by Serge S

Cleveland joined several communities nationwide who are changing their stance on Flock surveillance technology. 

During the Cleveland City Council Public Safety Committee’s June 17 meeting, members voted 3 to 1 against renewing their Flock “Safety” surveillance contract which expires on June 29. 

Voting against were Stephanie Howse-Jones, Richard Starr, and Kevin Conwell, leaving Committee Chair Mike Polensek as the sole member to vote for the agreement. 

According to News 5 Cleveland, council members, police administrators, Public Safety Director Wayne Drummond and fifteen community members were involved in the discussion which lasted nearly two hours. 

Flock cameras were first installed in Cleveland during the summer of 2023 and have spread to nearby communities including Euclid, Richmond Heights, Willoughby Hills. 

The $250,000 contract would have extended the system for another year. 

The fight isn’t over. Although the safety committee declined to renew the contract this time, another council committee will take up the legislation although no date has been set. 

Flock isn’t the only surveillance system in Cleveland. The city also operates 3,400 video surveillance cameras, most of which have AI tracking capabilities. 

This isn’t the first time that Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration has tried to sneak funding for surveillance technology through backroom channels. In the past he has bypassed the Safety Committee by extending contracts through the city’s Board of Control which effectively sidesteps council’s ability to review, approve, or deny them. 

In one such instance Bibb extended the city’s $850,000 contract with SoundThinking, the vendor of their gunshot-detection technology ShotSpotter in April of 2026. 

Several organizations have risen in response to Flock and other tracking systems which have flooded Cleveland in recent years as city’s including Dayton have cancelled or declined to renew contracts with Flock. 

One of them, “Flock No CLE” formed last year when the city tried to push an emergency proposal to expand Flock systems and replace their ShotSpotter system in 2025. The legislation would have authorized a $2 million three-year contract with Flock’s version of the “shot spotting” technology by using microphones in their already existing automated license plate readers, according to Signal Cleveland. 

According to Axios Cleveland the Cleveland Clergy Coalition spoke in favor of the contract on safety grounds while police argued the technology improves response times and claimed that there has been no misuse of data by Cleveland officers – although there is no way to verify these claims as officers can use a login system that does not always have two-factor authentication – meaning that logins could be shared to avoid tracking. 

Sources in order of use:

https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/cleveland-metro/cleveland-flock-license-plate-reader-contract-expiring-end-of-the-month

https://www.axios.com/local/cleveland/2026/06/18/cleveland-council-flock-contract-renewal-vote

https://www.axios.com/local/cleveland/2026/05/19/flock-cleveland-bibb-council

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The intellectual landscape of our era is defined by a fascinating paradox. On one hand, society remains deeply committed to a scientific, materialist critique of the world, yet on the other, it seems to many observers that we are witnessing a profound return of the religious. At the heart of this possible modern cultural shift lies a renewed dialogue between three historic figures whose legacies were once thought to be mutually exclusive: Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

By weaving together Hegel’s logic, Marx’s economic theories, and the concept of kenosis—the self-emptying of the divine—that has developed in many Christian traditions, some modern thinkers are discovering a shared consistency that addresses the deep identity crises of twenty-first-century life and the global pressures of capitalism. This evolving perspective provides one possible framework for a secular faith, with the person and teachings of Jesus the Christ offering an ethical foundation upon which the grand political projects of Hegel and Marx can be built.

To understand how the modern intersection of Christ and Marx works, one must first look through the lens of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, particularly as rather creatively reinterpreted by the contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek. On this reading of Hegel, the arrival of the man who would become the Christ represents a profound cosmic moment where the divine spirit steps out of the abstract clouds and enters into the messy, limited reality of human existence. Žižek takes this a step further by arguing that the “Death of God” on the cross is not simply the disappearance of the divine, but the precise moment God experiences what it feels like to be an atheist. When Jesus cries out in agony asking why he has been forsaken, the divine experiences the radical, terrifying gap of its own non-existence. This painful transition shifts spiritual authority away from a distant ruler in the sky and births the immanent Holy Spirit, which these philosophers redefine as the active community of believers working together.

At this point, Žižek is free-styling: the cry of dereliction (only in Mark) is never attributed to God, and only in the late twentieth century do theologians start to make that rather remarkable connection. “God experiences what it feels like to be an atheist” is provocative, which is how we know we’re reading Žižek.

