- Last 7 days
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Natural resources (like fossil fuels), are treated as expendable income, when in fact they should be treated as capital, since they are not renewable, and thus subject to eventual depletion.
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- Oct 2024
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fathom.video fathom.video
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fast capitalism versus slow, you know, organic mutualism.
Very deep meme for us at this time fast capitalism alongisde slow mutualism
or perhaps we can say slow capaitalism alongside fast mutualism
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www.carnegie.org www.carnegie.org
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That this talent for organization and management is rare among men is proved by the fact that it invariably secures for its possessor enormous rewards, no matter where or under what laws or conditions.
for - critique - extreme wealth a reward for rare management skills - Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - Mondragon counterexample - to - stats - Mondragon pay difference between highest and lowest paid - article - In this Spanish town, capitalism actually works for the workers - Christian Science Monitor - Erika Page - 2024, June 7
critique - extreme wealth a reward for rare management skills - Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - Mondragon counterexample - This is invalidated today by large successful cooperatives such as Mondragon
to - stats - Mondragon corporation - comparison of pay difference between highest paid and lowest paid - https://hyp.is/QAxx-o14Ee-_HvN5y8aMiQ/www.csmonitor.com/Business/2024/0513/income-inequality-capitalism-mondragon-corporation
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- to - stats - Mondragon pay difference between highest and lowest paid - article - In this Spanish town, capitalism actually works for the workers - Christian Science Monitor - Erika Page - 2024, June 7
- critique - extreme wealth a reward for rare management skills - Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - Mondragon counterexample
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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what really I was really interested in was the idea that Marx wasn't really Keen or was sort of hostile to the idea of equality which I'm guessing will come as a surprise to many people
for - interesting perspective - Karl Marx - He wasn't principally interested in equality - book - Capitalism: the word and the thing - perspectival knowledge of - Michael Sonenscher - misunderstanding - modern capitalists - misunderstand Karl Marx's work - Michael Sonenscher - Karl Marx and Capitalism - Maximizing each individual's freedom while not trampling on the same aspiration of other individuals within a society
Interesting perspective - Karl Marx wasn't principally interested in equality - Sonenscher offers an interesting interpretation and perspectival knowledge of Karl Marx's motivation in his principal work paraphrase - Marx's thought centered on is interest in individuality and the degree to which in certain respects being somebody who is free and able to make choices about his or her lives and future activities is going to depend on each person's: - qualities - capabilities - capacities - preoccupations - values, etc - For Marx, freedom is in the final analysis something to do with something - particular - specific and - individual w - What matters to me may not matter entirely in the same sort of way to you because ultimately - in an ideal State of Affairs, my kinds of concerns and your kinds of concerns will be simply specific to you and to me respectively - For Marx, the problems begin as is also the case with Rosseau - when these kinds of absolute qualities are displaced by - relative qualities that apply equally to us both - For Marx, things like - markets - prices - commodities and - things that connect people - are the hallmarks of equality because they put people on the same kind of footing prices and productivity - Whereas the things that REALLY SHOULD COUNT are - the things that separate and distinguish people that make each individual fully and and entirely him or herself and - the idea for Marx is that capitalism - which is not a term that Marx used, - puts people on a kind of spurious footing of equality - Getting beyond capitalism means getting beyond equality to a state of effect in which - difference , - particularity, - individuality and - uniqueness - in a certain kind of sense will prevail
comment - This perspective is quite enlightening on Marx's motivations on this part of his work and is likely misconstrued by those mainstream "capitalists" who vilify his work without critical analysis - Of course freedom - within a social context - is never an absolute term. - It is not possible to live in a society in which everyone is able to actualize their full imaginations, something pointed out in the work of two other famous thought leaders of modern history: - Thomas Hobbes observed in his famous work, Leviathan, and - Sigmund Freud also made a primary subject of his ID, Ego and Superego framework. - Total freedom would lead - first to anarchy and then - the emergence within that anarchy of those which possess the most charisma, influence, self-seeking manipulative skills and brutality - surfacing rule by authority - Historically, as democracy attempts to surface from a history of authoritarian, patriarchal governance, - democracy is far from ubiquitous and authoritarian governance is still alive and well in many parts of the world - The battle between - authoritarian governments among themselves and - authoritarian and democratic governments - results in war, violence and trauma that creates the breeding ground for the next generation of authoritarian leaders - Marx's main intent seems to be to enable the individual existing within a society to live the fullest life possible, - by way of enabling and maximizing their unique expression, - while not constraining the same aspiration in other individuals who belong to the same society
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for - capitalism - etymology - book Captialism: The Word and the Thing - Michael Sonenscher - from - Princeton University Press
Summary - Michael Sonenscher discusses the modern evolution of the word "capitalism". Adding the suffix "ism" to a word implies a compound term. - Capitalism is a complex, compound concept whose connotations from the use in 18th and 19th century France and England is quite different from today's. - How meaning evolved can give us insight into our use of it today.
from - Princeton University Press - book - Capitalism: the word and the thing - to - https://hyp.is/kVaURoxREe-x7MtVDX2t3Q/press.princeton.edu/ideas/capitalism-the-word-and-the-thing
Tags
- misunderstanding - modern capitalists - misunderstand Karl Marx's work - Michael Sonenscher
- book Captialism: The Word and the Thing - Michael Sonenscher
- interesting perspective - Karl Marx - He wasn't principally interested in equality - book - Capitalism: the word and the thing - perspectival knowledge of - Michael Sonenscher
- Karl Marx and Capitalism - Maximizing each individual's freedom while not trampling on the same aspiration of other individuals within a society
- capitalism - etymology
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press.princeton.edu press.princeton.edu
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Michael Sonenscher
for - capitalism - etymology - modern - book Capitalism: The Word and the Thing - Michael Sonenscher - from - Discussion of "spiritual capitalism" on Kansas Missouri Fair Shares Commons chat thread - to - youtube - New Books Network - interniew - Captialism: The word and the thing - Michael Sonenscher
Summary - Michael Sonenscher discusses the modern evolution of the word "capitalism". Adding the suffix "ism" to a word implies a compound term. - Capitalism is a complex, compound concept whose connotations from the use in 18th and 19th century France and England is quite different from today's. - How meaning evolved can give us insight into our use of it today.
to - youtube - New Books Network - interniew - Captialism: The word and the thing - Michael Sonenscher - https://hyp.is/ftWWfoxQEe-FkUuIeSoZCA/www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpNaxyPpOf0
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Barsamian: Corporate power seems unstoppable. The uber class of gazillionaires — Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk — are now flying into outer space. But I’m reminded of something that the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin said some years ago: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable.” And then she added, “So did the divine right of kings.” Chomsky: So did slavery. So did the principle that women are property, which lasted in the United States until the 1970s. So did laws against miscegenation so extreme that even the Nazis wouldn’t accept them, which lasted in the United States until the 1960s. All kinds of horrors have existed. Over time, their power has been eroded but never completely eliminated. Slavery was abolished, but its remnants remain in new and vicious forms. It’s not slavery, but it’s horrifying enough. The idea that women are not persons has not only been formally overcome, but to a substantial extent in practice, too. Still, there’s plenty to do. The constitutional system was a step forward in the eighteenth century. Even the phrase “We the people” terrified the autocratic rulers of Europe, deeply concerned that the evils of democracy (what was then called republicanism) could spread and undermine civilized life. Well, it did spread — and civilized life continued, even improved. So, yes, there are periods of regression and of progress, but the class war never ends, the masters never relent. They’re always looking for every opportunity and, if they’re the only participants in class struggle, we will indeed have regression. But they don’t have to be, any more than in the past.
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Local file Local file
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s we have often said before, paper is so cheap thatthere is no need for such economy.
Compare this with the reference in @Kimmerer2013 about responsibility to the tree and not wasting paper: https://hypothes.is/a/pvQ_4ofxEe-NfSOv5wMFGw
where is the balance?
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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the new subtlety added by the B is the creation of the spectacle by the market economy or by capitalism and here lies the main difference of his critique so what's the objective of the spectacle the spectacle aims to produce the same passive and predictable individual everywhere a spectator this new being is a passive consumer instead of an active participant in society
for - question - the society of the spectacle - is it just another critique of capitalism?
question - the society of the spectacle - is it just another critique of capitalism? - In short, no. It adds something new. - The new subtlety added by the creation of the spectacle by the market economy or by capitalism is that - the spectacle aims to produce the same passive and predictable individual everywhere - ** A SPECTATOR!" - This new being is - a passive consumer instead of - an active participant in society - The Spectator - sacrifices his authenticity to fit in society and - isn't a decision maker in his life anymore - The spectator is a passive human being who just awaits orders to execute (and consume)
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- Sep 2024
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4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com 4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com
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This industrial religion, evolving from monastic systems to modern enterprises, highlights the continuity between religious structures and capitalist production
for - quote - roots of industrial capitalism - found in medieval monasticism - Michel Bauwens on Pierre Musso - question - what was the impact of monasticism on modern capitalism? How did it become so pathological,?
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Pierre Musso's book "La Religion industrielle: Monastère, manufacture, usine. Une généalogie de l'entreprise
for - book - roots of capitalism in medieval monasticism - La Religion industrielle: Monastère, manufacture, usine. Une généalogie de l'entreprise- Pierre Musso
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- book - roots of capitalism in medieval monasticism - La Religion industrielle: Monastère, manufacture, usine. Une généalogie de l'entreprise- Pierre Musso
- question - what was the impact of monasticism on modern capitalism? How did it become so pathological,?
- quote - roots of industrial capitalism - found in medieval monasticism - Michel Bauwens on Pierre Musso
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- Aug 2024
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x.com x.com
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https://x.com/Chronotope/status/1828785701732663335
Crypto miners are being paid not to mine to ease energy production/consumption cycles.
Related to protection money for the mob
re: https://x.com/curious_founder/status/1828511303788322888/photo/1 on The Economist's article about crypto mining in Texas o/a 2024-08-27
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Salesman documents the work of a group of door-to-door Bible salesmen in New England and Florida. Deeper down, the film is a dissection of the degenerative and devastating effects of capitalism on small towns and individuals, but more than any political statement the film is about normal people in all their ugliness and truthfulness.
see also: Barnouw, Erik (1993), Documentary a History of the Non-fiction Film (PDF), New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 241–242, retrieved March 30, 2020
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www.westwingtranscripts.com www.westwingtranscripts.com
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CHINESE AMBASSADOR Exactly. But you have always taught us that liberty is the same thing as capitalism, as if life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot be crushed by greed. Your American dream is financial, not ethical.
West Wing S7 E 11 "Internal Displacement"<br /> http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/search.php?flag=getTranscript&id=145<br /> written by Aaron Sorkin & Bradley Whitford
A powerful quote about what really matters in America
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Thus, even where bosses expect attrition, the data shows they get substantially more attrition than they wanted. As a result, 29 percent of these companies are now facing substantial recruitment challenges, as the scale of resignations created serious operational and staffing problems. This misalignment between expectation and reality has left many companies struggling to fill the gaps left by departing employees.
Good. Justice would demand more, but this will probably have to do.
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- Jul 2024
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/kzc5o3/are_gene_hackman_characters_in_the_conversation/<br /> Are Gene Hackman characters in The Conversation (1974) and Enemy of the State (1998 ) connected?
I want to circle back to this as I've had this idea since I saw Enemy of the State as a rough cut.
