550 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. Poverty, by America

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

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

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

    2. how some lives are made small so thatothers may grow.
  2. Oct 2024
    1. fast capitalism versus slow, you know, organic mutualism.

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

      or perhaps we can say slow capaitalism alongside fast mutualism

    1. That this talent for organization and management is rare among men is proved by the fact that it invariably secures for its possessor enormous rewards, no matter where or under what laws or conditions.

      for - critique - extreme wealth a reward for rare management skills - Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - Mondragon counterexample - to - stats - Mondragon pay difference between highest and lowest paid - article - In this Spanish town, capitalism actually works for the workers - Christian Science Monitor - Erika Page - 2024, June 7

      critique - extreme wealth a reward for rare management skills - Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - Mondragon counterexample - This is invalidated today by large successful cooperatives such as Mondragon

      to - stats - Mondragon corporation - comparison of pay difference between highest paid and lowest paid - https://hyp.is/QAxx-o14Ee-_HvN5y8aMiQ/www.csmonitor.com/Business/2024/0513/income-inequality-capitalism-mondragon-corporation

    1. what really I was really interested in was the idea that Marx wasn't really Keen or was sort of hostile to the idea of equality which I'm guessing will come as a surprise to many people

      for - interesting perspective - Karl Marx - He wasn't principally interested in equality - book - Capitalism: the word and the thing - perspectival knowledge of - Michael Sonenscher - misunderstanding - modern capitalists - misunderstand Karl Marx's work - Michael Sonenscher - Karl Marx and Capitalism - Maximizing each individual's freedom while not trampling on the same aspiration of other individuals within a society

      Interesting perspective - Karl Marx wasn't principally interested in equality - Sonenscher offers an interesting interpretation and perspectival knowledge of Karl Marx's motivation in his principal work paraphrase - Marx's thought centered on is interest in individuality and the degree to which in certain respects being somebody who is free and able to make choices about his or her lives and future activities is going to depend on each person's: - qualities - capabilities - capacities - preoccupations - values, etc - For Marx, freedom is in the final analysis something to do with something - particular - specific and - individual w - What matters to me may not matter entirely in the same sort of way to you because ultimately - in an ideal State of Affairs, my kinds of concerns and your kinds of concerns will be simply specific to you and to me respectively - For Marx, the problems begin as is also the case with Rosseau - when these kinds of absolute qualities are displaced by - relative qualities that apply equally to us both - For Marx, things like - markets - prices - commodities and - things that connect people - are the hallmarks of equality because they put people on the same kind of footing prices and productivity - Whereas the things that REALLY SHOULD COUNT are - the things that separate and distinguish people that make each individual fully and and entirely him or herself and - the idea for Marx is that capitalism - which is not a term that Marx used, - puts people on a kind of spurious footing of equality - Getting beyond capitalism means getting beyond equality to a state of effect in which - difference , - particularity, - individuality and - uniqueness - in a certain kind of sense will prevail

      comment - This perspective is quite enlightening on Marx's motivations on this part of his work and is likely misconstrued by those mainstream "capitalists" who vilify his work without critical analysis - Of course freedom - within a social context - is never an absolute term. - It is not possible to live in a society in which everyone is able to actualize their full imaginations, something pointed out in the work of two other famous thought leaders of modern history: - Thomas Hobbes observed in his famous work, Leviathan, and - Sigmund Freud also made a primary subject of his ID, Ego and Superego framework. - Total freedom would lead - first to anarchy and then - the emergence within that anarchy of those which possess the most charisma, influence, self-seeking manipulative skills and brutality - surfacing rule by authority - Historically, as democracy attempts to surface from a history of authoritarian, patriarchal governance, - democracy is far from ubiquitous and authoritarian governance is still alive and well in many parts of the world - The battle between - authoritarian governments among themselves and - authoritarian and democratic governments - results in war, violence and trauma that creates the breeding ground for the next generation of authoritarian leaders - Marx's main intent seems to be to enable the individual existing within a society to live the fullest life possible, - by way of enabling and maximizing their unique expression, - while not constraining the same aspiration in other individuals who belong to the same society

    2. for - capitalism - etymology - book Captialism: The Word and the Thing - Michael Sonenscher - from - Princeton University Press

      Summary - Michael Sonenscher discusses the modern evolution of the word "capitalism". Adding the suffix "ism" to a word implies a compound term. - Capitalism is a complex, compound concept whose connotations from the use in 18th and 19th century France and England is quite different from today's. - How meaning evolved can give us insight into our use of it today.

      from - Princeton University Press - book - Capitalism: the word and the thing - to - https://hyp.is/kVaURoxREe-x7MtVDX2t3Q/press.princeton.edu/ideas/capitalism-the-word-and-the-thing

    1. Michael Sonenscher

      for - capitalism - etymology - modern - book Capitalism: The Word and the Thing - Michael Sonenscher - from - Discussion of "spiritual capitalism" on Kansas Missouri Fair Shares Commons chat thread - to - youtube - New Books Network - interniew - Captialism: The word and the thing - Michael Sonenscher

      Summary - Michael Sonenscher discusses the modern evolution of the word "capitalism". Adding the suffix "ism" to a word implies a compound term. - Capitalism is a complex, compound concept whose connotations from the use in 18th and 19th century France and England is quite different from today's. - How meaning evolved can give us insight into our use of it today.

      to - youtube - New Books Network - interniew - Captialism: The word and the thing - Michael Sonenscher - https://hyp.is/ftWWfoxQEe-FkUuIeSoZCA/www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpNaxyPpOf0

    1. Barsamian: Corporate power seems unstoppable. The uber class of gazillionaires — Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk — are now flying into outer space. But I’m reminded of something that the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin said some years ago: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable.” And then she added, “So did the divine right of kings.” Chomsky: So did slavery. So did the principle that women are property, which lasted in the United States until the 1970s. So did laws against miscegenation so extreme that even the Nazis wouldn’t accept them, which lasted in the United States until the 1960s. All kinds of horrors have existed. Over time, their power has been eroded but never completely eliminated. Slavery was abolished, but its remnants remain in new and vicious forms. It’s not slavery, but it’s horrifying enough. The idea that women are not persons has not only been formally overcome, but to a substantial extent in practice, too. Still, there’s plenty to do. The constitutional system was a step forward in the eighteenth century. Even the phrase “We the people” terrified the autocratic rulers of Europe, deeply concerned that the evils of democracy (what was then called republicanism) could spread and undermine civilized life. Well, it did spread — and civilized life continued, even improved. So, yes, there are periods of regression and of progress, but the class war never ends, the masters never relent. They’re always looking for every opportunity and, if they’re the only participants in class struggle, we will indeed have regression. But they don’t have to be, any more than in the past.
    1. s we have often said before, paper is so cheap thatthere is no need for such economy.

