The Means of Production is a small press and cultural myth deprogramming project.
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We publish work that treats contemporary life as a manufactured environment—built through media, policy, and repetition—then asks what it has trained us to accept as “normal.” We are interested in the rituals disguised as routines. The language that polices reality. The myths that keep labor quiet.
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This isn’t a self-help platform. It’s a diagnostic field manual for late capitalism’s inner life: the corporate voice that enters the body, the family story that becomes policy, the algorithm that decides what counts as coherent.

We are closer to a curatorial intelligence than a distribution house.
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What We Make
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‍The Myth Index
A growing catalog of cultural lies named plainly, analyzed structurally, and documented with citations. These entries are not hot takes. They’re tools.

‍The Red Screen Collective
Essays, readers, and research-driven criticism on film, television, and the industrial production of feeling—how ideology gets rehearsed in genre, story arcs, and “relatable” characters.

‍Ritual Artifacts
Books, Apps, Zines, printable systems, and symbol objects designed to be used like liturgy, like contraband, like proof. This includes experimental texts, protocols, and divination frameworks that read mass culture as a psychic infrastructure.
Our Substack. This is the place the press thinks out loud. We publish completed work in print, ebook, and on the main site's journal.

What We Believe

• Culture is not neutral. It is designed.
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• Most “common sense” is enforced through repetition, not argument.
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• Explanation is a form of administration.
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• Liberation requires different stories and different structures for living inside them.
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We don’t promise purity. We promise clarity and the refusal to pretend the machine is natural.

Why the Name

“The means of production” is an old phrase for who owns the tools, the factories, the distribution.

We extend it to culture.
Who owns the story?
Who profits from the myth?
Who gets to describe reality—and call it truth?

This project exists to take that ownership back, one system at a time.

Enter the Project

If you’re here, you might be:

• trying to unlearn the logic you were trained to survive under
• looking for language that doesn’t flatter power
• building a life that can’t be optimized into obedience

Start wherever you want. The index is open. The work is ongoing.

‍Welcome to The Means of Production.
We own the means. We tell the stories.

Sustaining the Work

The Means of Production is built slowly, deliberately, and without institutional backing.

Most of the work here is produced outside of grant cycles, publishing advances, or advertising models. That choice is intentional. It allows the project to remain structurally independent—free to follow lines of inquiry that don’t resolve neatly, sell easily, or flatter power.
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As the project grows, we are quietly seeking aligned patrons who value long-form thinking, cultural memory, and work that treats critique as infrastructure rather than content.

Patronage is not sponsorship.
It does not buy influence, editorial control, or visibility.
It supports time, continuity, and care.

Those who support the project help sustain:
• research-driven writing that isn’t optimized for speed
• experimental forms that don’t fit standard markets
• the maintenance of archives, indexes, and living systems
• the labor required to keep this work accessible rather than gated

If you are someone with the capacity to support work like this on an ongoing basis—and are interested in doing so discreetly—you can reach out at info@themeansofproduction.press

No urgency.
No pressure to convert belief into branding.
Just a shared interest in keeping difficult, careful work alive.