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tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu
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It seems ludicrous to imagine that these vitalresources incapable of further expansionwould become essentially free of charge.
for - question - transition - from capitalism to a form of socialism?
question - capitalism to a form of socialism? - To say it seems ludicrous is an opinion that makes sense from a traditional capitalists perspective - From a socialist perspective, it seems feasible - Nothing is free of charge, however, even in socialism, there is always some price an individual must pay, it's more about the incentive structure that differentiates the two - capitalism - polarized towards self-centric perspective - socialism -balanced self-and-other perspective
adjacency - between - capitalism - socialism - differing perspective on self/other worldview - adjacency relationship - While capitalism relies on a self-centric perspective, socialism relies on a more balanced self/other perspective
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www.versobooks.com www.versobooks.com
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for - transition - renewable energy - won't work - because - the price is wrong! - Brett Christopher - green energy - the price is wrong - transition - alternative to capitalism - book - The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism won't Save the Planet - Brett Christopher
summary - This book provides rationale for why capitalism won't scale renewable energy, but a public sector government approach might - What about the alternative of community-owned or cooperative-owned energy infrastructure? A pipe dream? - Is renewable energy just not profitable and therefore has to be subsidized? - Perhaps it could be seen as a stopgap to buy us time until fusion, deep geothermal or other viable, scalable options become widespread?
from - Planet Critical podcast - 6th Mass Extinction - interview with paleontologist Peter Brennan - https://hyp.is/3ss3Vj9vEe-iDX-3vRVlFw/docdrop.org/video/cP8FXbPrEiI/
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- renewable energy - publicly funded
- book - The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism won't Save the Planet - Brett Christopher
- green energy - the price is wrong
- renewable energy - government funded
- from - lanet Critical podcast - 6th Mass Extinction - interview with paleontologist Peter Brennan
- adjacency - question - transition - renewable energy - subsidized - stopgap - until fusion or deep geothermal is viable
- transition - renewable energy - won't work - because - the price is wrong! - Brett Christopher
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book that's sort of making its rounds in the climate World these days um by this author Brett Christopher I foret what it's called 00:31:25 um oh what is it called oh the price is wrong yeah about how Renewables yeah they're cheaper than ever which people always point at those graphs but just because of the way that you know utilities are set up and the energy system works they're not profitable and 00:31:38 they won't be in the near term
for - book - The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism won't Save the Planet - Brett Christopher
to - book - The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism won't Save the Planet - Brett Christopher - https://hyp.is/h01Tyj9uEe-rEhuQgFWRuQ/www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3069-the-price-is-wrong
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- Jun 2024
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www.lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk
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The classic account of industrialisation was David Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus (1969), which argued that economic transformation was rooted in three crucial substitutions: of ‘machines ... for human skill and effort’, of ‘inanimate for animate sources of power’, and of ‘mineral for vegetable or animal substances’ as raw materials.
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In 1880 Britain could with some justification be called the ‘workshop of the world’: it produced more than 20 per cent of global industrial output and about 40 per cent of the world’s manufactured exports. In the nearly half-century since Samuel published his essay of that name, historians have done much to undermine the narrative of an ‘industrial revolution’ bookended by the invention of the spinning jenny in 1764 and the New Poor Law of 1834.
There's an interesting linkage going on here between the industrial revolution (and thus possibly Capitalism) with the creation and even litigation of "the poor" classes in Britain.
Did "the poor" exist in the same way they do today prior to the Industrial Revolution? What are the subtle differences? (Compare with Thompson, E. P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present, no. 38 (1967): 56–97.)
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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for - progress trap - AI music - critique - Folia Sound Studio - to - P2P Foundation - Michel Bauwens - Commons Transition Plan - Netarchical Capitalism - Predatory Capitalism
to - P2P Foundation - Michel Bauwens - Commons Transition Plan - Netarchical Capitalism - Predatory Capitalism https://hyp.is/o-Hp-DCAEe-8IYef613YKg/wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Commons_Transition_Plan
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I think that Noam chsky said exactly a year ago in New York Times around a year ago that generative AI is not any 00:18:37 intelligence it's just a plagiarism software that learned stealing human uh work transform it and sell it as much as possible as cheap as possible
for - AI music theft - citation - Noam Chomsky - quote - Noam Chomsky - AI as plagiarism on a grand scale
to - P2P Foundation - commons transition plan - Michel Bauwens - netarchical capitalism - predatory capitalism - https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Commons_Transition_Plan#Solving_the_value_crisis_through_a_social_knowledge_economy
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- to - P2P Foundation - Michel Bauwens - Commons Transition Plan - Netarchical Capitalism - Predatory Capitalism
- AI music theft - citation - Noam Chomsky
- to - P2P Foundation - Michel Bauwens - netarchical capitalism - predatory capitalism
- quote - Noam Chomsky - AI as plagiarism on a grand scale
- progress trap - AI music - critique
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www.linkedin.com www.linkedin.com
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in a capitalist society like the USA the collective element failed and in a communist society like the former USSR the individual element failed
for - quote - comparing capitalism and communism
quote - comparing capitalism and communism - ( see below)
- in a capitalist society like the USA
- the collective element failed and
- in a communist society like the former USSR
- the individual element failed.
comment - polar abstractions don't work because reality is somewhere in the middle
- in a capitalist society like the USA
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sakai.duke.edu sakai.duke.edu
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Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - Author(s): E. P. Thompson - Source: Past & Present, No. 38 (Dec., 1967), pp. 56-97 - Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society - Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/649749
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Dan Allosso (@danallosso)</span> in Howard Zinn's A People's History, Part 1 (YouTube) (<time class='dt-published'>09/16/2021 09:28:56</time>)</cite></small>
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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Notions such as the common good, commonsense, and common culture could sometimes cause as many prob-lems as they purported to solve.
Are the commons (common good, common sense, and common culture) anathema in an uber-capitalist society where everyone is generally out for themselves and often only "covering" when their needs align with societies' needs?
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- May 2024
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www.lowimpact.org www.lowimpact.org
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The Law of Unintended Consequences is the only certainty of complex systems, and the biosphere of the planet is the most complex system we know of
for - progress traps - transcending capitalism
progress trap - transcending capitalism - As Stop Reset Go and Deep Humanity has consistently advocated: - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=progress+trap - there is an urgent need to establish a science of progress traps in order to develop a way to integrate systematically into all human activities. - It is a new field of research for risk analysis and praxis that is based on explicitly recognizing the difference between nature and human nature, between the fundamental nature of reality (emptiness / shunyata - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=emptiness and the symbolosphere we inhabit as humans which is inherently limited by our current reductionist way of knowing reality - Applying systems thinking and complexity is dependent on the explicit recognition of the gap between the inherent limitations of the evolutionary process of human learning which results from - human bias and which always produces - finite number of relationships which we use to make decisions upon and enact in the world
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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www.noemamag.com www.noemamag.com
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In his 2021 signing of the executive order on competition, President Biden said: “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation.”
I have horrible news for you, President Biden.
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Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire by [[Jason Del Rey]]
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app.thebrain.com app.thebrain.com
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Like Cuckoos, Capitalism Had to Push All Other Ways of Living Out of the Nest<br /> https://app.thebrain.com/brain/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/9aeb5260-87fb-4f0d-94ae-b2656c9d84bb
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www.bardsandsages.com www.bardsandsages.com
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Meanwhile, Amazon and other ebook retails are pushing full-steam ahead to promote AI-generated content at the expense of real authors and artists. Publisher who actually pay authors and artists and editors now have to compete with AI-generated material churned out in bulk and sold at 99 cents. And while it is easy to shrug this off if you are outside the industry and claim, "Well, the cream rises to the top," anyone that has been around the industry long enough knows that what rises to the top is what Amazon's algorithms push there. And the AI bots are much better at manipulating the algorithms that real people.
Amazon care about money; they don't care about humans.
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4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com 4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com
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open source paradigms, with its copyleft licensing scheme
for - adjacency - open source - copyleft - Achilles Heel - unpaid workers - predatory capitalism
adjacency - between - open source - copyleft - Achilles Heel - predatory capitalism - unpaid workers - adjacency statement - The Achilles Heel of the open source copyleft system is that it allows everyone to participate. Everyone can look at the innovation, including corporate raiders in it for their own self-interest. - This enables predatory capitalism. The well-capitalized corporations take the best open source ideas and integrate them into their own private systems. With their abundant capitalization, they can maintain the existent structural inequality - Meanwhile, most open source software is maintained by underpaid programmers
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- Apr 2024
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www.mcsweeneys.net www.mcsweeneys.net
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Special Features of Trump’s Bible by [[Andrew Singleton]]
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- Mar 2024
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thebaffler.com thebaffler.com
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Ongweso Jr., Edward. “The Miseducation of Kara Swisher: Soul-Searching with the Tech ‘Journalist.’” The Baffler, March 29, 2024. https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-miseducation-of-kara-swisher-ongweso.
ᔥ[[Pete Brown]] in Exploding Comma
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By insisting the issue with Uber was largely cultural, Swisher ends up affirming the myth that Uber was not only an inevitable but ultimately good innovation, a few bad apples notwithstanding.
Perhaps without the toxic capitalism portion Uber may have been a great innovation? Maybe it would have been better as a co-op, community, or government supported organization which put the value into both drivers' and riders' pockets?
Naturally the crazy hype which generated the VC money would have been needed to be replaced, so the question becomes: who would have funded the start up?
Tags
- techno-utopianism
- technology and the military
- Kara Swisher
- Tony West
- attention economy
- Sheryl Sandberg
- read
- diversity equity and inclusion
- surveillance capitalism
- startups
- Microsoft
- co-ops
- Sundar Pichai
- Travis Kalanick (Uber)
- access journalism
- acceleration
- toxic capitalism
- VC funding
- Satya Nadella
- bad technology
- toxic technology
- social media machine guns
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Slavery was thus a logicaloutgrowth of the colonial class system imagined by Hakluyt. It emergedfrom three interrelated phenomena: harsh labor conditions, the treatment ofindentures as commodities, and, most of all, the deliberate choice to breedchildren so that they should become an exploitable pool of workers.
While there is a strong thread of hierarchical male domination over women and their bodies, is some of the anti-abortion movement in the 21st century an historical appendage or outgrowth of "breeding children" as an exploitable pool of workers for capitalists?
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The hallowed American dream is thegold standard by which politicians and voters alike are meant to measurequality of life as each generation pursues its own definition of happinessunfettered by the restraints of birth (who your parents are) or station (theposition you start out from in the class system).
Did it help that America was broadly formed during the start of the Industrial Revolution and at a time in which social mobility was dramatically different than the period of history which proceeded it?
And how much of this difference is split with the idea of the rise of (toxic) capitalism and the switch to "keeping up with the Jonses" which also tends to drive class distinctions?
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ploum.net ploum.net
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Whether this "personalised advertisement" really works better than traditional one is up to debate. For Tim Hang, author of "Subtime Attention Crisis" and for Cory Doctorow, author of "How to destroy surveillance capitalism", the real impact on sales is negligible but as marketers think it works, they invest massive money in it, making the whole technology a very lucrative bubble.
the effectiveness of personalised advertising is still up for debate. I should look up Subtime Attention Crisis and read How to destroy surveillance capitalism.
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theinformed.life theinformed.life
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The whole industry is built on this concept of planned obsolescence. That’s the term that I think IBM famously came up with in the sixties, where basically you’re intentionally trying to constantly sell people on the new new thing. And that’s what drives the stock price up. And that’s what drives the press cycle. And that’s what gets people to buy new products and things. And so, the whole industry is predicated around this idea of there’s always a new thing around the horizon.
Where did the concept of planned obsolescence originate? Was it really IBM as Alex Wright suggests here?
How does planned obsolescence drive capitalism? And as a result of that is there a balance between future innovation and waste? Is there a mechanism within capitalism that can fix this waste (or dramatically mitigate it)?
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strangematters.coop strangematters.coop
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It is a specific set of social relations resulting from capitalist accumulation, which not only drive the reproduction of capitalism but act as a central stabilizing mechanism in modern society.
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sussex.figshare.com sussex.figshare.com
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These social relations are simultaneously generative of rapid economic growth, and impoverishment and inequality
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theanarchistlibrary.org theanarchistlibrary.org
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“Inherent in the dynamics of capitalism is a powerful drive to earn profits, invest them, innovate and thus grow the economy….These features of capitalism, as they are constituted today, work together to produce an economic and political reality that is highly destructive of the environment.” (7) Much of the book explores this drive of capitalism toward unlimited quantitative growth, the role of the market in this drive, the centrality of the corporation in carrying out accumulation, the wastefulness of consumption under capitalism, and the domination of the corporations over governments.
"domination of the corporations over governments"
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Speth apparently agrees with other writers such as Naomi Klein or Herman Daly. Daly, for example, has written a series of notable books and articles arguing for a “Steady State Economy.” He argues that the growth-driven industrial economy we live under is incompatible with an ecologically sustainable society. Daly advocates an economy which develops qualitatively, as he puts it, but not quantitatively (with appropriate and balanced development of the poorer nations). “The remaining natural world no longer is able to provide the sources and sinks for the metabolic throughput necessary to sustain the existing oversized economy—much less a growing one….The economy must conform to the rules of a steady state—seek qualitative development, but stop aggregate quantitative growth.” (Daly 2008; 1) Better not bigger. He believes that such an economy would produce as much happiness among the people as our existing system—if not more. “…The correlation between absolute income and happiness extends only up to some threshold of ‘sufficiency’….” (10)
Better not bigger
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Yet he is dissatisfied. While the establishment environmentalists won certain improvements (in cleaner air and water, for example), overall the environment has gotten much worse. “We have been winning battles…but losing the war.” (xii) This recognition has moved him to his left.