      Compare this with the reference in @Kimmerer2013 about responsibility to the tree and not wasting paper: https://hypothes.is/a/pvQ_4ofxEe-NfSOv5wMFGw

      where is the balance?

    1. the new subtlety added by the B is the creation of the spectacle by the market economy or by capitalism and here lies the main difference of his critique so what's the objective of the spectacle the spectacle aims to produce the same passive and predictable individual everywhere a spectator this new being is a passive consumer instead of an active participant in society

      for - question - the society of the spectacle - is it just another critique of capitalism?

      question - the society of the spectacle - is it just another critique of capitalism? - In short, no. It adds something new. - The new subtlety added by the creation of the spectacle by the market economy or by capitalism is that - the spectacle aims to produce the same passive and predictable individual everywhere - ** A SPECTATOR!" - This new being is - a passive consumer instead of - an active participant in society - The Spectator - sacrifices his authenticity to fit in society and - isn't a decision maker in his life anymore - The spectator is a passive human being who just awaits orders to execute (and consume)

  3. Sep 2024
    1. This industrial religion, evolving from monastic systems to modern enterprises, highlights the continuity between religious structures and capitalist production

      for - quote - roots of industrial capitalism - found in medieval monasticism - Michel Bauwens on Pierre Musso - question - what was the impact of monasticism on modern capitalism? How did it become so pathological,?

    2. Pierre Musso's book "La Religion industrielle: Monastère, manufacture, usine. Une généalogie de l'entreprise

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

  4. Aug 2024
    1. Salesman documents the work of a group of door-to-door Bible salesmen in New England and Florida. Deeper down, the film is a dissection of the degenerative and devastating effects of capitalism on small towns and individuals, but more than any political statement the film is about normal people in all their ugliness and truthfulness.

      see also: Barnouw, Erik (1993), Documentary a History of the Non-fiction Film (PDF), New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 241–242, retrieved March 30, 2020

    1. CHINESE AMBASSADOR Exactly. But you have always taught us that liberty is the same thing as capitalism, as if life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot be crushed by greed. Your American dream is financial, not ethical.

      West Wing S7 E 11 "Internal Displacement"<br /> http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/search.php?flag=getTranscript&id=145<br /> written by Aaron Sorkin & Bradley Whitford

      A powerful quote about what really matters in America

    1. Thus, even where bosses expect attrition, the data shows they get substantially more attrition than they wanted. As a result, 29 percent of these companies are now facing substantial recruitment challenges, as the scale of resignations created serious operational and staffing problems. This misalignment between expectation and reality has left many companies struggling to fill the gaps left by departing employees.

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

  5. Jul 2024
    1. It seems ludicrous to imagine that these vitalresources incapable of further expansionwould become essentially free of charge.

      for - question - transition - from capitalism to a form of socialism?

      question - capitalism to a form of socialism? - To say it seems ludicrous is an opinion that makes sense from a traditional capitalists perspective - From a socialist perspective, it seems feasible - Nothing is free of charge, however, even in socialism, there is always some price an individual must pay, it's more about the incentive structure that differentiates the two - capitalism - polarized towards self-centric perspective - socialism -balanced self-and-other perspective

      adjacency - between - capitalism - socialism - differing perspective on self/other worldview - adjacency relationship - While capitalism relies on a self-centric perspective, socialism relies on a more balanced self/other perspective

    1. for - transition - renewable energy - won't work - because - the price is wrong! - Brett Christopher - green energy - the price is wrong - transition - alternative to capitalism - book - The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism won't Save the Planet - Brett Christopher

      summary - This book provides rationale for why capitalism won't scale renewable energy, but a public sector government approach might - What about the alternative of community-owned or cooperative-owned energy infrastructure? A pipe dream? - Is renewable energy just not profitable and therefore has to be subsidized? - Perhaps it could be seen as a stopgap to buy us time until fusion, deep geothermal or other viable, scalable options become widespread?

      from - Planet Critical podcast - 6th Mass Extinction - interview with paleontologist Peter Brennan - https://hyp.is/3ss3Vj9vEe-iDX-3vRVlFw/docdrop.org/video/cP8FXbPrEiI/

    1. book that's sort of making its rounds in the climate World these days um by this author Brett Christopher I foret what it's called 00:31:25 um oh what is it called oh the price is wrong yeah about how Renewables yeah they're cheaper than ever which people always point at those graphs but just because of the way that you know utilities are set up and the energy system works they're not profitable and 00:31:38 they won't be in the near term

      for - book - The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism won't Save the Planet - Brett Christopher

      to - book - The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism won't Save the Planet - Brett Christopher - https://hyp.is/h01Tyj9uEe-rEhuQgFWRuQ/www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3069-the-price-is-wrong

  6. Jun 2024
    1. The classic account of industrialisation was David Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus (1969), which argued that economic transformation was rooted in three crucial substitutions: of ‘machines ... for human skill and effort’, of ‘inanimate for animate sources of power’, and of ‘mineral for vegetable or animal substances’ as raw materials.
    2. In​ 1880 Britain could with some justification be called the ‘workshop of the world’: it produced more than 20 per cent of global industrial output and about 40 per cent of the world’s manufactured exports. In the nearly half-century since Samuel published his essay of that name, historians have done much to undermine the narrative of an ‘industrial revolution’ bookended by the invention of the spinning jenny in 1764 and the New Poor Law of 1834.

      There's an interesting linkage going on here between the industrial revolution (and thus possibly Capitalism) with the creation and even litigation of "the poor" classes in Britain.

      Did "the poor" exist in the same way they do today prior to the Industrial Revolution? What are the subtle differences? (Compare with Thompson, E. P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present, no. 38 (1967): 56–97.)

    1. for - progress trap - AI music - critique - Folia Sound Studio - to - P2P Foundation - Michel Bauwens - Commons Transition Plan - Netarchical Capitalism - Predatory Capitalism

      to - P2P Foundation - Michel Bauwens - Commons Transition Plan - Netarchical Capitalism - Predatory Capitalism https://hyp.is/o-Hp-DCAEe-8IYef613YKg/wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Commons_Transition_Plan

    2. I think that Noam chsky said exactly a year ago in New York Times around a year ago that generative AI is not any 00:18:37 intelligence it's just a plagiarism software that learned stealing human uh work transform it and sell it as much as possible as cheap as possible

      for - AI music theft - citation - Noam Chomsky - quote - Noam Chomsky - AI as plagiarism on a grand scale

      to - P2P Foundation - commons transition plan - Michel Bauwens - netarchical capitalism - predatory capitalism - https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Commons_Transition_Plan#Solving_the_value_crisis_through_a_social_knowledge_economy

    1. in a capitalist society like the USA the collective element failed and in a communist society like the former USSR the individual element failed

      for - quote - comparing capitalism and communism

      quote - comparing capitalism and communism - ( see below)

      • in a capitalist society like the USA
        • the collective element failed and
      • in a communist society like the former USSR
        • the individual element failed.

      comment - polar abstractions don't work because reality is somewhere in the middle

    1. Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - Author(s): E. P. Thompson - Source: Past & Present, No. 38 (Dec., 1967), pp. 56-97 - Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society - Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/649749

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Dan Allosso (@danallosso)</span> in Howard Zinn's A People's History, Part 1 (YouTube) (<time class='dt-published'>09/16/2021 09:28:56</time>)</cite></small>

    1. Notions such as the common good, commonsense, and common culture could sometimes cause as many prob-lems as they purported to solve.

