ownership of flats is definitely a huge plus. But I think these are all things that can apply in apartment buildings if we choose to make that change.

As I wrote in my last article, we can build apartment buildings and terrace housing in harmony with nature. Without fences, with wild areas and generally an open feel that’s good for people and wildlife. Yes, we hear on Springwatch how “wildlife corridors” (aka making a hole in your fence) can help massively, and that’s true as long as you have nice neighbours who want to join you. But we can do so much better.

We can also design high quality apartment buildings that have good sound insulation, allowing people to not disrupt their neighbours (or as much as possible). With regard to leasehold properties; it’s slightly more difficult. When you have council housing as a major part of the housing stock, you clearly don’t have that problem. But in terms of ownership, we can mandate collective freehold among the owners of the flats in a building. It’s never going to be the same as true freehold for apartment dwellers; but as long as we make sure the occupiers own the building and not a company or the original developers, then that’s a decent compromise.

Even though I’ve personally never lived in a flat, I’ve always been fascinated by them. I used to enjoy going to visit my Grandparents who lived in a block of flats in the town centre when they downsized from the former family home. I thought it was so cool. The layout, the communal areas (even though there wasn’t much to speak of at that place), the intercom and remote front door unlocking. Even the underground car-park interested me. I guess you’re always going to be curious about a different way of living than what you’ve been used to your whole life. But it’s more than that. I’ve always been interested in small spaces. When I was young, I made a little clubhouse in a cupboard in one of the bedrooms. Aside from my own interests, I do believe that it’s the best and most sustainable way for all of us to live; and we can do some really innovative things to improve our quality of life that we haven’t really considered up until now. Well, except the rich. Funnily enough, the rich individualistic capitalists have the best communal facilities out there in their fancy apartment buildings or at luxury hotels they frequent around thr world. It’s time for everyone else to experience a bit of luxurious convenience in our lives too.

Going back to cost; the reason why these developments overwhelmingly consist of detached and semi-detached houses is because these privately owned developers make more profit from that type of housing. Even the apartment buildings that are built are almost exclusively luxury ones. It’s no great secret.

The only way to get affordable housing built is to nationalise the developers and bring in strict, expert led, ecologically considerate building regulations. That way, we can ensure that we’re building future-proof housing and infrastructure. Far from what we’re building right now, which is not fit for this century, and barely fit for the last one.

Build a lot of council housing

We have a housing crisis. We need to build a lot of housing. But we have to be intelligent about how we do it and where. I don’t think we should necessarily close the door on home ownership. At least not straight away. That’s for the long term degrowth communist plan. But for the moment, I’d like to see full focus on small, affordable, but still quality made council homes; with a small percentage of homes to buy. We have a lot of brownfield sites in this country we can be building on. According to the government, there are enough brownfield sites to build 1.5 million homes, and that half of these sites could be built on immediately. And not only that, I think it would be reasonable to assume that this figure of 1.5 million homes probably includes a lot of detached and semi-detached housing. So logically, you could build a lot more than that if you focused entirely on flats and terrace houses. And that’s building mid-rise buildings. No massive Hong-Kong style residential towers required. We should start there, and only go further out into the countryside when we’ve exhausted all other avenues.

I say start with brownfield sites, but actually, we have a lot of empty homes in this country too (around 700,000!). And when you combine those with all of the former private lets that we’d be taking into council control, we’d be able to make a big dent into our housing problems very quickly. According to the Office for National Statistics, 19% of all UK households in 2024 were in the private rented sector. It has overtaken social renting at 17%, with owner occupiers at 65%. We should be aiming to eliminate private rentals within a few years, and increase the social rented sector to something like 50% in the same kind of timeframe.

I think it’s definitely possible if we try. That’s fundamentally what’s holding us back. The only thing the neoliberal governments of recent times have been trying to do is increase house prices to encourage selfish homeowners to vote for them at the next election.

I’m having a hard time figuring out which would be the most important thing to start with. I think probably heavily subsidising the cost of solar installs for all properties and commercial, municipal buildings. And for those who live in apartments, I’d give them an equivalent subsidy off their energy bill. The energy bill subsidy would only need to be in operation for a year or so. Just until the other policies listed below had come into full effect.

Next, I’d ban new nuclear energy (including the establishment’s new favourite bullshit talking point, SMRs (Small, Modular Reactors). This would be a priority because these things could cause huge headaches for a long time to come if they actually get built. So we need to make sure they don’t.

I would also ban any kind of new coal (did they build that coal mine?) oil or gas development. We sometimes see oil powered grid backup sites, which are insanely polluting; and could obviously be replaced by grid battery storage. And we could do this very quickly. The only types of energy that I’d allow to be built would be Solar (domestic, municipal, commercial roofs, solar parks, farms etc); Wind (onshore and offshore as required, and as recommended by experts); and some other more niche renewables. For example: Geothermal, Tidal, Pumped Hydro and so on, where they would be more suitable than wind or solar. I don’t think they’d be used much, but there’s no reason to fully rule them out of the energy mix.