"we have been winning battles... but losing the war
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There is an interesting development in the anti-climate change/ecological movement. Most environmentalist leaders and theorists have been liberals or moderates. They have seen capitalism and its state as the necessary framework for preventing ecological catastrophe. But after decades of failure, some of these environmentalists have come to accept the analysis of radical ecologists, that the cause of climate warming (and other ecological problems) is the capitalist system, its drive to accumulate and grow indefinitely, its market, its inequality, poverty, and exploitation, and its national states. Yet these same environmentalists reject the radicals’ conclusion that capitalism must be replaced by socialism—meaning some kind of cooperative, nonprofit, economy with democratic planning and production for use. (As I will discuss, there is a decentralized and radically democratic version of socialism which is advocated by anarchists.)
big environmentalist shifting toward anti-capitalism
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- Feb 2024
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Local file Local file
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The GNR technologies do not divide clearly into commercial andmilitary uses; given their potential in the market, it’s hard to imaginepursuing them only in national laboratories. With their widespreadcommercial pursuit, enforcing relinquishment will require a verificationregime similar to that for biological weapons, but on an unprecedentedscale. This, inevitably, will raise tensions between our individual pri-vacy and desire for proprietary information, and the need for verifica-tion to protect us all. We will undoubtedly encounter strong resistanceto this loss of privacy and freedom of action.
While Joy looks at the Biological and Chemical Weapons Conventions as well as nuclear nonproliferation ideas, the entirety of what he's looking at is also embedded in the idea of gun control in the United States as well. We could choose better, but we actively choose against our better interests.
What role does toxic capitalism have in pushing us towards these antithetical goals? The gun industry and gun lobby have had tremendous interest on that front. Surely ChatGPT and other LLM and AI tools will begin pushing on the profitmaking levers shortly.
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Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of theimagined future, driven—this time by great financial rewards andglobal competition—despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating whatit may be like to try to live in a world that is the realistic outcome ofwhat we are creating and imagining.
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But thesewarnings haven’t been widely publicized; the public discussions havebeen clearly inadequate. There is no profit in publicizing the dangers.
Tags
- privatize profits socialize losses
- lobbying
- weapons of mass destruction
- genetics nanotechnology robotics (GNR)
- artificial intelligence control
- publicity
- personal interests
- societal interests
- quotes
- technology
- Bill Joy
- toxic capitalism
- surveillance capitalism
- artificial intelligence
- gun control
Annotators
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- Jan 2024
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ll this raises the question of what “capitalism” is to begin with, aquestion on which there is no consensus at all. The word wasoriginally invented by socialists, who saw capitalism as that systemwhereby those who own capital command the labor of those who donot.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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(my bias is showing through - marketing people don't call it surveillance capitalism, to be fair. That's a pejorative term. They just call it doing their job, generating leads, and increasing conversions.)
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just shooting from the hip, to me, I'm glad that subscription services like Netflix and Spotify are becoming more popular. That means that the companies (as opposed to Google & Facebook) don't have the incentive to follow this "surveillance capitalism," i.e. building increasingly sophisticated advertising technology predicated upon the behavioral history of users.(my bias is showing through - marketing people don't call it surveillance capitalism, to be fair. That's a pejorative term. They just call it doing their job, generating leads, and increasing conversions.)
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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for: elephants in the room - financial industry at the heart of the polycrisis, polycrisis - key role of finance industry, Marjorie Kelly, Capitalism crisis, Laura Flanders show, book - Wealth Supremacy - how the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Captialism Drive Today's Crises
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Summary
- This talk really emphasizes the need for the Stop Reset Go / Deep Humanity Wealth to Wellth program
- Interviewee Marjorie Kelly started Business Ethics magainze in 1987 to show the positive side of business After 30 years, she found that it was still tinkering at the edges. Why? - because it wasn't addressing the fundamental issue.
- Why there hasn't been noticeable change in spite of all these progressive efforts is because we avoided questioning the fundamental assumption that maximizing returns to shareholders and gains to shareholder portfolios is good for people and planet.**** It turns out that it isn't. It's fundamentally bad for civilization and has played a major role in shaping today's polycrisis.
- Why wealth supremacy is entangled with white supremacy
- Financial assets are the subject
- Equity and bonds use to be equal to GDP in the 1950s.
- Now it's 5 times as much
- Financial assets extracts too much from common people
- Question: Families are swimming in debt. Who owns all this financial debt? ...The financial elites do.
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meme
- wealth supremacy and white supremacy are entangled
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Which is exactly what you do in the book. And what did you find? - So what I do, I take apart the operating system of capitalism, which is, and I look at seven myths, really that drive it.
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for: book - wealth supremacy - 7 myths, 7 myths of Capitalism, capital bias, definition - capital bias
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DESCRIPTION: 7 MYTHS of CAPITALISM
- The Myth of Maximization
- example of absurdity of maximization
- Bill Gates had $10 billion. Then he invested it and got $300 billion. There's no limit to how much wealth an individual can accumulate. It is absurd.
- example of absurdity of maximization
- Myth of the Income Statement
- Gains to capital called profit is always to be increased and
- Gains of labor is called an expense, is always to be decreased
- Myth of Materiality (also called capital bias)
- definition: capital bias
- If something impacts capital, it matters
- If something impacts society or ecology, it doesn't matter
- With the capital bias, only accumulating more capital matters. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS. This is how most accountants and CFO's view the world.
- The Myth of Maximization
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quote: Laura Flanders
- The capital is what matters. We're aiming for more capital and nothing else really matters. That's the operating system of the economy. So the real world is immaterial to this world of wealth as held in stocks and shares and financial instruments.
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we're not in the economy of the 1950s anymore. And we act as though we are, that finance is this productive force and it's building, it's building wealth. Well, for the most part, it's not. It's, there's so much financialization, so many financial assets, that they've become an extractive force. And a big piece of this 00:06:37 is that we're not really distinguishing between productive investments and speculative investments
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for: quote - Marjorie Kelly, quote - finacialization, progress trap - financialization, progress trap - capitalism, speculative investing
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quote: Marjorie Kelly
- we're not in the economy of the 1950s anymore.
- And we act as though we are, that finance is this productive force and it's building, it's building wealth.
- Well, for the most part, it's not.
- There's so much financialization, so many financial assets, that they've become an extractive force.
- And a big piece of this is that we're not really distinguishing between
- productive investments and
- speculative investments
- And a big piece of this is that we're not really distinguishing between
-
Tags
- polycrisis - key role of finance industry
- Laura Flanders show
- magazine - Business Ethics
- Capitalism crisis
- definition - capital bias
- productive investment
- 7 myths of Capitalism
- speculative investing
- speculative investment
- progress trap - speculative investing
- elephant in the room - financial industry at heart of polycrisis
- Marjorie Kelly
- quote - financialization
- magazine - Business Ethics - founder - Marjorie Kelly
- book - Wealth Supremacy - How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today's Crises
- progress trap - capitalism
- progress trap - financialization
- quote - Marjorie Kelly
Annotators
URL
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- Dec 2023
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Local file Local file
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Wells attempts in this essay to help mankind "pull it's mind together" for the betterment of people and the planet. How is this supposed to happen in a modern media environment which is designed to pull our minds apart as rapidly as possible?
How might the strength of capitalism be leveraged to push people back toward a common middle rather than split them apart?
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paddyleflufy.substack.com paddyleflufy.substack.com
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An idea at the heart of capitalism is that owners of capital should aim to increase the capital they personally own and the profit they make from it.
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for: capitalism - heart of, adjacency - capitalism - self - othering - societal aspiration
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adjacency between
- heart of capitalism
- self other dualism
- societal aspiration
- adjacency statement
- The narrative that underlies personal gain is the socially acquired belief in a self and other dualism.
- This is a deep psychological construct facilitated in early childhood development by what in Deep Humanity praxis is referred to as the mOTHER, the Most significant OTHER at the beginning of our journey in life.
- From that point onwards, social learning propels us to objectify the world, and in particular others. Self and other co-emerge from early childhood learning.
- As climate scientist Kevin Anderson notes, the elite 1%, responsible for an outsized ecological footprint are the result of the dominant capitalist narrative. It constitutes the social norm of "good" for most people. It is the societal aspiration from which 1% of the world population, approximately 80 million people, surface from the 8 billion as the elites in their respective field and are compensated through financial and material reward.
- This societal aspiration aligns the majority of people to peer in the same direction of trying to win the game and bubble up to the 1% to indulge the rewards of a luxury lifestyle.
- It is this same winning that will produce the next generation of 1%. They are being groomed as we speak.
- Yet, their runaway success, and especially their reward is what can seal the fate of our civilization.
- It is this societal aspiration role of capitalism as the dominant narrative that is the root generator of the next 1% and must be mitigated if we are to address the root of inequality.
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climateuncensored.com climateuncensored.com
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for: climate crisis - elites, Kevin Anderson - elites, carbon emissions - elites, adjacency - elites - carbon inequality - incentives - luxury - capitalism
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title: A Habitable Earth Can No Longer Afford The Rich – And That Could Mean Me And You
- author: Kevin Anderson
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date: Nov. 29, 2023
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comment
- adjacency between
- elites
- capitalism
- free market
- incentives
- double bind
- wicked problem
- inequality
- carbon inequality
- luxury industry
- adjacency statement
- This article was pulled by "The Conversation" for being too controversial
- It addresses the double-bind / wicked problems that we find ourselves in.
- It's not just that the elites that are the highest per capita polluters, but
- it is an indictment of the entire philosophy and worldview of capitalism and the market economy which produces winners and losers and
- the winners reap enormous resource benefits, including being able to afford luxury items as rewards which constitute the largest ecological footprint of all
- while at any one time, there is always a minority of the 1%, who hold the most outsized ecological footprint of all, the logic that produced that 1% also serves as the incentives for the majority of the 99%, who because of the inherent precarity created by capitalism, will fight and struggle to become part of that 1%
- So while one generation of the 1% die off, a new generation is born and created by the incentive structure of scarcity and precarity.
- In this sense, capitalism has its own self-reinforcing, positive feedback loop that keeps the masses of the disenfranchised aspiring to the same high resource and ecological footprint, luxury lifestyle
- Look at the culture industry of sports, entertainment, movies, music, TV, etc. and of business in general. The leaders of these and ALL fields are celebrated as heros and they all reward themselves with an ultra-high carbon intensity, luxury lifestyle.
- Unless we do more than simply demonize the current set of elites, and recognize the root cause and change the incentive structure itself, we will only ever deal with the symptom and not the problem, and continue to generate the next generation of elites
- The luxury lifestyle industry is a important role-player in the self-reinforcing feedback loop
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
Tags
Annotators
URL
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- Nov 2023
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arstechnica.com arstechnica.com
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The FTC has accused Kochava of violating the FTC Act by amassing and disclosing "a staggering amount of sensitive and identifying information about consumers," alleging that Kochava's database includes products seemingly capable of identifying nearly every person in the United States. According to the FTC, Kochava's customers, ostensibly advertisers, can access this data to trace individuals' movements—including to sensitive locations like hospitals, temporary shelters, and places of worship, with a promised accuracy within "a few meters"—over a day, a week, a month, or a year. Kochava's products can also provide a "360-degree perspective" on individuals, unveiling personally identifying information like their names, home addresses, phone numbers, as well as sensitive information like their race, gender, ethnicity, annual income, political affiliations, or religion, the FTC alleged.
“Capable of identifying nearly every person in the U.S.”
So you have nothing to hide?
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- Oct 2023
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library.scholarcy.com library.scholarcy.com
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f Chinese modernity would not exist without the process of turning Summer Palace loot into art and commodities
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commodities in the capitalist market exchange.
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library.scholarcy.com library.scholarcy.com
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This hindered China's industrialization efforts and prevented them from entering the capitalist era.
Eurocentric perspective of global capitalism as China had its own capitalist system trading with other countries in the East before
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hina and Western nations granted various rights and privileges to the foreigners, including extraterritoriality and the practice of Christianity
trade relations gave extra privileges, start of colonisation
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quoteinvestigator.com quoteinvestigator.com
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“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
This quote is a feature of toxic capitalism, which should be efficient enough to allow a person to quickly obtain another job to thereby make the issue moot.
Part of it is tied into identity as well.
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udenver.zoom.us udenver.zoom.us
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Some related ideas that are suggesting some sort of thesis for improving the idea of ungrading: - We measure the things we care about. - In Education, we care about learning and understanding, but measuring these outside of testing and evaluation is difficult at best (therefor ungrading). - No one cares about your GPA six months after you graduate. - Somehow we've tied up evaluations and grades into the toxic capitalism and competition within US culture. Some of this is tied into educational movements related to Frederick Winslow Taylor and Harvards Eliot. - Hierarchies instituted by the Great Chain of Being have confounded our educational process.
