Confiscation Nation - Computerized Capitalism is looting society one transaction at a time

Computer hardware and software are merely tools, like saws and hammers. You can use the same tools to build a house or to build a jail.  Unfortunately, beginning around 1980, corporations have been intent upon building a lot of computerized jails for their customers. Increasingly, the power imbalance between individuals and corporations makes customers the equivalent of prisoners. They have little choice but to accept whatever terms corporations, unleashed by rightwing political destruction of regulations, dictate. An individual disputing their grasping licensing terms, their relentless targeted ads, their constant contractual changes, their strip-mining of personal information is as likely to succeed as a prison inmate is likely to get the warden to change the prison rules.

Computerization has reified the worldview that everything is a transaction, as someone put it so well:

“neoliberal ideology renders all relationships transactional, and all community monetarily determined and market-defined”.

On the internet, Ms. Thatcher infamous assetion would be true: there really is no such thing as society there. It is just a giant playpen run by Libertarian billionaires, who change the rules as they see fit when they see fit.

1. Early days - Trashing Customer Service

The new corporatist soft dictatorship has been enabled by the depersonalization provided by computer technology. Getting rid of human contact has allowed corporate callousness to increase without bounds. Computers have essentially created a castle wall that keeps customer complaints and scrutiny out. It started in the 1980s, with automatic teller machines and voice mail. Banks used ATMs to fire most of their customer-facing staffs. They did that by making the ATMs free. In a classic bait-and-switch scenario, as soon as the staff were fired, all the banks started charging fees for ATMs and forcing people into one or another corporate-loyalty fiefdom.

Around the same time, corporations that were already geographically distant used the newly invented voice mail systems (with no legal regulation of how complicated and time-consuming reaching an actual person is) to further forestall customers from having a fair chance to get a hearing for a billing mistake, a defective product, or identity theft. Complaints fell on the deaf ears of computers.

But, the definitive impact of early computerization was on Wall St. It is not well-known that Wall St. was one of the largest purchasers of the computer workstations that catapulted Silicon Valley into the economic stratosphere, beginning around 1980. Mike Bloomberg got rich with his “Bloomberg box” stock info terminals. Trading volume shot through the roof, consisting mostly of parasitical stock churning, arbitrage(see NOTE at end), and computerized boiler-room/bucketshops. The increased clout of finance enabled the legalization of stock buybacks, which are a major force behind the current “anti-gravity” behavior of stock prices. Computerization has replaced investing in the long term value of a company with making ultra-short term arbitrage moves via “high frequency trading” algorithms that are divorced from value and are little more than front running - not to mention that the algorithms are so arcane that no one really understands how they interact with each other.

2. The Libertarian Continent

The commercialization of DARPA’s Internet set off by Tim Berners Lee’s web browser was the equivalent of discovering a new continent. At first, no one owned it (or in this case, the government, having created it, gave it away to corporations for nothing). And, this new continent had no laws. At first, lack of law was not a problem because the internet was barely connected to the real world. It was just a different flavor of teletype. Yes, your website’s name became “property”, and real world money was exchanged to purchase those site names. But that was about it, at the beginning.

The demon of extra-territoriality raised its head when retailers, led by Amazon, showed up and started selling stuff. Amazon simply refused to pay any sales taxes at all, giving it an instant 5 to 10 percent advantage over any of its competitors. Businessmen on the internet, created by the government with taxpayer money, had decided it was to be “governed” by Libertarian contractual authoritarianism. Click-through licenses became the bane of customers, and led to increasingly bold claims of “ownership” by corporations, not to mention signing away your right to sue.

Wall St., recognizing the regulation smashing abilities the lawless internet, funded every cockamamie internet startup in the madness of the late 1990s. What Wall St. wanted, and got, from buying all those lottery tickets were a few gigantic corporations totally free of regulation that became huge monopolies and collected huge monopoly profits: Amazon, Google, Facebook. Lately, internet companies are not content to leave the Libertarianism online. Instead, you have Uber, AirBnB, and others openly flouting laws and regulations in the real world, and fighting the lawsuits against their depredations with money lavishly supplied by Wall St. Uber lost almost $3B in the last year, but Wall St. still loves their smash-and-grab business model.

