- Oct 2021
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inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net
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As Morgan says, masters, “initially at least, perceived slaves in much the sameway they had always perceived servants . . . shiftless, irresponsible, unfaithful,ungrateful, dishonest. . . .”
Interestingly, this is still all-too-often how business owners, entrepreneurs, and corporations view their own workers.
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bauhouse.medium.com bauhouse.medium.comMonopoly1
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monopoly over public discourse
This is the water we swim in.
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- Sep 2021
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pluralistic.net pluralistic.net
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Piketty, of course, is the bestselling French economist whose 2013 Capital in the 21st Century was an unlikely, 700+ page viral hit, describing with rare lucidity the macroeconomics that drive capitalism towards cruel and destabilizing inequality https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/
Great summary of Piketty's book.
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tracydurnell.com tracydurnell.com
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You might be looking for a gift for a friend, doing research for a project, trying to learn other perspectives — they filter all data through the lens of capitalism and how they can sell you more things. That’s no replacement for human connection, or expertise a person has that could help you leap to things you didn’t know to look for.
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tracydurnell.com tracydurnell.com
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Are women generally more interested in other social causes besides online surveillance and the negative cultural impacts of social media companies?
Most of the advanced researchers I seen on these topics are almost all women: Safiya Umoja Noble, Meredith Broussard, Ruha Benjamin, Cathy O'Neil, Shoshana Zuboff, Joan Donovan, danah boyd,Tressie McMillan Cottom, to name but a few.
The tougher part is that they are all fighting against problems created primarily by privileged, cis-gender, white men.
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www.lboro.ac.uk www.lboro.ac.uk
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there has been a spectacular rise in luxury consumption, with the consumption patterns of the global elite acting as a marker for those further down the income scale. Robert Frank (2000) describes the process as 'luxury fever', as consumption expectations are ratcheted up all the way down the income scale. The global elite are pushing up people's expectations and assumptions. In the US, for example, the average size of house has doubled, in square feet terms, in the past thirty years. In part it is a function of the positional nature of consumption. We consume in order to position ourselves relative to other people. Not only do the global elite raise the upper limit, everyone is thus forced to spend more just to keep up, but they also become the perceived benchmark, Juliet Schor's work, for example, shows that people are no longer keeping up with the people next door, but the people they see on television and magazines (Schor, 1998). In order to keep up with these raised consumption standards people are working harder and longer as well as taking out more debt. The increase in luxury consumption has raised consumption expectations further down the income scale, which in order to be funded has involved increased workloads and increased indebtedness. It is not so much keeping up with the Jones but 'keeping up with the Gates'.
The elites point the way for those in even the lowest income brackets to follow. This crosses cultures as well. Capitalism trumps colonialism as former colonized peoples reserve the right to taste the fruits of capitalism. Hence, hard work, ingenuity and leveraging opportunity to accumulate all the signs and symbols of wealth, joining the colonialist biased elites is seen as having arrived at success, even though it means contributing to the destruction of the planetary commons. The aspirations to wealth must be uniformly deprioritized in order to align our culture in the right direction that will rescue our species from the impact of following this misdirection for the past century.
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inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net
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Under these conditions, perhaps one of every three blacks transportedoverseas died, but the huge profits (often double the investment on one trip)made it worthwhile for the slave trader, and so the blacks were packed into theholds like fish
With the earlier death rate of two of every five dying on the death marches to the slave markets and one in every three dying on the ships, this means that 9/15 or a full 60% were dying before they even arrived in America.
This is certainly a disgusting indictment of capitalistic frenzy.
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Africanslavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel formof slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalisticagriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use ofracial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white wasmaster, black was slave.
While we've generally moved beyond chattel slavery, I'm struck by the phrase frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture. Though we don't have slavery, is American culture all-too captured by the idea of frenzied capitalism to the tune that the average American (the 99%) is a serf in their own country? Are we still blinded by our need for (over-)consumption?
Are we recommitting the sins of the past perhaps in milder forms because of a blindness to an earlier original sin of capitalism?
Do we need to better vitiate against raw capitalism with more regulation to provide a healthier mixed economy?
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The Virginians needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobaccofor export. They had just figured out how to grow tobacco, and in 1617 theysent off the first cargo to England. Finding that, like all pleasurable drugstainted with moral disapproval, it brought a high price, the planters, despitetheir high religious talk, were not going to ask questions about something soprofitable.
Told from this perspective and with the knowledge of the importance of the theory of First Effective Settlement, is it any wonder that America has grown up to be so heavily influenced by moral and mental depravity, over-influenced by capitalism and religion, ready to enslave others, and push vice and drugs? The founding Virginians are truly America in miniature.
Cross reference: Theory of First Effective Settlement
“Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to effect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been.” “Thus, in terms of lasting impact, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more for the cultural geography of a place than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants a few generations later.” — Wilbur Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973, pp. 13–14.
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sakai.duke.edu sakai.duke.edu
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n the extraordinary Law Book of the Crowley Iron Works. Here, at the very birth of the large-scale unit in manufacturing industry, the old autocrat, Crowley, found it necessary to design an entire civil and penal code, running to more than Ioo,ooo words, to govern and regulate his refractory labour-force.
A historical precursor to the company-town. One wonders if this was used as a model by Hershey, Pullman, Levittown(s), etc.?
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Kevin Marks talks about the bridging of new people into one's in-group by Twitter's retweet functionality from a positive perspective.
He doesn't foresee the deleterious effects of algorithms for engagement doing just the opposite of increasing the volume of noise based on one's in-group hating and interacting with "bad" content in the other direction. Some of these effects may also be bad from a slow brainwashing perspective if not protected for.
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www.propublica.org www.propublica.org
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The Uncomfortable Truth is the Difficult and Unpopular Decisions are Now Unavoidable.
Topic is relevant across a span of global issues. Natural resources are Finite.....period! Timely decisions are critical to insure intelligent use of resources. DENIAL is the enemy and 800lb gorilla in the room. Neoliberisim and social dysfunction feed on any cognitive dissonance and poop it out as "crap". True believers of American Capitalism (yes there is a difference) have become "cult-like" and drink the fluid of the cult to the very end, human consequence is of no concern.
Point being: Reality is always elusive within a cult controlled (authoritative) mindset. Cult members are weak sheep, incapable of individual logic/reason. Authority can not be challenged. -- Denial, a human defense mechanism has been and is the common denominator in all personal and global conflict. Denial can be traced throughout modern history and rears its ugly head whenever the stakes are high.
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twitter.com twitter.com
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What happens to this graph when we overlay pure capitalism instead of a mixed economy? What if this spectrum was put on a different axis altogether? What does the current climate of the United states look like when graphed out on it. Which parts have diminished over the past 50 years with the decrease in regulation?
Some of these areas benefit heavily by government intervention and regulation.
We need the ability to better protect both common and public goods.
definitions:
- rivalry: does use by one person physically preclude use by others?
- excludability: do laws prohibit access to these goods?
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- Aug 2021
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algorithmsoflatecapitalism.tumblr.com algorithmsoflatecapitalism.tumblr.comZines1
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Algorithms of Late-Capitalism’ zine.
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thepressproject.gr thepressproject.gr
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Η ευθύνη για την αντιμετώπιση της πανδημίας δεν ανήκει πρωτίστως στους ανεμβολίαστους του πρώτου κόσμου, αλλά στις νεοφιλελεύθερες πολιτικές των κυβερνήσεών τους και στην υποταγή στα εταιρικά συμφέροντα.
Οι ψεκες έχουν μικρή συμμετοχή στις μεταλλάξεις, λέει κ η Λαμπρινή Θωμά.
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Building on platforms' stores of user-generated content, competing middleware services could offer feeds curated according to alternate ranking, labeling, or content-moderation rules.
Already I can see too many companies relying on artificial intelligence to sort and filter this material and it has the ability to cause even worse nth degree level problems.
Allowing the end user to easily control the content curation and filtering will be absolutely necessary, and even then, customer desire to do this will likely loose out to the automaticity of AI. Customer laziness will likely win the day on this, so the design around it must be robust.
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- Jul 2021
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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In April 2000, Clinton hosted a celebration called the White House Conference on the New Economy. Earnest purpose mingled with self-congratulation; virtue and success high-fived—the distinctive atmosphere of Smart America. At one point Clinton informed the participants that Congress was about to pass a bill to establish permanent trade relations with China, which would make both countries more prosperous and China more free. “I believe the computer and the internet give us a chance to move more people out of poverty more quickly than at any time in all of human history,” he exulted.
This is a solid example of the sort of rose colored glasses too many had for technology in the early 2000s.
Was this instance just before the tech bubble collapsed too?
What was the state of surveillance capitalism at this point?
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edwardsnowden.substack.com edwardsnowden.substack.com
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If this past year-and-change has taught us anything, it's how interconnected we all are — a bat coughs and the world gets sick. Vaccines aside, our greatest weapon for defeating Covid-19 has been the mask, an accessory I'd formerly appreciated only a symbol: masks make secret, masks hide, masks cover, in protests as in pandemics. The social value of the mask has been made clear: they're not deceptive so much as protective, of ourselves and of others too. Masking is a mutual responsibility, a symbol of common identity founded in a common hope.
The idea of a bat coughing and infecting the world is a powerful one in relation to our interconnectedness.
I'm enamored of how he transitions this from the pandemic and masking for protection against virus to using masks as a symbol for protecting ourselves, our data, and our identity in a surveillance state.
