• for: fossil capitalism, progress trap, intersectionality, social norms, social norms - waste, externalization, capitalism

• title

  • Waves of Abandonment
    • The Permian Basin is ground zero for a billion-dollar surge of zombie oil wells

• 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

• 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

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.

• 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.
• author: Dana Boyd
  • principal researcher, Microsoft Research
  • founder, Data & Society

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?

Workist cultures are built on the principle that identity, worth, and dignity are grounded in an individual's accomplishments.

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?

• for: capitalism faults
  • bad at considering the long term future
  • bad at considering other species

Advertising industry schemes considered an attack

Stephen Farrell's perspective.

• 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.

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)

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.

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/

Noam Chomsky on Alan Greenspan's ideas on 'worker insecurity'.

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

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?

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?

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?

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.

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.

• 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

Book review of historian Quinn Slobodian's new book: Crack-up Capitalism

• 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
    • https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe
  • 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• 51:00 Degrowth making headway

  • Degrowth scholars are getting more attention on the need to decouple economic grwoth from climate policies

• 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

Like Cuckoos, Capitalism Had to Push All Other Ways of Living Out of the Nest

Friends of the Link 2023-03-01

Surveillance Capitalism by Accident

• Title

  • Revolution and American Indians: “Marxism is as Alien to My Culture as Capitalism"

• Author

  • Russell Means

• 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.

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

Posits the necessity, imposed by capitalism, of an individual myth of the neurotic (Lacan) as a problem that psychoanalysis was created to solve.

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.

Rest is Resistance

Fallow time, I like that wording

Was the Enlightenment a false dream of liberation which has really unleashed an unspeakable cruelty upon the world?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMD7r1poVUU

!- Urrego : Key Point - Can capitalism rapidly detour away from fossil fuels? The current data indicates no. So either Humanity does our it drops capitalism

!- Urrego : second point - can the same capitalist logic be used to solve the crisis it created?

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.

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?

!- surveillance capitalism : key insight -mass behavioral modification takes away autonomy

!- surveillance capitalism : key insight - knowledge assymetry between corporations and government bodies vs individuals

!- surveillance capitalism : example- - Propublica reported breathing machines for sleep apnea secretly send data to insurance companies

!- surveillance capitalism : metaphor - one way mirror

!- Definition : Surveillance Capitalism - as defined by Shoshana Zuboff

!- 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.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/12/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.

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.

This is probably true of average or poor software engineers given that GPT-3 can produce pretty reasonable code snippets

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".

not all good actions can necessarily be quantified.

Wild that driving functional organisations into the ground could just be the cost of doing business

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.

That is really interesting. Amazon is not exactly renowned as an m upholder of progressive values by the left either.

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.

Το βιντεο δεν υπαρχει,... γιατι?

Το ανακαλυψα από τον Alexander Clapp about για τους πλούσιους ελληνες εφοπλιστές που διασκεδαζαν στο θωρηκτό Αφερωφ ενω οι πολιτες πεινούσαν.

.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1589700721121058817.html

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?

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

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.

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

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, 2022

This 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.

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/26/1131578207/writer-truck-driver-meatcutter-and-prophet-of-compassion-mike-davis-dies-at-76

On Gordon Ramsey's Street Burger chain.

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

Een mooie beschrijving voor wat advertenties en trackingpixels eigenlijk zijn

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.”

A "TopView" advertisement runs $3 million a day

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.

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?

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?

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.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09/28/publisher-blocks-access-ebooks-students-faculty-scramble

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/patagonia-climate-philanthropy-chouinard.html

The algorithm’s role in surveillance capitalism

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

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.

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?

Oft repeated phrase and one I wouldn't have expected in this article.

Oral cultures treat information dramatically different than literate cultures, and particularly Western literate cultures within capitalism-based economies.

An important logical point. Listing what they don't keep isn't as good as saying what they actually do with one's data.

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.

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?

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.

Will regulation be able to change the North Star?

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?

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?

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?

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.

Capitalism's subject is Capital, not the bourgeoisie or an owner class. "Open source communities" are still corporations.

There's no chance. Blockchains by principle benefit corporations in the long run.

Openness by itself can't make a dent against corporations.

This is a nightmare, and it would possibly be capitalism's final victory.

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.

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

Original tweet thread archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20220222025045/https://twitter.com/perusall/status/1495945680002719751

What about a standard of care for students?

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

#annotation https://t.co/wVemEk2yao

— Remi Kalir (@remikalir) February 23, 2022

Comaroff and Comaroff (2000) - Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming - https://is.gd/yWCl8i - urn:x-pdf:a8e24543f52dc4c4cf554706560c993f

Big public sector drives health-services prices down.

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?

capitalism as system of organized power