In this framework, Christ represents the ultimate alienation of God into humanity. By dying on the cross, the distant master vanishes, leaving behind human collective agency to shape history. Many point out that Marx’s later critique of religion was actually a radical expansion of this Hegelian logic. Where Hegel believed humanity would find its ultimate peace and reconciliation within the structure of the political state, Marx looked closely at the world and saw ongoing economic alienation.

This relationship is often oversimplified by reducing  Marx’s legacy to his famous catchphrase that religion is the “opium of the people.” In truth, his work was a deep critique of the material world rather than a simple attack on faith. For Marx, the inverted, fantasy world of religious mythology was a mirror image of the inverted reality of capitalism, where dead labor—which we call capital, machinery, and corporate wealth—rules over living, breathing workers. These dynamics form what Žižek calls the “theology of the commodity,” a phenomenon where inanimate objects seem to possess magical social powers while the real humans who made them are ignored.

Consider how this plays out on a regular basis when a consumer buys a brand-new smartphone. People will camp outside stores overnight, treating a sleek piece of glass and metal like a sacred relic capable of bringing them status and joy. Meanwhile, the actual human beings extracting raw materials or working grueling hours in overseas factories remain invisible to the consumer. The object is given an almost divine personality, while the living worker is reduced to an invisible cog in a machine.

In our current era, this tension has fueled a massive revival of Hegelian Marxism, led by scholars like Nathan Brown, who seek to reunite Marx’s economic sharpness with Hegel’s focus on personal and social freedom. This aligns naturally with Liberation Theologians, such as José Porfirio Miranda , who have long argued that the biblical concept of a “preferential option for the poor” is the spiritual equivalent of Marx identifying the working class as the driver of human liberation. Within this synthesis, the radical teachings of Jesus regarding the poor are not treated as polite suggestions for occasional charity but are recognized as the primary engine for historical transformation.

The conceptual bridge linking these three pillars is kenosis, the voluntary self-emptying of power. In Hegel’s philosophy, God empties Godself of heavenly authority to share in human suffering. As Žižek emphasizes, this self-emptying represents the true birth of democracy, forcing the realization that no external superhero is coming to save us, thereby redistributing responsibility to the community.. The Holy Spirit becomes the emotional and social bond of a revolutionary group that steps up after the master is gone.  Marx localizes this self-emptying in the working class—the people who, by owning nothing under the law, end up representing the universal interests of humanity.

Thinkers such as Enrique Dussel  argue that modern global capitalism operates like a religion of death, requiring constant human sacrifice in the form of extreme overwork and poverty just to keep corporate markets satisfied. When these ideas intersect, the results are revolutionary: Jesus provides the deep ethical mandate of self-sacrifice, Marx delivers the structural blueprint of systemic greed, and Hegel offers the logical framework to push through the negative struggles of history.

In our current digital landscape, this philosophical struggle has moved directly onto our screens. Every time a user scrolls through a social media feed, highly advanced algorithms exploit dopamine triggers to maximize corporate ad revenue. The user is no longer just a consumer; their behavior, time, and attention are mined like raw coal. Yet this digital self-emptying also contains the seeds of its own subversion.

This resistance forms what Martin Hägglund calls a secular faith. Because our time on this earth is strictly finite, reclaiming our hours from the digital grind becomes a sacred act of liberation. True freedom in this universe is not the shallow ability to choose between brands, but a deep break from treating ourselves like products to be bought and sold.

Thinkers like Alain Badiou look to the Apostle Paul as the ultimate prototype of this revolutionary attitude, defined by total loyalty to a radical break from the status quo. Freedom is transformed from simple consumer choice into a shared human capacity to physically reshape the material world, echoing the early Christian church’s view (such as the principle of omnia sunt communia, that all goods are to be held in common, as presented in Acts chapters 2 and 4) that the free development of each person is the absolute condition for the free development of all. (Paul may or may not have followed through on his vision, but his rhetoric of equality is significant.)