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The intimate linking of users' online personas with their offline legal identity was an iniquitous squandering of liberty and technology that has resulted in today's atmosphere of accountability for the citizen and impunity for the state. Gone were the days of self-reinvention, imagination, and flexibility, and a new era emerged — a new eternal era — where our pasts were held against us. Forever.
Even Heraclitus knew that one couldn't stand in the same river twice.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.comYouTube1
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i feel for for tool builders that are serious about building useful software interoperability can actually be a huge 00:45:22 spoon uh to their success um it'll make easier to acquire users it will make it easier to help users embed your own tool in their workflows um you may be also losing some users but 00:45:34 that's okay i guess because it'll create sustainable pressure to you for you to focus on an audience well and build really really useful services for them and if you do that they also won't leave as easily
I agree. I think companies that allow their users to take their data and run when they want to just create trust. Gone are the days when users automatically thought companies had their best interests at heart, as compared with current-day surveillance capitalists.
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aeon.co aeon.co
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It’s a familiar trick in the privatisation-happy US – like, say, underfunding public education and then criticising the institution for struggling.
This same thing is being seen in the U.S. Post Office now too. Underfund it into failure rather than provide a public good.
Capitalism definitely hasn't solved the issue, and certainly without government regulation. See also the last mile problem for internet service, telephone service, and cable service.
UPS and FedEx apparently rely on the USPS for last mile delivery in remote areas. (Source for this?)
The poor and the remote are inordinately effected in almost all these cases. What other things do these examples have in common? How can we compare and contrast the public service/government versions with the private capitalistic ones to make the issues more apparent. Which might be the better solution: capitalism with tight government regulation to ensure service at the low end or a government monopoly of the area? or something in between?
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stop.zona-m.net stop.zona-m.net
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Broad recycle of Tim Bray's article https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-losing-its-memory with an example of the same effect for their site.
DuckDuckGo has a better index that doesn't prioritize for "right now" or currency.
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Forty years ago, Michel Foucault observed in a footnote that, curiously, historians had neglected the invention of the index card. The book was Discipline and Punish, which explores the relationship between knowledge and power. The index card was a turning point, Foucault believed, in the relationship between power and technology.
This piece definitely makes an interesting point about the use of index cards (a knowledge management tool) and power.
Things have only accelerated dramatically with the rise of computers and the creation of data lakes and the leverage of power over people by Facebook, Google, Amazon, et al.
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ayjay.org ayjay.org
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Against Canvas
I love that he uses this print of Pablo Picasso's Don Quixote to visually underline this post in which he must feel as if he's "tilting at windmills".
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All humanities courses are second-class citizens in the ed-tech world.
And worse, typically humans are third-class citizens in the ed-tech world.
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- Jun 2021
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>KevinMarks</span> in #indieweb 2021-06-25 (<time class='dt-published'>06/26/2021 01:52:39</time>)</cite></small>
IndieWeb + Welsh finally comes in handy! The Cwtch service Kevin Marks mentioned is the the Welsh word for "hug" or "cuddle" and cleverly has a heart shaped Celtic design for their logo. Kind of cute when you think about it. And speaking of opaque ids, if they're using a new protocol I hope they call it Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch....
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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If so many people who say they have committed their life to Christ live a life that is in many areas so antithetical to the ways of Christ, what are we to make of that?
Does Christianity still have a space in modern life if it can't be effective in the simplest ways?
Is it christianity+capitalism and conspicuous consumption that doesn't work?
What is causing this institutional failure?
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Here it is in July 2008, Nicholas Carr has essentially specified and created a small warning bell about the surveillance capitalism we've been experiencing for the past 13 years. He's also put a bright yellow highlight on the method by which they would do it.
What are other early surveillance capitalism warning sources from this period?
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- May 2021
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blogs.harvard.edu blogs.harvard.edu
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Doc Searls blames the cookie for poisoning the web.
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www.cnbc.com www.cnbc.com
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“Finance is, like, done. Everybody’s bought everybody else with low-cost debt. Everybody’s maximised their margin. They’ve bought all their shares back . . . There’s nothing there. Every industry has about three players. Elizabeth Warren is right,” Ubben told the Financial Times.
Pretty amazing statement! Elizabeth Warren is right!
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howtomeasureghosts.substack.com howtomeasureghosts.substack.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Kevin Marks</span> in "@alexstamos You gave a pithy quote about 'strangers' which downplayed the sustained attempts by the social silos to gather and document our lives in their dossiers and cash in on it. @matlock explains more here https://t.co/lo4dG4CuqV" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>05/18/2021 19:32:39</time>)</cite></small>
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www.buzzfeednews.com www.buzzfeednews.com
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“For one of the most heavily guarded individuals in the world, a publicly available Venmo account and friend list is a massive security hole. Even a small friend list is still enough to paint a pretty reliable picture of someone's habits, routines, and social circles,” Gebhart said.
Massive how? He's such a public figure that most of these connections are already widely reported in the media or easily guessable by an private invistigator. The bigger issue is the related data of transactions which might open them up for other abuses or potential leverage as in the other examples.
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crookedtimber.org crookedtimber.org
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To change incentives so that personal data is treated with appropriate care, we need criminal penalties for the Facebook executives who left vulnerable half a billion people’s personal data, unleashing a lifetime of phishing attacks, and who now point to an FTC deal indemnifying them from liability because our phone numbers and unchangeable dates of birth are “old” data.
We definitely need penalties and regulation to fix our problems.
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I know tech policy pretty well, and this absolute dumpster fire of a policy area isn’t just a cool new place to build a blockchain-based commons, but a hard-right haven of male libertarians asset-stripping the social democratic state to build global monopolies that re-run nineteenth century colonialism, but bigger.
A well stated version of our current problem.
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signal.org signal.org
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This would be funnier if it weren't so painfully true.
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- Apr 2021
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www.techiechan.com www.techiechan.com
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Σε μια οικονομία που το χρήμα τυπώνεται και προσφέρεται στους ημετέρους, το κίνητρο του κέρδους είναι ανύπαρκτο· ενώ το πραγματικό κίνητρο (όπως πάντα) είναι ο έλεγχος. Το χρήμα είναι το μέσο με το οποίο επιτυγχάνεται αυτός ο έλεγχος.
Δεν υπάρχει (πλέον) ανταγωνισμός, γινόμαστε σοβιετία, απλώς με μεγαλύτερες ανισότητες και κατανεμημένο πολίτμπιρο.
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mignano.medium.com mignano.medium.com
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The open RSS standard has provided immense value to the growth of the podcasting ecosystem over the past few decades.
Why do I get the sinking feeling that the remainder of this article will be maniacally saying, "and all of that ends today!"
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We also believe that in order to democratize audio and achieve Spotify’s mission of enabling a million creators to live off of their art, we must work to enable greater choice for creators. This choice becomes increasingly important as audio becomes even easier to create and share.
Dear Anchor/Spotify, please remember that democratize DOES NOT equal surveillance capitalism. In fact, Facebook and others have shown that doing what you're probably currently planning for the podcasting space will most likely work against democracy.
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Thus, the creative freedom of creators is limited.
And thus draconian methods for making the distribution unnecessarily complicated, siloed, surveillance capitalized, and over-monitized beyond all comprehension are beyond the reach of one or two for profit companies who want to own the entire market like monopolistic giants are similarly limited. (But let's just stick with the creators we're pretending to champion, shall we?)
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Και όμως, θα αρκούσε μια πιο διεισδυτική ματιά στο «κίνημα των απαλλοτριώσεων» και των «περιφράξεων» της εποχής του, που μετέτρεπε την κοινόχρηστη γη σε ατομική ιδιοκτησία, για να αντιληφθεί ότι ο καταμερισμός εργασίας και η αγορά είναι αποτέλεσμα κοινωνικών και πολιτικών διεργασιών.
Δεν είχε καταλάβει ο Ανταμ Σμιθ πως ο πλούτος φέρνει πλούτο, δηλαδή.
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www.wired.com www.wired.com
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So on a blindingly sunny day in October 2019, I met with Omar Seyal, who runs Pinterest’s core product. I said, in a polite way, that Pinterest had become the bane of my online existence.“We call this the miscarriage problem,” Seyal said, almost as soon as I sat down and cracked open my laptop. I may have flinched. Seyal’s role at Pinterest doesn’t encompass ads, but he attempted to explain why the internet kept showing me wedding content. “I view this as a version of the bias-of-the-majority problem. Most people who start wedding planning are buying expensive things, so there are a lot of expensive ad bids coming in for them. And most people who start wedding planning finish it,” he said. Similarly, most Pinterest users who use the app to search for nursery decor end up using the nursery. When you have a negative experience, you’re part of the minority, Seyal said.
What a gruesome name for an all-too-frequent internet problem: miscarriage problem
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- Mar 2021
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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The scholars Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias have called it “data colonialism,” a term that reflects our inability to stop our data from being unwittingly extracted.
I've not run across data colonialism before.
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www.opendemocracy.net www.opendemocracy.net
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We will never be able to predict with any certainty how altering instrumental and socio-affective traits will ultimately affect the reflexively structured human personality as a whole. Today's tacit assumption that neuro-psychotropic interventions are reversible is leading individuals to experiment on themselves. Yet even if certain mental states are indeed reversible, the memory of them may not be. The barriers to neuro-enhancement actually fell some time ago, albeit in ways that for a long time went unnoticed. Jet-lag-free short breaks to Bali, working for global companies with a twenty-four hour information flow from headquarters in Tokyo, Brussels and San Francisco, exams and assessments, medical emergency services
The machinery of capital requires productivity and the psychopharmacology industry has stepped in to fulfill that requirements.