Corporations want to turn everything you do into a transaction, and charge you a fee for each one. They want automatic tolls on every road. (Your not supposed to notice that they track every car on the road to do that.) They want paywalls on every website. They want a fee on every financial transaction, and they want to eliminate cash to make sure their tollbooths can’t be bypassed. They want to own all the media and simply rent it or lease it back to you. (Pay per view instead of buying a DVD; Amazon Kindle’s “close account, lose books” policy.)  It is all about monopoly rent. This behavior is not limited to the net; it is endemic throughout our money-mad “society”. Banks charge you a fee for taking out your own money. Cut-rate airlines charge you an extra fee to print your boarding pass.

Corporations also want to know everything you do, ostensibly to sell stuff; in reality, to spy on you, build a profile on you, manipulate you - and if you get out of line, turn you over to the corporate-owned government to fine you and arrest you. A recent BBC story highlights the fact that your printer prints a yellow dot code to identify on what machine and when a document was produced. As some wag said,

“the purpose of the Internet of Things is to spy on you.”

When you accept the rights-grabbing corporate terms, that’s not the end of it. You are also subject to massive time theft, uncertainty, and harassment. Junk email, relentless popup ads, and robocalls that ignore do-not-call laws are the order of the day in our Libertarian cyber-hell. If you ever talk to (or e-chat with) a human being, they are probably part of the precariat - stuck in the bullshit job of trying to part you from your money. As for the actual transaction, the term “nuisance shifting” refers to corporate structuring of transactions to force the customer to do the corporation’s work for them for free. Even then, you have to navigate the deliberately complex websites. You have to deal with the completely confusing and non-standard interfaces. Once every few months, you are hit with yet another five page restatement of the contract terms, some of which would baffle a Jesuit.

Thanks to the predictably draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the centuries-old practice of reverse-engineering is now, in the case of software, considered to be a crime. Recently, this confiscation has been extended to hardware with any software in it. Case in point: tractor manufacturers lock farmers out of doing their own repairs and force them to use not only manufacturers’ parts, but manufacturers’ technicians, who can take days to show up – no matter that delayed repair can lead to ruined crops.

Thanks to the DMCA, the right of first sale, that is, the right to do what you want with something you paid for (and therefore “own”), is increasingly moot. The elimination of property for the plebs is the end goal of the confiscators. In Libertarian paradise, only corporations and billionaires will be permitted to have ownership. Everyone else will be renters, leasees, fee payers - all enforced by software on the chumps’ cellphones. When corporate feudalism comes to America, it will be wrapped in an app and carrying a credit card reader.

The final confiscation is your rights as a citizen. With electronic voting machines, corporations have effectively privatized voting. That is, they have confiscated your vote. Voting today is carried out on trade-secret platforms (protected by the odious DMCA) that have been proven time and again to be easily hackable via the internet or via a piece of thumb drive malware. Electronic voting gives no paper trail, but exit polling indicates massive departures of counted votes from exit polls. In a real democracy, “trust me” e-voting would be banned; and any honest e-voting would be run by governments on open software, not by corporations with deep partisan ties and agendas.

3. Its a Libertarian world. We just live in it.

Uncontrolled computerization has, within one generation, created a new and untouchable oligarchy of Libertarian billionaires, many of them under-socialized savants like the infamous Robert Mercer or the now mellowing Bill Gates. The leverage that computers give these adepts has not been countered by any kind of regulation, so they basically own the economy, have veto power in Congress, and extract monopoly rent as they please. The loot they collect is plowed back into the political process to rewrite even more laws in their favor in a positive feedback loop of governmental and societal deconstruction that gladdens the hearts of the Koch Brothers. All this came to pass because the government retained no rights to, royalties from, or control over the internet that it spent 20 years creating, and because it refused to collect any taxes on internet transactions for almost an entire generation.