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- Aug 2023
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- for: fossil capitalism, progress trap, intersectionality, social norms, social norms - waste, externalization, capitalism
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title
- Waves of Abandonment
- The Permian Basin is ground zero for a billion-dollar surge of zombie oil wells
- Waves of Abandonment
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summary
- a story that illustrates the intersectionality of fossil capitalism
- progress trap
- exploitation
- tragedy of the commons
- fossil fuel industry
- gold rush
- externalization
- fossil capitalism
- a story that illustrates the intersectionality of fossil capitalism
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Comment
- Yet another example of capitalism's tendency to externalize manifests at the most basic level.
- The tendency to treat nature as an inexhaustable garbage dumping ground seems to be built into our culture's economic norms taught to us by most parents and society at large.
- There are not enough parents that teach their children to love, respect and feel that they are an intrinsic part of nature.
- The externalization our society teaches us in the form of destructive, widely-accepted social norms of waste such as::
- having the concept of waste and garbage
- garbage taken out once a week
- waste bins everywhere
- keep our backyard clean, but at the expense of trucking out our garbage to some unknown place
- has been enculturated into us from early age
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The industrial worker now has twentyhours of free time a week that his grandfather did not have.
Where does this wealth ultimately go in the long run? Not to the worker, but primarily to the corporation competing against them for the added value.
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www.pewresearch.org www.pewresearch.org
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I’m going to start with the U.S.; technology in the U.S. is caught up in American late-stage (or financialized) capitalism where profitability isn’t the goal; perpetual return on investment is. Given this, the tools that we’re seeing developed by corporations reinforce capitalist agendas.
- for: corporate power, technology - capitalism, capitalism - exploitation, Danah Boyd, progress trap
- paraphrase
- quote
- technology in the U.S. is caught up in American late-stage (or financialized) capitalism
- where profitability isn’t the goal;
- perpetual return on investment is.
- Given this, the tools that we’re seeing developed by corporations
- reinforce capitalist agendas.
- Innovation will require pushing past this capitalist infrastructure to achieve the social benefits and civic innovation that will work in the United States.
- China is a whole other ball of wax.
- If you want to go there, follow up with me. But pay attention to Taobao centers.
- We haven’t hit peak awful yet.
- I have every confidence that social and civic innovation can be beneficial in the long run
- with a caveat that I think that climate change dynamics might ruin all of that
- but no matter what, I don’t think we’re going to see significant positive change by 2030.
- I think things are going to get much worse before they start to get better.
- I should also note that I don’t think that many players have taken responsibility for what’s unfolding.
-Yes, tech companies are starting to see that things might be a problem,
- but that’s only on the surface. -News media does not at all acknowledge its role in amplifying discord,
- or its financialized dynamics.
- The major financiers of this economy don’t take any responsibility for what’s unfolding. Etc.
- technology in the U.S. is caught up in American late-stage (or financialized) capitalism
- author: Dana Boyd
- principal researcher, Microsoft Research
- founder, Data & Society
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Meador, Jake. “The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church.” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/christian-church-communitiy-participation-drop/674843/.
Meador looks at how churches might offer better community as a balm to W.E.I.R.D. lifeways and toxic capitalism.
Why must religion be the source for these communal and social supports? Why can't alternate social structures or institutions handle these functions?
Is this why the religious right is also so heavily opposed to governmental social support programs? Are they replacing some of the needs and communal desires people in need have? Why couldn't increased governmental support programs be broader and more holistic in their leanings to cover not only social supports, but human contact and community building as well.
Do some of these tensions between a mixed W.E.I.R.D. and non-W.E.I.R.D Americans cause a lot of the split political identities we see in the last few decades? What is the balm for this during the transition?
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In a workist culture that believes dignity is grounded in accomplishment, simply reclaiming this alternative form of dignity becomes a radical act.
Workist cultures are built on the principle that identity, worth, and dignity are grounded in an individual's accomplishments.
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Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children. Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.
Extreme focus on financial and professional success has driven people to give less time to communal spaces and experiences including religious life.
Is this specific to America's brand of toxic capitalism or do other WEIRD economies experience this?
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- Jul 2023
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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capitalist economics is notoriously bad at considering non-human beings and it's also notoriously bad at considering 00:10:56 the future Beyond a certain amount of time
- for: capitalism faults
- bad at considering the long term future
- bad at considering other species
- for: capitalism faults
Tags
Annotators
URL
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www.rfc-editor.org www.rfc-editor.org
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It's noteworthy that RFC 7258 doesn't consider that bad actors are limited to governments, and personally, I think many advertising industry schemes for collecting data are egregious examples of pervasive monitoring and hence ought also be considered an attack on the Internet that ought be mitigated where possible. However, the Internet technical community clearly hasn't acted in that way over the last decade.
Advertising industry schemes considered an attack
Stephen Farrell's perspective.
Tags
Annotators
URL
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inthesetimes.com inthesetimes.com
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The second great separation followed the industrial revolution.
- Second great separation
- Industrial Revolution
- The early enclosure movement during the 1600s
- separated people into farmers and non-farmers
- https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.parliament.uk%2Fabout%2Fliving-heritage%2Ftransformingsociety%2Ftowncountry%2Flandscape%2Foverview%2Fenclosingland%2F&group=vnpq69nW
- Prior to the enclosures, land was held in common for public use, not owned by individuals.
- The rise of capitalism also occurred during this time.
- Adam Smith wrote his landmark book, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776.
- Land was privatized so the most efficient use of land could be determined
- by market competition rather than
- community consensus.
- Labor then also had to be “commodified,” or bought and sold,
- so non-farmers could work for wages and buy food and the other necessities of life they had been getting from the land.
- With reliance on working for wages, buying, and selling
- the necessity for personal relationships were diminished.
- With the diminished necessity for personal relationships,
- the social cohesion within families, communities and society began to diminish as well.
- The persistence of chronic poverty and malnutrition, even during times of tremendous economic growth and individual wealth, are direct consequences of a growing sense of disconnectedness from each other that was nourished by the industrial era of economic development.
- The early enclosure movement during the 1600s
- Industrial Revolution
- Second great separation
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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As socialist realism was imposed on Soviet writers, one form of permissible resistance, of finding an inner freedom, was to read translations of foreign writers. No private library was complete without Hemingway, Faulkner, London, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Salinger—all officially permitted as “progressive writers” exposing the “ulcers of the capitalist world.”
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- Jun 2023
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Technology is valuable and empowering, but at what end direct cost? Consumers don't have available data for the actual costs of the options they're choosing in many contexts.
What if that reprocessing costs the equivalent of three glasses of waters? Is it worth it for our environment, especially when the direct costs to the "consumer" are hidden into advertising models.
(via Brenna)
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- May 2023
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www.desiringgod.org www.desiringgod.org
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fighting the fear of not having enough money
In a capitalist society, where the profit motive is the prime directive, the fear of not having enough money is one of (if not, the) greatest fears we have in our old age.
My hope of a better tomorrow includes a society that has outgrown the profit motive and sincerely cares for everyone, even the old and unemployed.
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www.federalreserve.gov www.federalreserve.gov
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Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity. In 1991, at the bottom of the recession, a survey of workers at large firms by International Survey Research Corporation indicated that 25 percent feared being laid off. In 1996, despite the sharply lower unemployment rate and the tighter labor market, the same survey organization found that 46 percent were fearful of a job layoff.
Regarding Noam Chomsky's words about Greenspan.
This is also mentioned in https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/jul/21/facebook-posts/social-media-meme-says-alan-greenspan-said-insecur/
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www.counterpunch.org www.counterpunch.org
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So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more. That’s the way you keep societies efficient and healthy from the point of view of the corporations. And as universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is exactly what is being imposed. And we’ll see more and more of it.
Noam Chomsky on Alan Greenspan's ideas on 'worker insecurity'.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Is there potentially a worry amongst Republicans that by losing the "culture wars" that they'll somehow lose control of society and the capitalist order which funds their party and helps to keep them in control?
Link to Gramsci's idea about cultural hegemony: https://hypothes.is/a/pRnPLPTtEe2_pyt2-Z7pwg
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Cultural hegemony is therefore used to maintain consent to the capitalist order, rather than the use of force to maintain order.
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- Apr 2023
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theodora.com theodora.com
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Why do we devalue education? Is it such a commodity now that its transmission value is worth pennies on the dollar?
Is Government requirement and support for education part of what causes the devaluation of the "educational market"? If so, how would one decouple this process to increase the wages of educators? Is a capitalistic version the best way to go, or is it better to socialize it further and inject more money into it versus other choices?
Major nationwide strike forming minimum wage with variances for local consumer indices and city/state costs of living? Something which would drive competition for child care and teaching spaces? Wages that would push up the social value of education? Create a market for competition for teachers at the local level as well as between areas?
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Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/lV19ytGBEe2ynWMu34UKUg
This depreciation is done at the lowest level of exchange and caused the system to collapse rather quickly. What level is our current exchange done at such that the inequalities are pushed up multiple levels making the system seem more stable? How is instability introduced? How could it be minimized?
Our current system is valued both by time and skill (using the measure of payment per hour).
Compare this with salespeople who are paid on commission rather than on an hourly basis. They are then using their skill of sales ability and balancing time (and levels of chance) to create their outcomes, but at the same time, some of their work is built on the platform that sales management or the company provides. Who builds this and how do they get paid for it? Who provides sales leads? How is this calculated into the system costs?
How do these ideas fit into the Bullshit Jobs thesis?
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- Mar 2023
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement
How much of the 1935 Stakhanovite movement was propaganda vs. reality and how much of it used the ideas of scientific management from the late 1800s/early 1900s?
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usa.anarchistlibraries.net usa.anarchistlibraries.net
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The lineage of domination from childhood in schools and at home to adulthood in the workplace is clear. Its purpose is to habituate us to hierarchy and psychological enslavement. Our aptitude for autonomy is atrophied and our vitality is suppressed so that we are reconciled with regimentation and can replicate and reproduce it throughout our interpersonal lives, politics, and cultures. That is Why Revolution Needs Therapy.
It's incredible how our work ideology is shaped by a hierarchical way of thinking that you can see in many places of our society.
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www.sciencedirect.com www.sciencedirect.com
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Historical geometric growth revealed by this data suggests an average growth rate of 7.9% per year, which we extrapolate to 2050.
Quinn Slobodian's Crack-Up Capitalism may be a new form of disaster capitalism that will emerge as the polycrisis continues - https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2Fr8k0r3dZsog%2F&group=world - as the growth of elites attest, we can count on capitalism to capitalize on disaster.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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crack up capitalism that is a form of economic activity 00:04:47 propagated by people whose profit model and their kind of a normative vision of change and the social future relies on an idea of an accelerating process of social dissolution and an accelerating process of political 00:05:00 fragmentation this is a form of this is sort of a profit model and a kind of a political vision that sees an acceleration in the near future and the medium-term future 00:05:14 of processes of political crack-up
- Definition
- Crack-Up Capitalism is defined as
- a form of economic activity
- propagated by people
- whose profit model and
- their kind of a normative vision of
- change and
- the social future
- relies on an idea
- of an accelerating process of
- social dissolution and
- an accelerating process of political
fragmentation
- in the near future and
- the medium-term future
- Crack-Up Capitalism is defined as
- Definition
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Book review of historian Quinn Slobodian's new book: Crack-up Capitalism
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www.gndmedia.co.uk www.gndmedia.co.uk
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Ads, Andrew and James discuss where the the climate movement is right now, how deep time plays into the effects we are having on the planet, when good people do bad things because of poor systems and what happens next if 1.5C fails.
- 21:52 Carbon credits, carbon markets
- it's a scam designed to perpetuate fossil fuel use, in a phoney war against the climate crisis
- Offsets were designed to allow polluters to pay others to create schemes that would compensate or "offset" that pollution. The classic example WAS afforestation, the planting of trees that can sequester that carbon.
- Carbon neutrality comes from this idea that you can keep polluting if you offset it and become "carbon neutral"
- A company may decarbonize a lot of their supply chain but may struggle to get rid of airflights around the world. In that case, they use offsets. When companies analyze the very difficult choices, they take the easy way out and use carbon offsets
- However, there is so much offsets for afforestation now that there isn't enough land on earth
- Carbon markets are a recipe for grifting and fraud or zero impacts
- This is the current state of offsets
31:00 Shell oil carbon offset greenwashing scam - the sky zero proposal - Shell claims they can offset all the O+G emissions out of the ground - it is preposterous - there's not enough land on earth when you tally up all the carbon offset afforestation schemes
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32:30 Neo-colonialism
- rich white man can offset his emissions by buying land from a developing nation. Now the indigenous people cannot use that land for any reason.