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Unlike the latter, however, the neurosciences are extremely well funded by the state and even more so by private investment from the pharmaceutical industry.
More reasons to be wary. The incentive structure for the research is mostly about control. It's a little sinister. It's not about helping people on their own terms. It's mostly about helping people become "good" citizens and participants of the state apparatus.
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twitter.com twitter.com
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"So capitalism created social media. Literally social life, but mediated by ad sellers." https://briefs.video/videos/why-the-indieweb/
Definition of social media: social life, but mediated by capitalistic ad sellers online.
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- Feb 2021
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hyperallergic.com hyperallergic.com
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There is only one way to “play” Twitter, and the only real gain is that “No one is learning anything, except to remain connected to the machine.”
Ik vraag me af of dat echt zo is. Twitter lijkt meer en meer de plek te worden om je eigen media op te bouwen en het eigen spel te spelen. Er zijn meerdere manieren om het spel te spelen. Toch?
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The tech takeover corresponds with shrinking possibilities. This evolution has also seen the rise of a seeming aesthetic paradox. Minimalist design reigns now that the corporations have taken over the net. Long seen as anti-consumerist, Minimalism has now become a coded signal for luxury and control. The less control we have over our virtual spaces, the less time we spend considering our relationships with them.
Interessante laatste zin. Hoe minder we eigen controle hebben, zeggenschap, agency, hoe minder we ons bezighouden met de aard van de relatie. Die relatie kan verschillende vormen hebben.
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onezero.medium.com onezero.medium.com
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identity theft
Saw this while scrolling through quickly. Since I can't meta highlight another hypothesis annotation
identity theft
I hate this term. Banks use it to blame the victims for their failure to authenticate people properly. I wish we had another term. —via > mcr314 Aug 29, 2020 (Public) on "How to Destroy ‘Surveillance C…" (onezero.medium.com)
This is a fantastic observation and something that isn't often noticed. Victim blaming while simultaneously passing the buck is particularly harmful. Corporations should be held to a much higher standard of care. If corporations are treated as people in the legal system, then they should be held to the same standards.
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Cory Doctorow</span> in Pluralistic: 16 Feb 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links (<time class='dt-published'>02/25/2021 12:20:24</time>)</cite></small>
It's interesting to note that there are already two other people who have used Hypothes and their page note functionality to tag this article as to read, one with
(to read)
and another with(TODO-read)
.
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www.thelancet.com www.thelancet.com
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Horton, Richard. ‘Offline: COVID-19—a Crisis of Power’. The Lancet 396, no. 10260 (31 October 2020): 1383. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32262-5.
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www.coreknowledge.org www.coreknowledge.org
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Explain that this is the basis of the economic system
add a comment here.
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consortiumnews.com consortiumnews.com
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“We’ve moved away from the whole ethic of what was industrial capitalism.”
Defend this argument in 2021 America.<br> Refute this argument in 2021 America.<br> Contemplate the genesis behind this argument Share opinion regarding this argument.
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And essentially, we became what’s called a rent-seeking economy, not a productive economy. So, when people in Washington talk about American capitalism versus Chinese socialism this is confusing the issue. What kind of capitalism are we talking about?
What kind of capitalism are we talking about?
We are starting to see critical thinking and discussion around "hard" but necessary truths. These truths center around complicated concepts, controlled by politicians, MSM and others who would rather not have this discussion. America's general population seems lost, gorging on the dumb-down need to know culture (those that have and can dictate what the rest need to know) and group think, herd mentality.
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Time. ‘The Great Reset: How to Build a Better World Post-COVID-19’. Accessed 19 February 2021. https://time.com/collection/great-reset/.
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stevenberlinjohnson.com stevenberlinjohnson.com
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This is just one study, of course, and these are complicated social realities. I think it is fair to say that our pundits and social critics can no longer make the easy assumption that the web and the blogosphere are echo-chamber amplifiers. But whether or not this study proves to be accurate, one thing is certain. The force that enables these unlikely encounters between people of different persuasions, the force that makes the web a space of serendipity and discovery, is precisely the open, combinatorial, connective nature of the medium. So when we choose to take our text out of that medium, when we keep our words from being copied, linked, indexed, that’s a choice with real civic consequences that are not to be taken lightly.
These words certainly didn't take into account the focusing factor that social media algorithms based on surveillance capitalism and attention seeking clicks and engagement would inflict in the coming decade.
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www.huffpost.com www.huffpost.com
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michael-lewis.com michael-lewis.com
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A broad overview of the original web and where we are today. Includes an outline of three business models that don't include advertising including:
- Passion projects
- Donation-based sites
- Subscription-based sites
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We have “limbic capitalism” which “preys on our addicted brains”, with vast amounts of money invested into making sites and apps more addictive so subjects view more adverts, with some people even claiming this has created a new generation with shorter attention spans and less focus and concentration than ever before.
This is the first time I've seen a reference to limbic capitalism as a term. Not a bad word for the concept.
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nymag.com nymag.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>jeremycherfas </span> in The Capitalist Case for Overhauling Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>02/08/2021 14:14:45</time>)</cite></small>
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- Jan 2021
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For example, the notion of the workplace as a family is a refrain in offices but it is most explicit for nannies.
Too often corporations use the idea that the workplace is a "family", but when times get tough, we don't abandon our families the same way that corporations will summarily fire their employees to try to survive themselves without any real thought about their supposed "family members".
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seirdy.one seirdy.one
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Recently, WhatsApp updated its privacy policy to allow sharing data with its parent, Facebook. Users who agreed to use WhatsApp under its previous privacy policy had two options: agree to the new policy or be unable to use WhatsApp again. The WhatsApp privacy policy update is a classic bait-and-switch: WhatsApp lured users in with a sleek interface and the impression of privacy, domesticated them to remove their autonomy to migrate, and then backtracked on its previous commitment to privacy with minimal consequence. Each step in this process enabled the next; had user domestication not taken place, it would be easy for most users to switch away with minimal friction.
Definitely a dark pattern that has been replicated many times.
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anagora.org anagora.org
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cited yearly value of a facebook user at 250 USD.
It's interesting to think in terms of dollar value per person per year on something like facebook.
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www.fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com
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Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined. “Clearly,” says Edward Fox, head of Southern Methodist University’s J.C. Penney Center for Retailing Excellence, “Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has ever been.” It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being.
- Wal-Mart has no real rivals
- Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer in history
- Does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penny, Safeway, and Kroger combined!
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The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don’t change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices
- Wal-Mart has clear policy for suppliers: Basic products must lower in price year after year.
- Wal-Mart uses its position and power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. Ex: bras, bicycles, blue jeans must lower in price.
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- Dec 2020
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Instead of “find the yes,” the directive became, effectively, find the no that saved the most money.
An interesting business cost that killed the golden goose.
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning. The rise of QAnon, for example, is one of the social web’s logical conclusions. That’s because Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences. Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, targeted harassment, terrorist recruitment, emotional manipulation, and genocide—a world-historic weapon that lives not underground, but in a Disneyland-inspired campus in Menlo Park, California.
The original goal with a bit of moderation may have worked. Regression to the mean forces it to a bad place, but when you algorithmically accelerate things toward our bases desires, you make it orders of magnitude worse.
This should be though of as pure social capitalism. We need the moderating force of government regulation to dampen our worst instincts, much the way the United State's mixed economy works (or at least used to work, as it seems that raw capitalism is destroying the United States too).
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www.spakhm.com www.spakhm.com
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By the time any of this gets objectively evaluated, you'll be happily working in a different role, and someone else will deal with the objective metrics.
This from the same writer about observing Russian fraud: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1332699000089292801.html
So only worry about yourself and moving up without any regard to the fact that your offspring will be left with a gaping hole of detritus. Who cares about building value of any sort? Ugh...
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www.telegraph.co.uk www.telegraph.co.uk
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Ek said that many artists are happier in private about the money they receive than they are in public. He also said that musicians not doing well from streaming are the ones who want to release music “the way it used to be released”.
This is hogwash. Artists want to make a living, while Ek and his cohorts maximise their profits while actively lobbying against songwriter royalties and pushing transphobic people like Joe Rogan. More here: https://niklasblog.com/?p=25501
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many musicians are “scared to speak out” because they don’t want to “lose favour” with all-powerful streaming services and record labels.
This is horrifying. Just what Shell has done, and other major and uncaring companies, naturally.
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- Nov 2020
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Billionaires have convinced workers to look down on people who are not productive because then the people at the top make less money. The working class is conditioned to consider anyone who is not constantly producing something as lazy and moochers who are coasting through life; their laziness strains the systems and makes it harder for the working class to become billionaires. Spoilers — the working class is closer to abject poverty than to ever becoming a billionaire. People making $5,000 dollars an hour have convinced people making $25 an hour that people who make $9 an hour are the problem.
A sad truth to our system.
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No one ever earned a billion dollars — they stole it.
This is almost assuredly true.
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sfupublishing.pressbooks.com sfupublishing.pressbooks.com
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surveillance capitalism.
I recommend to link to the book where its author, Shoshana Zuboff, has coined the term.
The irony right now is that you're linking to an Amazon version of Zuboff's book; Amazon is currently one of the top-five surveillance-capitalist companies in the tech world.
I would also consider linking to the Wikipedia page for the term.
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aeon.co aeon.co
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Between 1950 and 1973 GDP doubled or more. This prosperity was broadly shared, with consistent growth in living standards for rich and poor alike and the emergence of a broad middle class.