The bottom line is that the rich get to write and change the rules of the net, as they please, to their advantage. For them, it’s always about playing with the rules. From the beginning, settled law has been excluded. The internet is completely corporate controlled. Google and Facebook decide what will be censored. Googled, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft (GAAFM) decide what info will be collected and sold. The only politics left on the corporate-controlled FCC is the fight between GAAFM and the old-school telecom folks at Verizon about who gets to extract what monopoly rents. The rights of citizens don’t count anymore. Because that’s so, the FCC will kill Net Neutrality in the next few months.

The fact that copying and storing computer data is essentially free has been pre-empted by a massive lobbying campaign to “protect” outrageously expanded claims of copyright, and ever-broader software patents. Copyright has been turned into a massive inheritance that, at no cost to the “owner”, increasingly pauperizes every consumer of what should be free media. In 2013, there was an successful lawsuit against the infamous copyright holder of the Happy Birthday song.

That’s right, someone was still collecting royalties on a twenty-word ditty written in the early 1900s, and if someone hadn’t found a century old piece of music in a musty drawer proving that the original copyright was invalid, we would still be paying for the “right” to play Happy Birthday. Copyright is a huge part of the Intellectual Property confiscation racket that has inserted itself in the middle of too many transactions, paralyzing the livelihoods of small businesses (like the documentary filmmaker in the lawsuit about HB) who can’t afford to pay this legal viggorish.

4. The internet has become a centralized monoculture. Its touted “freedom” is a mirage.

Another deliberately avoided fact about the wired world is that computer-based “decentralization” is really centralization. Five companies (GAAFM) create and control the virtual reality in which the rest of humanity is forced to live. The fact is that the major computer monopolies employ very few people. For example, Google has only 25,000 employees (but well over one million servers). These are very smart people, creating and maintaining incredibly complex software and hardware infrastructures. The fanboys may praise “decentralization” and “disintermediation”, but that is simply a lie. Control of the internet is tightly held in a handful of major corporations. The best new entrepreneurs who survive “infant mortality” can hope for is a lucrative buyout offer from one of the Big Five. Because the internet has insinuated itself into almost every transaction, even established non-computer businesses will be bought out as the capitalist demand for unending growth forces GAAFM to grab ever bigger shares of the economy. For example, just today, Amazon purchased Whole Foods, for $13.7 Billion.

The downside of the software monoculture created by GAAFM is that it is always one nasty piece of malware away from chaos. Those infrastructures are a big juicy target for all kinds of ransomeware artists, identity thieves, crooks, terrorists, and hostile governments (can you say Stuxnet?). And those are just the threats when GAAFM are functioning well. People are getting fed up with the smug adolescents running this show, as the protests against Google buses in San Francisco showed. Imagine if some terrorist group decided to blow up a significant GAAFM office complex, killing the critical engineers that know how to keep things running.

The technical bottom line here is that monopolization/centralization/monoculture leads to hacks. Hacks lead to constant updates. Constant updates lead to immense time wasted as updated systems fail to sync correctly with other systems. It resembles the constant erosion of our civil rights to deal with “terrorism”. Both auto-immune diseases would never have gotten as bad as they are if the corporations were willing to forego some profit in the name of social stability.

But they are not willing. Further centralization is coming - driverless cars and trucks. Ten million truck drivers will be replaced by some tiny number of programmers, while the manufacturing will either be sent to China or be automated. The job destruction will be worse than going from 250k GM workers to 25k google employees. Even more awful, can you imagine the disaster if a piece of Stuxnet-like malware got loose among automated trucks? Worse than that, in a generation, no one will know how to drive a truck - how to maneuver the trailer, how to shift gears, how to manage the massive inertia of these vehicles in bad driving conditions. When a Hurricane Sandy event knocks out the power in that situation, who is going to drive trucks that depend on routes downloaded from the internet?

5. This will end badly

As the back-to-back election of a fraud pretending to be a liberal and a fraud pretending to be a populist prove, we have a government of money, by money, and for money. This is enshrined in the Citizens United unlimited, secret bribery decision of the SCOTUS. It is exemplified by the Washington Post being owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who instantly received a CIA contract worth more than twice what he payed for the paper. Free press? Fair elections? Whom are you kidding? Politics is over because the billionaire class decided to dispense with it. Frank Zappa has proven to be a prophet.

With the political system blocked from taking corrective action against internet confiscation, it is only a question of when the society reaches a tipping point, a question of what spark is going to blow this leaking gas tank sky high? It is fair to say that, over the last thirty years, never has so much been stolen from so many by so few. And, those few, insulated in their monetary cocoons, do not seem to care that they are destroying that which supports them: the society and the environment. As true Libertarians, they believe that the people whose livelihoods they have destroyed are “losers”; they believe that environmental regulation is a “taking”, an impediment to progress.

They will go on believing that fantasy until the society they have looted explodes in rage and/or the environment collapses. The only thing that will get through to these people are events that actually touch them (or their fetishized assets). In their typical arrogant manner, these Libertarian assholes are already buying survival shelters in old missile silos or in New Zealand. They are smart enough to see trouble coming, but too stupid to back off the confiscation that is causing the trouble. What more could you expect from greedy adolescent boys? I hate to mention to them that someone on the internet is probably already compiling a list of where all these high-end hideouts are located, so that the mobs will know where to go.

6. In conclusion

So long as the political left fails to formulate a strategy to deal with the complete Libertarian/neoliberal control of the computer companies that increasingly are attaching Chains of Silicon to all us proles, the left will easily be ignored, sabotaged, or simply blacklisted.

Bernie's campaign succeeded on the computer front to the extent it did because the current power structure didn't take it seriously. The only real sabotage was when they opened a window into HRC's campaign and tried to get Bernie's IT staff to go fishing. That was a transparent flop. Corbyn used Bernie's people, and he did it in a country where campaigns last six weeks and the voting machines have yet to be hacked.

Next time around, leftie computer folk had better be ready for the worst that the CIA can throw at them. Because they will.

 ——

NOTE: At one point, one firm - D.E. Shaw - was trading 10% of the volume of the NYSE, and doing so for purposes of international arbitrage. Just FYI, Dr. Shaw gave his employee, Jeff Bezos, money and encouragement to start Amazon.

Shaw's trading volume is sometimes equal to 5% (NOTE: other sources say 10%) of the total volume of the New York Stock Exchange.

Fortune Magazine, 1996

Share
up
0 users have voted.

Comments

Arrow's picture

It's great read. Thanks for this.

up
0 users have voted.

I want a Pony!

joe shikspack's picture

thanks for posting this, there's a lot of food for thought.

i hope that the new masters of the universe create their version of galt's gulch (probably in new zealand) and find out that their peers are awful neighbors and that they can't stand to live with them.

up
0 users have voted.

The value of the internet for me is information unfiltered.
Your essay is worth this month's bill.
Thanks.

up
0 users have voted.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

@on the cusp

I could reach Queen Elizabeth easier than talk to a person (that I don't have to pay to talk to) at one of these places. I've gotten to a point where I put customer service at the top of my list.

Great essay. Thanks for posting it here. c99 has better thinkers and writers than whats left at the echo chamber. We are growing our presence on social media, unfortunately, it is slower than I would like it to be. We are getting new people each week, and our fantastic writers make it easier to do.

up
0 users have voted.

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

@dkmich this is what make this site so important!

up
0 users have voted.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

gulfgal98's picture

@dkmich Thank you for highlighting on Twitter some of the great writers we have here. I tweeted this essay yesterday, but I am going to tweet it again. Thank you again for all you do. Good

up
0 users have voted.

Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

snoopydawg's picture

Thanks for writing this here.

If the democrats actually wanted to make sure that the voting machines aren't hackable, they would go to paper ballots.

TPTB haven't thought very far down the road if they are planning for thousands of people to be out of jobs because of the automation. People are still going to need money to eat and basically live.

As for someone keeping a list of all the bailout bunkers, TPTB are going to need protection and will probably hire private mercenaries. But they will need to include their families too. If they don't, those mercenaries might just take the bunkers themselves. Another reason for the list. People might just beat TPTB to the shelters and TPTB will be shit out of luck Smile

up
0 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg

and no system is independent of the environments. Those that will make the world bleed will inherit the ruin.

up
0 users have voted.

Fighting for democratic principles,... well, since forever

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

but I *definitely* will get to it tomorrow, b/c this is very important stuff.

up
0 users have voted.

"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Pricknick's picture

First off, I have to say thank you for some truly outside the normal box thinking. Well done!
Secondly, there are simple cures to many of the woes that you speak of. It's just that most won't take advantage of them because as some say "They know not what they do." I promise to come back to this thread and give some of those "simple" cures. Would you mind if I republish your essay a bit down the road with some of my thoughts?
Again. Well done!

up
0 users have voted.

Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

The Hindsight Times's picture

This essay is great and reminds me of what is happening here on Kauai.

Billionaires, from the Facebook guy Mark Zuckerberg, trying to take land from locals, to the America Online co-founder, Steve Case, owner of Grove Farm, a large land owner on Kauai who with Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and Ulupono Initiative (http://ulupono.com/), are trying to put an industrial dairy, 6/10ths of a mile up-slope from the ocean, next to a stream, the Waiopili, recently listed as a 303(d) impaired water of the US. The area of Kauai potentially effected by this proposed dairy is a tourist destination with many businesses as well as timeshares which are both downwind and down current from the site of the proposed diary. This dairy would already be in operation if it wasn't for the very hard and, so far, successful work of community/environmental activists on the South Shore of Kauai, http://FriendsofMahaulepu.org.

I say successful because Friends of Maha`ulepu (FOM) was able to fund a successful Clean Water Act case against the billionaires. FOM was able to do this with lots of help and the dogged determination from many on Kauai and the mainland. FOM had many obstacles, they needed to find legal counsel and specialists in many diverse fields, from Archeology and Hydrology to Economics and Agriculture, to mount their case, these were just some of the hurdles that needed to be cleared in a successful court battle all of which is expensive.

FOM relentlessly pursued a campaign of informing public officials and the public at large of the potential hazards of an industrial dairy at the Maha`ulepu location. They used the media to counter propaganda from the dairy and timed media coverage for when events in the courts happened favorable in FOM's Clean Water Act case. But that is what it takes... Money and lots of time and effort. Without the ability to fund and the never ending work to stay in contact with public officials, specialists, news media and supporters, to update and gather new information, there would be 2,000+ dairy cows on less than 500 acres of land. That is a lot of manure in a small area.

Wow, I just wanted to say I don't like what these new billionaires are doing to our planet. Not that they are much different from the old billionaires, Hearst, DuPont, Rockefeller, Carnegie and such...

Peace

up
0 users have voted.
TheOtherMaven's picture

@The Hindsight Times
which compelled them to throw a few crumbs back at the peasants they had robbed (libraries, museums, colleges, etc).

The new robber barons have no conscience and don't care if they kill us all.

up
0 users have voted.

There is no justice. There can be no peace.

arendt's picture

@TheOtherMaven Because there was no such thing as automation or computers, the old robber barons actually needed a substantial middle class of accountants and other financial functionaries. They needed skilled workers. There was no international communication or massive cargo ship fleet to enable overseas production

So it was sensible for them to invest in the local population.

Nowadays, the brainwork that is needed to run a business can be done mostly by computers, and the labor is sent to the rottenest places on the planet. The New RBs simply don't care.

up
0 users have voted.

Denounce Digital & Digital Hybrids, the opportunity and the costs are enormous. The noodles is not ignoreable.

up
0 users have voted.

Fighting for democratic principles,... well, since forever

studentofearth's picture

It is imaginary property used to create capital to buy real property.

During the 1990 the software business reminded me of the free wheeling days of the California and Alaskan gold rushes. No rules, biggest bully won, everyone thought they would strike it rich and were busy to selling part of their claim to speculators (investors).

The courts have been very aggressive in expanding the power of software licenses. It has creeped into all the service agreements we are now forced to accept to participate in modern society.

up
0 users have voted.

Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.

MarilynW's picture

are out there for us all to see, but we haven't been looking. The term "world wide web" or "www" was well named. It is a sticky web and we are caught up in it.

I know friends who are communicating with their cell phones all day, at every meeting, at every course they are taking, while walking down the street. Then I noticed that they also record every event of their lives online, possibly they are even creating or attending events in order to feed the record. They consider "this will look good on Facebook" as part of their planning.

What more could you expect from greedy adolescent boys? I hate to mention to them that someone on the internet is probably already compiling a list of where all these high-end hideouts are located, so that the mobs will know where to go.

Ha ha! Billionaire greedy adolescent boys.

up
0 users have voted.

To thine own self be true.

arendt's picture

@MarilynW Not really original with me.

They describe the billionaire cabal (Broad, Gates, slimy David Geffen, and sad to say, Elon Musk) pushing charter schools as "The Billionaire Boys Club".

up
0 users have voted.
mimi's picture

one boycotting non-transaction at a time. Great article, haven't read it yet :-), but the first paragraphs told me the rest must be excellent.

Will read later. Thanks for writing this.

up
0 users have voted.
arendt's picture

@mimi I try my best to avoid trackable transactions. Use cash or checks for everything I can. Stay away from spy-on-yourself sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

But they keep pushing to eliminate cash. They just made the Mass Pike into a cashless road. If I drive on it without an EZpass (another piece of spyware), they send me a photograph of my car and a bill for the toll plus a surcharge for the service.

Getting harder to avoid big brother.

up
0 users have voted.
riverlover's picture

in a credible way. I am very tired of being fee'ed to death. New surcharges weekly. Every transaction seems promissory, but the rules change monthly. How can the upper hand alter a contract at will? I do not recall entering an agreement in which I was warned that it was meaningless (except for fee extraction) but I had to go along.

What to do? Getting rid of CU is a start. But the hill grows higher every day, and the rock gets larger.

up
0 users have voted.

Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

arendt's picture

@riverlover Yeah, "What is to be done?" Same question Lenin asked a century ago. And we are back to where society was then and going in the wrong direction at an accelerating rate.

I don't have an answer; but I thought by laying out how it all interlocks, people would at least begin to see the cage they are in.

up
0 users have voted.

I see it every election. They wait patiently in line for an e-voting machine while the paper ballot booths are free. They don't want a life. They just want to stare into their phones. When I was a young man, people would talk to each other at a table. Now I look at other tables and see two people, not talking, staring into two phones. They don't take receipts at merchants and check them against charges on their bank statements. They don't check their bank statements! They don't know their bank balance. They only know how high is the overdraft fee. I don't know what my bank charges for overdrafts because I have never in my life written a bad check. It used to be illegal until it became a profit center. People want autopay and to just tap their phone to charge. No wonder the bankruptcy courts are overflowing.

up
0 users have voted.

I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

arendt's picture

@The Voice In the Wilderness Yes. Cellphone hypnosis is very scary.

I can't tell if its a generational thing. I have seen senior citizens glued to their phones too. But, I do read how students, even when they are face-to-face, interact via text messages.

The lack of socialization is a huge problem. How do you motivate people to take back their society when they have been addicted to digital media since age three? To them, Facebook IS society. That is what is scary. The Jesuits used to say "give me a child until he is seven, and he will be mine forever." I fear we are there.

Of course, note that the elites do not want their children immersed in this muck. The elite schools ban phones from classrooms and try to avoid computers in the early grades. Anyone with a functioning brain wants to keep their kids safe from this toxic environment.

up
0 users have voted.
MarilynW's picture

@arendt
all with their heads bent to view their phones, I was thinking of a business for a young entrepreneur,
neck therapy, neck massage, neck acupuncture, neck acupressure. There will be whole salons just to treat the neck problems of this generation when it hits middle age.

Look up people, the sky is beautiful.

up
0 users have voted.

To thine own self be true.

arendt's picture

@MarilynW

The Chinese have reported a large rise in the number of near-sighted young people.

Apparently by spending all their time squinting at their phones, they are deforming their still malleable eyeballs in such a way as to produce near-sighted eyes. Once produced, I believe they can't be undone.

So, add eye doctoring to your list of business opportunities.

up
0 users have voted.
divineorder's picture

Germany next?

https://www.investing.com/news/world-news/germany's-hard-left-hopes-to-take-inspiration-from-corbyn's-success-494210


Germany's hard left hopes to take inspiration from Corbyn's success

World Jun 11, 2017 12:10PM ET

With the mainstream left Social Democrats (SPD) part of a grand coalition with Angela Merkel's conservatives, the Linke is currently Germany's biggest opposition party and is on 8-11 percent in the latest polls.

The party is hoping for a Corbyn-style surge to help boost its share of the vote and make it a potential player in an alternative coalition after the national election on Sept. 24.

Party co-leader Katja Kipping told Reuters she was encouraged by Corbyn's "magnificent catch-up race" after he entered the campaign far behind the Conservatives, especially as his ideas such as redistributing wealth mirrored Linke themes.

"He showed you can score a lot of points with a modern election campaign, doorstep visits and a social program that's very similar to ours," the 39-year-old said in an interview at a party congress in the northern city of Hanover.

Corbyn, whose party denied the Conservatives an outright victory, struck a chord with young voters and made clever use of social media in a campaign that had echoes of Democrat Bernie Sanders' bid to run for the U.S. presidency last year.

up
0 users have voted.

A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

A lot in here I had not known previously. I am going to post a link on my FB, which I rarely use (my kids signed me up).

up
0 users have voted.

Mary Bennett

gulfgal98's picture

This is such a comprehensive and informative essay, probably one of the best I have read in a long time. Nothing epitomizes the rentier economy we now live in and the continuing collapse of society better than the internet. The internet was originally a tool to allow us to work more efficiently, but like any tool, it can be misused and abused. This essay clearly shows just how this has happened to us and how little control we now have over our own lives.

This essay coupled with Tony Wikrent's essay on India's War on Cash and the push for a cashless society are two essays that every person here at Caucus should read and save.

up
0 users have voted.

Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

arendt's picture

@gulfgal98

There is a "wait a minute" literature about the internet. It doesn't get a lot of attention in the corporate media, but it has yet to be trashed by the CM.

Dmitri Morozov has written several books. Also, someone wrote "The Internet is NOT the Answer". Another book is "The Shallows", about what the net is doing to the way we think, the way we interact with the world.

I should generate a complete list as a resource for others.

up
0 users have voted.
MarilynW's picture

@arendt
here we are communicating on the net in a way that was not possible just a few years ago. Sigh!

up
0 users have voted.

To thine own self be true.

arendt's picture

@MarilynW

That's why I said its a neutral tool.

However, once the computer has been purposed to run Facebook or Twitter, it is no longer neutral. It's job is now to produce revenue for the corporation.

Its as if your pen and writing paper were structured to produce profit (or spy on what you wrote) for those companies every time you wrote something, or they nagged you to write more things that you didn't want to write.

I think very few people use the internet the way they used letter writing. The net is all about zippy one liners and passing around links to the latest bit of sensationalism to sweep the net. I think 99% of net users would take one look at C99p and move right on to something sexier.

up
0 users have voted.
gulfgal98's picture

@arendt Without this internet site, I would have never read this incredible essay. And I hope you will continue to write more and share your resources with us.

For what it is worth, this is the only essay that I have ever posted on Twitter more than once. Actually three times thus far. It is one of the most important essays I have read anywhere in some time. Thank you again for sharing it with us, arendt.

up
0 users have voted.

Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

Alphalop's picture

reads on most "Mainstream" outlets.

Keep them coming Arendt!

I guess that's one of the benefits of being semi-absentee for the last couple months, I get to discover excellent new writers on our site.

This is a very well composed and styled read, I hope it gets shared far and wide.

Kudos to you my fellow C99Peep!

Now, off to read the comments. Smile

up
0 users have voted.

"I used to vote Republican & Democrat, I also used to shit my pants. Eventually I got smart enough to stop doing both things." -Me

edg's picture

You wrote "Everyone else will be renters, lessees, fee payers". There is a better word, one that more precisely describe the status corporations wish us to hold: serf.

serf (noun)
1. a person in a condition of servitude, required to render services to a lord, commonly attached to the lord's property and transferred with it from one owner to another.
2. a slave.

up
0 users have voted.
arendt's picture

@edg

What you say is true. But, "serfdom" was taken a long time ago by the ur-Libertarian, Friedrich Hayek. In 1943, he published the book "The Road to Serfdom", in which he trashed any kind of government social program as a step on the path to hell.

I myself like the term "peon", as in "debt peonage".

Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, is a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work. Legally, peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867.

That's because Lords still had some obligation to the serfs. Debt slavers have no obligation whatsoever. The peonage is merely a financial transaction. The only moral element is the imputed moral failure of the person who fell into debt. David Graeber covers this angle intensively in his "Debt: The first 5,000 years"

up
0 users have voted.
Mark from Queens's picture

First, a huge Thank You.

What a comprehensive, cogent look at the Fine Print culture and surveillance apparatus which has seized society. The world has been turned into a global Libertarian fiefdom of debt peasants dazzled by tech gadgets and the idea of "convenience, completely unaware of the trap they further ensconce themselves in.

I've got a friend visiting from abroad and unfortunately don't have time to get into it more, but must say that I intend to re-read this.

This essay should be seen far and wide - one of the best I've read, and of a subject that is so opaque and purposely kept out of public discourse that it makes that all the more important.

Great, impressive work.

up
0 users have voted.

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"

- Kurt Vonnegut

arendt's picture

@Mark from Queens

debt peasants dazzled by tech gadgets and the idea of "convenience, completely unaware of the trap they further ensconce themselves in.

Yes. Its hard to get the alcoholic to recognize that drink is a problem.

Surfing the internet is addictive. Technically, it is "random reinforcement learning". Each click is like pulling the lever on a slot machine, hoping to find something entertaining. The addictees may think the slot machine in their pocket costs them nothing; but it consumes their time, and it reduces their thought process to "should I click on this link or not".

Finally, at least in places like China and South Korea, internet addiction is being recognized as a problem; and the governments and private organizations have set up clinics and detox camps. Japan has a serious "otaku" problem, where males just hide in their rooms 24/7 and surf the net. But, Japan is such a cultural outlier that using it for comparison makes no sense.

up
0 users have voted.
arendt's picture

@The Hindsight Times

Thanks for sharing.

With the hijacking of national (and even state level, courtesy of ALEC) politics, the methods you used are the only methods left to citizens.

What kind of jackass wants to ruin paradise with a stinking (literally) cattle ranch? The man looks at Hawaii and sees nothing more than a way to make money.

Fortunately, Hawaii is an island. The people there are forced by geography to keep their focus local. It is that local community which has accomplished your success.

up
0 users have voted.
IowanX's picture

@arendt, Thank you for such a fine overview, which is 100 percent spot-on. I've been reading Naked Capitalism for a few years, and I forwarded the link to them, so I hope they publish it. You deserve a link for sure, and I'd like you (and Caucus99percent.com) a larger readership. You structured this really well, which is really hard to do; when you start pulling on neo-liberal threads, the connections appear, but always tangled in a ball you just want to dis-entangle later.

Speaking of Naked Capitalism, you mentioned it, but didn't expand on it in the course of your brilliant essay, but Yves and Lambert at NC have been yakking for years on the "Tax-on-Time" that computerization has made endemic in modern life. That's a detail, but it comes through in so many ways:

* You can't really "shop" for health insurance, can you?

*You gotta wait in a long line, or scan your stuff at the grocery, and still, the woman (it's always a woman) has to come by, type in a digital user name, password, and then hit the equivalent of "escape", then "enter". (Gotta check the ID for a 60 year old man buying a bottle of wine)...

*Speaking of "passwords" reminds me of the tax-on-time that "password management" imposes. Yes, you can pay for a password "service", but sheesh...It's impossible, so most people let "their browsers" "remember" their passwords. That is obviously *not* super "secure".

There's more, much more, as you know...
IowanX

up
0 users have voted.
enhydra lutris's picture

friend in all of this. They're fighting a good rear-guard action and sometimes taking the offensive. They need, of course, bread and activists.

up
0 users have voted.

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --