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When we think of extractivism today, we usually picture a massive mining pit or towering oil rigs. But there’s another, more subtle type of extraction happening that affects each of us more directly: the steady flow of local wealth into distant corporate coffers.
Spencer R. Scott explores this dynamic in his recent essay on effective activism, describing how energy, labour and capital are extracted from local communities and funneled into the bottom lines of the ‘extractive class’, leaving behind hollowed-out economies and frayed social bonds.
“At the bottom of nearly every modern problem is this cultural monomyth of neoliberalism, and the inequality of power it creates and the environmental and social degradation it causes. If you can wade through everything else as a symptom of this singular cause, it illuminates a path forward: getting very serious about doing everything in our power to keep value you generate away from their bottomless pit.”
A perfect example of this can be found in our relationship with cars: often manufactured overseas with opaque labour practices, financed through major banks, insured by multinational corporations, and fuelled by big oil companies. Each transaction drains money from local communities, redirecting it to corporate entities that – on top of everything else – know how to maximise tax loopholes.
But alternatives to this extractive model already exist, as demonstrated by the remarkable story of Yackandandah, a small country town in Australia. When their only petrol station was about to close, residents pooled together money to form a community-owned company. Twenty years later, their service station not only provides essential services but returns profits directly to local shareholders and community projects. (Yes, they also still sell fossil fuels, but EV charging stations are in the works.)
What makes this story particularly compelling is how it demonstrates the ripple effects of local economic empowerment. Their community-owned service station has helped fund everything from sports equipment to firefighting gear. The venture’s success has inspired other local businesses to invest in their future, transforming what could have been another tale of rural decline into a blueprint for community resilience.
Scott argues that meaningful change often requires personal transformation – “we have to make real, tangible changes to our lives... we may have to quit our jobs, become activists at work, go back to school, start over, rethink, retool”. The residents who founded Yackandandah’s community service station embody this spirit, choosing to step beyond their usual roles to become local changemakers.
Building alternatives to extractive economics isn’t just about critiquing the system from afar/behind our screens. It’s about actively rewriting the story at the local level, where change feels personal and immediate. When those benefits are visible to the people we care about, they have the power to inspire more systemic change over time.
– Kai
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Apps & Sites
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For this and future fire events near you: Breathable is a (now) free air quality index widget for all Apple devices. I love this by its maker Garrett Murray: “In light of the awful fires and air quality in Los Angeles, I’ve made Breathable free and app will remain free permanently. I charged for the app prior only so I could donate the proceeds to climate change charities, but paying Apple 15% for that privilege is silly.”
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Collaborative docs & tasks
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I mentioned Craft here before and it was already a very solid Notion alternative. The recently released v3 makes it a more powerful and well-rounded product: it’s now more task-centric, offers a revamped calendar, integrates with Apple Reminders, comes with built-in ChatGPT assisstance and Apple Intelligence support, and more. It’s built for macOS and iOS, so the UI is really lovely. Friends of DD enjoy a 30% liftetime discount.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
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Let kids earn screen time
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A free iOS app designed to help parents manage their kids’ screen time by linking it to the completion of certain tasks. Parents can set mandatory tasks that kids must complete before accessing games or videos, as well as bonus tasks that allow them to earn additional screen time.
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Random YouTube recommendations
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Worthy Five: Laura Olin
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Five recommendations by digital strategist and old house fixer-upper Laura Olin
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A video worth watching:
Please watch this video of a man doing an impression of Gandalf, reciting the lyrics to the Duck Tales theme song. It is a minute and sixteen seconds’ worth of respite from our unserious times.
An Instagram account worth following:
I always learn something from sociologist, professor and author Tressie McMillan Cottom who contributes new aspect to a conversation about culture or politics. She's also funny as hell.
A concept worth understanding:
The Finnish concept of sisu is sometimes translated as something like ‘guts’ but we think of sisu more as determination in the face of impossible odds. The ‘impossible’ part there is important. When Russia invaded Finland in 1939, it was a huge empire taking on a tiny nation. You’d expect Finland would be crushed, but Finns inflicted such heavy Russian losses that they were able to negotiate a ceasefire only a few months later. Why fight when you can have no expectation of winning? Because fighting for a just cause matters even if you lose.
An activity worth doing:
There is no instance when a dumb little walk around your neighbourhood won’t improve your mood.
An activity worth doing:
I love If Books Could Kill with Michael Hobbs and Peter Shamshiri as they take on the airport business book complex with appropriate scorn and hilarity.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Laura Olin in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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Stealth wealth and the new colonialism
Sociologist Brooke Harrington offers a compelling exploration of the shadowy world of offshore finance, exposing how the global elite use offshore tax havens to shield their wealth, evade taxes and exploit legal loopholes, often at the expense of ordinary citizens and national economies. “She shows what offshore finance costs all of us, and how it has colonized the world-not on behalf of any one country, but to benefit a largely invisible empire of a few thousand billionaires who help themselves to the best society has to offer while sticking us with the bill.”
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Joy and meaning on a bicycle
For the cycling fans among you: a visual celebration of cycling’s diverse culture and the profound impact bicycles have on individuals’ lives. Peter Flax, a renowned cycling journalist, delves into the universal motivations behind riding, with stunning photography and illustrations, and interviews and profiles of both legendary and contemporary cyclists. “The bicycle is one of the greatest inventions in human history. It can literally transport you to places you want to go – to your school or office, to the summit of a local hilltop, to some objective in your pursuit of fitness – but it can do more than that. A bicycle can also transport you to an entirely different mindset, a place where you can embrace the unexpected and live in the moment.”
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Overheard on Mastodon
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I’m not pirating movies, I’m just training my model.
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Food for Thought
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This is a follow-up/second part to Spencer R. Scott’s excellent piece on going beyond mere ‘social media activism’ to actively shape a more positive future. This piece looks at how we can reverse the extractive flow of wealth from our local communities. “The task before us is immense, but so is the strength we possess together. By investing our energy, capital, and labor into systems of mutual aid, community resilience, and ecological stewardship, we can nourish a new paradigm that circulates wealth into our communities and ecosystems instead of draining them dry.”
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With the housing crisis in Australia worsening every year and with every successive government, boomers have become a financial backbone of many younger folks lucky enough to have parents who own property. Eliza Filby with an excellent and insightful piece on how the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’ increasingly determines life opportunities, creating an ‘inheritocracy’ that deepens social inequalities across generations. “‘Parents have become the gatekeepers to their children’s adulthood, the wealth level of the previous generation ultimately determining which milestones are achievable and which are not.‘ Inheritocracy is the driver of milestone culture.”
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“The truth is going out of business as technology turns us into a folk-story society, ripe for influence by a demagogue.” Journalist Matt Pearce on journalism’s struggle to survive in a world where producing quality information is becoming more expensive and difficult compared to creating misleading content. “Consumers have gotten pretty tolerant of bullshit. By ‘bullshit’ I’m referring broadly to the kind of stuff – like social media commentary, podcast chat shows or ChatGPT summaries – that can contain factual information but often contains nonsense, in a context where there’s zero consequences for bullshitting to begin with and then bullshitting even more. Consumers hardly ever realize it, but they hold traditional news media to vastly higher standards of accurate and ethical behavior than practically every other information source they encounter, even when they’ve started relying on those other information sources instead of the news media.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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Spaniard Sergi Cadenas is a self-taught artist known for his innovative kinetic portraits that transform based on the viewer’s perspective.
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A fascinating, eye-opening photography project by George Steinmetz – a visual investigation of where our food comes from: “The Feed the Planet project is an examination of how the world can meet the rapidly expanding challenge of feeding humanity without putting more natural lands under the plow. Most of us only come into contact with raw food in the supermarket, and are unaware of the methods used to raise it. In many cases, the food industry goes to significant lengths to prevent us from seeing how our food is produced.”
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I’m really enjoying the work of Taiwanese-Canadian painter Liang Wang, who often depicts Taiwanese urban and rural landscapes, capturing everyday scenes with a cinematic quality.
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The gorgeous Azurio is a modern, sharp serif type family ranging from light to black – elegant but with strong personality at the same time.
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Notable Numbers
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A Stanford study on software engineering productivity involving over 50,000 engineers from hundreds of companies found that around 9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing – so-called ghost engineers – and may be working multiple jobs.
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In the US, around 10 million artificial Christmas trees are purchased each season. Nearly 90% of them are shipped across the world from China.
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Zero-emission zones have come into force across 14 Dutch cities to decarbonise urban logistics in the Netherlands. As of January 1st 2025, these zones prohibit polluting vans and trucks from entering the area and aim to reduce CO2 emissions associated with freight.
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Classifieds
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Stateshift is an app that unlocks powerful states inside your nervous system. Dense Discovery readers save 50% on an annual membership, alongside a 7-day free trial.
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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