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www.marketwatch.com www.marketwatch.com
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Jeff Bezos has so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it all, so he figures he’d might as well spend it on spaceships. That’s what the Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, -1.04% founder and chief executive told Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Business Insider parent Axel Springer, in an interview published over the weekend.
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She was not his spouse; instead, she was the political officer of the Communist Party of China and she was embedded in the school. In fact, the university is full of political officers who operate behind the scenes but are there to keep party discipline. Today, companies like Nike, Google, Microsoft and others don’t need a communist party to impose their own totalitarian-like discipline upon workers.
To read
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In another interview, this time by John Laidler of the Harvard Gazette (March 2019), Zuboff expanded on this: 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
Zuboff's definition of Surveillance Capitalism
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www.publicaffairsbooks.com www.publicaffairsbooks.com
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The digital realm is overtaking and redefining everything familiar even before we have had a chance to ponder and decide.
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www.schneier.com www.schneier.com
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But as long as the most important measure of success is short-term profit, doing things that help strengthen communities will fall by the wayside. Surveillance, which allows individually targeted advertising, will be prioritized over user privacy. Outrage, which drives engagement, will be prioritized over feelings of belonging. And corporate secrecy, which allows Facebook to evade both regulators and its users, will be prioritized over societal oversight.
Schneier is saying here that as long as the incentives are still pointing in the direction of short-term profit, privacy will be neglected.
Surveillance, which allows for targeted advertising will win out over user privacy. Outrage, will be prioritized over more wholesome feelings. Corporate secrecy will allow Facebook to evade regulators and its users.
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- Oct 2020
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www.dn.se www.dn.se
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Antalet premiumprenumeranter som står för hälften av Spotifys intäkter steg med 27 procent till 144 miljoner jämfört med samma period föregående år. Det var fler än analytiker förväntat sig (142,5 miljoner) enligt Refinitivs sammanställning.
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www.wired.com www.wired.com
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are woefully underfunded. And many haven't quite found the egalitarian ideal that can really sustain them in the long term
Issues between socialism and capitalism. Creating something to benefit society (although, the examples mentioned above seem to go against this idea...) versus something that needs to turn a profit.
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newrepublic.com newrepublic.com
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Is there any truly ethical way to buy groceries in America?In short: no. Americans now spend only 10 percent of their budgets on food, Lorr notes, while in 1900 it was 40 percent. Our food is the cheapest in the world because we import so much of it from places where things like labor and antibiotics are cheap. Not only that, we hunger for cheapness in our own shopping habits, forever seeking the great promotional deal.
The rest of the world isn't totally non-susceptible to this; even France has had food budget percentage spending decrease. But given the extreme throes of late-stage capitalism the US is in ...
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knightcolumbia.org knightcolumbia.org
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It would allow end users to determine their own tolerances for different types of speech but make it much easier for most people to avoid the most problematic speech, without silencing anyone entirely or having the platforms themselves make the decisions about who is allowed to speak.
But platforms are making huge decisions about who is allowed to speak. While they're generally allowing everyone to have a voice, they're also very subtly privileging many voices over others. While they're providing space for even the least among us to have a voice, they're making far too many of the worst and most powerful among us logarithmic-ally louder.
It's not broadly obvious, but their algorithms are plainly handing massive megaphones to people who society broadly thinks shouldn't have a voice at all. These megaphones come in the algorithmic amplification of fringe ideas which accelerate them into the broader public discourse toward the aim of these platforms getting more engagement and therefore more eyeballs for their advertising and surveillance capitalism ends.
The issue we ought to be looking at is the dynamic range between people and the messages they're able to send through social platforms.
We could also analogize this to the voting situation in the United States. When we disadvantage the poor, disabled, differently abled, or marginalized people from voting while simultaneously giving the uber-rich outsized influence because of what they're able to buy, we're imposing the same sorts of problems. Social media is just able to do this at an even larger scale and magnify the effects to make their harms more obvious.
If I follow 5,000 people on social media and one of them is a racist-policy-supporting, white nationalist president, those messages will get drowned out because I can only consume so much content. But when the algorithm consistently pushes that content to the top of my feed and attention, it is only going to accelerate it and create more harm. If I get a linear presentation of the content, then I'd have to actively search that content out for it to cause me that sort of harm.
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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The conundrum isn’t just that videos questioning the moon landing or the efficacy of vaccines are on YouTube. The massive “library,” generated by users with little editorial oversight, is bound to have untrue nonsense. Instead, YouTube’s problem is that it allows the nonsense to flourish. And, in some cases, through its powerful artificial intelligence system, it even provides the fuel that lets it spread.#lazy-img-336042387:before{padding-top:66.68334167083543%;}
This is a great summation of the issue.
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www.eff.org www.eff.org
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Legislation to stem the tide of Big Tech companies' abuses, and laws—such as a national consumer privacy bill, an interoperability bill, or a bill making firms liable for data-breaches—would go a long way toward improving the lives of the Internet users held hostage inside the companies' walled gardens. But far more important than fixing Big Tech is fixing the Internet: restoring the kind of dynamism that made tech firms responsive to their users for fear of losing them, restoring the dynamic that let tinkerers, co-ops, and nonprofits give every person the power of technological self-determination.
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econproph.com econproph.com
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Capitalists and market-thinkers inevitably seek to enclose the commons, privatizing benefits and externalizing costs onto society.
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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As Casper’s January IPO filing revealed, scale is all: in 2018 the company lost $92.1 million on revenue of $358 million, spending $126 million on sales and marketing and, according to one calculation, losing $160 on every mattress it sold.
The problem with believing your own advertising. What happened to real capitalism?
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A fascinating encapsulation of consumerism for the past 5-10 years. I love this.
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www.vox.com www.vox.com
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A second strand in the development of the American prosperity gospel was the valorization of the “Protestant work ethic.” Written in 1905, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism traced what he saw as the specifically Protestant approach to labor as integral to the development of capitalism and industrialization. In Weber’s historical analysis, Protestant Calvinists — who generally believe in the idea of “predestination,” or that God has chosen some people to be saved and others damned — felt the need to justify their own sense of themselves as the saved. They looked both for outward signs of God’s favor (i.e., through material success) and for ways to express inward virtue (i.e., through hard work). While the accuracy of Weber’s analysis is still debated by scholars, it nevertheless tells us a lot about cultural attitudes at the time Weber wrote it.
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www.washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com
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choice and competition improve schools
How can choice and competition improve schools? From a capitalistic perspective one needs to be much more mobile or have a tremendous number of nearby schools for this to happen. Much like the lack of true competition in local hospitals, most American families don't have any real choice in schools as their local school may be the only option. To have the greatest opportunity, one must be willing to move significant distances, and this causes issues with job availability for the parents as well as other potential social issues.
When it's the case that there is some amount of local selection, it's typically not much and then the disparity of people attending one school over another typically leads to much larger disparities in socio-economic attendance and thus leading to the worsening of the have and the have-nots.
Even schools in large cities like the Los Angeles area hare limited in capacity and often rely on either lottery systems or hefty tuition to cut down on demand. In the latter case, again, the haves and have-nots become a bigger problem than a solution.
I'll have to circle back around on these to add some statistics and expand the ideas...
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adanewmedia.org adanewmedia.org
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Academic capitalism promotes engaged academics as an empirical measure of a university’s reputational currency. Academic capitalism refers to the ways in which knowledge production increasingly embeds universities in the new economy (Berman 2011; Rhoades and Slaughter 2010).
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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As it turns out his vision perfectly reflected the history of capitalism, marked by taking things that live outside the market sphere and declaring their new life as market commodities.
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www.wesjones.com www.wesjones.com
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But that state of consciousness that permits the growth of liberalism seems to stabilize in the way one would expect at the end of history if it is underwritten by the abundance of a modern free market economy.
Writers spend an awful lot of time focused too carefully on the free market economy, but don't acknowledge a lot of the major benefits of the non-free market parts which are undertaken and executed often by governments and regulatory environments. (Hacker & Pierson, 2016)
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Abneesh Roy, an analyst at Edelweiss Securities, noted that ahead of elections set for early next year, the government could be moving to appease owners of smaller shops that have been hit as customers buy more goods online. “Shopkeepers have been unhappy,” he said. “In an election year, the government will definitely listen more to voters.”
It's nice to see foreign countries looking at what has happened to coutries like America with the rise of things like e-commerce, actually thinking about them and the longer term implications, and making rules to effect the potential outcomes.
Now the bigger follow up question is: is this a good thing? Perhaps there won't be the community interruption we've seen in the US, but what do the overall effects look like decades hence? From a community perspective, from a competitive perspective?
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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For Piketty, rising inequality is at root a political phenomenon. The social-democratic framework that made Western societies relatively equal for a couple of generations after World War II, he argues, was dismantled, not out of necessity, but because of the rise of a “neo-proprietarian” ideology. Indeed, this is a view shared by many, though not all, economists. These days, attributing inequality mainly to the ineluctable forces of technology and globalization is out of fashion, and there is much more emphasis on factors like the decline of unions, which has a lot to do with political decisions.
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www.metamute.org www.metamute.org
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Americans have always had state planning, but they prefer to call it the defence budget.
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- Sep 2020
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monthlyreview.org monthlyreview.org
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a conceptual framework to understand the mutually constitutive nature of racialization and capitalist exploitation, inter alia, on a global scale, in specific localities, in discrete historical moments, in the entrenchment of the carceral state, and in the era of neoliberalization and permanent war.
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Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism
Some Theoretical Insights
by Charisse Burden-Stelly
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www.buzzfeednews.com www.buzzfeednews.com
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Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.
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www.metamute.org www.metamute.org
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When Japanese companies threatened to take over the American microchip market, the libertarian computer capitalists of California had no ideological qualms about joining a state-sponsored cartel organised by the state to fight off the invaders from the East!
A good example of so-called capitalists playing the do as we say and not as we do game.
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Entrepreneurs often have an inflated sense of their own 'creative act of will' in developing new ideas and give little recognition to the contributions made by either the state or their own labour force.
Techbro hubris
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www.propublica.org www.propublica.org
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That’s what happened in Florida. Hurricane Andrew reduced parts of cities to landfill and cost insurers nearly $16 billion in payouts. Many insurance companies, recognizing the likelihood that it would happen again, declined to renew policies and left the state. So the Florida Legislature created a state-run company to insure properties itself, preventing both an exodus and an economic collapse by essentially pretending that the climate vulnerabilities didn’t exist.
This is an interesting and telling example.
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And federal agriculture aid withholds subsidies from farmers who switch to drought-resistant crops, while paying growers to replant the same ones that failed.
Here's a place were those who cry capitalism will save us should be shouting the loudest!
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germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org
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while a Minister’s view is always slanted on matters that affect his own interests, so that instead of promoting deserving persons he will fill the places with his own creatures, and will try to strengthen his own position by the number of persons whom he makes dependent on his fortunes;
Here, we see a distrust of Democratic systems, commoners, and burgher-capitalism.
The thread of logic is that people from lower classes - coming from positions of less power and wealth - are more susceptible to corruption as they attempt to shore up their own interests by surrounding themselves with flunkies and sycophants.
The nobility, on the other hand, need no such false assurances.
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www.vox.com www.vox.com
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Throughout the twentieth century, proponents of this particularly American blend of theology envisaged God as a kind of banker, dispensing money to the deserving, with Jesus as a model business executive. Both of these characterizations were, at times, literal: In 1936, New Thought mystic and founder of the Unity Church Charles Fillmore rewrote Psalm 23 to read, “The Lord is my banker/my credit is good”; in 1925, advertising executive Bruce Bowler wrote The Man Nobody Knows to argue that Jesus was the first great capitalist. The literal money quote reads, “Some day ... someone will write a book about Jesus. Every businessman will read it and send it to his partners and his salesmen. For it will tell the story of the founder of modern business.”
Note the strong restructuring of god in line with capitalism
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As Laura Turner notes in an excellent piece for BuzzFeed, no theological tradition is as rife for accusations of hypocrisy as the “prosperity gospel,” a distinctively American theological tradition. While it’s popular among many evangelical Protestants, it’s been condemned by many others. But to many of its critics, especially since the election of Donald Trump, this tradition has come to represent the worst of the conflation of American-style capitalism, religion, and Republican party politics.
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- Aug 2020
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ar.al ar.al
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The mass surveillance and factory farming of human beings on a global scale is the business model of people farmers like Facebook and Google. It is the primary driver of the socioeconomic system we call surveillance capitalism.
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www.theregister.com www.theregister.com
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Facebook has apologized to its users and advertisers for being forced to respect people’s privacy in an upcoming update to Apple’s mobile operating system – and promised it will do its best to invade their privacy on other platforms.
Sometimes I forget how funny The Register can be. This is terrific.
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arstechnica.com arstechnica.com
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Facebook is warning developers that privacy changes in an upcoming iOS update will severely curtail its ability to track users' activity across the entire Internet and app ecosystem and prevent the social media platform from serving targeted ads to users inside other, non-Facebook apps on iPhones.
I fail to see anything bad about this.
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- Jul 2020
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www.newstatesman.com www.newstatesman.com
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Gray, J. (2020 April 01). Why this crisis is a turning point in history. https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/04/why-crisis-turning-point-history
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www.buzzfeednews.com www.buzzfeednews.com
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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But the business model that we now call surveillance capitalism put paid to that, which is why you should never post anything on Facebook without being prepared to face the algorithmic consequences.
I'm reminded a bit of the season 3 episode of Breaking Bad where Jesse Pinkman invites his drug dealing pals to a Narcotics Anonymous-type meeting so that they can target their meth sales. Fortunately the two low lifes had more morality and compassion than Facebook can manage.
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sens-public.org sens-public.org
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a new kind of power
This is what Shoshana Zuboff sustains in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: a new kind of power which can, at first, be apprehended through Marx’s lenses; but as a new form of capitalism, it <mark>“cannot be reduced to known harms—monopoly, privacy—and therefore do not easily yield to known forms of combat.”</mark>
It is <mark>“a new form of capitalism on its own terms and in its own words”</mark> which therefore requires new conceptual frameworks to be understood, negotiated.
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One of these semiotizing processes is the extraction, interpretation and reintegration of web data from and into human subjectivities.
Machine automation becomes another “subjectivity” or “agentivity”—an influential one, because it is the one filtering and pushing content to humans.
The means of this automated subjectivity is feeding data capitalism: more content, more interaction, more behavioral data produced by the users—data which is then captured (“dispossessed”), extracted, and transformed into prediction services, which render human behavior predictable, and therefore monetizable (Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surviellance Capitalism, 2019).
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niklasblog.com niklasblog.com
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Nefarious corporations
As somewhat detailed here.
For far more information I strongly recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
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Local file Local file
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El jardín de la extracción capitalista se constru-ye mediante tecnologías de exterminio que acaban con la bio-diversidad natural y, por lo tanto, con la potencialidad actuante de la materia.
Creo que la "potencialidad actuante de la materia" no se ve disminuida por el capitalismo, es mas, la agencialidad del cumulo de aserrin atesta a lo contrario. De la misma forma, podemos ver en esta materia impuesta por el neoliberalismo, un agente tambien. Como en el caso del matsutake, del libro the Anna Tsing, The mushroom at the end of the world
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- Jun 2020
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n this project we see a shift from a citizen-based model to a consumer model for urban planning, where all citizens’ ‘personal and environmental data is an economic resource.’
Called survillance capitlism
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theintercept.com theintercept.com
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One of the new tools debuted by Facebook allows administrators to remove and block certain trending topics among employees. The presentation discussed the “benefits” of “content control.” And it offered one example of a topic employers might find it useful to blacklist: the word “unionize.”
Imagine your employer looking over your shoulder constantly.
Imagine that you're surveilled not only in regard to what you produce, but to what you—if you're an office worker—tap our in chats to colleagues.
This is what Facebook does and it's not very different to what China has created with their Social Credit System.
This is Orwellian.
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www.axios.com www.axios.com
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Zoom didn't do this to comply with local law.
They did this because they don't want to lose customers in China.
This is just capitalistic greed.
Shutting down activists over a dictatorship is wrong, and it is actually as simple as that.
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www.weforum.org www.weforum.org
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Schwab, K. (2020, June 03). Now is the time for a “great reset.” World Economic Forum. Retrieved June 5, 2020, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a-great-reset/
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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anchoring products - stating what products would otherwise sell for, while advocating that purchasers buy sooner than later such that they receive the products for cheap
-> creation of urgency
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particularization and discrete-formation of activity - activity is reduced from an ambiguous relationship of activities to singular "do this" or "do that" activities for ambiguous "success"
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"People buy off emotion and not logic."
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- May 2020
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Aya Adra en Twitter: “I’m deeply angry at psychology at the moment, and I can’t think of an outlet for that anger. So, Twitter it is. #Phdchat #AcademicTwitter #AcademicChatter https://t.co/8YkfeGN7oN” / Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved April 16, 2020, from https://twitter.com/ayaadra1/status/1243881900797841409
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Fraser, N., Neiman, S., Mouffe, C., Sassen, S., Müller, J.-W., Rodrik, D., Piketty, T., Zucman, G., Chang, H.-J., & others, and many. (2020, May 15). Humans are not resources. Coronavirus shows why we must democratise work | Thomas Piketty and others. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/15/humans-resources-coronavirus-democratise-work-health-lives-market
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- opinion
- employee
- COVID-19
- economy
- work
- capitalism
- is:webpage
- lang:en
- dignity
- business
- human resource
- democratization
- health
- human rights
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theintercept.com theintercept.com
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www.bleepingcomputer.com www.bleepingcomputer.com
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medium.com medium.com
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What is more frightening than being merely watched, though, is being controlled. When Facebook can know us better than our parents with only 150 likes, and better than our spouses with 300 likes, the world appears quite predictable, both for governments and for businesses. And predictability means control.
"Predictability means control"
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- Apr 2020
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twitter.com twitter.com
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The most extraordinary statement from an audit firm after missing a $800 million hidden loss: "We stand behind the quality of our work". That's Deloitte & Touche LLP's response on the collapse of oil trading house Hin Leong |
Remind anybody of the Big Four's complicity in '08?
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www.epsilontheory.com www.epsilontheory.com
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The World Health Organization’s internal corruption became palpable to most people in late March. That is when this video, in which a Radio Television Hong Kong journalist conducts an interview with WHO official Bruce Aylward, came to light. To be fair, Dr. Aylward – a senior advisor to the Director-General – had been put in an awkward position when asked if the WHO will reconsider Taiwan’s membership. He is not the person who makes this determination.
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For decades, we have permitted the financial services industry to repeatedly force us into Hobson’s Choices at the end of every market cycle. Every cycle, Wall Street levers up and empowers cyclical sectors of the economy to lever up. When they do, they improve their returns in the interim, extract as much cash as possible and subject us all to systemic risk in the process. When that risk manifests, and it always does in some way “no one could have predicted”, we are then told we must all share the burden for it, since now is not a time for blame! Real businesses and families are hurting, and not helping Wall Street right now would hurt them, too.
Wow
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Doug Parker has pocketed more than $150 million through his sale of 3.6 million shares in American Airlines. These sales were particularly egregious in 2015 – 2016, not coincidentally the period of American’s greatest stock buyback activity. How egregious were the stock sales? For a twelve month period from mid-2015 through mid-2016, Doug Parker pocketed between $4 million and $11 million in stock sales per month. How large were the stock buybacks? Two-thirds of American’s $13 billion in stock buybacks over this six year period occurred over these same months.Here’s another fun fact about Doug Parker. For a brief shining moment, American Airline’s stock price went above $50 in early 2018. Wouldn’t you know it, Doug just happened to choose that moment to sell 437,000 shares of stock, more than twice as much stock as he had ever sold before and almost 5x the usual size of his stock sales. Barf.
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We are talking about Whiting Petroleum, and Brad serves as both its Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer. On March 26, 2020, that board paid him and his fellow executives $14.6 million in bonuses. Holley himself pocketed $6.4 million. Six days later, that same board sent Whiting Petroleum into Chapter 11 bankruptcy with a proposal that would wipe out 97% of the equity in the company. According to the Board of Directors of the Whiting Petroleum Company, these bonuses were “intended to ensure the stability and continuity of the company’s workforce and eliminate any potential misalignment of interests that would likely arise if existing performance metrics were retained.” If you are a layperson, this explanation may sound to you like a very large crude carrier full of horseshit. I understand why you might think that. But let me assure you as a non-layperson that this explanation is an ultra large crude carrier full of horseshit.
Disgusting
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Prologue:
Federalism => competition between states => one (small) state, S. Dakota, abolishing long-standing laws that prevented usury => growth of trillion dollar credit card debt industry
- But when state leaders, desperate to attract outside businesses during the economic recession of the early 1980s, changed South Dakota's usury laws to eliminate the cap on interest rates and fees, Citibank came calling...The deal was breathtakingly quid pro quo, with then-Gov. Bill Janklow's chief-of-staff leaving to become president and CEO of Citibank South Dakota.
AND then the abolishing of laws against perpetuities
In 1983, he abolished the rule against perpetuities and, from that moment on, property placed in trust in South Dakota would stay there for ever. A rule created by English judges after centuries of consideration was erased by a law of just 19 words. Aristocracy was back in the game.
The Tax Justice Network (TJN) still ranks Switzerland as the most pernicious tax haven in the world in its Financial Secrecy Index, but the US is now in second place and climbing fast, having overtaken the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong and Luxembourg since Fatca was introduced. “While the United States has pioneered powerful ways to defend itself against foreign tax havens, it has not seriously addressed its own role in attracting illicit financial flows and supporting tax evasion,” said the TJN in the report accompanying the 2018 index. In just three years, the amount of money held via secretive structures in the US had increased by 14%, the TJN said.
Here is an example from one academic paper on South Dakotan trusts: after 200 years, $1m placed in trust and growing tax-free at an annual rate of 6% will have become $136bn. After 300 years, it will have grown to $50.4tn. That is more than twice the current size of the US economy, and this trust will last for ever, assuming that society doesn’t collapse altogether under the weight of this ever-swelling leach.
If the richest members of society are able to pass on their wealth tax-free to their heirs, in perpetuity, then they will keep getting richer than those of us who can’t. In fact, the tax rate for everyone else will probably have to rise, to make up for the shortfall caused by the wealthiest members of societies opting out, which will just make the problem worse. Eric Kades, the law professor at William & Mary Law School, thinks that South Dakota’s decision to abolish the rule against perpetuities for the short term benefit of its economy will prove to have been a long-term catastrophe. “In 50 or 100 years, it will turn out to have been an absolute disaster,” said Kades. “Now we’re going to have a bunch of wealthy families, and no one will be able to piss away that wealth, it will stay in the family for ever. This just locks in advantage.”
All effected by one man
And upheld by this 1978 SCOTUS case which allowed banks to export interest rates based on where they were "headquartered," — sound similar to the Irish tax dodge? (based on where the IP was owned)
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newrepublic.com newrepublic.com
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Fascinating especially in discussing how use of data science allows psychological distancing from the actual task: predatory loaning
Capital One collects $23 billion in interest per year—an average that works out to $181 from each family in America. Of course, not every family has a Capital One account, and most public surveys say roughly half of people with credit cards pay them in full and accrue no interest. So simple math tells you that many families are paying Capital One at least $800 in interest every year.
People at Capital One are extremely friendly. But one striking fact of life there was how rarely anyone acknowledged the suffering of its customers. It’s no rhetorical exaggeration to say that the 3,000 white-collar workers at its headquarters are making good money off the backs of the poor. The conspiracy of silence that engulfed this bottom-line truth spoke volumes about how all of us at Capital One viewed our place in the world, and what we saw when we looked down from our glass tower. This is not meant to offer a broad-brush indictment of business at Capital One; it is hardly the only corporation that has been ethically compromised by capitalism. It is, however, meant to shine a few photons of light on the financial industry in a post-crisis age of acute inequality.
Amid the daily office banter at Capital One, we hardly ever broached the essence of what we were doing. Instead, we discussed the “physics” of our work. Analysts would commonly say that “whiteboarding”—a gratifying exercise in gaming out equations on the whiteboard to figure out a better way to build a risk model or design an experiment—was the favorite part of their job. Hour-long conversations would oscillate between abstruse metaphors representing indebtedness and poverty, and an equally opaque jargon composed of math and finance-speak.
If you were not familiar with the almanac of metaphors—many of which, as I understand it, were specific to Capital One—you would not follow the conversations. The “bathtub,” for example, denotes a loan portfolio, because it’s like water down the drain when you lose customers—either because they have closed their account or were fed up with Capital One or have involuntarily defaulted on their loan. When you spend tens of millions of dollars on marketing, that’s turning on the spigot for new water in your “bathtub.”
It was common to hear analysts say things like, “I just love to solve problems.” But what they were really doing was solving something closer to puzzles. It’s clear to me, for example, that the janitor at my middle school solved problems when she cleaned up trash. It’s far less clear whether analysts at Capital One are solving problems or creating them. In either event, the work culture at this well-appointed lender of dwindling resort is pretty much designed to encourage former students of engineering or math to let their minds drift for a few years and forget whether the equations in front of them represent the laws of thermodynamics or single moms who want to pay for their kids’ Christmas gifts without having to default on their rent or utilities payments.
Before I managed Capital One’s secured card product, I worked on what we called “Mainstreet proactive credit limit increases” or “Mainstreet pCLIP” for short. Mainstreet was yet another piece of euphemistic in-house jargon; it meant subprime. As for proactive credit limit increase, it meant raising the cap on how much someone is allowed to borrow—without getting their permission to raise the cap.
The emails we used to send these “Mainstreet pCLIP” customers would go as follows: “Elena Botella, you’re a valued customer, and we want you to get more out of your card. So recently, your credit line was increased to $6550.00. This gives you more in your wallet, which gives you more flexibility. Thank you for choosing Capital One®. Enjoy your higher credit line.”
At any bank, if you have a low credit score, you’re only likely to get a credit limit increase if you’re getting close to your existing credit limit. So if you got that email, you probably had a few thousand dollars of Capital One credit card debt at an interest rate of at least 20 percent. That implies you were probably paying Capital One around $40 in interest per month or more. You might want or need to borrow more money on top of what you’ve already borrowed, but I always thought it was a little bit sick for us to be telling people to “enjoy” their higher credit line. It felt more than a little like shouting, “Enjoy getting into more debt, suckers!” before disappearing in a cloud of smoke and speeding off in a Tesla.
Capital One’s culture of experimentation also acted as a kind of buffer. Fast Company has reported that Capital One runs 80,000 experiments per year. As Christopher Worley and Edward Lawler III explain in the journal Organizational Dynamics, a bank like Capital One can randomly assign differing interest rates, payment options, or rewards to various customers and see which combinations are most profitable for any given segment of people. It’s not so different from how a pharmaceutical company might use a randomized control trial to test whether a new drug is effective, except that the results of the bank’s experiment will never get published, and instead of curing diseases, the bank is trying to extract more money from each customer. The use of experiments is itself an act of psychological distancing; it allows the analysts controlling the experiment to resolutely apply its findings as a profit-maximizing mandate without giving the strategy a name such as, oh, “predatory lending.”
The rise of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence means that you don’t need venal corporate tycoons wearing Monopoly Man hats to grind the faces of the poor into the dirt. Under the data-driven directives of Capitalism 2.0, you can have a bunch of friendly data scientists who don’t think too deeply about the models they’re building, while tutoring low-income kids on the side. As far as they’re concerned, they’re refining a bunch of computer algorithms.
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www.buzzfeednews.com www.buzzfeednews.com
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blog.zoom.us blog.zoom.us
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Thousands of enterprises around the world have done exhaustive security reviews of our user, network, and data center layers and confidently selected Zoom for complete deployment.