      Are the commons (common good, common sense, and common culture) anathema in an uber-capitalist society where everyone is generally out for themselves and often only "covering" when their needs align with societies' needs?

  7. May 2024
    1. The Law of Unintended Consequences is the only certainty of complex systems, and the biosphere of the planet is the most complex system we know of

      for - progress traps - transcending capitalism

      progress trap - transcending capitalism - As Stop Reset Go and Deep Humanity has consistently advocated: - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=progress+trap - there is an urgent need to establish a science of progress traps in order to develop a way to integrate systematically into all human activities. - It is a new field of research for risk analysis and praxis that is based on explicitly recognizing the difference between nature and human nature, between the fundamental nature of reality (emptiness / shunyata - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=emptiness and the symbolosphere we inhabit as humans which is inherently limited by our current reductionist way of knowing reality - Applying systems thinking and complexity is dependent on the explicit recognition of the gap between the inherent limitations of the evolutionary process of human learning which results from - human bias and which always produces - finite number of relationships which we use to make decisions upon and enact in the world

    1. In his 2021 signing of the executive order on competition, President Biden said: “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation.”

      I have horrible news for you, President Biden.

    1. Meanwhile, Amazon and other ebook retails are pushing full-steam ahead to promote AI-generated content at the expense of real authors and artists. Publisher who actually pay authors and artists and editors now have to compete with AI-generated material churned out in bulk and sold at 99 cents. And while it is easy to shrug this off if you are outside the industry and claim, "Well, the cream rises to the top," anyone that has been around the industry long enough knows that what rises to the top is what Amazon's algorithms push there. And the AI bots are much better at manipulating the algorithms that real people.

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

    1. open source paradigms, with its copyleft licensing scheme

      for - adjacency - open source - copyleft - Achilles Heel - unpaid workers - predatory capitalism

      adjacency - between - open source - copyleft - Achilles Heel - predatory capitalism - unpaid workers - adjacency statement - The Achilles Heel of the open source copyleft system is that it allows everyone to participate. Everyone can look at the innovation, including corporate raiders in it for their own self-interest. - This enables predatory capitalism. The well-capitalized corporations take the best open source ideas and integrate them into their own private systems. With their abundant capitalization, they can maintain the existent structural inequality - Meanwhile, most open source software is maintained by underpaid programmers

  8. Apr 2024
  9. Mar 2024
    1. Ongweso Jr., Edward. “The Miseducation of Kara Swisher: Soul-Searching with the Tech ‘Journalist.’” The Baffler, March 29, 2024. https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-miseducation-of-kara-swisher-ongweso.

      ᔥ[[Pete Brown]] in Exploding Comma

    2. By insisting the issue with Uber was largely cultural, Swisher ends up affirming the myth that Uber was not only an inevitable but ultimately good innovation, a few bad apples notwithstanding.

      Perhaps without the toxic capitalism portion Uber may have been a great innovation? Maybe it would have been better as a co-op, community, or government supported organization which put the value into both drivers' and riders' pockets?

      Naturally the crazy hype which generated the VC money would have been needed to be replaced, so the question becomes: who would have funded the start up?

    1. Slavery was thus a logicaloutgrowth of the colonial class system imagined by Hakluyt. It emergedfrom three interrelated phenomena: harsh labor conditions, the treatment ofindentures as commodities, and, most of all, the deliberate choice to breedchildren so that they should become an exploitable pool of workers.

      While there is a strong thread of hierarchical male domination over women and their bodies, is some of the anti-abortion movement in the 21st century an historical appendage or outgrowth of "breeding children" as an exploitable pool of workers for capitalists?

    2. The hallowed American dream is thegold standard by which politicians and voters alike are meant to measurequality of life as each generation pursues its own definition of happinessunfettered by the restraints of birth (who your parents are) or station (theposition you start out from in the class system).

      Did it help that America was broadly formed during the start of the Industrial Revolution and at a time in which social mobility was dramatically different than the period of history which proceeded it?

      And how much of this difference is split with the idea of the rise of (toxic) capitalism and the switch to "keeping up with the Jonses" which also tends to drive class distinctions?

    1. Whether this "personalised advertisement" really works better than traditional one is up to debate. For Tim Hang, author of "Subtime Attention Crisis" and for Cory Doctorow, author of "How to destroy surveillance capitalism", the real impact on sales is negligible but as marketers think it works, they invest massive money in it, making the whole technology a very lucrative bubble.

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

    1. The whole industry is built on this concept of planned obsolescence. That’s the term that I think IBM famously came up with in the sixties, where basically you’re intentionally trying to constantly sell people on the new new thing. And that’s what drives the stock price up. And that’s what drives the press cycle. And that’s what gets people to buy new products and things. And so, the whole industry is predicated around this idea of there’s always a new thing around the horizon.

      Where did the concept of planned obsolescence originate? Was it really IBM as Alex Wright suggests here?

      How does planned obsolescence drive capitalism? And as a result of that is there a balance between future innovation and waste? Is there a mechanism within capitalism that can fix this waste (or dramatically mitigate it)?

    1. It is a specific set of social relations resulting from capitalist accumulation, which not only drive the reproduction of capitalism but act as a central stabilizing mechanism in modern society.
    1. “Inherent in the dynamics of capitalism is a powerful drive to earn profits, invest them, innovate and thus grow the economy….These features of capitalism, as they are constituted today, work together to produce an economic and political reality that is highly destructive of the environment.” (7) Much of the book explores this drive of capitalism toward unlimited quantitative growth, the role of the market in this drive, the centrality of the corporation in carrying out accumulation, the wastefulness of consumption under capitalism, and the domination of the corporations over governments.