- also, will require huge amount of water to grow those trees
- we don't have enough land and we don't have 100 years, only 5 years.
- nature-based solutions are an industrial, myopic approach
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37:00 Deferred Emission Reduction
- a lot of carbon credits are called deferred emission reduction credits.
- this is avoided emissions - ie. trees in a forest with 100 ton of sequestering potential
- this is promise to not destroy the biosphere any further so it's not removing any existing carbon
- maybe multiple people might own the same forest, or someone might come along and burn it down
- Trees are vulnerable to climate impacts - ie. Microsoft bought a large forest in California that later burned down in a climate change intensified wildfire
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40:00 can we do anything within the extractive capitalist system?
- some people claim that as long as extractivist capitalism still persists, we cannot have system change
- also a neocolonialist element - global north exploited the global south to create most of the emissions in the atmospheric commons
- a number of people are beginning to see that an extractivist capitalist system is not in line with effectively addressing the climate crisis
- wind, solar, etc has displaced electricity generation in a number of countries like in the UK. However, these are only a few countries.Renewables are helping increase overall energy production
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44:22: Stop burning fossil fuels
- t doesn't matter if investments in renewables triple. It won't make a difference if we don't significantly stop burning fossil fuels at the same time.
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47:00 economic growth prevents real change
- Insisting on 1, 2 or 3% growth, will limit the response to the climate threat to render it irrelevant
- Climate change is still mostly an optimization problem. They are more concerned with economic damage.
- Economists believe that anything that threatens economic growth cannot be accepted
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51:00 Degrowth making headway
- Degrowth scholars are getting more attention on the need to decouple economic grwoth from climate policies
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52:10 Is there a positive future scenario - The role of solidarity
- Solidarity is the greatest strength we can harness.
- The success of Doughnut Economics gives me hope
- The richest 1% must reign in their impacts and redistribute to allow the impoverished to live humane lives
- We can all have good lives and we don't have to manufacture that wonder
- This is what it is to be human
- 21:52 Carbon credits, carbon markets
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app.thebrain.com app.thebrain.comTheBrain1
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Like Cuckoos, Capitalism Had to Push All Other Ways of Living Out of the Nest
Friends of the Link 2023-03-01
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idlewords.com idlewords.com
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We started out collecting this information by accident, as part of our project to automate everything, but soon realized that it had economic value. We could use it to make the process self-funding. And so mechanized surveillance has become the economic basis of the modern tech industry.
Surveillance Capitalism by Accident
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www.filmsforaction.org www.filmsforaction.org
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Title
- Revolution and American Indians: “Marxism is as Alien to My Culture as Capitalism"
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Author
- Russell Means
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Context
- The following speech was given by Russell Means in July 1980, before several thousand people who had assembled from all over the world for the Black Hills International Survival Gathering, in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
- It was Russell Means's most famous speech.
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journals.sagepub.com journals.sagepub.com
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‘networked accumulation’ platform firms (hereafter NAPFs) rely on existing or easily replaceable assets with minimal infrastructure, as distinct to platform firm models that extend or complement transport and accommodation infrastructures through the acquisition of their own fleets of vehicles or suites of properties (Stehlin et al., 2020). NAPFs typically launch local services under a cloud of ‘regulatory indeterminacy’ (Stehlin et al., 2020, 1256), relying on being “simultaneously embedded and disembedded from the space-times they mediate” (Graham, 2020, 454)
The thread in this article is the paradoxical relationship to local place, using it instrumentally to turn it into space
This also highlights the grey regulatory zone that is typical here
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- Feb 2023
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www.academia.edu www.academia.edu
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And a theory of "multilayered social worlds", when fully developed, can be a helpful tool in understanding why, in modern Europe, certain phenomena became common enough to catch the attention of physicians, scientists, artists and philosophers. In a current unpublished work, STP suggests that, if the logic of affinity is properly conceptualized, both in terms of its essentially paraconsistent properties as a social logic and in terms of its historical presentation throughout very different societies, one arrives at the conclusion that modern families – in the sense of nuclear familiar units composed of heterossexual parents and their children – do not logically form a basic "atom of kinship" in Levi-Strauss' sense. That is, in modern capitalist societies, the logic of affinity is not composed in such a way as to form a world of its own, it has little synthetic power. In fact, the logic of affinity is most consistent within capitalist worlds at the points where it is tasked with "stitching together" dynamics dominated by property and value – at the point of contact between family and the production of independent adult workers, or at the intersection between affinity and the State, where the nation-form is born, etc. Because capitalist structures do not respect the internal logic of kinship – which would allow people to socially map not only those that are part of their families and those who are not, but also those that occupy strangely indeterminate positions in this social fabric – it is up to individuals themselves, as they grow up, to develop ways to supplement to this fractured logic. This is what Lacan called the "individual myth of the neurotic": how, in order to become persons , we must supplement our social existence before other people with an invisible partnership with an "Other", a figure that helps us determine how to distinguish these indeterminate elements of affinity logic and that capitalist sociality does not help to propagate in a consistent and shared way.
Posits the necessity, imposed by capitalism, of an individual myth of the neurotic (Lacan) as a problem that psychoanalysis was created to solve.
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press.uchicago.edu press.uchicago.edu
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Mattei, Clara E. The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707138.html.
I've always wondered why the United States never used the phrase austerity to describe political belt tightening.
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- Jan 2023
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thedreammachine.substack.com thedreammachine.substack.com
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Protecting and practicing fallow time is an act of resistance; it can make us feel out of step with what the prevailing culture tells us.
Rest is Resistance
Fallow time, I like that wording
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Local file Local file
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the Enlightenment project, one now seen inrevolutionary quarters as a false dream of liberation that has insteadunleashed unspeakable cruelty upon the world
Was the Enlightenment a false dream of liberation which has really unleashed an unspeakable cruelty upon the world?
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.comYouTube1
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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we have individual capitalists who try 00:48:45 to make the most profit and this is linked to their capital and productivity so to achieve more in less time and 00:48:57 productivity is linked to energy [Music] the only source of energy to increase profit is carbon oil and gas and this has resulted in a change in our 00:49:15 atmosphere we have to put an entities if we wish to live in our planet can our capitalism do this based on the current data we won't be able to do so 00:49:28 therefore perhaps we should do the following reflection if capitalism is unable to do so either Humanity will die with it or 00:49:42 Humanity will overcome capitalism so that we can live in our planet
!- Urrego : Key Point - Can capitalism rapidly detour away from fossil fuels? The current data indicates no. So either Humanity does our it drops capitalism
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that will be my second point and it's something that is not often mentioned capitalism the capitalism that we have known in the 00:47:54 last 30 40 years overcome the climate crisis that the capitalism helped create it's a rhetorical question but it also makes sense because if the answer is no 00:48:06 then we're wasting our time
!- Urrego : second point - can the same capitalist logic be used to solve the crisis it created?
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newsroom.spotify.com newsroom.spotify.com
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a challenging macro environment
I wonder if this is à la Google. From the twitter thread:
Pretty incredible that Google is trying to get away with blaming macroeconomic conditions for their layoffs, when over the last year they’ve spend 57.36B on stock buybacks.
That’s enough to support the 12,000 laid off engineers at their median engineer compensation for 23 years.
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thebaffler.com thebaffler.com
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But in the new full-blown capitalist version of evolution, where the drive for accumulation had no limits, life was no longer an end in itself, but a mere instrument for the propagation of DNA sequences—and so the very existence of play was something of a scandal.
Could refuting the idea of accumulation without limits (and thus capitalism for capitalism's sake) help give humans more focus on what is useful/valuable?
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If old-school Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer viewed nature as a marketplace, albeit an unusually cutthroat one, the new version was outright capitalist. The neo-Darwinists assumed not just a struggle for survival, but a universe of rational calculation driven by an apparently irrational imperative to unlimited growth.
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news.harvard.edu news.harvard.edu
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What is abrogated here is our right to the future tense, which is the essence of free will, the idea that I can project myself into the future and thus make it a meaningful aspect of my present. This is the essence of autonomy and human agency. Surveillance capitalism’s “means of behavioral modification” at scale erodes democracy from within because, without autonomy in action and in thought, we have little capacity for the moral judgment and critical thinking necessary for a democratic society.
!- surveillance capitalism : key insight -mass behavioral modification takes away autonomy
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surveillance capitalism represents an unprecedented concentration of knowledge and the power that accrues to such knowledge. They know everything about us, but we know little about them. They predict our futures, but for the sake of others’ gain. Their knowledge extends far beyond the compilation of the information we gave them. It’s the knowledge that they have produced from that information that constitutes their competitive advantage, and they will never give that up. These knowledge asymmetries introduce wholly new axes of social inequality and injustice.
!- surveillance capitalism : key insight - knowledge assymetry between corporations and government bodies vs individuals
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ProPublica recently reported that breathing machines purchased by people with sleep apnea are secretly sending usage data to health insurers, where the information can be used to justify reduced insurance payments.
!- surveillance capitalism : example- - Propublica reported breathing machines for sleep apnea secretly send data to insurance companies
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from the start the logic reflected the social relations of the one-way mirror. They were able to see and to take — and to do this in a way that we could not contest because we had no way to know what was happening.
!- surveillance capitalism : metaphor - one way mirror
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I define surveillance capitalism as the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These data are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets — business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later.
!- Definition : Surveillance Capitalism - as defined by Shoshana Zuboff
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www.nature.com www.nature.com
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But these models typically focus on a single country and fail to take into account cross-border dynamics, such as movements of capital and currency. For example, if markets are spooked by low growth in one country, some companies might move their capital overseas, which could adversely affect the original country’s currency and increase borrowing costs. Conditions such as these posed severe financial problems for Argentina in 2001 and Greece in 2010. International cooperation for tighter border control of capital movements needs to be considered and the effects modelled.
!- Global Capitalism's pathological behavior of maximizing profit : comment - Due to lack of global coordination and agreements, - global capitalism game played by multi-nationals is a whack-a-mole game that eludes any kind of attempts at individual state level regulation. - Any attempt by one country at social or ecological regulation will be met with a corporation exercising their right to pull out and find another country that has no such regulation in place.
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www.niemanlab.org www.niemanlab.org
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More news organizations will realize they are in the business of impact, not eyeballs
Journalistic outlets should be in the business of creating impact and not scrounging merely for eyeballs and exposure.
Exposure may be useful for advertising revenue with respect to surveillance capitalism, but if you're not informing along the way, not making a measurable impact, then you're not living, not making a change.
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- Dec 2022
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www.robinsloan.com www.robinsloan.com
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I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet.
Social media should be comprised of people from end to end. Corporate interests inserted into the process can only serve to dehumanize the system.
Robin Sloan is in the same camp as Greg McVerry and I.
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jarche.com jarche.com
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If my interpretation of the Retrieval quadrant is correct, it will become much more difficult to be an average, or even above average, writer. Only the best will flourish. Perhaps we will see a rise in neo-generalists.
This is probably true of average or poor software engineers given that GPT-3 can produce pretty reasonable code snippets
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pluralistic.net pluralistic.net
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But there's another side to this playlistification of feeds: playlists and other recommendation algorithms are chokepoints: they are a way to durably interpose a company between a creator and their audience. Where you have chokepoints, you get chokepoint capitalism: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
Massive social media networks using algorithmic feeds and other programmatic and centralizing methods to interpose themselves between people trying to reach each other, often in ways which allow them to extract additional value from the participants. They become necessary platforms which create chokepoints for flows of information which Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin call "chokepoint capitalism".
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radreads.co radreads.co
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You’re walking to work and you see a burning mansion. You’ve been in that mansion and know that there’s a Picasso worth $100 million. (Quick math: 100,000 lives saved.) You’re about to run into the mansion to save the Picasso…But right next to you, there’s a lake. And in that lake, there’s a drowning child.
not all good actions can necessarily be quantified.
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www.zephoria.org www.zephoria.org
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Throughout the 80s and 90s, private equity firms and hedge funds gobbled up local news enterprises to extract their real estate. They didn’t give a shit about journalism; they just wanted prime real estate that they could develop. And news organizations had it in the form of buildings in the middle of town. So financiers squeezed the news orgs until there was no money to be squeezed and then they hung them out to dry.