This doesn't really account for the fact that Zoom have committed some atrociously heinous acts, such as (and not limited to):
- Abuse how installation works on macOS
- Claiming to support end-to-end encryption while not doing that and then, shadily inventing a nomenclature that steers away from standards
- Sending your data to Facebook even if you don't have a Facebook account and hiding this practice from their privacy policy
- Installing a web server on your Mac that Apple had to build a tool to erase
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- Mar 2020
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theintercept.com theintercept.com
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This is known as transport encryption, which is different from end-to-end encryption because the Zoom service itself can access the unencrypted video and audio content of Zoom meetings. So when you have a Zoom meeting, the video and audio content will stay private from anyone spying on your Wi-Fi, but it won’t stay private from the company.
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But despite this misleading marketing, the service actually does not support end-to-end encryption for video and audio content, at least as the term is commonly understood. Instead it offers what is usually called transport encryption, explained further below
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www.contractingbusiness.com www.contractingbusiness.com
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Ten Reasons Why Capitalism Is Morally Superior
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www.digital-democracy.org www.digital-democracy.org
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www.marketwatch.com www.marketwatch.com
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Mastercard acquired NuData Security in 2017 and it has been making advances in biometric identification.
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The payment provider told MarketWatch that everyone has a unique walk, and it is investigating innovative behavioral biometrics such as gait, face, heartbeat and veins for cutting edge payment systems of the future.
This is a true invasion into people's lives.
Remember: this is a credit-card company. We use them to pay for stuff. They shouldn't know what we look like, how we walk, how our hearts beat, nor how our 'vein technology' works.
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- Feb 2020
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thenextweb.com thenextweb.com
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Last year, Facebook said it would stop listening to voice notes in messenger to improve its speech recognition technology. Now, the company is starting a new program where it will explicitly ask you to submit your recordings, and earn money in return.
Given Facebook's history with things like breaking laws that end up with them paying billions of USD in damages (even though it's a joke), sold ads to people who explicitly want to target people who hate jews, and have spent millions of USD every year solely on lobbyism, don't sell your personal experiences and behaviours to them.
Facebook is nefarious and psychopathic.
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www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
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From 2010 to 2016, Facebook Ireland paid Facebook U.S. more than $14 billion in royalties and cost-sharing payments
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the Internal Revenue Service tries to convince a judge the world’s largest social media company owes more than $9 billion
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www.core-econ.org www.core-econ.org
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Capitalism is an economic system that can combine centralization with decentralization.
How can we analogize this with the decentralization of the web and its economy?
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First, because capital goods do not fall from the sky: all countries that have successfully moved from poverty to affluence have done so, of necessity, by accumulating large amounts of capital. We will also see that a crucial feature of capitalism is who owns and controls the capital goods in an economy.
3:11pm
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First, because capital goods do not fall from the sky: all countries that have successfully moved from poverty to affluence have done so, of necessity, by accumulating large amounts of capital. We will also see that a crucial feature of capitalism is who owns and controls the capital goods in an economy.
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mattstoller.substack.com mattstoller.substack.com
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Spotify is directly mimicking Google and Facebook, and attempting to roll up power over digital audio markets the way Google and Facebook did over the internet. It has already done so in music. Here’s Rolling Stone, reporting on Spotify’s exploitation of its public utility platform of music distribution to organizes payola-style extortion against artists.
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marxdown.github.io marxdown.github.io
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Section 1. The Two Factors of a Commodity, Use-Value and Value
Marx's analysis of a capitalist system begins by postulating that it's fundamentally composed of units called commodities.
In the capitalist system commodities have two features.
1. They are produced
2. They are produced by capitalists
Capitalists produce commodities by employing workers to produce them.
In this section, Marx begins his analysis of the first feature of the capitalist system (viz. that it is commodity producing). Workers and capitalists will not appear in Marx's analysis for several more chapters.
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investor.uber.com investor.uber.com
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Revenue of $4.1 billion, growing 37% year-over-year or 39% on a constant currency basis
They forgot to add '...money that our drivers—who basically are left to their own devices where blame and poor wages are concerned—will never see.'
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robertheaton.com robertheaton.com
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I suspect that Wacom doesn’t really think that it’s acceptable to record the name of every application I open on my personal laptop. I suspect that this is why their privacy policy doesn’t really admit that this is what that they do.
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plato.stanford.edu plato.stanford.edu
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Most socialists, however, tend to find the profit motive problematic.
Is it worthwhile to envision a society where people's motives are pre-anticipated or controllable?
I think social systems should be robust enough to account for stable functioning of society, independent of the motives and only depending on actions.
Only actions can be observed, and hence only actions can be regulated in any form of organized society and highly so in capitalism.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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socialists do not support capitalism, meaning they want workers to control the means of production
Workers controlling the means of production sounds like co-operative industries. This paradigm is not antithetical to 'capitalism' in the sense that there is still private ownership of the means of production. I disagree with the statement that democratic socialists do not support capitalism.
A good debate on this topic here - https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/323/are-worker-cooperatives-socialist-capitalist-or-their-own-category
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- Jan 2020
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marxdown.github.io marxdown.github.io
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prevails
In the original German, 'prevails' is rendered "herrscht." Herrscht shares a common root with the ordinary German word Herr (Mister, or, more evocatively, Master). 'Lordship' (as, in the chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, on 'Lordship and Bondage' is rendered Herrschaft.)
My own reading of Capital tends to center upon the question of domination in capitalist societies, and throughout chapter 1 (in particular, in The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof) Marx is especially attuned to the distinguishing how the forms of domination that are prevalent in capitalist societies are distinct from the relations of "personal dependence" that characterize pre-capitalist modes of production.
It seems prudent, therefore, to take note of the way that the seemingly innocuous notion of 'prevalence' is, for Marx, in his original formulation, already evocative of the language of mastery, domination, perhaps even something like 'hegemony'.
Furthermore, the capitalist mode of production prevails--it predominates. Yet, as Louis Althusser observes in his discussion of the concept of the 'mode of production' in On the Reproduction of Capitalism, every concrete social formation can be classified according to the mode of production that is dominant (that prevails--herrscht). In order to dominate, something must implicitly be dominated, or subordinate. "In every social formation," Althusser writes, "there exists more than one mode of production: at least two and often many more." Althusser cites Lenin, who in his analysis of the late 19th c. Russian social formation, observes that four modes of production can be distinguished (Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p. 19.)
In our analysis of social formations, the concrete specificity of each can be articulated by carefully examining the multiplicity of modes of production that coincide within it, and examine the way in which capitalism tends to dominate a multiplicity of subordinate modes of production that, on the one hand, survive from past modes of production but which may also, on the other, be emerging in the present (i.e. communism). Thus even if capitalism tends towards the formation of a contiguous world-system dominated by its particular imperatives, this does not mean that this process is homogenous or unfolds in the same way in each instance.
For some commentators, capitalism is defined by the prevalence of wage labor and the specific dynamics that obtain therefrom. Yet this has often led to confusion over, whether, in analyzing the North American social formation prior to 1865, in which slavery coexists with wage-labor, the mode of production based on slave-labor is pre-capitalist. Yet as we find here in ch. 1, what determines the commodity as a commodity is not that it is the product of wage labor, rather that it is produced for exchange. As Marx writes on p. 131, "He who satisfies his own need with the product of his own labor admittedly creates use-values, but not commodities. Insofar as the slave-system in North America produced commodities (cotton, tobacco, etc.) for exchange on the world market, the fact that these commodities were produced under direct conditions of domination does not have any bearing on whether or not we identify this system of production as 'capitalist'. Wage-labor is therefore not likely the determinative factor; the determinative factor is the production of commodities for exchange. It is only insofar as commodities confront one another as exchange-values that the various modes of useful labor appear as expressions of a homogenous common substance, labor in the abstract
It is in this sense that we can observe one of the ways that the capitalist mode of production prevails over other modes of production, as it subordinates these modes of production to production for exchange, and thus the law of value, regardless of whether wage-labor represents the dominant form of this relation. Moreover, it provides a clue to how we can examine, for example, the persistence of unwaged work within the family, which has important consequences for Social Reproduction Theory.
Nonetheless, we can say that insofar as commodities confront each other on the market in a scene of exchange that they implicitly contain some 'third thing' which enables us to compare them as bearers of a magnitude of value. This 'third thing', as Marx's demonstration shows, is 'socially necessary labour time', which anticipates the way that wage-labor will become a dominant feature of capitalist society.
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www.seattletimes.com www.seattletimes.com
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- surveillance capitalism
- face paint
- security
- privacy
- license plates
- juggalo
- facial recognition
- sunglasses
- fashion
- clothes
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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A Microsoft programme to transcribe and vet audio from Skype and Cortana, its voice assistant, ran for years with “no security measures”, according to a former contractor who says he reviewed thousands of potentially sensitive recordings on his personal laptop from his home in Beijing over the two years he worked for the company.
Wonderful. This, combined with the fact that Skype users can—fairly easily—find out which contacts another person has, is horrifying.
Then again, most people know that Microsoft have colluded with American authorities to divulge chat/phone history for a long time, right?
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Platform capitalism, digital technology, and the future of work
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www.technologyreview.com www.technologyreview.com
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Since capitalists make money from every hour of workers’ labor, they will get increasingly rich over time, while workers won’t because they’re too busy making money for capitalists
This is not entirely obvious, it depends on the competing interests of the owners of the means of production vs the workers. The current economic and social organization that disincentivises labour unions and any forms of collective organization on the worker side reduces their bargaining power and hastens this statement. But there can be alternative ways of structuring companies and the macroeconomics to balance both the forces.
Am I missing something here?