      "domination of the corporations over governments"

    2. Speth apparently agrees with other writers such as Naomi Klein or Herman Daly. Daly, for example, has written a series of notable books and articles arguing for a “Steady State Economy.” He argues that the growth-driven industrial economy we live under is incompatible with an ecologically sustainable society. Daly advocates an economy which develops qualitatively, as he puts it, but not quantitatively (with appropriate and balanced development of the poorer nations). “The remaining natural world no longer is able to provide the sources and sinks for the metabolic throughput necessary to sustain the existing oversized economy—much less a growing one….The economy must conform to the rules of a steady state—seek qualitative development, but stop aggregate quantitative growth.” (Daly 2008; 1) Better not bigger. He believes that such an economy would produce as much happiness among the people as our existing system—if not more. “…The correlation between absolute income and happiness extends only up to some threshold of ‘sufficiency’….” (10)

      Better not bigger

    3. Yet he is dissatisfied. While the establishment environmentalists won certain improvements (in cleaner air and water, for example), overall the environment has gotten much worse. “We have been winning battles…but losing the war.” (xii) This recognition has moved him to his left.

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

    4. There is an interesting development in the anti-climate change/ecological movement. Most environmentalist leaders and theorists have been liberals or moderates. They have seen capitalism and its state as the necessary framework for preventing ecological catastrophe. But after decades of failure, some of these environmentalists have come to accept the analysis of radical ecologists, that the cause of climate warming (and other ecological problems) is the capitalist system, its drive to accumulate and grow indefinitely, its market, its inequality, poverty, and exploitation, and its national states. Yet these same environmentalists reject the radicals’ conclusion that capitalism must be replaced by socialism—meaning some kind of cooperative, nonprofit, economy with democratic planning and production for use. (As I will discuss, there is a decentralized and radically democratic version of socialism which is advocated by anarchists.)

      big environmentalist shifting toward anti-capitalism

  10. Feb 2024
    1. The GNR technologies do not divide clearly into commercial andmilitary uses; given their potential in the market, it’s hard to imaginepursuing them only in national laboratories. With their widespreadcommercial pursuit, enforcing relinquishment will require a verificationregime similar to that for biological weapons, but on an unprecedentedscale. This, inevitably, will raise tensions between our individual pri-vacy and desire for proprietary information, and the need for verifica-tion to protect us all. We will undoubtedly encounter strong resistanceto this loss of privacy and freedom of action.

      While Joy looks at the Biological and Chemical Weapons Conventions as well as nuclear nonproliferation ideas, the entirety of what he's looking at is also embedded in the idea of gun control in the United States as well. We could choose better, but we actively choose against our better interests.

      What role does toxic capitalism have in pushing us towards these antithetical goals? The gun industry and gun lobby have had tremendous interest on that front. Surely ChatGPT and other LLM and AI tools will begin pushing on the profitmaking levers shortly.

    2. Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of theimagined future, driven—this time by great financial rewards andglobal competition—despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating whatit may be like to try to live in a world that is the realistic outcome ofwhat we are creating and imagining.
    3. But thesewarnings haven’t been widely publicized; the public discussions havebeen clearly inadequate. There is no profit in publicizing the dangers.
  11. Jan 2024
    1. ll this raises the question of what “capitalism” is to begin with, aquestion on which there is no consensus at all. The word wasoriginally invented by socialists, who saw capitalism as that systemwhereby those who own capital command the labor of those who donot.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. (my bias is showing through - marketing people don't call it surveillance capitalism, to be fair. That's a pejorative term. They just call it doing their job, generating leads, and increasing conversions.)
    2. just shooting from the hip, to me, I'm glad that subscription services like Netflix and Spotify are becoming more popular. That means that the companies (as opposed to Google & Facebook) don't have the incentive to follow this "surveillance capitalism," i.e. building increasingly sophisticated advertising technology predicated upon the behavioral history of users.(my bias is showing through - marketing people don't call it surveillance capitalism, to be fair. That's a pejorative term. They just call it doing their job, generating leads, and increasing conversions.)
      • for: elephants in the room - financial industry at the heart of the polycrisis, polycrisis - key role of finance industry, Marjorie Kelly, Capitalism crisis, Laura Flanders show, book - Wealth Supremacy - how the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Captialism Drive Today's Crises

      • Summary

        • This talk really emphasizes the need for the Stop Reset Go / Deep Humanity Wealth to Wellth program
        • Interviewee Marjorie Kelly started Business Ethics magainze in 1987 to show the positive side of business After 30 years, she found that it was still tinkering at the edges. Why? - because it wasn't addressing the fundamental issue.
        • Why there hasn't been noticeable change in spite of all these progressive efforts is because we avoided questioning the fundamental assumption that maximizing returns to shareholders and gains to shareholder portfolios is good for people and planet.**** It turns out that it isn't. It's fundamentally bad for civilization and has played a major role in shaping today's polycrisis.
        • Why wealth supremacy is entangled with white supremacy
        • Financial assets are the subject
          • Equity and bonds use to be equal to GDP in the 1950s.
          • Now it's 5 times as much
        • Financial assets extracts too much from common people
        • Question: Families are swimming in debt. Who owns all this financial debt? ...The financial elites do.
      • meme

        • wealth supremacy and white supremacy are entangled
    1. Which is exactly what you do in the book. And what did you find? - So what I do, I take apart the operating system of capitalism, which is, and I look at seven myths, really that drive it.
      • for: book - wealth supremacy - 7 myths, 7 myths of Capitalism, capital bias, definition - capital bias

      • DESCRIPTION: 7 MYTHS of CAPITALISM

        • The Myth of Maximization
          • example of absurdity of maximization
            • Bill Gates had $10 billion. Then he invested it and got $300 billion. There's no limit to how much wealth an individual can accumulate. It is absurd.
        • Myth of the Income Statement
          • Gains to capital called profit is always to be increased and
          • Gains of labor is called an expense, is always to be decreased
        • Myth of Materiality (also called capital bias)
        • definition: capital bias
          • If something impacts capital, it matters
          • If something impacts society or ecology, it doesn't matter
        • With the capital bias, only accumulating more capital matters. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS. This is how most accountants and CFO's view the world.
      • quote: Laura Flanders

        • The capital is what matters. We're aiming for more capital and nothing else really matters. That's the operating system of the economy. So the real world is immaterial to this world of wealth as held in stocks and shares and financial instruments.
    2. we're not in the economy of the 1950s anymore. And we act as though we are, that finance is this productive force and it's building, it's building wealth. Well, for the most part, it's not. It's, there's so much financialization, so many financial assets, that they've become an extractive force. And a big piece of this 00:06:37 is that we're not really distinguishing between productive investments and speculative investments
      • for: quote - Marjorie Kelly, quote - finacialization, progress trap - financialization, progress trap - capitalism, speculative investing

      • quote: Marjorie Kelly

        • we're not in the economy of the 1950s anymore.
        • And we act as though we are, that finance is this productive force and it's building, it's building wealth.
        • Well, for the most part, it's not.
        • There's so much financialization, so many financial assets, that they've become an extractive force.
          • And a big piece of this is that we're not really distinguishing between
            • productive investments and
            • speculative investments
  12. Dec 2023
    1. Wells attempts in this essay to help mankind "pull it's mind together" for the betterment of people and the planet. How is this supposed to happen in a modern media environment which is designed to pull our minds apart as rapidly as possible?

