Baseline Communism

Richard Seymour | London Review of Books | Aug 14 2025

All societies maintain what, in Debt, he calls ‘baseline communism’: a free, non-commodified mutuality without which no society can exist. Baseline communism happens wherever ‘no accounts are taken’ and it would be ‘offensive, or simply bizarre’, even to consider taking them: giving a stranger directions, buying someone a pint, offering food to a guest, or fixing a friend’s car. Graeber finds this ‘raw material of sociality’ everywhere, usually working alongside more hierarchical and contractual relations.

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Graeber is at his most speculative, and engaging, as a theorist-practitioner of fun. Elaborating the political ethics of play and care, in the final part of the collection, he takes up a version of the question he once posed in an introduction to Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: ‘If all you can imagine is what you claim to stand against, then in what sense do you actually stand against it?’

Google, Nvidia and OpenAI

Ben Thompson | Stratechery | Dec 01 2025

With all the pessimistic takes making the round about OpenAI, sharing an argument as to why it’s actually Nvidia that should be more worried by Google’s apparent dominance across the AI stack - foundation models, chips, data centers, consumer and enterprise products.

What is interesting to consider is which company is more at risk from Google, and why? On one hand Nvidia is making tons of money, and if Blackwell is good, Vera Rubin promises to be even better; moreover, while Meta might be a natural Google partner, the other hyperscalers are not. OpenAI, meanwhile, is losing more money than ever, and is spread thinner than ever, even as the startup agrees to buy ever more compute with revenue that doesn’t yet exist. And yet, despite all that — and while still being quite bullish on Nvidia — I still like OpenAI’s chances more. Indeed, if anything my biggest concern is that I seem to like OpenAI’s chances better than OpenAI itself.