Capitalism
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
David Graeber • 8 highlights
amazon.comBeing an artist within an economic system that favors private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, a price system, and competitive markets belittles my practice into a hobby. I am an amateur with no artist statement, thesis show, or MFA. The money I invest in creating art is a temporary loan to myself that I feel pressured to repay quickly... See more
Cortney Cassidy • A soft manifesto
Blue Cross and Blue Shield began as nonprofits that insured all comers. But as big profit-seeking insurers targeted younger and healthier people, the Blues were left to insure the older and less healthy, which made it impossible for them to continue. They turned to making money. Now, private equity runs hospitals, into the ground.
Robert Reich • How private equity is destroying the labors of love
While serving a life sentence in jail, Kaczynski wrote a little-known sequel to his manifesto, entitled “Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How”. In it he outlines his belief that all technologically advanced civilizations become trapped in fatal games before they learn to colonize space. This happens because industry is driven by competition, and
... See moreGurwinder • Why Everything Is Becoming a Game
The Antitrust Division will hopefully respond with “No, your search engine was awesome, but it’s increasingly ad-filled crap. You’re too powerful, you’re too lazy, and America needs some real competition.”
Matt Stoller • The First Big Antitrust Trial of the Century Is About to Start
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
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” wrote the literary critic Fredric Jameson. One of the hardest elements to imagine is what capitalism has done to our perception of time via clocks. It now seems embedded into our very psychology to view time as a commodity that can be spent or wasted.