      How might the strength of capitalism be leveraged to push people back toward a common middle rather than split them apart?

    1. An idea at the heart of capitalism is that owners of capital should aim to increase the capital they personally own and the profit they make from it.
      • for: capitalism - heart of, adjacency - capitalism - self - othering - societal aspiration

      • adjacency between

        • heart of capitalism
        • self other dualism
        • societal aspiration
      • adjacency statement
        • The narrative that underlies personal gain is the socially acquired belief in a self and other dualism.
        • This is a deep psychological construct facilitated in early childhood development by what in Deep Humanity praxis is referred to as the mOTHER, the Most significant OTHER at the beginning of our journey in life.
        • From that point onwards, social learning propels us to objectify the world, and in particular others. Self and other co-emerge from early childhood learning.
        • As climate scientist Kevin Anderson notes, the elite 1%, responsible for an outsized ecological footprint are the result of the dominant capitalist narrative. It constitutes the social norm of "good" for most people. It is the societal aspiration from which 1% of the world population, approximately 80 million people, surface from the 8 billion as the elites in their respective field and are compensated through financial and material reward.
        • This societal aspiration aligns the majority of people to peer in the same direction of trying to win the game and bubble up to the 1% to indulge the rewards of a luxury lifestyle.
        • It is this same winning that will produce the next generation of 1%. They are being groomed as we speak.
        • Yet, their runaway success, and especially their reward is what can seal the fate of our civilization.
        • It is this societal aspiration role of capitalism as the dominant narrative that is the root generator of the next 1% and must be mitigated if we are to address the root of inequality.
      • for: climate crisis - elites, Kevin Anderson - elites, carbon emissions - elites, adjacency - elites - carbon inequality - incentives - luxury - capitalism

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

      • author: Kevin Anderson
      • date: Nov. 29, 2023

      • comment

      • adjacency between
        • elites
        • capitalism
        • free market
        • incentives
        • double bind
        • wicked problem
        • inequality
        • carbon inequality
        • luxury industry
      • adjacency statement
        • This article was pulled by "The Conversation" for being too controversial
        • It addresses the double-bind / wicked problems that we find ourselves in.
        • It's not just that the elites that are the highest per capita polluters, but
          • it is an indictment of the entire philosophy and worldview of capitalism and the market economy which produces winners and losers and
          • the winners reap enormous resource benefits, including being able to afford luxury items as rewards which constitute the largest ecological footprint of all
        • while at any one time, there is always a minority of the 1%, who hold the most outsized ecological footprint of all, the logic that produced that 1% also serves as the incentives for the majority of the 99%, who because of the inherent precarity created by capitalism, will fight and struggle to become part of that 1%
        • So while one generation of the 1% die off, a new generation is born and created by the incentive structure of scarcity and precarity.
        • In this sense, capitalism has its own self-reinforcing, positive feedback loop that keeps the masses of the disenfranchised aspiring to the same high resource and ecological footprint, luxury lifestyle
        • Look at the culture industry of sports, entertainment, movies, music, TV, etc. and of business in general. The leaders of these and ALL fields are celebrated as heros and they all reward themselves with an ultra-high carbon intensity, luxury lifestyle.
        • Unless we do more than simply demonize the current set of elites, and recognize the root cause and change the incentive structure itself, we will only ever deal with the symptom and not the problem, and continue to generate the next generation of elites
        • The luxury lifestyle industry is a important role-player in the self-reinforcing feedback loop
  13. Nov 2023
    1. The FTC has accused Kochava of violating the FTC Act by amassing and disclosing "a staggering amount of sensitive and identifying information about consumers," alleging that Kochava's database includes products seemingly capable of identifying nearly every person in the United States. According to the FTC, Kochava's customers, ostensibly advertisers, can access this data to trace individuals' movements—including to sensitive locations like hospitals, temporary shelters, and places of worship, with a promised accuracy within "a few meters"—over a day, a week, a month, or a year. Kochava's products can also provide a "360-degree perspective" on individuals, unveiling personally identifying information like their names, home addresses, phone numbers, as well as sensitive information like their race, gender, ethnicity, annual income, political affiliations, or religion, the FTC alleged.

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

      So you have nothing to hide?

  14. Oct 2023
    1. f Chinese modernity would not exist without the process of turning Summer Palace loot into art and commodities
    2. commodities in the capitalist market exchange.
    1. This hindered China's industrialization efforts and prevented them from entering the capitalist era.

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

    2. hina and Western nations granted various rights and privileges to the foreigners, including extraterritoriality and the practice of Christianity

      trade relations gave extra privileges, start of colonisation

    1. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

      This quote is a feature of toxic capitalism, which should be efficient enough to allow a person to quickly obtain another job to thereby make the issue moot.

      Part of it is tied into identity as well.

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

      Some related ideas that are suggesting some sort of thesis for improving the idea of ungrading: - We measure the things we care about. - In Education, we care about learning and understanding, but measuring these outside of testing and evaluation is difficult at best (therefor ungrading). - No one cares about your GPA six months after you graduate. - Somehow we've tied up evaluations and grades into the toxic capitalism and competition within US culture. Some of this is tied into educational movements related to Frederick Winslow Taylor and Harvards Eliot. - Hierarchies instituted by the Great Chain of Being have confounded our educational process.

  15. Aug 2023
      • for: fossil capitalism, progress trap, intersectionality, social norms, social norms - waste, externalization, capitalism
      • title

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

        • a story that illustrates the intersectionality of fossil capitalism
          • progress trap
          • exploitation
          • tragedy of the commons
          • fossil fuel industry
          • gold rush
          • externalization
          • fossil capitalism
      • Comment

        • Yet another example of capitalism's tendency to externalize manifests at the most basic level.
        • The tendency to treat nature as an inexhaustable garbage dumping ground seems to be built into our culture's economic norms taught to us by most parents and society at large.
        • There are not enough parents that teach their children to love, respect and feel that they are an intrinsic part of nature.
        • The externalization our society teaches us in the form of destructive, widely-accepted social norms of waste such as::
          • having the concept of waste and garbage
          • garbage taken out once a week
          • waste bins everywhere
          • keep our backyard clean, but at the expense of trucking out our garbage to some unknown place
        • has been enculturated into us from early age
    1. The industrial worker now has twentyhours of free time a week that his grandfather did not have.