Wild that driving functional organisations into the ground could just be the cost of doing business
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www.thetimes.co.uk www.thetimes.co.uk
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there will surely come a time when spending 9 billion pounds on refashioning an old powerstation into a place for parting rich people from their money will be regarded as a preposterous historical anomaly.
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mattstoller.substack.com mattstoller.substack.com
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Amazon is hated on the right as a bulwark of progressivism. For instance, to pick a random example, GOP icon Tucker Carlson recently characterized the firm’s behavior as ‘modern-day book burning.’ And you can find an endless number of right-wing critiques. Conservatives distrust Amazon.
That is really interesting. Amazon is not exactly renowned as an m upholder of progressive values by the left either.
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thereader.mitpress.mit.edu thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
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n the political aftermath of the tragedy at Chernobyl, the failure to inform its citizens served to expose the hubris of the Soviet State
It's the hubris of the #West to neglect that the capitalist Japan 25 years later would cripple transparency and honesty much further than Soviets had done. Eventually we learned everything about the accident 2 years later, whil it took 8 years for Fukoshima to admit they had been consciously hiding the fact that cores had melted.
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- Nov 2022
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thepressproject.gr thepressproject.gr
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αντιμάχονται αγνώστους αγκαλιασμένοι με μια τηλεόραση
Το βιντεο δεν υπαρχει,... γιατι?
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Το ανακαλυψα από τον Alexander Clapp about για τους πλούσιους ελληνες εφοπλιστές που διασκεδαζαν στο θωρηκτό Αφερωφ ενω οι πολιτες πεινούσαν.
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news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com
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The subsequent decline in product quality was caused by advertising displacing genuine user feedback in creating demand for products, among other things (planned obsolescence).You no longer needed to create a great product that people would buy and recommend because it is great. Simply skip the loop and go straight from A to B via advertising (fake buzz).The Galbraith argument that advertising was a necessary technology that benefits consumers is a Big Lie. Advertising benefits large producers, while consumers suffer from losing their voice and declining product quality.
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threadreaderapp.com threadreaderapp.com
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arstechnica.com arstechnica.com
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Those sticking with Musk must be prepared to work “maniacally,” he says, to support whatever move he makes next, creating an ongoing environment where employees can’t easily predict their day to day, which experts say makes it even more likely that turnover will remain high.
A billionaire following a $44 billion dollar company purchase pushing employees to work "maniacally"? As if they weren't working hard before?
What value did he possibly see here?
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doctorow.medium.com doctorow.medium.com
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Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis intheir classic Schooling in Capitalist America
Bowles and Gintis apparently make an argument in Schooling in Capitalist America that changes in education in the late 1800s/early 1900s served the ends of capitalists rather than the people.
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twitter.com twitter.com
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<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>I've been told since the first day I started working at the Division of Hospital Medicine at @UCSF that my work doesn't bring in $ to cover my salary. It's a narrative of manufactured scarcity, a common tactic in capitalism. The CEO is making $1.85 million plus bonuses.
— Rupa Marya, MD (@DrRupaMarya) November 4, 2022
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>A Hospitalist’s economic value is in what we *save* the system in terms of quality-driven care and patient throughput (DC/unit time), not in how much we bring in through profees. Because of how the system is structured, you’ll only see our value when we aren’t there.
— Rupa Marya, MD (@DrRupaMarya) November 4, 2022This sounds a lot like hospitalists fall under David Graeber's thesis in Bullshit Jobs that the more necessary and useful you are the less you're likely to get paid and be valued.
I suspect the ability to track an employees' direct level of productivity also fits into this thesis. One can track the productivity of an Amazon warehouse worker or driver, but it's much more difficult to track the CEOs direct productivity.
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www.npr.org www.npr.org
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- Oct 2022
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We all know where meat comes from but this manages to actually taste dead, as if it had been entombed for too long in the recesses of one of the dank fridges that feature so frequently in the great man’s TV oeuvre.
On Gordon Ramsey's Street Burger chain.
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www.engadget.com www.engadget.com
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https://www.engadget.com/amazon-attrition-leadership-ctsmd-201800110.html?src=rss
Amazon tracking their hourly workers and not their middle management's efficiency.
Originally read on Tue [[2022-10-18]] 1:25 PM
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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surveillance beacons
Een mooie beschrijving voor wat advertenties en trackingpixels eigenlijk zijn
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www.bankinfosecurity.com www.bankinfosecurity.com
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A Midwestern hospital system is treating its use of Google and Facebook web tracking technologies as a data breach, notifying 3 million individuals that the computing giants may have obtained patient information.
Substitute “library” for “hospital”
In an alternate universe: “A Midwestern library system is treating its use of Google and Facebook web tracking technologies as a data breach, notifying 3 million individuals that the computing giants may have obtained search and borrowing histories.”
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Local file Local file
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If I start pestering them now, the security team at my LARGE_CORP employer might allow me access to sorucehut.org in about 3-4 months.
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www.washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com
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After cornering the market on entertainment, TikTok began offering its model of behavioral tracking and algorithmic suggestion to advertisers, promising them a way to know which ads people find most compelling without having to ask. It was an instant hit: The company’s ad revenue tripled this year, to $12 billion, according to eMarketer estimates, and is expected to eclipse YouTube at nearly $25 billion by 2025. In the United States, the cost to advertisers for TikTok’s premium real estate — the first commercial break a viewer sees in their feed, known as a “TopView” — has jumped to $3 million a day.
A "TopView" advertisement runs $3 million a day
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How TikTok ate the internetThe world’s most popular app has pioneered a new age of instant attention. Can we trust it?By Drew HarwellOct. 14
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delong.typepad.com delong.typepad.com
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A youngman or woman who cannot read very well is hindered in hispursuit of the American dream
This would seem to indicate that reading's primary importance was to fuel capitalism and production. It certainly says a lot about American culture, particularly in a book that wants to focus on syntopical reading.
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- Sep 2022
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Unemployed workers are much more likelyto fall into poverty in countries like the United States, Canada, and Japan,compared with countries such as the Netherlands and Iceland.
Is part of this effect compounded by America's history of the Protestant work ethic (see Max Weber)?
Do the wealthy/powerful benefit by this structure of penalizing the unemployed this way? Is there a direct benefit to them? Or perhaps the penalty creates a general downward pressure on overall wages and thus provides an indirect benefit to those in power?
What are the underlying reasons we tax the unemployed this way?
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One reason for this is that poverty is not something that people wish to ac-knowledge or draw attention to. Rather, it is something that individuals andfamilies would like to go away. As a result, many Americans attempt to concealtheir economic difficulties as much as possible.22 This often involves keeping upappearances and trying to maintain a “normal” lifestyle. Such poverty downthe block may at first appear invisible. Nevertheless, the reach of poverty iswidespread, touching nearly all communities across America.
Middle Americans, and particularly those in suburbia and rural parts of America that account for the majority of poverty in the country, tend to make their poverty invisible because of the toxic effects of extreme capitalism and keeping up appearances.
Has this effect risen with the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and the idea of "living one's best life"? How about the social effects of television with shows like "Keeping up with the Kardashians" which encourage conspicuous consumption?
More interesting is the fact that most of these suburban and rural poverty stricken portions of the country are in predominantly Republican held strongholds.
Is there a feedback mechanism that is not only hollowing these areas out, but keeping them in poverty?
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Although the causes of poverty have not been examined in this chapter,the findings presented here suggest that given its widespread nature, povertyappears systematic to our economic structure. In short, we have met the enemy,and they are us.
Tags
- unemployment
- human resources
- Protestant work ethic
- conspicuous consumption
- economics
- rural poverty
- keeping up appearances
- social taxes
- invisible poverty
- poverty
- social welfare
- penalizing poverty
- open questions
- sociology
- suburbs
- politics
- toxic capitalism
- middle America
- keeping up with the Jonses
- Republican party
- power over
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my.slc.edu my.slc.edu
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A producer, however, will never allowhimself to be driven to present material that in any way attacks the foun-dations of society, for to do so would destroy his own existence as a cap-italist entrepreneur.
filmmakers want to make money, and have money, and it is often driven away from the idea of artisticness and moved more towards money making.
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www.insidehighered.com www.insidehighered.com
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I still say that students should do their own work on researching and identifying textbooks and not their professors. They should all be optional and never required. This would fix the textbook issue rapidly.
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www.aftonbladet.se www.aftonbladet.se
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Bara sedan 2016 har Anders Hultin plockat ut 9,4 miljoner kronor som aktieutdelning samt tagit ut ytterligare tre miljoner i lön.
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Svensk vård och skola har blivit en guldgruva för riskkapitalister. Ett av de tydligaste exemplen heter Anders Hultin. Han blev känd för en vidare krets efter att Aftonbladets ledarsida uppmärksammat att han taktlöst lagt ut en bild på ett sjuhundrakronors vin på Facebook och texten: "Because I'm worth it". Då hade han som vd för skolkoncernen John Bauer precis ansökt om konkurs. 14 500 elever förlorade sina skolor och deras lärare hade blivit arbetslösa.Men Anders Hultin gick det, som han själv konstaterade, ingen nöd på. För en billig peng kunde han köpa ut ett antal skolor ur det egna konkursboet och drev dem vidare i det nystartade bolaget Fria Läroverken.
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johnclarkeblog.com johnclarkeblog.com
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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- Jul 2022
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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When we talk about “the algorithm,” we might be conflating recommender systems with online surveillance, monopolization, and the digital platforms’ takeover of all of our leisure time—in other words, with the entire extractive technology industry of the twenty-first century.
The algorithm’s role in surveillance capitalism
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Sounds like his philosophy fit may have fit in with the broader prosperity gospel space, Napoleon Hill, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, et al. Potentially worth looking into. Also related to the self-help movements and the New Thought philosophies.
fascinating that he wrote a book Copywriting and Direct Marketing. This may also tie him into the theses of Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy?
Link to: https://hyp.is/E4I_qgvCEe2rQO9iXvaTgA/www.goodreads.com/author/show/257221.Robert_Collier
Tags
- prosperity gospel
- Norman Vincent Peale
- metaphysics
- psychology
- Napoleon Hill
- positive thinking
- self-help
- Billy Graham
- Collier's Weekly
- direct marketing
- copywriting
- abundance
- religion
- The Secret
- Kevin Phillips
- Peter Fenelon Collier
- Rhonda Byrne
- desire
- bookmark
- Robert Collier
- visualization
- American Theocracy
- capitalism
- faith
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ariadne.space ariadne.space
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reply to: https://ariadne.space/2022/07/01/a-silo-can-never-provide-digital-autonomy-to-its-users/
Matt Ridley indicates in The Rational Optimist that markets for goods and services "work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to deliver efficiency and innovation" while assets markets are nearly doomed to failure and require close and careful regulation.
If we view the social media landscape from this perspective, an IndieWeb world in which people are purchasing services like easy import/export of their data; the ability to move their domain name and URL permalinks from one web host to another; and CMS (content management system) services/platforms/functionalities, represents the successful market mode for our personal data and online identities. Here competition for these sorts of services will not only improve the landscape, but generally increased competition will tend to drive the costs to consumers down. The internet landscape is developed and sophisticated enough and broadly based on shared standards that this mode of service market should easily be able to not only thrive, but innovate.
At the other end of the spectrum, if our data are viewed as assets in an asset market between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al., it is easy to see that the market has already failed so miserably that one cannot even easily move ones' assets from one silo to another. Social media services don't compete to export or import data because the goal is to trap you and your data and attention there, otherwise they lose. The market corporate social media is really operating in is one for eyeballs and attention to sell advertising, so one will notice a very health, thriving, and innovating market for advertisers. Social media users will easily notice that there is absolutely no regulation in the service portion of the space at all. This only allows the system to continue failing to provide improved or even innovative service to people on their "service". The only real competition in the corporate silo social media space is for eyeballs and participation because the people and their attention are the real product.
As a result, new players whose goal is to improve the health of the social media space, like the recent entrant Cohost, are far better off creating a standards based service that allows users to register their own domain names and provide a content management service that has easy import and export of their data. This will play into the services market mode which improves outcomes for people. Aligning in any other competition mode that silos off these functions will force them into competition with the existing corporate social services and we already know where those roads lead.
Those looking for ethical and healthy models of this sort of social media service might look at Manton Reece's micro.blog platform which provides a wide variety of these sorts of data services including data export and taking your domain name with you. If you're unhappy with his service, then it's relatively easy to export your data and move it to another host using WordPress or some other CMS. On the flip side, if you're unhappy with your host and CMS, then it's also easy to move over to micro.blog and continue along just as you had before. Best of all, micro.blog is offering lots of the newest and most innovative web standards including webmention notificatons which enable website-to-website conversations, micropub, and even portions of microsub not to mention some great customer service.