While Hegel provides the grand logic and Marx provides the mechanical critique of social institutions, it is the figure of Jesus, in my opinion, who injects the vital pulse and the ultimate purpose into this modern synthesis. Without this element, Hegel’s philosophy risks treating human beings as abstract chess pieces in history, and Marx’s theories can devolve into a cold, utilitarian machine of state power. It is only through the explicit focus on the infinite value of the individual—the theological defense of the least of these—that the struggle remains human and redemptive.

The teachings of Jesus thus can be seen as serving as a direct corrective to the potential extremes of both idealistic philosophy and raw economic materialism. Where a philosopher might justify the suffering of entire generations for the abstract progress of a nation, Christ demands immediate compassion for the individual sufferer and offers radical love as the cure. Where a political theorist might reduce a human being to an economic production unit, Christ asserts an inherent dignity that transcends a person’s utility to a market.

In our contemporary world, this intellectual intersection is a practical call to imitate that radical empathy. The most inspiring element of the Marxist dream—the desire for a world free from exploitation—is, at its core, a secular adaptation of the Kingdom of God. The conclusion of this great historical struggle is not found in the growth of the state or the expansion of the market, but in a community defined by agape, or self-giving love.

Works Consulted

Badiou, A. (2003). Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford University Press.

Brown, Nathan. (2019). The Revival of Hegelian Marxism. Radical Philosophy.

Dussel, E. (2003). Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology. Rowman & Littlefield.

Hägglund, M. (2019). This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. Pantheon.

Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit (A. V. Miller, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1807).

Marx, K. (1970). Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (J. O’Malley, Ed. & Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1844).

Miranda, J. P. (1980). Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression. Orbis Books.

Žižek, S. (2000). The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? Verso.

Žižek, S. (2003). The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. MIT Press.

Žižek, S. (2009). The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? MIT Press.

The post Why Jesus, Marx, and Hegel Matter in the Digital Age appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

Democratic Left interviews Congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier as part of a series of interviews with members of New York City DSA's insurgent slate.

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A specter is haunting our world– the specter of capitalist distraction. 

The old forces of capital and the new giants of tech have entered into an alliance set upon squandering human experience in a manner and a scale unfamiliar to history. So far, they’re winning.

Not content with merely the dictatorial control of our working lives and the controlling of our behavior via incentives, they now endeavor to subordinate our every thought to their whims and our very understanding of the world to processes they control. They seek to be the facilitators of all discussion, the arbiters of all ideas, the sole authority in the shaping of the mind.

Comrades, the fight against the forces is nothing less than an existential struggle for the preconditions of our organizing.

Our most immediate task is instilling the working class with an awareness of the forces shaping their material conditions and how workers relate to each other and the capitalist class. This class consciousness must be followed with diligent study of the theoretical foundations of socialism on a mass scale, with the training of huge swaths of our fellow workers in an entirely new way of viewing and understanding the world.

Democratic socialism unavoidably requires an informed, passionate, and intellectual society. Without it, our movement will necessarily veer into authoritarianism. We must build this society brick by brick creating the seeds of a counter-hegemonic bloc in our party and building it out through education and alliances with other organizations. We confront this task in an environment in which vast rivers of capital are flowing in the opposite direction, sweeping the public away from the left’s platform and towards ignorance and isolation. 

We are swimming upstream, and nowhere is this more acutely felt than in our relationships to algorithmic media: platforms in which content is delivered not by user curation but instead by fiendishly effective automated models. The modern incarnations of these  platforms arose from traditional social media and have been supercharged by the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. 

While inscrutable and complex, these models are shaped by material forces and optimized for the interests of the platform owners, formed by directives to increase engagement time and engagement intensity. Bluntly, the ruling class has devised an evolving machine with which it can squander human life and control the human experience. As this machine perfects itself, it squeezes away more and more of our lives. Over the last two decades it has utterly consumed us.

Our lived experience is zero-sum. Every moment spent on these platforms is a moment not spent with family, creating art, or improving oneself. When there is a ubiquitous source of instant, endless dopamine, the opportunity cost of doing literally anything else becomes higher. This includes organizing for a socialist future.

Political education is work, both in presenting the information and in absorbing it. That task becomes much harder when participants’ brains are being trained every day to expect only the shortest, easiest-to-digest content it is possible to produce. We each have a duty to enthusiastically learn, understand, and advance the theoretical cause of socialism. This is essentially impossible without the ability to read and digest the foundational texts of our movement.