      Where does this wealth ultimately go in the long run? Not to the worker, but primarily to the corporation competing against them for the added value.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. I’m going to start with the U.S.; technology in the U.S. is caught up in American late-stage (or financialized) capitalism where profitability isn’t the goal; perpetual return on investment is. Given this, the tools that we’re seeing developed by corporations reinforce capitalist agendas.
      • for: corporate power, technology - capitalism, capitalism - exploitation, Danah Boyd, progress trap
      • paraphrase
      • quote
        • technology in the U.S. is caught up in American late-stage (or financialized) capitalism
          • where profitability isn’t the goal;
          • perpetual return on investment is.
        • Given this, the tools that we’re seeing developed by corporations
        • reinforce capitalist agendas.
        • Innovation will require pushing past this capitalist infrastructure to achieve the social benefits and civic innovation that will work in the United States.
        • China is a whole other ball of wax.
        • If you want to go there, follow up with me. But pay attention to Taobao centers.
        • We haven’t hit peak awful yet.
        • I have every confidence that social and civic innovation can be beneficial in the long run
          • with a caveat that I think that climate change dynamics might ruin all of that
        • but no matter what, I don’t think we’re going to see significant positive change by 2030.
        • I think things are going to get much worse before they start to get better.
        • I should also note that I don’t think that many players have taken responsibility for what’s unfolding. -Yes, tech companies are starting to see that things might be a problem,
          • but that’s only on the surface. -News media does not at all acknowledge its role in amplifying discord,
          • or its financialized dynamics.
        • The major financiers of this economy don’t take any responsibility for what’s unfolding. Etc.
      • author: Dana Boyd
        • principal researcher, Microsoft Research
        • founder, Data & Society
    1. Meador, Jake. “The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church.” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/christian-church-communitiy-participation-drop/674843/.

      Meador looks at how churches might offer better community as a balm to W.E.I.R.D. lifeways and toxic capitalism.

      Why must religion be the source for these communal and social supports? Why can't alternate social structures or institutions handle these functions?

      Is this why the religious right is also so heavily opposed to governmental social support programs? Are they replacing some of the needs and communal desires people in need have? Why couldn't increased governmental support programs be broader and more holistic in their leanings to cover not only social supports, but human contact and community building as well.

      Do some of these tensions between a mixed W.E.I.R.D. and non-W.E.I.R.D Americans cause a lot of the split political identities we see in the last few decades? What is the balm for this during the transition?

    2. In a workist culture that believes dignity is grounded in accomplishment, simply reclaiming this alternative form of dignity becomes a radical act.

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

    3. Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children. Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.

      Extreme focus on financial and professional success has driven people to give less time to communal spaces and experiences including religious life.

      Is this specific to America's brand of toxic capitalism or do other WEIRD economies experience this?

  16. Jul 2023
    1. capitalist economics is notoriously bad at considering non-human beings and it's also notoriously bad at considering 00:10:56 the future Beyond a certain amount of time
      • for: capitalism faults
        • bad at considering the long term future
        • bad at considering other species
    1. It's noteworthy that RFC 7258 doesn't consider that bad actors are limited to governments, and personally, I think many advertising industry schemes for collecting data are egregious examples of pervasive monitoring and hence ought also be considered an attack on the Internet that ought be mitigated where possible. However, the Internet technical community clearly hasn't acted in that way over the last decade.

      Advertising industry schemes considered an attack

      Stephen Farrell's perspective.

    1. The second great separation followed the industrial revolution.
      • Second great separation
        • Industrial Revolution
          • The early enclosure movement during the 1600s
          • Prior to the enclosures, land was held in common for public use, not owned by individuals.
          • The rise of capitalism also occurred during this time.
            • Adam Smith wrote his landmark book, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776.
            • Land was privatized so the most efficient use of land could be determined
              • by market competition rather than
              • community consensus.
            • Labor then also had to be ​“commodified,” or bought and sold,
              • so non-farmers could work for wages and buy food and the other necessities of life they had been getting from the land.
            • With reliance on working for wages, buying, and selling
              • the necessity for personal relationships were diminished.
            • With the diminished necessity for personal relationships,
              • the social cohesion within families, communities and society began to diminish as well.
          • The persistence of chronic poverty and malnutrition, even during times of tremendous economic growth and individual wealth, are direct consequences of a growing sense of disconnectedness from each other that was nourished by the industrial era of economic development.
    1. As socialist realism was imposed on Soviet writers, one form of permissible resistance, of finding an inner freedom, was to read translations of foreign writers. No private library was complete without Hemingway, Faulkner, London, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Salinger—all officially permitted as “progressive writers” exposing the “ulcers of the capitalist world.”
  17. Jun 2023
    1. Technology is valuable and empowering, but at what end direct cost? Consumers don't have available data for the actual costs of the options they're choosing in many contexts.

      What if that reprocessing costs the equivalent of three glasses of waters? Is it worth it for our environment, especially when the direct costs to the "consumer" are hidden into advertising models.

      (via Brenna)

  18. May 2023
    1. fighting the fear of not having enough money

      In a capitalist society, where the profit motive is the prime directive, the fear of not having enough money is one of (if not, the) greatest fears we have in our old age.

      My hope of a better tomorrow includes a society that has outgrown the profit motive and sincerely cares for everyone, even the old and unemployed.

    1. Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity. In 1991, at the bottom of the recession, a survey of workers at large firms by International Survey Research Corporation indicated that 25 percent feared being laid off. In 1996, despite the sharply lower unemployment rate and the tighter labor market, the same survey organization found that 46 percent were fearful of a job layoff.
    1. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more. That’s the way you keep societies efficient and healthy from the point of view of the corporations. And as universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is exactly what is being imposed. And we’ll see more and more of it.

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

    1. Is there potentially a worry amongst Republicans that by losing the "culture wars" that they'll somehow lose control of society and the capitalist order which funds their party and helps to keep them in control?

      Link to Gramsci's idea about cultural hegemony: https://hypothes.is/a/pRnPLPTtEe2_pyt2-Z7pwg

    2. Cultural hegemony is therefore used to maintain consent to the capitalist order, rather than the use of force to maintain order.
  19. Apr 2023
    1. Why do we devalue education? Is it such a commodity now that its transmission value is worth pennies on the dollar?

      Is Government requirement and support for education part of what causes the devaluation of the "educational market"? If so, how would one decouple this process to increase the wages of educators? Is a capitalistic version the best way to go, or is it better to socialize it further and inject more money into it versus other choices?

      Major nationwide strike forming minimum wage with variances for local consumer indices and city/state costs of living? Something which would drive competition for child care and teaching spaces? Wages that would push up the social value of education? Create a market for competition for teachers at the local level as well as between areas?

