the title of the book implies an ownership of poverty (by America)... there's also an implication of authorial voice as if America is a "creator", but specifically a creator of poverty as much as it is a creator of wealth

In the framing of toxic capitalism, it's almost as if one of the things America is good at manufacturing is poverty.

If we've outsourced most of our manufacturing sector, why not also include poverty?!?

Desmond, Matthew. Poverty, by America. 1st ed. New York: Crown, 2023. https://amzn.to/40Aqzlp

Annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:eefd847a2a1723651d1d863de5153292

Alternate annotation link: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3Aeefd847a2a1723651d1d863de5153292

Very deep meme for us at this time fast capitalism alongisde slow mutualism

or perhaps we can say slow capaitalism alongside fast mutualism

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

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

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

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

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?

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)

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,?

for - book - roots of capitalism in medieval monasticism - La Religion industrielle: Monastère, manufacture, usine. Une généalogie de l'entreprise- Pierre Musso

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

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

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

Good. Justice would demand more, but this will probably have to do.

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.

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

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/

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

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.)

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

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

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

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>

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?

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism

I have horrible news for you, President Biden.

Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire by [[Jason Del Rey]]

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

Amazon care about money; they don't care about humans.

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

Special Features of Trump’s Bible by [[Andrew Singleton]]

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

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?

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?

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?

the effectiveness of personalised advertising is still up for debate. I should look up Subtime Attention Crisis and read How to destroy surveillance capitalism.

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)?

"domination of the corporations over governments"

Better not bigger

"we have been winning battles... but losing the war

big environmentalist shifting toward anti-capitalism

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_without_organs

• 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

• 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.

• meme

  • wealth supremacy and white supremacy are entangled

• for: book - wealth supremacy - 7 myths, 7 myths of Capitalism, capital bias, definition - capital bias

• 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.
  • 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.

• 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.

• for: quote - Marjorie Kelly, quote - finacialization, progress trap - financialization, progress trap - capitalism, speculative investing

• 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

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?

• for: capitalism - heart of, adjacency - capitalism - self - othering - societal aspiration

• 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.
    • https://hyp.is/cyUb4p4rEe6LIpeSDrCcDQ/climateuncensored.com/1485-2/
  • 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.

• for: climate crisis - elites, Kevin Anderson - elites, carbon emissions - elites, adjacency - elites - carbon inequality - incentives - luxury - capitalism

• title: A Habitable Earth Can No Longer Afford The Rich – And That Could Mean Me And You

• author: Kevin Anderson

• date: Nov. 29, 2023

• 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

“Capable of identifying nearly every person in the U.S.”

So you have nothing to hide?

Eurocentric perspective of global capitalism as China had its own capitalist system trading with other countries in the East before

trade relations gave extra privileges, start of colonisation

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.

https://udenver.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcuceuspzkuE9VomnEaGva1HH1ra_iS4Eua?ref=jessestommel.com#/registration

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.

• 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