beckman466

yes and this: https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideo...

"There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless.

The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete."

they most militantly 'defend' their intellectual property system and have also monopolized many communications networks

it was meant in jest because the CIA directly participated in the drug trade as uncovered by investigative journalist Gary Webb (who died from two gunshot wounds to the head...).

"Michael Cuesta’s movie 'Kill the Messenger' tells the story of Gary Webb, whose August 1996 investigative series “Dark Alliance,” published in the San Jose Mercury News, uncovered ties between the Central Intelligence Agency and massive drug peddling by the right-wing, mercenary Nicaraguan Contras. Webb’s three-part series established that in the 1980s the CIA-backed Contras smuggled cocaine into the US that was widely distributed as crack. The drug profits were then funneled by the CIA to the Contras in their war against the left-nationalist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/17/kill-o17.html

> I'd like to be able to open my reader just once a day and have it check all feeds and catch the full days activities but, the way they work now, it'll only get what happens to be there at that point in time.

the un-user-configurable and un-opt-out-able straightjacketed sorting algorithms in these walled gardens are all about getting users 'hooked' and creating FOMO

i've heard the SSB protocol [1] be described as a "more advanced RSS". it's basically a distributed social network built on the ideas of RSS.

[1] SSB: An Identity-Centric Protocol for Subjective and Decentralized Applications, https://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2019/proceedings/icn...

> How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech such as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications?

RSS being killed is a part of the commodification/privatization of knowledge. RSS simply gives users too much freedom.

"What if we thought of some of the most lucrative tech companies as essentially tax collectors, but privately-run (and thus not democratically accountable)? Economists call this rent-seeking, and what we’re seeing with a lot of tech companies is that their telos is little more than “rent-seeking as a service”. It’s basically baked in to their business model. Once you’ve fully developed the technology underpinning your service - be it coordinating food delivery, or processing payments, or displaying intrusive ads to people who just want to read a goddamn page on the Internet without being entreated to buy stuff - then your whole schtick then becomes collecting taxes on a whole ecosystem of economic activity."

https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-86

you've just described bitcoin - except it's missing the part about the uselessness and wastefulness of 'mining'

this just reminds me of books like 'How To Win Friends and Manipulate' ..cough.., sorry, i mean 'Influence People'

Caroline - 2 stars // Apr 02, 2010:

"This book had a profound effect on me, however, of the negative variety. It did give me pointers on how to actually break out of my shell and "win friends" but in the long term, it did way more harm than good. Not the book per se, but my choice to follow the advice given there. The book basically tells you to be agreeable to everybody, find something to honestly like about them and compliment them on it, talk about their interests only and, practically, act like a people pleaser all the time.

It might sound like a harmless, or even attractive idea in theory, but choosing to apply it in your every day life can lead to dangerous results. Case in point: after being a smiley happy person with loads of friends for about a year, the unpleasant realization began to creep in, that by being so agreeable to everybody else, I rarely ever got my way. I also sustained friendships with people who were self-centered, so talking about their interests was all we got to do together, which drained me of my energy. The worst thing still, is that by trying to find something to like about every person, I completely disregarded their glaring faults. It didn't matter that those people did have redeeming qualities - they weren't redeeming enough! I ended up with a bunch of friends I didn't really want and, because I was so preoccupied with "winning" those friendships I missed out on the chance to form relationships with good people.

I suppose, for somebody who is a better judge of character, the principles outlined in this book - could - be of some value. But that's really just me trying to find something positive (using the "principles") in a book that I am still trying to UNlearn.

If you want to win friends, you have to do it the hard way, by being yourself and risking rejection (and daring to do some rejection of your own, as well). And if you want to influence people the only fair way to do it is through honesty. All the rest is manipulation and pretending. Do not read this book, you'll only learn how to manipulate yourself & others. Do not read it out of fear of rejection & low self-esteem, there are better ways to gain some courage in approaching people. This will harm you in the long run.

Thank you for reading this review."

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4865.How_to_Win_Friends_...

> Instead of working honest jobs with their hands like most people, they just have to sit in a chair and be smart

if you want an even more bulletproof argument you could add that most tech workers are overpaid because they are benefitting from the rents/royalties extracted from intellectual property by the propertied class

> Pointless name calling.

you realize you are the one referring to women who do sex work as 'whores'....

> You already have bodily autonomy, you can a) make sure you use a condom or better yet, an IUD b) refrain from sex unless you are OK with getting pregnant.

again showing your misogynist colors; where is male contraception? where is the vasectomy in your list of recommendations/strategies?

> ignore the choice aspect of having sex in the first place.

seriously, you are digging such a deep hole here

> Maybe it is not clear to some people that sex is first and foremost a means of reproduction, and not just pleasure?

um what?

> "once a whore, always a whore"

> Basically, once a woman tries out whoring

> weird analogies claiming that whoring (renting out your body for money) is just like physical labor, which is fscking insane.

> How is being sexually penetrated by a stranger, ejaculated on, etc... anything like a man doing manual labor?

well we've found our misogynist

> Why is she even a single-mom in the first place?

right, because women have bodily autonomy and basic health care services available to them everywhere. yes i am talking about abortion

seriously, why the hell share this disgusting tirade?

edit: wow i see this isn't your only misogynistic comment

> At least a woman can take the easy way out and become a prostitute. A man has no such "luxury". Society does not pity weak men the way it pities weak women. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28928183

what do we have for people in the service industry who burn out? what advice do we have for them?

they're both about killing a brand name and trying to deceive public perception and manipulate our collective memory/map

> Did she reach a ripe old age? Death comes for us all.

please don't write anything if you have nothing constructive to say. your closed-ended questions are judgments disguised as 'questions' that are only meant to shame OP and dismiss their loss.

damn, when are we going to see a Michael Bay The Island-esque film about an underground cloning facility through the eyes of a pig who lives there?

love that. yes some are making it out to be something disrespectful somehow. i also would prefer if cemeteries were converted to parks to be green spaces available to all.

spots in cemeteries are also usually only affordable for the propertied class too. for many in the working class they're not viable.

do our cities really need to reserve and block off sizable physical spaces for decades, when we have a housing crisis in most cities around the world? i am all for beautiful ceremonies and the like, but the use of excessive physical space in cities seems outdated.

consider also that we now have photos, video and other digital media to help us remember loved ones and keep them alive in our memory.