    2. Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/lV19ytGBEe2ynWMu34UKUg

      This depreciation is done at the lowest level of exchange and caused the system to collapse rather quickly. What level is our current exchange done at such that the inequalities are pushed up multiple levels making the system seem more stable? How is instability introduced? How could it be minimized?

      Our current system is valued both by time and skill (using the measure of payment per hour).

      Compare this with salespeople who are paid on commission rather than on an hourly basis. They are then using their skill of sales ability and balancing time (and levels of chance) to create their outcomes, but at the same time, some of their work is built on the platform that sales management or the company provides. Who builds this and how do they get paid for it? Who provides sales leads? How is this calculated into the system costs?

      How do these ideas fit into the Bullshit Jobs thesis?

  20. Mar 2023
    1. The lineage of domination from childhood in schools and at home to adulthood in the workplace is clear. Its purpose is to habituate us to hierarchy and psychological enslavement. Our aptitude for autonomy is atrophied and our vitality is suppressed so that we are reconciled with regimentation and can replicate and reproduce it throughout our interpersonal lives, politics, and cultures. That is Why Revolution Needs Therapy.

      It's incredible how our work ideology is shaped by a hierarchical way of thinking that you can see in many places of our society.

    1. Historical geometric growth revealed by this data suggests an average growth rate of 7.9% per year, which we extrapolate to 2050.

      Quinn Slobodian's Crack-Up Capitalism may be a new form of disaster capitalism that will emerge as the polycrisis continues - https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2Fr8k0r3dZsog%2F&group=world - as the growth of elites attest, we can count on capitalism to capitalize on disaster.

    1. crack up capitalism that is a form of economic activity 00:04:47 propagated by people whose profit model and their kind of a normative vision of change and the social future relies on an idea of an accelerating process of social dissolution and an accelerating process of political 00:05:00 fragmentation this is a form of this is sort of a profit model and a kind of a political vision that sees an acceleration in the near future and the medium-term future 00:05:14 of processes of political crack-up
      • Definition
        • Crack-Up Capitalism is defined as
          • a form of economic activity
          • propagated by people
            • whose profit model and
            • their kind of a normative vision of
              • change and
              • the social future
            • relies on an idea
            • of an accelerating process of
              • social dissolution and
              • an accelerating process of political fragmentation
                • in the near future and
                • the medium-term future
    1. Ads, Andrew and James discuss where the the climate movement is right now, how deep time plays into the effects we are having on the planet, when good people do bad things because of poor systems and what happens next if 1.5C fails.
      • 21:52 Carbon credits, carbon markets
        • it's a scam designed to perpetuate fossil fuel use, in a phoney war against the climate crisis
        • Offsets were designed to allow polluters to pay others to create schemes that would compensate or "offset" that pollution. The classic example WAS afforestation, the planting of trees that can sequester that carbon.
        • Carbon neutrality comes from this idea that you can keep polluting if you offset it and become "carbon neutral"
        • A company may decarbonize a lot of their supply chain but may struggle to get rid of airflights around the world. In that case, they use offsets. When companies analyze the very difficult choices, they take the easy way out and use carbon offsets
        • However, there is so much offsets for afforestation now that there isn't enough land on earth
        • Carbon markets are a recipe for grifting and fraud or zero impacts
        • This is the current state of offsets

      31:00 Shell oil carbon offset greenwashing scam - the sky zero proposal - Shell claims they can offset all the O+G emissions out of the ground - it is preposterous - there's not enough land on earth when you tally up all the carbon offset afforestation schemes

      • 32:30 Neo-colonialism

        • rich white man can offset his emissions by buying land from a developing nation. Now the indigenous people cannot use that land for any reason.
        • also, will require huge amount of water to grow those trees
        • we don't have enough land and we don't have 100 years, only 5 years.
        • nature-based solutions are an industrial, myopic approach
      • 37:00 Deferred Emission Reduction

        • a lot of carbon credits are called deferred emission reduction credits.
        • this is avoided emissions - ie. trees in a forest with 100 ton of sequestering potential
        • this is promise to not destroy the biosphere any further so it's not removing any existing carbon
        • maybe multiple people might own the same forest, or someone might come along and burn it down
        • Trees are vulnerable to climate impacts - ie. Microsoft bought a large forest in California that later burned down in a climate change intensified wildfire
      • 40:00 can we do anything within the extractive capitalist system?

        • some people claim that as long as extractivist capitalism still persists, we cannot have system change
        • also a neocolonialist element - global north exploited the global south to create most of the emissions in the atmospheric commons
        • a number of people are beginning to see that an extractivist capitalist system is not in line with effectively addressing the climate crisis
        • wind, solar, etc has displaced electricity generation in a number of countries like in the UK. However, these are only a few countries.Renewables are helping increase overall energy production
      • 44:22: Stop burning fossil fuels

        • t doesn't matter if investments in renewables triple. It won't make a difference if we don't significantly stop burning fossil fuels at the same time.
      • 47:00 economic growth prevents real change

        • Insisting on 1, 2 or 3% growth, will limit the response to the climate threat to render it irrelevant
        • Climate change is still mostly an optimization problem. They are more concerned with economic damage.
        • Economists believe that anything that threatens economic growth cannot be accepted
      • 51:00 Degrowth making headway

        • Degrowth scholars are getting more attention on the need to decouple economic grwoth from climate policies
      • 52:10 Is there a positive future scenario - The role of solidarity

        • Solidarity is the greatest strength we can harness.
        • The success of Doughnut Economics gives me hope
        • The richest 1% must reign in their impacts and redistribute to allow the impoverished to live humane lives
        • We can all have good lives and we don't have to manufacture that wonder
        • This is what it is to be human
    1. We started out collecting this information by accident, as part of our project to automate everything, but soon realized that it had economic value. We could use it to make the process self-funding. And so mechanized surveillance has become the economic basis of the modern tech industry.