Today, every page of theory we read must compete directly for time and attention with precisely targeted rage-bait, brain rot, bad faith content, and advertising, a deluge of maximally stimulating information that our brains are wholly unequipped to handle. Being constantly buffeted by such content has a strange dual effect familiar to all of us, a sort of pacified rage, a despair without definite cause or real depth, the result of being thrown back and forth between the extremes of emotion every few seconds.

It is certainly possible to channel the discontent this creates, dulled as it is, and use it to our benefit. Indeed, algorithmic media can be an engine of radicalization. But this requires the careful strategy of a communications team. As rank-and-file members, efforts to agitate on social media are worse than useless. They prove exhausting and divisive, wasting organizer capacity and burning members out of the movement entirely.

Even if we attempt to engage in good-faith discussion, these efforts are shown to the two groups most likely to respond strongly: those who already agree with us and those who will be enraged by us. That is, online agitation is shown to the groups of people we least want to reach!

It is tempting then, to believe that algorithmic media can be useful in our bubble, among comrades. This conclusion underestimates the distortions inherent to the medium. As a rule, curation algorithms punish heavily any content that causes the user to leave the app. Longer posts do this. The pause necessary to engage gives the brain a chance to return to reality and opt out of further scrolling. Posts that link outside of the app, whether sending users to a call to action, an event signup, or simply a  source of considered, long-form information (as is necessary in informed debate) are suppressed most of all.

The force of the algorithm thus pushes essays towards paragraphs, paragraphs towards blurbs, and blurbs to mere slogans. These slogans in some respects reflect correct ideas, but are only understood as such by those familiar with the underlying reasoning, the forces at play, and the conditions in which the idea is formed. Outside of this context, these slogans readily strawman themselves and can be wielded as a cudgel by the right to alienate potential progressive and liberal allies. At worst, these slogans take on a life of their own, leading astray party decision-making, undermining tactical flexibility, and eroding all nuance. Instead of making our ideas accessible to the masses, we risk debasing our ideas to vagaries.

All this is to say nothing of the inherent flaws of a written medium– lack of conversational context and body language clues, alienation from the other participants, and the difficulty of conveying ideas in text in the first place. The discourse on algorithmic media platforms necessarily devolves into people parroting slogans that are understood by neither the author or the reader, the most shrill and irritating examples being lifted up and circulated while any conversation of value is suppressed. This is not a failure of our ideas or our movement. It is not a reflection of who we are, or even who our ideological opponents are. It is a circus in which we are all both the clowns and the audience.

Of course, infighting and fragmentation happen on these platforms; they are literally designed to divide and enrage! They draw us into endless, pointless sideshows. They exhaust our spirit and attack our unity. They undermine our solidarity and convince us of lies. They deprive us of the most essential element of organizing, human to human connection, where the fire of socialism can be felt and the ideas which constitute it can be discussed without interference.

So what can we do about this? Set screen time limits and have a friend or partner set the unlock code. You can gradually reduce the time or go cold turkey. Try getting in the habit of turning your phone completely off and setting it physically away from you. Remember that short-form video is the most powerful stimulant and the hardest to kick. For the genuinely social uses of platforms like Instagram (posts about upcoming events, keeping tabs on distant friends, etc.), restrict your use to a laptop or desktop computer. You do not need it accessible on your phone at all times.

If nothing else, stop arguing online. You are wasting your capacity and your energy, allowing the framing of debate to be undermined in ways that lead to incorrect conclusions. Take those discussions to your branch meetings, to social events, to essays in Midwest Socialist. The issues of our day are too important to be confined to a screen and too complex to fit in a character limit.

Once you wean yourself off the digital ketamine of algorithmic media, tasks that once sounded impossible will become invigorating. Every part of your life can be richer, your brain quieter, your focus deeper, your time spent on the pursuits that matter to you. Today can be the day you take the first step towards that goal.

So, comrades, let us throw off the yoke of so-called “social media” and burn it in the fires of intellectualism and solidarity! Do not let yourself be controlled by our enemies, do not undermine our movement by subordinating yourself to the tools of the billionaire class! A better world lies ahead, let us forge the path together.

The post To Build Socialism, Reject Algorithmic Media appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

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