The next policy would be to nationalise the National Grid (private company with misleading name), and the energy providers. Or I’d shut down all the energy providers except Ecotricity, and designate them as the UK’s sole nationalised energy provider.

I would of course change the absurd policy that exists right now, which ties the cost of electricity to the cost of gas, so that we get actually affordable renewable energy. This is something Dale Vince constantly talks about, but is completely ignored by the media and our shitty establishment politicians. Including of course his beloved Labour Party. I’m sure they’ll get it together in another year or two Dale. Keep the faith…

I would regulate that all new buildings be built to the highest environmental standards for insulation, energy generation and so on.

I would ban new detached and semi-detached housing. Everything would be small apartment buildings and terrace housing. Everything much smaller and more energy efficient; built for people and nature to coexist in harmony. I don’t want to get any further into housing or other areas of policy though. I want to stick with specifically energy as much as possible.

I would plan to have a mixture of domestic, municipal and large grid battery storage sites. Most homes won’t require it, but other types of buildings would benefit from battery backup.

There would be a plan for the gradual phasing out of existing oil, gas and nuclear energy infrastructure. Gas would be last to go, because of the potential extended use of domestic gas boilers for heating. It’ll depend on the rollout of green gas, how hot it gets in summers, as to whether AC becomes a necessity; and if Heat Pumps start to make sense for mass adoption; which could happen with these policy changes. But this is an area where there are different potential paths to explore at a later date. There’s no real rush to settle on one technology. Especially when there’s so much else to do in the meantime.

Wasn’t that nice? Considering what it’d be like living in a country with sane leadership that wants to solve problems.

In the past, I used to play PC games quite a lot. I played MMOs like World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic a lot for example. I played StarCraft and other RTS games quite often too. But for the last 5-10 years, I’ve been almost exclusively a console gamer. As in pretty much TV and controller only. I tend to leave my Switch, and now Switch 2 permanently docked. I don’t really like the feeling of the post DS / 3DS / PS Vita mainstream handheld offerings from Nintendo, Valve, and a handful of others, including Microsoft through their partnership with ASUS. They’re all big, heavy and bulky. The point is, I mostly gave up on PC and Mac gaming for a variety of reasons. I was frustrated by cost, reliability, complexity (of hardware, of multiple storefronts); and above all, feeling held to ransom by Microsoft and their Windows OS if I want to play games.

I want to get into the situation with computer gaming now, where I think it’s going, and where it needs to go to become worthy of the gamers who spend our money and time on this hobby. I’m not going to get into the free to play model which I absolutely hate. That can come in another blog, although it’s almost not worth touching on because there’s not much to say other than we all hate it (or are lying to ourselves) and it should burn in hell. I want to focus on hardware, operating systems and storefronts.

So with that said, let’s talk about operating systems.

Windows 11 isn’t the worst in terms of design, I will admit. I like the central start menu. I like the way the windows look and the minimise, restore and maximise buttons. I find them easier to use than the small buttons on Mac. I even like the default blue ribbon wallpaper design. But that’s where the love-in ends. Beyond that, it’s bad. You can get rid of a lot of the nonsense ads and clickbait news, simplify the start menu, and remove co-pilot and the search box. But you can’t get rid of the sluggish performance or Microsoft’s poor policies on data collection. People deserve a good alternative to Windows that’s snappy, lightweight, and respects your privacy. When our 16 year old Dell XPS wasn’t eligible for the Windows 11 upgrade, and security update support was about to be ended, I thought I might as well try installing Ubuntu again. It had been a long time since the last time I tried it (funnily enough, about 16 years; just before we got said Dell), and I was impressed. Everything seemed to work out of the box. The wi-fi, video in web browsers. All the web apps we’ve become so used to, that previously we might need a plugin for, or go through some other hassle in order to get them to work in the past.

I installed Steam because of course I was curious if our old PopCap games would run on Linux, and most of them did. The problem came a month or so later when something seemed to have gone pretty badly wrong. There were repeated icons for those games listed in our user accounts under the software list that seemed to multiply by the day. Then Ubuntu started having real problems booting, until eventually the whole OS seemed to be corrupted and I couldn’t do anything.

At that point we had a think about what to do next. I had a look on the Steam store, and it seemed to indicate that those old games were playable on Mac, so I started thinking about whether a basic spec Mac Mini would do for the next few years or more. We decided to get the Mac, and upon setting it up and installing Steam, promptly realised that the Apple logo next to the game names were referring to old Intel-based Macs, and that Apple Silicon is not supported if you want to play old 32-bit games. To be fair, that was my own fault. But if someone like me, who’s usually very detail oriented can make that mistake, it’s easy to imagine many others have as well.