I like to analogize the internet and social media to competition in the telecom/cellular phone space In America, you have a phone number (domain name) and can then have your choice of service provider (hosting), and a choice of telephone (CMS). Somehow instead of adopting a social media common carrier model, we have trapped ourselves inside of a model that doesn't provide the users any sort of real service or options. It's easy to imagine what it would be like to need your own AT&T account to talk to family on AT&T and a separate T-Mobile account to talk to your friends on T-Mobile because that's exactly what you're doing with social media despite the fact that you're all still using the same internet. Part of the draw was that services like Facebook appeared to be "free" and it's only years later that we're seeing the all too real costs emerge.
This sort of competition and service provision also goes down to subsidiary layers of the ecosystem. Take for example the idea of writing interface and text editing. There are (paid) services like iA Writer, Ulysses, and Typora which people use to compose their writing. Many people use these specifically for writing blog posts. Companies can charge for these products because of their beauty, simplicity, and excellent user interfaces. Some of them either do or could support the micropub and IndieAuth web standards which allow their users the ability to log into their websites and directly post their saved content from the editor directly to their website. Sure there are also a dozen or so other free micropub clients that also allow this, but why not have and allow competition for beauty and ease of use? Let's say you like WordPress enough, but aren't a fan of the Gutenberg editor. Should you need to change to Drupal or some unfamiliar static site generator to exchange a better composing experience for a dramatically different and unfamiliar back end experience? No, you could simply change your editor client and continue on without missing a beat. Of course the opposite also applies—WordPress could split out Gutenberg as a standalone (possibly paid) micropub client and users could then easily use it to post to Drupal, micro.blog, or other CMSs that support the micropub spec, and many already do.
Social media should be a service to and for people all the way down to its core. The more companies there are that provide these sorts of services means more competition which will also tend to lure people away from silos where they're trapped for lack of options. Further, if your friends are on services that interoperate and can cross communicate with standards like Webmention from site to site, you no longer need to be on Facebook because "that's where your friends and family all are."
I have no doubt that we can all get to a healthier place online, but it's going to take companies and startups like Cohost to make better choices in how they frame their business models. Co-ops and non-profits can help here too. I can easily see a co-op adding webmention to their Mastodon site to allow users to see and moderate their own interactions instead of forcing local or global timelines on their constituencies. Perhaps Garon didn't think Webmention was a fit for Mastodon, but this doesn't mean that others couldn't support it. I personally think that Darius Kazemi's Hometown fork of Mastodon which allows "local only" posting a fabulous little innovation while still allowing interaction with a wider readership, including me who reads him in a microsub enabled social reader. Perhaps someone forks Mastodon to use as a social feed reader, but builds in micropub so that instead of posting the reply to a Mastodon account, it's posted to one's IndieWeb capable website which sends a webmention notification to the original post? Opening up competition this way makes lots of new avenues for every day social tools.
Continuing the same old siloing of our data and online connections is not the way forward. We'll see who stands by their ethics and morals by serving people's interests and not the advertising industry.
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- Jun 2022
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Local file Local file
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We’ve been conditioned to view information through aconsumerist lens: that more is better, without limit.
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hybridpedagogy.org hybridpedagogy.org
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Get a copy of Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection
I can't help but wonder at the direct link here to Amazon with an affiliate link. I won't fault them completely for it, but for a site that is so critical of the ills of educational technology, and care for their students and community, the exposure to surveillance capitalism expressed here seems to go beyond their own pale. I would have expected more care here.
Surely there are other platforms that this volume is available from?
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www.nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com
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“Data is the new oil,” she said.
Oft repeated phrase and one I wouldn't have expected in this article.
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But the copyright on the materials still gives the organization control over how the information is used, which is what some tribal leaders find objectionable.
Oral cultures treat information dramatically different than literate cultures, and particularly Western literate cultures within capitalism-based economies.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Private tech companies have greater power to influence, censor and control the lives of ordinary people than any government on earth
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- May 2022
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Local file Local file
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Ken Pomeranz’s study, published in 2000, on the “greatdivergence” between Europe and China in the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries,1 prob ably the most important and influential bookon the history of the world-economy (économie-monde) since the pub-lication of Fernand Braudel’s Civilisation matérielle, économie etcapitalisme in 1979 and the works of Immanuel Wallerstein on “world-systems analysis.”2 For Pomeranz, the development of Western in-dustrial capitalism is closely linked to systems of the internationaldivision of labor, the frenetic exploitation of natural resources, andthe European powers’ military and colonial domination over the restof the planet. Subsequent studies have largely confirmed that conclu-sion, whether through the research of Prasannan Parthasarathi orthat of Sven Beckert and the recent movement around the “new his-tory of capitalism.”3
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seirdy.one seirdy.one
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The ad lists various data that WhatsApp doesn’t collect or share. Allaying data collection concerns by listing data not collected is misleading. WhatsApp doesn’t collect hair samples or retinal scans either; not collecting that information doesn’t mean it respects privacy because it doesn’t change the information WhatsApp does collect.
An important logical point. Listing what they don't keep isn't as good as saying what they actually do with one's data.
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www.propublica.org www.propublica.org
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Under the radar, a new class of dangerous debt — climate-distressed mortgage loans — might already be threatening the financial system. Lending data analyzed by Keenan and his co-author, Jacob Bradt, for a study published in the journal Climatic Change in June shows that small banks are liberally making loans on environmentally threatened homes, but then quickly passing them along to federal mortgage backers. At the same time, they have all but stopped lending money for the higher-end properties worth too much for the government to accept, suggesting that the banks are knowingly passing climate liabilities along to taxpayers as stranded assets.
We need better ways of making valuations and assessing risk so that these sorts of dangerous debt can't be passed along.
These sorts of sales should have long term baggage clauses built into them to prevent government "suckers". If they fail within x number of years, the original owners and their investors are held liable for them.
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doctorow.medium.com doctorow.medium.com
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The next time someone tells you “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product,” remember this. These farmers weren’t getting free, ad-supported tractors. Deere charges six figures for a tractor. But the farmers were still the product. The thing that determines whether you’re the product isn’t whether you’re paying for the product: it’s whether market power and regulatory forbearance allow the company to get away with selling you.
Nuanced "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product"
Is your demographic and/or activity data being sold? Then you are still the product even if you are paying for something.
I worry about things like Google Workspace sometimes. Am I paying enough for the product to cover the cost of supplying the product to me, or is Google having to raise additional revenue to cover the cost of serving me? Is Google raising additional revenue even though they don't have to in order to cover my cost?
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www.eff.org www.eff.org
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We've had three things happen simultaneously: we've moved from an open web where people start lots of small projects to one where it really feels like if you're not on a Facebook or a YouTube, you're not going to reach a billion users, and at that point, why is it worth doing this? Second, we've developed a financial model of surveillance capitalism, where the default model for all of these tools is we're going to collect as much information as we can about you and monetize your attention. Then we've developed a model for financing these, which is venture capital, where we basically say it is your job to grow as quickly as possible, to get to the point where you have a near monopoly on a space and you can charge monopoly rents. Get rid of two aspects of that equation and things are quite different.
How We Got Here: Concentration of Reach, Surveillance Capitalism, and Venture Capital
These three things combined drove the internet's trajectory. Without these three components, we wouldn't have seen the concentration of private social spaces and the problems that came with them.
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- Apr 2022
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barackobama.medium.com barackobama.medium.com
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these companies need to have some other North Star other than just making money and increasing market share
Will regulation be able to change the North Star?
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pioneerworks.org pioneerworks.org
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As a general rule, if your call is to dismantle institutions without a plan for what is supposed to take their place, you can safely assume the default setting is “the market will take care of it.”
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- Mar 2022
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every.to every.to
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You also need to design a compensation structure that pays writers what they’re worth.
A writer's collective trying to gather writers using the bait that they've managed to crack the problem of "paying writers what they're worth" seems to be a lot of hype.
This seems to put the already extant fear into a writer's mind that they're not being paid enough. Doesn't the broader economics of a capitalistic system already solve this issue? Where are the inequalities? What about paying the website designers and developers? What about the advertising and other marketing people?
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We’re building a knowledge base, so if one writer collects information for an article, their research is made available to the other writers in the collective.
How does one equitably and logically build a communally shared knowledge base for a for-profit space?
How might a communal zettelkasten work? A solid index for creating links between pieces is incredibly important here, but who does this work? How is it valued?
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www.cs.umd.edu www.cs.umd.edu
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Posting a new algorithm, poem, or video on the web makes it a vailable, but unless appropriate recipients notice it, the originator has little chance to influence them.
An early statement of the problem of distribution which has been widely solved by many social media algorithmic feeds. Sadly pushing ideas to people interested in them (or not) doesn't seem to have improved humanity. Perhaps too much of the problem space with respect to the idea of "influence" has been devoted to marketing and commerce or to fringe misinformation spaces? How might we create more value to the "middle" of the populace while minimizing misinformation and polarization?
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Refinement is a social process: New ideas are conceived of by individuals, and then they are refined through reviews from knowledgeable peers and mentors.
Refinement is a social process. Sadly it can also be accelerated, often negatively, by unintended socio-economic forces.
The dominance and ills created by surveillance capitalism within social media is one such result driven by capitalism.
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- Feb 2022
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seths.blog seths.blog
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The second reason might support positive change. The existence of tokens and decentralization means that it’s possible to build resilient open source communities where early contributors and supporters benefit handsomely over time. No one owns these communities, and we can hope that these communities will work hard to serve themselves and their users, not the capital markets or other short-term players.
Capitalism's subject is Capital, not the bourgeoisie or an owner class. "Open source communities" are still corporations.
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And that’s the first reason that the blockchain matters—because there’s a chance that it might lead to more open, resilient, market-focused networks and databases. It’s only a chance, though, because all the hype around the tokens sometimes makes it seem more likely that financial operators will simply seek to manipulate unregulated markets for their own benefit.
There's no chance. Blockchains by principle benefit corporations in the long run.
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Because the internet rewards people who own networks so handsomely, these organizations continue to gain in power. Google began by building a database on top of the open internet, and they’ve spent the last twenty years relentlessly making the internet less open so they can fortify the power of their databases and the attention they influence or control.
Openness by itself can't make a dent against corporations.
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Now imagine a blockchain/token project in which contributors earned tokens as they built it and supported it. Over time, the decentralized project would go up in value. As the ecosystem and the market delivered more and more utility to more and more people, the users would need to buy tokens to use it. And the holders of tokens would receive either a dividend or have the ability to sell their tokens if they chose. Early speculators would attract more attention, and people with more skill than capital could invest by contributing early and often. As the project reached a steady state, the stakeholders would shift, from innovators and speculators to people who treat their daily contributions as a job without a boss. Innovators could build on top of this network without permission, creating more and more variations and choice using the same underlying database.
This is a nightmare, and it would possibly be capitalism's final victory.
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kotaku.com kotaku.com
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One source described the Q&A as an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at extracting some kind of accountability from Stadia management.
There is no accountability to people inside corporations, only to results. Which is working as intended, companies are meant to make money by serving customers, not employees.
The simple "truth" here is that these Stadia games likely wouldn't have been successful without a lot of additional investments.
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else.
Apparently Persuall was embarrassed about their pro-surveillance capitalism stance and perhaps not so much for its lack of kindness and care for the basic humanity of students.
Sad that they haven't explained or apologized for their misstep.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220222022208/https://twitter.com/perusall/status/1495945680002719751
Additional context: https://twitter.com/search?q=(%40perusall)%20until%3A2022-02-23%20since%3A2022-02-21&src=typed_query
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Original tweet thread archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20220222025045/https://twitter.com/perusall/status/1495945680002719751
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perusall.com perusall.comPerusall1
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Stay at the forefront of educational innovation
What about a standard of care for students?
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Bragging about students not knowing how the surveillance technology works is unethical.<br><br>Students using accessibility software or open educational resources shouldn't be punished for accidentally avoiding surveillance. pic.twitter.com/Uv7fiAm0a3
— Ian Linkletter (@Linkletter) February 22, 2022
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>#annotation https://t.co/wVemEk2yao
— Remi Kalir (@remikalir) February 23, 2022
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Local file Local file
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Comaroff and Comaroff (2000) - Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming - https://is.gd/yWCl8i - urn:x-pdf:a8e24543f52dc4c4cf554706560c993f
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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That's because of bargaining power. Government programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, can ask for a lower price from health service providers because they have the numbers: the hospital has to comply or else risk losing the business of millions of Americans.
Big public sector drives health-services prices down.
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davidharvey.org davidharvey.org
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at the very outset a sense of how the elements or “moments” (as Marx prefers to call them) of the capitalist economic system, such as production, labour, wages, profit, consumption, exchange, realization and distribution
At the onset, if possible - - it would be preferable to have a clear understanding of what and how Marx would define the following three terms: 1. What is capital? 2. What is capitalism? 3. What is a capitalist economic system?
The list of eight (8) elements or "moments" combined with the phrase "totality of what capital is all about". appears to be somewhat confusing. Did you mean to say what "capitalism is all about"? Or, does "capital" consists of a list of "things" as well as (at least one) process?
And, are these 8 items all part of one single process - - called "capital" which is then transformed into different elements or "moments" as it circulates? Or, are there 8 separate interrelated processes?
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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In , power is the governing principle as rooted in of private ownership. Private ownership is wholly and only an act of institutionalized , and institutionalized exclusion is a matter of organized power
capitalism as system of organized power
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chomsky.info chomsky.info
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Back in 1981, a State Department insider boasted that we would "turn Nicaragua into the Albania of Central America"-that is, poor, isolated and politically radical-so that the Sandinista dream of creating a new, more exemplary political model for Latin America would be in ruins.
Cruelty of the imperialistic US administrator is telling of what we can achieve without toxic capitlalism.
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doctorow.medium.com doctorow.medium.com
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Preventing cheating during remote test-taking:https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorioSpying on work-from-home employees:https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#bosswareSpying on students and their families:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_DistrictRepossessing Teslas:https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/Disabling cars after a missed payment:https://edition.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/04/17/aa.bills.shut.engine.down/index.htmlForcing you to buy official printer ink:https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printerSpying on people who lease laptops:https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/09/ftc-halts-computer-spyingBricking gear the manufacturer doesn’t want to support anymore:https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/05/google-reaches-into-customers-homes-and-bricks-their-gadgets/
This is some really troubling developments for all first world people, especially educators
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- Jan 2022
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notesfromasmallpress.substack.com notesfromasmallpress.substack.com
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If booksellers like to blame publishers for books not being available, publishers like to blame printers for being backed up. Who do printers blame? The paper mill, of course.
The problem with capitalism is that in times of fecundity things can seem to magically work so incredibly well because so much of the system is hidden, yet when problems arise so much becomes much more obvious.
Unseen during fecundity is the amount of waste and damage done to our environments and places we live. Unseen are the interconnections and the reliances we make on our environment and each other.
There is certainly a longer essay hiding in this idea.
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canvas.ucsc.edu canvas.ucsc.eduFiles1
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The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
- Benjamin is part of the Frankfurt School at Institute of Social Studies in Germany.
- They are trying to examine the failure of Marxist revolutionary social change.
- The idea is that ideology disseminated through mass media are making it very difficult for Marx's prognotication are making it very difficult for social change to occur.
- 19th century modernity: mass transportation, factory work, dissemination of capitalism, movement to cities and experience of urban life
These convergent endeavors made predictable a situation which Paul Valéry pointed up in this sentence: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.” (op. cit., p. 226) Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations—the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film—have had on art in its traditional form.
Q: Why does it matter that film minimizes the aura?
At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of ‘pure’ art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarmé was the first to take this position.) An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.7 From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.<br> Ritual: pre-modern timesPolitics: Despite the political painting the art piece will be associated with the aura of original piece of art.
- Film is not auratic because in film: 1) spaces and times are constructed 2) actors performance is stitched together 3) actors do not share space with spectators 4) multiple points of view 5) appeals to a MASS AUDIENCE and a COLLECTIVE AUDIENCE 6) reveals new aspects of the thing reproduced (time alpse, slow motion).
How do institutions put the aura back into film?
In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance.
The superstar is a way to put the aura back into film
The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art. We do not deny that in some cases today’s films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property. However, our present study is no more specifically concerned with this than is the film production of Western Europe.
*Marx says capitalism produces the seeds of its demise. We can think of that as a guiding principle in which capitalism produces the neorosis that leads Chaplins character into a destructive set of behaviors that stops the Fordist capitalist production in a factory.
Feelings of belongoing and togetherness and being overhwemed by a mass you want to be a part of , but for Benjamin this is a trynanny where people feel they are in control but they are not really in control. Thus communism replies by politicizing art. Art for art's sake is harmful when put in the service of a facist regime. Art for political progress.
The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.21 The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.
Film is not merely a translation of an in-person thetaer performance. Rather film is performing for future audiences and for the director and for cinematrography. This supports the idea that film is a collabroative creation that brings an object into the world.
One film can be playing multiple times around the world and so this can be distributed on mass scale.
Film is not merely a recording of reality. Film reproduced new aspects of the things reproduced through slow motion and it brings to light entirely new aspects of matter but discloses quite aspects within them. If Benjamin merely interested in the epistemological possibility of the film to expand our limited perceptual appartus, yes but think about how this reinforces his claim that film moves us away from the aura,...that if we can see unknown aspects by recording it then we can't rely on film to reproduce an original we have to keep in mind that the image is qualitatively distinct from our perceptual access to the thing. So film is not merely a copy of the thing that it records.
Benjamin flips things and says that maybe film isn't art the way we see an art and this will get us away from the trappings.
What is Benjamin's definition of art which he is defining with the aura, the transcendence of individual of ritual.
- substructure or base: factors that produce commodities and economic relations that result from these concrete aspects
- superstructure: culture, law, media that for a Marxist thinker emerges in the way that the economic structure functions; the more media/education/political cosumption that you do the less you are going to understand the conditions of your exploitation and the more you are going to think change is possible.
- What role does cinema play in the move from cult and aura to mechanical reproduction? See snapshots.
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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In a recent paper, Pierre Azoulay and co-authors concluded that Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s long-term grants to high-potential scientists made those scientists 96 percent more likely to produce breakthrough work. If this finding is borne out, it suggests that present funding mechanisms are likely to be far from optimal, in part because they do not focus enough on research autonomy and risk taking.
Risk taking and the potential return are key pieces of progress.
Most of our research funding apparatus isn't set up with a capitalistic structure. Would that be good or bad for accelerating progress?
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learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com
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Europeans were constantly squabbling for advantage; societies ofthe Northeast Woodlands, by contrast, guaranteed one another themeans to an autonomous life – or at least ensured no man or womanwas subordinated to any other. Insofar as we can speak ofcommunism, it existed not in opposition to but in support of individualfreedom.
Why can't we have some of the driving force of capitalism while ensuring that no person is subordinated to another while still supporting individual freedoms?
Where did Western culture go wrong in getting stuck in a death lock with capitalism?
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www.noemamag.com www.noemamag.com
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Raw capitalism mimics the logic of cancer within our body politic.
Folks who have been reading David Wengrow and David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything are sure to appreciate the sentiment here which pulls in the ideas of biology and evolution to expand on their account and makes it a much more big history sort of thesis.
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- Dec 2021
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pluralistic.net pluralistic.net
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DoS a federal agency, then charge for access
Capitalism run amok. Force a public good or commons into a corner so it's unusable, then charge for access to it.
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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Yet the existence of an independent and goodwill-based web is endangered : threatened by the never-ending technology race which makes the websites more difficult and expensive to set up, by the overwhelming commercial advertising pressure, and soon by dissymetric networks, Network Computers, proprietary networks, broadcasting, all aiming at the transformation of the citizen into a basic consumer.
An early notice of the rise of consumerism on the web and potentially prefiguring the rise of surveillance capitalism.
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www.independent.co.uk www.independent.co.uk
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Dogs’ innate sense of fairness being eroded by humans, study suggests https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/dogs-wolves-unfairness-acceptance-human-owners-pets-behaviour-research-vienna-a7779076.html
While thinking about inequality in reading The Dawn of Everything, I started thinking about inequality and issues in other animal settings.
Why am I not totally surprised to find that animals' innate sense of fairness could be eroded by humans?
I wonder if this effect might be seen across all cultures, or only Western cultures with capitalist economies? Could we look at dogs in Australian indigenous cultures and find the same results?
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We live under governments that are too captured by the near-term priorities of capitalism to seriously address the threat of climate change
Inability of politics to go beyond sort-term objectives
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www.efsyn.gr www.efsyn.gr
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Παρόμοιες είναι οι ιστορίες δεκάδων ακόμη δισεκατομμυριούχων που συναντάμε στη λίστα των 100 πλουσιότερων ανθρώπων του κόσμου. Ακόμη και αν οι γονείς τους δεν διέθεταν αμύθητες περιουσίες, σχεδόν όλοι μεγάλωσαν σε ένα περιβάλλον το οποίο τους διέκρινε από τη συντριπτική πλειονότητα των κατοίκων του πλανήτη. Ο Μαρκ Ζούκερμπεργκ της Facebook (126 δισ. δολάρια), παραδείγματος χάριν, είχε τη δυνατότητα να σπουδάσει στην ιδιωτική ακαδημία Phillips Exeter (ετήσιο κόστος διδάκτρων 57.000 δολάρια), ενώ από τα 11 του χρόνια είχε τον προσωπικό του καθηγητή που του μάθαινε προγραμματισμό (γεγονός που προφανώς του έδωσε τον τίτλο του «παιδιού θαύματος» των υπολογιστών). Η μητέρα του Σεργκέι Μπριν (121.9 δισ. δολάρια) ήταν ερευνήτρια στη NASA, ενώ ο πατέρας του Γουάρεν Μπάφετ (105,2 δισ. δολάρια) ήταν μεγαλο-επενδυτής και γερουσιαστής επί σειρά ετών.
Όσο για την κοινωνική κινητικότητα του Καπιταλισμου, πλεον ουτε να παντρυετείς τον πλούτο δεν γινεται, μονο να τον κληρονομήσεις.
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apenwarr.ca apenwarr.ca
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Writing all this down, you know what? I'm kind of mad about it too. Not so mad that I'll go chasing obviously-ill-fated scurrilous rainbow financial instruments. But there's something here that needs solving. If I'm not solving it, or part of it, or at least trying, then I'm... wasting my time. Who cares about money? This is a systemic train wreck, well underway. We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.
I love you so much Avery Pennarun. It's so cathartic to hear such plain & simple truth telling. Your blog post is full of so many wonderful plainly said things. This is such a non-controversial, clear statement of so much of the tension & conflict we're in, so well reduced.
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- Nov 2021
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bbhosted.cuny.edu bbhosted.cuny.edu
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They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: “Sister, you got the short end of the stick . . .”
It's a bit funny and ironic to think that the communal/peaceful Skywoman would use such a Western-centric phrase like "short end of the stick", which as I understand it has an economic underpinning of a receipt by which the debtor and the lender used marked sticks that were broken apart with one somewhat shorter than the other. When put back together the marks on the stick matched each other, but the debtor got the shorter end. (Reference: Behavioral Economics When Psychology and Economics Collide by Scott A. Huettel; what was his source?)
Compare with etymologies expanded upon here:
The Long Story of The Short End of the Stick by Charles Clay Doyle. American Speech, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 96-101 (6 pages), Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/455954
Which doesn't include the economic reference at all.
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www.forbes.com www.forbes.com
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a desire, a search and active discovery reach to enhance our collective experiences
A builders collective?
We have realized that we want more in our lives than to be the unwitting pawns in a game of global domination, genocide, slavery, and oppression called capitalism.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Striketober is the labor strike wave in October 2021 by workers in the United States in the context of strikes during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the month, more than 100,000 workers in the United States either participated in or prepared for strikes in one of the largest increases of organized labor in the twenty-first century.
Perhaps people have finally had a chance to read Debt by David Graeber or Temp by Louis Hyman or Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas.
This is the great disillusionment in capitalism that Forbes will not talk about. What have we been building this whole time? Colonization, slavery, and genocide on steroids enabled by big tech and big business? Maybe people just want their self-respect back.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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The climate catastrophe we're facing is the result of three issues, three processes.
- The tragedy of the commons, the free-rider problem
- Coordination (money is there)
- Capitalist beast eating up everything to survive.
The first 2 are solvable - for the 3rd we need to reconsider [[property rights]].
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so we're going to ask first who thinks capitalism albeit with tweaks and reforms is still the best economic system we've got so if you think that give us a wave
It seems as if 80% raised their hands, believing that Capitalism if the best economic system, and very few raised hands, later, believing that a new economic system is needed. A bit reasonable, since it would cost thousands to enter the room, no?
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