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- Dec 2019
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www.profgalloway.com www.profgalloway.com
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We are barrelling toward a country with 350 million serfs serving 3 million lords. We attempt to pacify the serfs with more powerful phones, bigger TVs, great original scripted television, and Mandalorian action figures delivered to your doorstep within the hour. The delivery guy might be forced to relieve himself in your bushes if not for the cameras his boss installed on every porch.
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www.forbes.com www.forbes.com
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Google found 1,494 device identifiers in SensorVault, sending them to the ATF to comb through. In terms of numbers, that’s unprecedented for this form of search. It illustrates how Google can pinpoint a large number of mobile phones in a brief period of time and hand over that information to the government
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- Nov 2019
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foundation.mozilla.org foundation.mozilla.org
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half of iPhone users don’t know there’s a unique ID on their phone (called an IDFA, for “identifier for advertisers”) tracking their app activity and sending it to third-party advertisers by default.
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www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
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Google has confirmed that it partnered with health heavyweight Ascension, a Catholic health care system based in St. Louis that operates across 21 states and the District of Columbia.
What happened to 'thou shalt not steal'?
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Found a @facebook #security & #privacy issue. When the app is open it actively uses the camera. I found a bug in the app that lets you see the camera open behind your feed.
So, Facebook uses your camera even while not active.
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thenextweb.com thenextweb.com
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Speaking with MIT Technology Review, Rohit Prasad, Alexa’s head scientist, has now revealed further details about where Alexa is headed next. The crux of the plan is for the voice assistant to move from passive to proactive interactions. Rather than wait for and respond to requests, Alexa will anticipate what the user might want. The idea is to turn Alexa into an omnipresent companion that actively shapes and orchestrates your life. This will require Alexa to get to know you better than ever before.
This is some next-level onslaught.
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www.eff.org www.eff.org
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Somewhere in a cavernous, evaporative cooled datacenter, one of millions of blinking Facebook servers took our credentials, used them to authenticate to our private email account, and tried to pull information about all of our contacts. After clicking Continue, we were dumped into the Facebook home page, email successfully “confirmed,” and our privacy thoroughly violated.
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www.eff.org www.eff.org
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In 2013, Facebook began offering a “secure” VPN app, Onavo Protect, as a way for users to supposedly protect their web activity from prying eyes. But Facebook simultaneously used Onavo to collect data from its users about their usage of competitors like Twitter. Last year, Apple banned Onavo from its App Store for violating its Terms of Service. Facebook then released a very similar program, now dubbed variously “Project Atlas” and “Facebook Research.” It used Apple’s enterprise app system, intended only for distributing internal corporate apps to employees, to continue offering the app to iOS users. When the news broke this week, Apple shut down the app and threw Facebook into some chaos when it (briefly) booted the company from its Enterprise Developer program altogether.
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thereader.mitpress.mit.edu thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
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If the apparatus of total surveillance that we have described here were deliberate, centralized, and explicit, a Big Brother machine toggling between cameras, it would demand revolt, and we could conceive of a life outside the totalitarian microscope.
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The FBI is currently collecting data about our faces, irises, walking patterns, and voices, permitting the government to pervasively identify, track, and monitor us. The agency can match or request a match of our faces against at least 640 million images of adults living in the U.S. And it is reportedly piloting Amazon’s flawed face recognition surveillance technology.
FBI and Amazon are being sued because of surveillance of people living in the USA.
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www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
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Senior government officials in multiple U.S.-allied countries were targeted earlier this year with hacking software that used Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) WhatsApp to take over users’ phones, according to people familiar with the messaging company’s investigation.
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- Oct 2019
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www.foxbusiness.com www.foxbusiness.com
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This is what happens when capitalism is the norm.
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thenextweb.com thenextweb.com
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Per Bloomberg, which cited an memo from an anonymous Google staffer, employees discovered that the company was creating the new tool as a Chrome browser extension that would be installed on all employees’ systems and used to monitor their activities.
From the Bloomberg article:
Earlier this month, employees said they discovered that a team within the company was creating the new tool for the custom Google Chrome browser installed on all workers’ computers and used to search internal systems. The concerns were outlined in a memo written by a Google employee and reviewed by Bloomberg News and by three Google employees who requested anonymity because they aren’t authorized to talk to the press.
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www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com
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www.theregister.co.uk www.theregister.co.uk
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A highly interesting article where a well-known company prefers blood money to allowing employees to talk about politics. This is capitalism at its core: all profit, no empathy.
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GitLab, a San Francisco-based provider of hosted git software, recently changed its company handbook to declare it won't ban potential customers on "moral/value grounds," and that employees should not discuss politics at work.
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Meanwhile at Microsoft's GitHub, employees at both companies have objected to GitHub's business with ICE, not to mention Microsoft's government contracts. Employees at Amazon have also urged the company not to sell its facial recognition technology to police and the military.
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If you can see how people might respond to IBM, infamous for providing technology that helped the Nazis in World War II, saying, "Who has time to look into the source of this hard German currency?" you can imagine how GitLab's policy amendment has been received.
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www.theregister.co.uk www.theregister.co.uk
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there's still the issue of user IP addresses, which Tencent would see for those using devices with mainland China settings. That's a privacy concern, but its one among many given that other Chinese internet companies – ISPs, app providers, cloud service providers, and the like – can be assumed to collect that information and provide it to the Chinese surveillance state on demand.
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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www.chinalawblog.com www.chinalawblog.com
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This system will apply to foreign owned companies in China on the same basis as to all Chinese persons, entities or individuals. No information contained on any server located within China will be exempted from this full coverage program. No communication from or to China will be exempted. There will be no secrets. No VPNs. No private or encrypted messages. No anonymous online accounts. No trade secrets. No confidential data. Any and all data will be available and open to the Chinese government. Since the Chinese government is the shareholder in all SOEs and is now exercising de facto control over China’s major private companies as well, all of this information will then be available to those SOEs and Chinese companies. See e.g. China to place government officials inside 100 private companies, including Alibaba. All this information will be available to the Chinese military and military research institutes. The Chinese are being very clear that this is their plan.
At least the current Chinese government are clear about how all-intrusive they will be, so that people can avoid them. IF people can avoid them.
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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Amazon doesn’t tell customers much about its troubleshooting process for Cloud Cam. In its terms and conditions, the company reserves the right to process images, audio and video captured by devices to improve its products and services.
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Nowhere in the Cloud Cam user terms and conditions does Amazon explicitly tell customers that human beings are training the algorithms behind their motion detection software.
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An Amazon team also transcribes and annotates commands recorded in customers’ homes by the company’s Alexa digital assistant
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Dozens of Amazon workers based in India and Romania review select clips captured by Cloud Cam, according to five people who have worked on the program or have direct knowledge of it.
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help.twitter.com help.twitter.com
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We recently discovered that when you provided an email address or phone number for safety or security purposes (for example, two-factor authentication) this data may have inadvertently been used for advertising purposes, specifically in our Tailored Audiences and Partner Audiences advertising system.
Twitter may have sold your e-mail address to people.
Twitter has only done this with people who have added their e-mail address for security purposes.
Security purposes for Twitter = sell your e-mail address to a third-party company.
Spam for you = security purposes for Twitter.
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www.thedailybeast.com www.thedailybeast.com
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Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, claims that Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, successfully campaigned for The Guardian to scrub her name from one of their bombshell data-abuse stories.
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www.pastemagazine.com www.pastemagazine.com
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In case you wanted to be even more skeptical of Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts, Facebook has now changed its advertising policies to make it easier for politicians to lie in paid ads. Donald Trump is taking full advantage of this policy change, as popular info reports.
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The claim in this ad was ruled false by those Facebook-approved third-party fact-checkers, but it is still up and running. Why? Because Facebook changed its policy on what constitutes misinformation in advertising. Prior to last week, Facebook’s rule against “false and misleading content” didn’t leave room for gray areas: “Ads landing pages, and business practices must not contain deceptive, false, or misleading content, including deceptive claims, offers, or methods.”
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- Sep 2019
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I wonder which privacy-related stuffs users must accept to agree to this.
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onezero.medium.com onezero.medium.com
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Goodreads is nearly useless for finding recommendations
I believe that the point of Goodreads—since Amazon bought the site—is lost here.
The point of Goodreads is to make people buy books from Amazon. They're capitalists. They don't care about the common good, or about making people find books that they can truly benefit from.
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techcrunch.com techcrunch.com
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To wit: iOS 13, which will be generally released later this week, has already been spotted catching Facebook’s app trying to use Bluetooth to track nearby users.
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www.privacyinternational.org www.privacyinternational.org
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There is already a lot of information Facebook can assume from that simple notification: that you are probably a woman, probably menstruating, possibly trying to have (or trying to avoid having) a baby. Moreover, even though you are asked to agree to their privacy policy, Maya starts sharing data with Facebook before you get to agree to anything. This raises some serious transparency concerns.
Privacy International are highlighting how period-tracking apps are violating users' privacy.
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- Aug 2019
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www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
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I think Netflix would’ve avoided this controversy if it had plainly told subscribers what it was doing somewhere in the app or with a notification. Instead, people discovered that Netflix was utilizing Android’s physical activity permission, which is strange behavior from a video streaming app. In some instances, it was doing this without asking users to approve the move first, as was the case for The Next Web’s Ivan Mehta. You’ve got to be transparent if you want to monitor anyone’s movements. Netflix was unable to immediately answer whether it will be removing the physical activity recognition permission from its app now that the test is done.
It's great that sites like The Verge and The Next Web are calling surveillance capitalists out.
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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Last March, ProPublica published an extensive investigation that found IBM had fired an estimated 20,000 U.S. employees ages 40 or older in the past five years.
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