Internet platforms have reached end-stage enshittification, where they claw back the goodies they once used to lure in end-users and business customers, trying to walk a tightrope in which there's just enough value left to keep you locked in, but no more. It's ugly out there.
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@pluralistic I have a compulsion: when I see a bookshelf in a movie or television show, or in a still picture, I examine it with extreme attention to see if I can identify any of the titles.
Auditors are capitalism's lubricants, who keep the gears of finance capital smoothly a-whirl, allowing investors to move their money in and out of companies without having to go pore over their books and walk through their facilities. Without auditors, the gears of capitalism would grind themselves to dust:
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It's a double-whammy that defines 21st century American life: a corporation gets caught doing something terrible, exploitative or even murderous, and a government agency steps in - only to discover that there's nothing it can do, because Reagan/Trump/Clinton/Bush I/Bush II deregulated that industry and stripped the agency of enforcement powers.
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Take #Section5 of the #FTCAct, which gives the Commission broad powers to prevent "unfair and deceptive" practices. Since the 1970s, the FTC just acted like this didn't exist, even though it was right there all along, between Section 4 and Section 6.
Then, under the directorship of FTC chair #LinaKhan, Section 5 was rediscovered and mobilized, first to end the practice of #noncompete "agreements" for workers nationwide:
Hey, #Berkeley! I'm appearing again today at #BayBookFest with #WendyLiu (Abolish Silicon Valley) at 11AM at Freight and Salvage to discuss "Chokepoint Capitalism," the book #RebeccaGiblin and I wrote about #monopoly and creative #labor markets. It's free!
> The second part of your question, “Is there something better coming?” I think it’s Mastodon; and I think it’s Mastodon for a bunch of reasons. One is that the Mastodon standard was developed when the tech platforms were totally disinterested and didn’t have their fingers on the scale. ActivityPub, which is the standard that governs Mastodon, happened in this moment of reduced scrutiny and interference.
> The people who made it were ideologically committed to decentralization and technological self-determination, and they made it without interference from large firms that otherwise would’ve found it relatively easy to capture the process.
> So, it’s a very good standard and it has a lot of very good characteristics. One of them is that it has the right to exit built in. The standard ensures any user can export not just the list of people they follow, but the list of people who..
I'm many kinds of writer - novelist, journalist, activist, editorialist, screenwriter - but at core, I'm a #blogger. Every bit of interesting stuff that crosses my path gets turned into a blog post, which gets lodged in both a #WordPress database and my mind, where it rubs up against other interesting stuff and crystallizes into longer, more considered pieces:
The Writers Guild is on strike. Hollywood is closed for business. The union's bargaining documents reveal a cartel of studios that refused to negotiate on a single position. This could go on for a long-ass time:
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The writers are up for it. A lot of people are saying this is the first writers' strike since 2007/8, but that's not quite right. That was the last time the writers went on strike against the studios, but in 2019, the writers struck against their own talent agents - within the space of a week, all 7,000 writers in Hollywood fired their agents. They struck against the agencies for 22 months.
As has been the case since the time of the Luddites, the issue isn't what the machine does, it's who it does it for and who it does it to.
After all, as @cstross points out, a corporation is just a #SlowAI, remorselessly paperclip-maximizing its way through the lives and joy of the flesh-and-blood people who constitute its inconvenient gut-flora:
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
Call me a conspiratorialist if you must. But when CEOs get on earnings calls and brag about how covid, war, and scare-stories about #inflation let them hike their prices and rake in never-before-seen profit margins, I think it's reasonable to blame inflation on greed, not on workers getting a couple of relief checks during the lockdown.
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Wingstop used a temporary disruption in chicken supplies to hike prices by 125%, and kept them high even as the price of chickens fell by 50%. Their share price climbed to 250% of its pre-covid high.
The same happened with eggs: a transient bird-flu disruption drove up prices, but even after capacity was restored, the prices stayed high:
Y'know how "#realist" became a synonym for "#asshole?" As in, "I'm not a racist, I'm just a #RaceRealist?" That "realism" is also used to discredit the idea of democracy, among a group of self-styled "#LibertarianElitists," who claim that social science proves that democracy doesn't work - and can't work.
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@pluralistic I grew up in fundamentalism; this is no different than the insistence that their beliefs are “the plain simple text of Scripture” while everyone else’s are suspicious “interpretations.” It’s ideology laundering.
> David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of the network I’m talking to you on right now, was paid $250 million last year, a quarter of a billion dollars. That’s about the same level as what 10,000 writers are asking him to pay all of us collectively, alright. So I would say if you’re being paid $250 million—these companies are making enormous amounts of money. Their profits are going up. It’s ridiculous for them to plead poverty.