Then, I thought there was no harm in having a punt and installing Windows 11 via a trial of Parallels (Mac virtualisation software). To our great surprise, those old 32-bit games ran fine in the virtual machine. I really wasn’t expecting that, given that they’re designed for 32-bit Intel / AMD processors; and definitely not Apple M-series chips. The problem then obviously is that you’ve bought a Mac for £600, and then you have to spend about £60 annually on a Parallels licence, and £200 on a Windows 11 Pro licence, just to play a handful of 15 year old games. For not much more than that, you could buy a Windows 11 native mini-PC from Geekom or similar. And if you bought a PC for the cost of all of those items together (£860-ish), you almost certainly could run many modern games at decent settings at 1080p.

At this point, I was starting to think about getting back into PC gaming properly myself, but we were stuck with a base model Mac Mini with very limited storage and RAM for modern gaming, and running MacOS; which itself still has limited support from most game developers. The only real option available to me was to play the relative handful of Mac games that I can fit on the 256gb of storage, and will run well. And beyond that you’re limited to streaming (GeForce Now, Luna or Xbox Cloud). So then you’re forced to pay money to some of the least moral, or most environmentally damaging companies out there, or watch ads in the case of Nvidia’s service. GeForce Now is the one I prefer of course, because it integrates with Steam. This means you own the games for the future and can play them on your own hardware as well. This is a decent stopgap solution, but I don’t think we should be reliant on big corporate data centres in future, especially as prices keep climbing because of AI and neoliberalism. I want to be able to play on my own hardware ideally.

But then what would happen if I wanted to try Linux for gaming now? Well, to be truthful, I don’t know. That’s the problem with traditional Linux. Very little is truly user friendly when it comes to games. It always seems to be guesswork as far as compatibility with traditional Linux distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, and especially when it comes to the more “boutique” distros designed for gaming, like Bazzite. I had a look on their website and to me it comes across as an OS for tinkerers and not the general public. Basically, the situation for regular people who want to own their games and play them on their own computer hardware (that’s not Windows), and have a wide selection, is not good. That is if you don’t factor in Valve’s activities.

Thank god Valve (Steam) exists. If it weren’t for them, gaming in general (and especially those of us who play and spend our money) would be so much worse off. Their Steam Deck; while it’s not something I’d like to use as I mentioned before, I can appreciate that it has put developers, publishers and console hardware makers under pressure to have more consumer friendly practices; and forced many of them to support Linux hardware in order to access that Steam Deck installed base. And obviously it’s provided many players with a great handheld gaming experience.

Their upcoming Steam Machine (console / PC hybrid / GameCube tribute) is another huge deal that piles yet more pressure on the rest of the industry. A lot of people will hopefully be buying this thing, and they’re going to be expecting extensive support for new games. And the fact that the device is relatively modest hardware spec wise (or it certainly will be in a couple of years time), that also bodes well for many gamers without the cash to keep upgrading; but who still want a PC experience with keyboard and mouse support, and an actual desktop OS as an option. As well as the rest of us who want to use our similarly modest hardware for as long as possible. It will increase the pressure on developers to keep the system requirements low as long as they can.

So, if I was going to get seriously into PC gaming again now, what would I do? Honestly I wouldn’t buy or build a high end gaming PC and eschew Windows 11 for any Linux distro. I just don’t think that’s an option for 99% of people yet. Hopefully that changes soon. I also wouldn’t want to compromise my principles and buy a Windows 11 PC. I would either get a Steam Machine, or just continue as I am with cloud gaming and a handful of local games on the Mac Mini. That’s as good as you can do unless you’re a Linux expert and you want the hassle (or fun depending on your perspective) of solving the various inevitable problems that crop up.

I think in the long run, we need to be demanding a socialist gaming scenario. One storefront that’s nationalised and globally available (Steam), no DRM and true game ownership, maintaining free online play and features like cloud saves that are practically essential in today’s gaming world. We need to ensure games are maintained in the long run and preserved for future generations of players; with hardware built to last and be supported for as long as possible. We also need to see cloud gaming be democratised. Built for the people, affordable and easy to use.

We need to see less AI in gaming. That’s one of my big fears for the next generation of consoles; that they’ll try pushing AI where it’s not wanted and not needed, to try justifying a big increase in cost of both hardware and games. We need to make sure that doesn’t happen too, and fight back hard if they do try it. Gamers need to learn to vote with their wallets finally. People need the self control to be able to resist that latest blockbuster game and hold the developers and publishers accountable when their social policies don’t reach a level we can accept.

I suppose what I’m saying is, the best thing you can do right now as a gamer in this capitalist hellhole of a global society to bring about positive change, is to buy a Steam Machine if you want to support a better future. It sounds like a funny thing to say as an Ecosocialist, but it’s indicative of how right wing gaming has become. You have no choice but to participate in it. But at least this way you send the right kind of message. You can support a (is it social democratic?) company that has many policies that clearly outshine the competition in terms of consumer friendliness. Obviously, don’t buy one if you don’t need it right now. If you’re happy with your current hardware, or you’re happy as a console only gamer. But definitely consider Valve hardware when you do come to replace your gear.

And maybe by then, it’ll be much more reasonable for the vast majority of regular gamers who currently feel bullied into using Windows to switch over to either Mac or Linux. Linux probably the ideal, since it’s open-source, and there’s Steam OS. Maybe we’ll see a situation where gaming hardware manufacturers like ASUS ROG ship with Steam OS over Windows. It could happen. But even Apple do seem to be making progress now too after many years of stagnation, when seemingly only Blizzard were loyally supporting it. Razer have recently begun supporting Mac with their peripherals and accompanying software, and it can only keep going in this fashion. If Microsoft keep having trouble converting Windows 10 users to 11 (presumably 12 soon); and they keep stepping on rakes with regards to their Xbox policies that gamers hate, then this change could accelerate much faster than I’m expecting.

But certainly for right now, maybe just get a Switch 2 and a Steam Machine… Then you’ll have a great selection of games you’d get on PS5 and Xbox. But you’d also get a nice mixture of the affordable Steam sales, as well as the high quality Nintendo games, that probably won’t be affordable, but they will be good. That’s probably the ultimate socialist gaming setup for the time being. Obviously, the long term goal should be for all games, new and old to be available on all platforms; in a similar way to movies and music. And we need to see legislation to make it far easier and legal to run games past a certain age on any hardware you see fit. Right now it’s a sort of unspeakable dark art to run roms of classic games on new handhelds or other devices. We need to make that process seamless and normalised.

I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot recently; since I basically gave up on mainstream media of all kinds and dove into Twitch streaming for something more human to watch (even if it is owned by Amazon).

Twitch is an interesting platform. It was definitely a pioneer in live-streaming as we know it today. And that’s generally a good thing. Live-streaming is a useful thing to be able to do. Anyone can use it for citizen journalism at a moment’s notice for example. And it’s an easy way to get into producing content online. It’s certainly easier than (scripting?), filming and uploading a YouTube video.

But aside from popularising and perfecting the technology of streaming itself, I can’t think of anything else positive Twitch is responsible for. It’s good at promoting conservative, individualistic thinking through its system of monetisation where it brings out the worst in so many people. Everything has a price. Streamers sell their dignity to the highest bidder all the time it feels like. It’s also good at creating either extremely right wing or anti-political discourse. It rewards stupidity in a way no other social media platform does. At least in my experience. And that’s despite other apps undoubtedly providing stiff completion. Its community on the whole practically celebrates anti-intellectualism. And that’s barely exaggeration, if at all.

And then you get into the gaming roots of the Twitch service itself. The original Justin.tv website which preceded Twitch was not gaming related. It was a more generic streaming service that came out of a sort of stunt; streaming the life of one of the founders 24/7 for a significant period of time. They chose to focus its successor service on gaming rather than IRL (in real life). And that was a mistake in my view. Presumably they chose to do that because they saw game streaming as the next big market they could aim it at to differentiate Twitch from YouTube. I guess it could also have come down to technical limitations of outdoor streaming at the time. Which would have been fair enough, even if it has seemingly not paid off in the long run. Shoehorning outdoor streaming into a platform designed for gaming was always going to be awkward and sub-optimal. Under social democracy, they might have felt empowered to take a punt on IRL / general variety streaming in the early stages.

The gaming world does have plenty of good people involved; but I don’t think anyone would dispute the fact that it was and is far more toxic and unpleasant than it is welcoming and open minded. Had they chosen to (or been able to) focus on life streaming at the beginning, Twitch (or whatever they might have called it instead) could have been a genuine YouTube competitor by now. Rather than a relatively niche community of often angry / depressed gamer misfits (and that’s speaking as an anxious, occasionally angry and depressed gamer misfit). Had YouTube been put under pressure over the years, they’d likely not be as awful as they are now too because of their monopolistic position in online video.

Another interesting element to me, is just how easily the Twitch model has been copied by newcomers like Kick, which is even more right wing and problematic. Kick demonstrated how little of a unique selling point Twitch actually has, and maybe exposed their hubris. YouTube has that gargantuan back catalogue of videos stretching back 20 years. This is genuinely useful and makes them practically untouchable in video, as I said. What does Twitch have content wise? Yes, they have contracts with popular streamers. But we’ve seen big names abandon the platform for guaranteed cash payouts elsewhere already, and this trend will surely accelerate. In terms of archived streams, they now limit even paid accounts to just a few months of archives. And even when streamers choose to make full VODs highlighted permanently; watching 10 hour streams back is a very niche pursuit. I like to do it, because I find that very often, the best parts of streams don’t make the highlights (on YouTube of course). But I will readily admit I’m far from normal in that regard, and it’s surely not a money spinner for Twitch either. And even in this scenario, a lot of Twitch streamers actually just upload their full VODs to secondary YouTube accounts anyway. So Twitch loses out here too.

When you add everything together: the toxic, idiotic, extremely capitalistic culture; the gaming theme that has almost certainly limited the platform’s mainstream appeal; and the fact that almost the entire service can easily be replicated; it doesn’t look good.

If Amazon decided tomorrow to shut the whole thing down; everyone would just move over to Kick or another similar service, and barely anyone would shed a tear. You could even rebrand Kick with the Twitch name and logo, and turn the green accents to purple, and how many people would even be able to tell the difference?

To be absolutely clear; what we need now is definitely not Kick to replace Twitch. What we need is a non-gaming themed, socialist run live-streaming service that keeps the streaming tech but cuts out all the capitalist bullshit. Get rid of text-to-speech (TTS) donations; which hand a megaphone to rich arseholes who can promote fascist politics and climate denial as much as their fat wallets allow (Aka endlessly). Maybe allow one TTS message per viewer per stream. Free of charge of course (or very cheap if absolutely necessary). You’d still be able to be heard above the crowd when you feel like you have something really important to say. But you’d have to be very careful to make the most of it. To time it right, and really be profound. You wouldn’t have stupid spam messages all the time; and you’d allow socialists a voice too. Not just the cashed up, climate denying MAGA supporters. You’d also get rid of these sycophantic sugar daddy types that are way too common on the platform right now. And even that is hardly surprising given the rampant inequality in society. The rich are hoarding all the money!

You often get situations where female streamers are extremely reliant on (probably) older, (probably) rich (probably) men to pay their bills. Some of them are harmless, nice guys who maybe just really like the person and genuinely want to help them out. Albeit sometimes stretching their own finances to the limit to do so. But other times it’s more insidious. You can quite easily have situations where some men perhaps enjoy the power they have over women streamers in a way that pushes the boundary of innocent fun, or crosses it. Sometimes it feels pretty misogynistic, even if it’s not necessarily intentional. You would have a far healthier environment for streamers and viewers alike if you had an overall more equal society, with many people contributing smaller amounts. Rather than a handful as is so often the case now.

A left wing (or even centrist) Twitch alternative I think could very easily take the best elements of the technology, remove all the bad stuff; be a much more inclusive and open minded place for all kinds of thought and entertainment; and become a genuine YouTube competitor. I don’t think that would be too hard either these days, because I get the feeling many people kind of hate YouTube. I used to be a massive fan of YouTube before it became the undisputed home for all internet video not produced by a big corporation like Netflix or Disney. But in the last few years, the algorithm, the AI comment police, the censorship of small channels that speak uncomfortable truths, the incessant clickbait, the stupid facial expressions in thumbnails that creators are forced to make in order to pay their bills. The whole thing has just become so shit. So I think people are increasingly using it begrudgingly and are more open to alternatives. And especially if they’re live focused, because live is relatable, and has a unique, fun element when executed well.

If we do see something new come along, and Twitch does fall out of favour, then they’ll only have themselves to blame. Not least for choosing not to pay their “partners” what they’re worth; which is perhaps the biggest black mark against the company of all. It shows a disregard for the people who generate the money. A streaming platform without streamers is nothing after all. Even the lack of imagination in how payments are structured is mystifying. It seems obvious to me that you should have a progressive payment system. Pay small streamers the highest percentage, to enable them to make a living and potentially deliver more revenue for the company later on; and reduce it down to a base of maybe 50% as streamers earn more and more. But at the moment, you have a scenario where even streamers who have 100k followers and plenty of loyal subscribers are getting burnt out. It makes no sense for anyone. The whole streaming world is ripe for a totally new approach.

I used to think AI had some legitimate benefits. Mostly in areas like healthcare. I still believe that it’s likely to be beneficial in that one specific instance. But I started getting the feeling recently that the capitalist class are using the very few actually useful scenarios for AI as a way to sell their dystopian vision for the technology to people who are otherwise rightly sceptical.

There have been recent reports about how even students at top universities (in western countries I believe, which makes sense) have been relying on AI to write their entire coursework projects for them. If it’s happening in those institutions, imagine what’s happening at high schools. This is my impression of the conservative approach to education through and through, but on steroids. Students learn very little (or in this case, basically nothing), but they get an oh so useful piece of paper saying they passed, which will surely prepare them for life in the workplace. When I left college in the early 2000s, I didn’t feel prepared for a job; and there was no AI back then. It would have been hard to cheat on assignments too, although I’m sure some tried copying and pasting from Wikipedia or something. It illustrates that conservatives never really cared about true education. They always just wanted to create the next generation of obedient worker drones who don’t ask questions, do jobs they’re overqualified for, so they can keep their pay and level of power to challenge the system suppressed as much as possible. And try to push as many people as possible into the financial sector. Simultaneously killing true education as well as the arts. Slowly but surely so people barely noticed for decades (until about now).

So I suppose we can say that AI is the natural next step conservatives want us to take. They want us to be even more incurious than before. And I feel like I’m noticing this everywhere. People are often unwilling to even look up the most basic of facts in a search engine these days. Let alone find an answer in a book while researching the old fashioned way. I’ve been talking to people on services like Bluesky, and they won’t have even bothered to look at my profile to see I call myself a degrowth communist. They’ll be surprised a few days later when I bring it up once I suspect they haven’t seen. And these are otherwise very smart and switched-on people. If they’re acting in this way, what are Trump / Reform voters doing? They’re seemingly waiting to be told what to think and feel. Ash Sarkar said essentially this on Novara Live last week, and it got me thinking about this topic.

Speaking of search engines, that brings me to my next point. People are using AI chatbots as replacements for traditional search engines like Google (or DuckDuckGo, which I’ve switched to recently). This is clearly excessive. Search engines do the job for us perfectly fine. They’re not as conversational, but they work. There’s no real benefit to using AI in this way. In fact, it’s objectively worse. For example, as we’ve seen in a recent story, Grok, which is Elon Musk’s AI built into X, has been giving answers which have clearly been manipulated by an employee at X. Potentially Musk himself. If AI is not truly independently intelligent, and instead just parrots the ideology of its creators, then how can any of us take it seriously and trust its answers? With a search engine, you are shown a list of independent websites best placed to answer your question or provide the information you’re looking for. I know search providers can manipulate this, but generally speaking it’s still decent. With AI, people are often taking the paragraph or so of text it churns out as gospel. If they even bother to look up the thing at all. This is incredibly dangerous for society when opinion is being presented as fact, or if a bug causes incorrect information to be presented as fact too. It doesn’t have to be deliberate to be disastrous. Of course, even search engines are integrating AI answers now. On DuckDuckGo, and most other search engines, you can turn it off, which is good. But how long are these companies going to give us the option?

And this is another massive problem with AI. The energy consumption. An AI search request uses around 10 times more energy than a Google search, for example. This is something that we absolutely can’t afford to scale up to all web searches, for obvious reasons. We’re already destroying our climate and environment at a rapid pace. Are we determined to put ourselves out of our misery faster? Is that it? Or is it just incredible levels of stupidity that has pushed us into doing the worst possible things at the worst possible time?

As I said earlier, there are a few legitimate areas of society where AI can improve our lives in a tangible way. But I’m not willing to implement those at any cost. If we limited the scope of AI purely to these areas, such as healthcare; then fair enough. But that can only happen under a socialist or communist society. As long as the capitalists are in charge, we’re going to get a nightmarish implementation of AI that we really don’t want. And it doesn’t have to include a Terminator style robot uprising for that to be the case. The acceleration of the dumbing down of society, and the additional climate damage being caused are nightmarish enough. And I haven’t even mentioned autonomy taking people’s jobs. That’s a whole other topic that gets endlessly written about.

I’ve been boycotting AI for years already. Everyone else who cares about our future needs to do the same. It’s getting progressively more difficult to avoid, but we just have to stay one step ahead. If that means switching email provider, or not using a social network, switching to a different type of smartphone; or even stopping using a smartphone altogether; we have to do it.

Since Amazon recently removed our right as Kindle eBook owners (or licencees?) to download our books (and subsequently strip the DRM – Digital Rights Management) from them to enable use on other devices; I’ve seen YouTubers talking about switching to the Kobo store for example. As though Kobo is perfect. People talk about how they trust Kobo to not be the evil corporation that Amazon are most associated with being. And while Kobo certainly does seem vastly more focused on customers having a good experience; they still have DRM on their books. People talk happily about being able to easily strip the DRM. And that Kobo even tells you how to do it themselves. That’s a lot better than Amazon as well, of course. But we shouldn’t continue to accept this as normal.

There’s absolutely no reason why all paid eBooks can’t be sold entirely DRM free tomorrow (or maybe in a month. It might take a while to make the switch. But you get the idea). We fought for and won DRM free iTunes music 16 years ago! Even in the book world, we have Libro.fm, the fantastic audiobook service (that I use and recommend). It provides DRM free audiobooks that you can download, back up, and play on any media player on any device. They also have an excellent app which has streaming, and cloud sync of your place. I tend to back up books, but then listen via the app. It’s awesome. As a communist in a miserable capitalist world where pretty much all corporations exist to fleece you; it’s shocking to me that I found even a single company that I’d recommend this highly. Stop giving Amazon (and then Google) money for audiobooks; as I was before I found out about Libro.fm. Before I get accused of being sponsored, I’m a communist. I hate sponsorships. So no.

It’s pretty bewildering that audiobooks are DRM free, but eBooks mostly aren’t. I would have thought the book industry would be more protective of audiobooks than eBooks because of their increasing popularity and their investments in the production of the audiobooks, the narrators and so on. There are two reasons I can think of why the publishing industry would do it this way round. Either they would be fine with DRM-free eBooks, but no one really complains vocally (because they’re quiet and polite bookworms), and therefore they haven’t realised there’s demand for it. Or they’re worried about how easily eBooks (which are small files) could be shared around. Compared to audiobooks, which are relatively large files and so people will be less willing to make the effort to steal them? I think the first option I’ve arbitrarily given myself to pick from is clearly more plausible. I mean I don’t know if that second argument holds water at all given the speed and reliability of our 2025 internet, and the affordability of storage as well.

DRM is definitely a big problem in our lives in various fields. Gaming is a big one. I’m not exactly sure how that gets solved under capitalism, because I do think that if gaming publishers did offer DRM-free, I’m not confident that the majority of gamers would keep paying. I honestly don’t think the gesture of respect would be reciprocated by enough. Although I hope I’m proven wrong on that. I’m sure there are many gaming industry experts (on the left) out there who can speak to this better than me. But certainly we can continue to eliminate it from more places very easily, and books are one of the easiest. I do think that the publishing industry could be easily pushed to do it with a relatively small co-ordinated campaign. Libro.fm shows that it can definitely be done.

Hopefully pretty soon, the only place where DRM for books exists will be with digital borrowing from libraries; where it actually makes total sense.

One of my biggest bugbears in recent years has been hearing this idea being banded around in socialist media; (I don’t want to say left because that can mean too many different things) that suggests that socialists are to blame for our lack of societal traction.

To me, this is total nonsense. While you can argue, and I’d agree, that the Corbyn campaign didn’t do everything 100% perfectly strategy wise for example; the discourse amplifies tiny strategic errors as being the virtual sole cause of loss of support amongst the electorate. Societal political literacy and media influence get mostly overlooked with less importance placed upon them. People like Nigel Farage and Richard Tice get the opposite treatment. Some prominent British socialist journalists are quick to praise Nigel Farage in particular as a political strategic genius. I’m not saying he isn’t a shrewd operator and a great public speaker / showman. He is. But he, and most others like him generally find their popularity falls into their lap. All they have to do is avoid a mega blunder that would cut through to the mainstream and expose them for the anti-worker charlatans they are and always have been to a population that barely pays attention to politics at all. Apart from on polling day where about half of them can be bothered to actually turn up and express their anger at how much more shit the country has become since last time.

And that’s in a country where we still have a modicum of common sense and we aren’t by and large a zombie wasteland like the United States. There, you don’t even have to avoid the mega blunder. You can be an out-and-proud fascist, rapist, fraudster and so on; and still win the popular vote. It’s almost as if the less strategy you have, the better. So, why do we allow Farage, or Tice, or any of the rest of them to get painted as strategic masterminds even by socialists like Aaron Bastani (who I generally like); and meanwhile someone like Jeremy Corbyn gets harsh criticism from the same journalists and outlets for tiny strategic errors that would never even make the news if Farage did them?

We don’t like to blame the public. We don’t want to have to say that a large part of our electorate are blithering idiots (which often leads them to racism, bigotry and sometimes violence); but it’s true. Look at every man or woman on the street “vox pop” video that’s been released on youtube or broadcast on TV in the last few years. They almost seem to be getting stupider, more racist and more bigoted with every single video. Maybe they are. Take Bastani’s recent trip to Runcorn for example. The vast majority of the people he talked to were convinced that Britain is a poor country and we have to choose between either housing and supporting British born citizens, and treating “illegal migrants” (aka desperate asylum seekers who have been through a hell of a lot to even get here) to lavish lifestyles in hotels. And they also tend to think that the migrants don’t want to work, when they are literally being prevented from working. The government refuse to reverse a couple of decade old policy that stops refugees contributing to society because it allows them to more easily demonise the vulnerable people; which in turn benefits them politically. Although it will benefit Farage more obviously.

