Capitalism
Hard Work is Only Sometimes Necessary and Never Sufficient, But What Else Can You Do?
Freddie deBoerfreddiedeboer.substack.com
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
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.
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
Being 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
But this Google trial? By far the most important moment was when Judge Mehta denied a third-party motion to broadcast a publicly accessible audio feed of the trial for fear that information Google wishes wouldn’t be disclosed become public. Indeed, Google lawyers have explicitly argued that the judge should avoid allowing documents to become public... See more