Monsanto --> Bayer

> it's not comparing Americans of different classes. It's comparing Americans at different stages of life. Or just the ebb and flow of income over and individual's life

no, what we should really measure is property, ownership. the richest people pay little to no income. many years ago, before i learned about today's economic system, i remember being impressed upon hearing that Steve Jobs only took a $1 salary. now i know this is just incredibly beneficial tax-wise (along with a bunch of other tricks that aren't available to the non-propertied class).

seriously all this talk about 'measuring income' or whatever is just a distraction from the underlying property systems and relations in our current system.

"In the coming years you’ll read a lot of columns agonising over how to ‘fix’ Silicon Valley. Most will be technocratic, evacuating politics from the discussion. This is, after all, the framing that allowed Silicon Valley to grow so powerful in the first place: a binary choice between technological development on capital’s terms, or remaining stuck in the past. But structural problems require structural solutions. Rather than relying on ‘ethical’ founders or investors to change the system, we need collective action to challenge it.

This will mean undoing the labyrinth of intellectual property rights, which are intended to protect corporations and commodify information. It will mean revisiting the funding model that gave rise to the ‘go-big-or-go-home’ culture responsible for so many wasteful start-ups, shifting away from the return-driven venture capital model, and towards a state-backed social entrepreneurship with public responsibilities.

It will also mean building worker power, within the tech industry and beyond it. Within it, the long-term goal must be a union culture encompassing all workers involved in production. That means not just the highly-paid software engineers but contractors packing boxes for Amazon, or driving for Uber, or cleaning offices in Silicon Valley should all have representation in decision-making structures. And beyond the confines of the industry, a wider-organised labour movement needs to offer resistance to technology being used to facilitate increased worker exploitation through surveillance or regulatory arbitrage.

None of this will be easy, of course. Reclaiming the emancipatory potential of technology will require prying it from the clutches of capital. But that is a worthy fight. If the task of politics is to imagine a different world, then the job of technology is to help us get there. Whether technology is developed for the right ends — for the public good, instead of creating a privatised dystopia — will depend on the outcome of political struggles."

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

> I disagree with the possibly unintended insinuations that children of rich people can't work hard because they have a safety net, that facebook was an easy success, etc etc.

did you really just try to defend the children of billionaires?

> but way too many people are naive and couldn't see it earlier.

right, yeah, so others are dumb and you're enlightened?

> It hasn't "morphed" into anything. It always was a way to easy money (while lying through their teeth)

i don't get comments like yours. i'm sharing this quote because i like that whole article by Wendy Liu. Wendy agrees with you, and so do i. so why not just read it? your comment comes across know-it-all-y and bitter.

> a lose-lose proposition for anybody but the most short-term minded.

"[I]n recent years the realisation has dawned that what’s good for Silicon Valley is not always good for everyone. What started with scrappy upstarts promising to make the world a better place has morphed into something more sinister: a pantheon of faceless multinationals who collectively dominate the world’s digital infrastructure, flouting regulations, avoiding taxes, and taking advantage of precarious labour to make a small number of people tremendously wealthy."

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

thanks!

It’d be better as:

+2 love

+1 like

0 don’t mind it

-1 dislike

-2 never again

> Say what you want about Apple, but there’s no question that they go above and beyond their competitors when it comes to their users’ privacy.

that's not what Snowden's leaks showed us. Apple inc. is a very willing participant in all sorts of shady NSA projects. in fact, you could even argue that the reason that Apple and other SV monopolies have evaded being broken up is exactly because of their full participation in these programs; programs that have deeply undemocratic rules (e.g. FISA courts are the reason Snowden still cannot return to his homeland). similarly, the Crypto AG news was unfortunately ‘forgotten' by the media in no time. it further showed us the extreme lengths the NSA, CIA, etc. will go to in order to dominate and exploit the working class in the US and abroad (as well as the media's role in helping us quickly forget about it with new ‘news' headlines).

> The spat playing out in the news between Cook and Zuck might seem like posturing on both sides, but I think Apple’s argument is genuine. They believe that people should be able to pay more for more control over their data.

shaming undereducated working class people for not being able to buy the more expensive iGizmo is the height of hypocrisy. encryption and zero knowledge systems should be the norm, not a 'luxury' good/service (the etymological root of which is 'excess' btw).

> Phones aren’t people, but they are devices we have intimate relationships with, and they are demonstrating increasing levels of sentience and intersubjective-like responsiveness.

> I know this sounds far-fetched, but it makes sense when you recall that the shift to AI is not a 0-to-perfect AGI but a more gradual shift through which machines will appear more sentient as they develop.

genuine question: do you seriously believe what you write here?

> Why is this different?

Employees having to bottle-pee maybe?

live/move underground

> The Peekskill meteorite is estimated to be 4.4 billion years old.

If everything in the universe is the same age (emerging from the big bang), is 4.4 billion years the last time the meteorite had a serious physical transformation (to it’s current form)? If not, what is meant with 4.4 billion years old?

> [China is] less encumbered by international politics

in what way(s)?

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin

> A more direct statement of your point might help here.

abolish Silicon Valley. [1]

[1] Wendy Liu, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley