Capitalism
Now, the GoFundMe and DonorsChoose thing is closely related, but it gets its own throughline. These platforms emerge to seemingly supplement gaps in the public safety net for things like education and health care. But instead, they’re in a kind of enabling feedback loop: instead of your taxes ensuring that kids have desks and cancer patients can... See more
The Problems of Modern Philanthropy
Web3 Is the Opportunity We Have Had All Along: Innovation Amnesia and Economic Democracy
cryptocarnival.wtfcryptocarnival.wtfPolarization and gridlock have become increasingly synonymous with democracy.
This is not for lack of opportunities. Recent decades have seen social movements and technologists develop numerous experiments in more textured, responsive, and participatory forms of collective decision-making. These include participatory budgeting (Cabannes 2004), liquid democracy (Hardt and Lopes 2015), sortition (Gastil 2000; Bouricius 2013; Pek 2019; Fan and Zhang 2020), citizens’ assemblies (Niemeyer 2014; Chwalisz 2017; Giraudet et al. 2022), crowdsourcing (Hsiao et al. 2018; Bernal 2019), and various alternative voting systems (Posner and Weyl 2014; Emmett 2019). A growing field of platforms for online citizen engagement has emerged to facilitate these processes (Stempeck 2020). Yet in even the most advanced applications of technology-enabled governance, from Madrid to Taiwan (Hsiao et al. 2018; Smith and Martín 2021; Tseng 2022), the new mechanisms serve in solely advisory roles; participatory budgeting processes, while more likely to be binding, apply to only small fractions of public budgets.
Governments could be eagerly transforming themselves into the vibrant, creative, networked institutions that the networked world arguably needs them to be, but they are not.
The unabated “creative destruction” of one kind of capital after another has only further increased the wealth of a few and done nothing to emancipate the overall collective creative spirit, which has remained stagnant. Today, almost every artistic effort inevitably (perhaps unknowingly) reinscribes the values of the ruling capitalist class.
GD Dess • Cultural Dopes
Most analysts of capitalism, following nineteenth- and twentieth-century leads, have ignored the formation of “raw” materials, taking them for granted as capitalist resources. Yet these materials have their own genealogies of production outside the capitalist purview, and our recent awareness that capitalism is destroying Earth’s livability makes... See more
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing • Salvage Accumulation, or the Structural Effects of Capitalist…
“We have to overcome some legal hurdles, but we could unionize musicians tomorrow,” DeFrancesco said. “SAG is like an alternate history for musicians. We’ve done all this before and won, just not within recent memory.”
Some musicians are in fact unionized. The American Federation of Musicians, with 80,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, collectively... See more
Some musicians are in fact unionized. The American Federation of Musicians, with 80,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, collectively... See more
August Brown • Musicians deal with stingy streamers and AI threats, too. So why aren't they on strike?
