This summer I spent a week at Plum Village, a Buddhist monastery in the southwest of France. And this place held up a mirror in a way that I didn't expect. There are lots of ways in which this retreat changed me as a person, but here I want to discuss one specific thing that happened there. Plum Village made me...

Violence is complex. It requires systems of thought, rationalizations. Violence requires the redirection of suffering, and the obfuscation of this redirection. Compassion is simple. It thrives on attention. It is always already here. Compassion arises in the empty mind, the present moment. It requires no theories or...

I recently gave a talk at a doctoral school in Belgium about alternatives to Big Tech software: do they exist, where are they, and how to find them? I figured it might be useful to other people as well, so I'm sharing the presentation here. There are a myriad reasons to opt out of Big Tech: ethics, privacy,...

"It's so weird that this isn't weird" The voice came out of a pile of around a dozen people. The room was dark, I couldn't see who said it. The people in the pile were lying criss-cross on top of each other, forming a kind of net of interconnected human beings. They were touching, holding and caressing each other....

There's this tenacious idea that in an unequal society, those at the top are the winners. That is, if you manage to avoid oppression, and if you manage to do the oppressing yourself, then you've got yourself a good life. I'm a white man in an affluent country, and I'm here to tell you why that's bullshit. Why that's...

The first time I heard the phrase 'All Cops Are Bastards' in an activist context, it shocked me. I thought it was way out of line, a dangerous generalization that can only cause prejudice and hatred. Not at all the kind of attitude we need if we want to work towards a better society with more mutual understanding....

Often, in discussions about things deemed undesirable, someone will use an annoyingly popular trope. I call it 'the people's fallacy'. (Even though I secretly hate the trend of calling everything a fallacy. It has strong LessWrong and RationalWiki vibes. Anyway!) It usually goes something like this: Anne argues that...

I'll keep this one short and sweet: Digital archiving is crucial in the face of rising fascism. I'll go over the why and the how. WhyFascists are grappling for power around the world. The US is only the most notable example, but European countries are showing much of the same worrying trends, and I don't think I...

A blog post about coffee addiction that somehow ends up being about entanglement, capitalism, and colonialism.

Update 19-06-2025: since the publication of this blog post, I have adapted it for the Dutch-language philosophy webzine Bij Nader Inzien, and it was published there today! It uses largely the same sources, but it's shorter and perhaps a bit more conventionally readable. It's still very angry! Link Update 24-07-2025:...

I'm constantly being asked and pushed not to care about others. That's just the society we live in. The #1 concern for any good citizen should be 'doing well for yourself'. That means: get a job, get married, buy a house, hoard some money, buy trinkets that promise happiness, be perpetually online to tell others how...

This post is about something I'm struggling with in my philosophical research, and I hope that by writing about it, I will gain some clarity. Don't expect neatly structured arguments here. When talking about decentering the human in ethics, a common pushback is that animals do not behave ethically in the same way...