      Surveillance Capitalism by Accident

      • Title

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

        • Russell Means
      • Context

        • The following speech was given by Russell Means in July 1980, before several thousand people who had assembled from all over the world for the Black Hills International Survival Gathering, in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
        • It was Russell Means's most famous speech.
    1. ‘networked accumulation’ platform firms (hereafter NAPFs) rely on existing or easily replaceable assets with minimal infrastructure, as distinct to platform firm models that extend or complement transport and accommodation infrastructures through the acquisition of their own fleets of vehicles or suites of properties (Stehlin et al., 2020). NAPFs typically launch local services under a cloud of ‘regulatory indeterminacy’ (Stehlin et al., 2020, 1256), relying on being “simultaneously embedded and disembedded from the space-times they mediate” (Graham, 2020, 454)

      The thread in this article is the paradoxical relationship to local place, using it instrumentally to turn it into space

      This also highlights the grey regulatory zone that is typical here

  21. Feb 2023
    1. And a theory of "multilayered social worlds", when fully developed, can be a helpful tool in understanding why, in modern Europe, certain phenomena became common enough to catch the attention of physicians, scientists, artists and philosophers. In a current unpublished work, STP suggests that, if the logic of affinity is properly conceptualized, both in terms of its essentially paraconsistent properties as a social logic and in terms of its historical presentation throughout very different societies, one arrives at the conclusion that modern families – in the sense of nuclear familiar units composed of heterossexual parents and their children – do not logically form a basic "atom of kinship" in Levi-Strauss' sense. That is, in modern capitalist societies, the logic of affinity is not composed in such a way as to form a world of its own, it has little synthetic power. In fact, the logic of affinity is most consistent within capitalist worlds at the points where it is tasked with "stitching together" dynamics dominated by property and value – at the point of contact between family and the production of independent adult workers, or at the intersection between affinity and the State, where the nation-form is born, etc. Because capitalist structures do not respect the internal logic of kinship – which would allow people to socially map not only those that are part of their families and those who are not, but also those that occupy strangely indeterminate positions in this social fabric – it is up to individuals themselves, as they grow up, to develop ways to supplement to this fractured logic. This is what Lacan called the "individual myth of the neurotic": how, in order to become persons  , we must supplement our social existence before other people with an invisible partnership with an "Other", a figure that helps us determine how to distinguish these indeterminate elements of affinity logic and that capitalist sociality does not help to propagate in a consistent and shared way.

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

    1. Mattei, Clara E. The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707138.html.

      I've always wondered why the United States never used the phrase austerity to describe political belt tightening.

  22. Jan 2023
    1. Protecting and practicing fallow time is an act of resistance; it can make us feel out of step with what the prevailing culture tells us.

      Rest is Resistance

      Fallow time, I like that wording

    1. the Enlightenment project, one now seen inrevolutionary quarters as a false dream of liberation that has insteadunleashed unspeakable cruelty upon the world

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

    1. we have individual capitalists who try 00:48:45 to make the most profit and this is linked to their capital and productivity so to achieve more in less time and 00:48:57 productivity is linked to energy [Music] the only source of energy to increase profit is carbon oil and gas and this has resulted in a change in our 00:49:15 atmosphere we have to put an entities if we wish to live in our planet can our capitalism do this based on the current data we won't be able to do so 00:49:28 therefore perhaps we should do the following reflection if capitalism is unable to do so either Humanity will die with it or 00:49:42 Humanity will overcome capitalism so that we can live in our planet

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

    2. that will be my second point and it's something that is not often mentioned capitalism the capitalism that we have known in the 00:47:54 last 30 40 years overcome the climate crisis that the capitalism helped create it's a rhetorical question but it also makes sense because if the answer is no 00:48:06 then we're wasting our time

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

    1. a challenging macro environment

      I wonder if this is à la Google. From the twitter thread:

      Pretty incredible that Google is trying to get away with blaming macroeconomic conditions for their layoffs, when over the last year they’ve spend 57.36B on stock buybacks.

      That’s enough to support the 12,000 laid off engineers at their median engineer compensation for 23 years.

    1. But in the new full-blown capitalist version of evolution, where the drive for accumulation had no limits, life was no longer an end in itself, but a mere instrument for the propagation of DNA sequences—and so the very existence of play was something of a scandal.

      Could refuting the idea of accumulation without limits (and thus capitalism for capitalism's sake) help give humans more focus on what is useful/valuable?

    2. If old-school Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer viewed nature as a marketplace, albeit an unusually cutthroat one, the new version was outright capitalist. The neo-Darwinists assumed not just a struggle for survival, but a universe of rational calculation driven by an apparently irrational imperative to unlimited growth.
    1. What is abrogated here is our right to the future tense, which is the essence of free will, the idea that I can project myself into the future and thus make it a meaningful aspect of my present. This is the essence of autonomy and human agency. Surveillance capitalism’s “means of behavioral modification” at scale erodes democracy from within because, without autonomy in action and in thought, we have little capacity for the moral judgment and critical thinking necessary for a democratic society.

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

    2. surveillance capitalism represents an unprecedented concentration of knowledge and the power that accrues to such knowledge. They know everything about us, but we know little about them. They predict our futures, but for the sake of others’ gain. Their knowledge extends far beyond the compilation of the information we gave them. It’s the knowledge that they have produced from that information that constitutes their competitive advantage, and they will never give that up. These knowledge asymmetries introduce wholly new axes of social inequality and injustice.

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

    3. ProPublica recently reported that breathing machines purchased by people with sleep apnea are secretly sending usage data to health insurers, where the information can be used to justify reduced insurance payments.

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

    4. from the start the logic reflected the social relations of the one-way mirror. They were able to see and to take — and to do this in a way that we could not contest because we had no way to know what was happening.

      !- surveillance capitalism : metaphor - one way mirror

    5. I define surveillance capitalism as the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These data are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets — business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later.

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

    1. But these models typically focus on a single country and fail to take into account cross-border dynamics, such as movements of capital and currency. For example, if markets are spooked by low growth in one country, some companies might move their capital overseas, which could adversely affect the original country’s currency and increase borrowing costs. Conditions such as these posed severe financial problems for Argentina in 2001 and Greece in 2010. International cooperation for tighter border control of capital movements needs to be considered and the effects modelled.

      !- Global Capitalism's pathological behavior of maximizing profit : comment - Due to lack of global coordination and agreements, - global capitalism game played by multi-nationals is a whack-a-mole game that eludes any kind of attempts at individual state level regulation. - Any attempt by one country at social or ecological regulation will be met with a corporation exercising their right to pull out and find another country that has no such regulation in place.

    1. More news organizations will realize they are in the business of impact, not eyeballs

      https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/12/more-news-organizations-will-realize-they-are-in-the-business-of-impact-not-eyeballs/

      Journalistic outlets should be in the business of creating impact and not scrounging merely for eyeballs and exposure.

      Exposure may be useful for advertising revenue with respect to surveillance capitalism, but if you're not informing along the way, not making a measurable impact, then you're not living, not making a change.

  23. Dec 2022
    1. I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet.

      Social media should be comprised of people from end to end. Corporate interests inserted into the process can only serve to dehumanize the system.


      Robin Sloan is in the same camp as Greg McVerry and I.

    1. If my interpretation of the Retrieval quadrant is correct, it will become much more difficult to be an average, or even above average, writer. Only the best will flourish. Perhaps we will see a rise in neo-generalists.

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