Even the people he interviewed who weren’t entirely brain rotted didn’t have much of use to say. Out of the whole almost half an hour long video, only one person mentioned the Green Party (the only left of centre party in England), and he was basically the only person who made any cogent points at all. As far as the two women I think it was who said they were going to vote Labour in the parliamentary by-election; the best argument they came up with was that Labour just needed a bit more time to see if they could turn it around. Aaron mentioned this as notable in his summary of the video as well.

We need to be honest about the fact that British people are very, very stupid and uninformed on average at this point. Yes, you can say that Farage and Reform are “strategic” in terms being best placed to manipulate fools into voting against their own interests. But they’re not strategic masterminds. They’re just benefitting from decades of societal decay. There’s nothing significantly wrong with the left’s strategy. It’s been more than good enough to win elections in 2017 and 2019. We’ve seen it in Canada and Australia in the last couple of weeks. I’m not saying those results were good for the left. They weren’t. But those countries show that the more educated a society is, the more likely it is that they will resist fascism. Canada and Australia have definitely fallen back in education standards and political knowledge as well, which is why the results were still bad for socialists and social democrats. The “Shit Lite” party (as The Juice Media would say) won in both of those cases. I think that’s a really good illustration though of what this is really about.

Smart countries vote for socialists. Moderately intelligent countries vote for the neoliberals, and brain dead looney populations vote for obvious charlatans who offer nothing to them, and get propped up by the media, like Nigel Farage.

I saw some liberal responses to an Instagram video by Chris Packham; where they say basically “I voted for Labour because I thought they would turn it all around, but they turned out to be just as shit as the Tories”.

This shit broke me. It’s the most angry I’ve felt for quite a while. I haven’t been that angry about Trump. I’ve just been like “ah yeah ok” every time I’ve been told about the latest executive action Trump has introduced. I’m just entirely apathetic about it. Obviously I’ve been feeling for those innocent people impacted by these fascist policies. But I knew everything they would do, and I just generally prepared myself mentally for the worst policies I could imagine. So nothing shocked or surprised me in the slightest.

But when it comes to liberal voters and politicians; they really infuriate me. Obviously it’s the same all over the world; but considering I’m British, I’ll talk about the situation here specifically. The way Jeremy Corbyn and the left in general have been treated by so called Labour and the media is just nauseating. And then on top of that, the way we were ignored at every single point, when we were right at EVERY SINGLE POINT is unforgivable. This isn’t them saying “you were right about Jeremy Corbyn. You were right about Starmer. You were right to vote for Rebecca Long-Bailey.” This is “we fucked up by voting for Starmer” and nothing more. It’s like when they say nothing before October 7th is relevant when it comes to Palestine. They ignore history to justify the unjustifiable in their minds. They’ll never accept the left was right and they were wrong about anything (let alone everything).

They would rather play dumb and pretend that Labour under Starmer was always a social democratic proposition; until it suddenly wasn’t. It wasn’t an extreme neoliberal government in waiting from the very beginning in 2020 (5 years ago!) It wasn’t a party that offered nothing to voters because they knew as long as they remained alive, and gave away practically nothing on future policy; that by election day that they’d be in number 10 and 11 Downing Street. We can talk about the Tories making it inevitable that Labour would take over, and the media who ignored the only party that had policies that made actual sense (or any serious policy at all), the Green Party.

But at the end of the day, a special fuck you goes out to the liberal voters. The ignorant, insufferable morons who insisted that they knew better than us. They knew better about the economy. They knew better about the climate. They knew better about nature. They knew better about antisemitism. They knew better about protest. They knew better about politics and political strategy.

Except they didn’t. And they still can’t accept that they don’t. They never will, regardless of what goes wrong.

Fuck these people! I’m never listening to any of them again. Nor the liberal media, who are probably at fault more than any voters. I don’t know. There’s just something about liberal voters realising they fucked up but never taking any responsibility that particularly pisses me off.

Either way, they all need to own everything that happens from here on in. It’s nothing to do with the left. Climate breakdown and collapse. It’s on them. Fascism and the removal of all of our rights in the meantime. It’s on them.

If you’re reading this and you’re a neoliberalism enabler; it’s all on you. We’re always told that we need to go further to the right, even though capitalist ideology has failed time and time again. Ok, you win. The world is going fascist. You got what you wanted. Now let’s see you take responsibility for once. No one is going to believe you this time, when you inevitably try to blame the left for your utter failure; and the destruction of our only home.

I’m not even sure how far fetched it is to imagine a TV newsreader in a destroyed and smouldering newsroom in the future blaming Jeremy Corbyn and the left for our destruction at the hands of the fascists. That’s how insane our world now is.