41–50 of 89 posts
"...Google execs all work for their shareholders, in a psychotic "market system" in which the myth of "fiduciary duty" is said to require companies to hurt us right up to the point where the harms they inflict on the world cost them more than the additional profits those harms deliver" Nailed it.
Not really. The idea that "fiduciary duty" requires companies to maximize shareholder value is a pernicious Internet myth.
But when stock valuations are completely disconnected from fundamentals like earnings, then regardless of the legality we're kind of circling back to the market pushing that dynamic, aren't we? It's like the market is no longer even optimizing for short term gains per se (eg quarterly earnings), but rather for whatever memes might boost their meme stock. Sometimes this is [still] quarterly earnings, and sometimes it's about the perceived size of the market or how they're cozying up to the fascists in power. So for public companies, it's not like major shareholders, the board, or management really have the ability to work towards longer term plans that go against this dynamic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. The idea that "fiduciary duty" requires companies to maximize shareholder value is a pernicious Internet myth.
That myth long predates the internet version of it I think. Pernicious, yes. But note that the quote does call it out as a myth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you be assuaged if it was titled "Ad-tech is police state tech"?
Word use is important. We have allowed thumos (and epithumia ) to rule over nous . It has become acceptable to misuse words, like "fascist" or "communist" in political contexts, to the detriment of rational and fruitful discourse. Often a false equivalence is drawn between denying something is "fascist" or "communist" and denying something is bad. This is false. Something can be bad without being fascist or communist…
Please explain how the trumpist movement significantly differs from most points of Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism. Because in my estimation, the word is entirely appropriate for what we're facing and people are shouting it down because they don't like the uncomfortable truth.
I'm open to changing my mind, especially if there is a better term that more accurately describes what we're facing. Because the dynamic isn't merely "crumbling postwar liberal democratic order", but rather a particular overly-simplistic reaction to that crumbling.
You’d still be having fascism here even if the internet didn’t exist. The most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans. Eventually rents/healthcare/tuitions outpace income, so people become desperate and st…
The post is not about preventing the rise of fascism, it's about not preemptively building tools for them to use in implementing fascism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Word use is important. We have allowed thumos (and epithumia ) to rule over nous . It has become acceptable to misuse words, like "fascist" or "communist" in political contexts, to the detriment of rational and fruitful discourse. Often a false equivalence is drawn between denying something is "fascist" or "communist" and denying something is bad. This is false. Something can be bad without being fascist or communist…
Word use is important. Please explain how the trumpist movement significantly differs from most points of Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism . Because in my estimation, the word is entirely appropriate for what we're facing and people are shouting it down because they don't like the uncomfortable truth. I'm open to changing my mind, especially if there is a better term that more accurately describes what we're facing. Because…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Word use is important. Please explain how the trumpist movement significantly differs from most points of Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism . Because in my estimation, the word is entirely appropriate for what we're facing and people are shouting it down because they don't like the uncomfortable truth. I'm open to changing my mind, especially if there is a better term that more accurately describes what we're facing. Because…
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I'm open to another definition that attempts to faithfully capture the general dynamics of fascism, and avoids the trap of pigeonholing the term into a few specific movements that are now safely in the past.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found many points interesting. Here's one: Policymakers supposedly work for us/the people and they could have made surveillance ad tech expensive and thereby severely limited it, but > "Policymakers failed us because cops and spies hate privacy laws and lobby like hell against them. Cops and spies love commercial surveillance, because the private sector's massive surveillance dossiers are an off-the-books trove of…
That point may be pithy, but it's unconvincing to any skeptic; those are characteristics of a polemic.
Let religious voices like Doctorow indicate places where we may examine policy and why we should be interested to look there, but sermons aren't vehicles to carry meaningful analysis.
Sermons must have a righteous tone and term "fascist", used correctly by Doctorow, has a long-standing colloquial connotation of teutonic allegiances during WW2, which emotionally overloads his diatribe.
Yet, he's correct to invoke it, even as his rhetoric is misplaced for audiences whose forbearers were sacrificed to the trauma of WW2, and whose generational scar tissues suppress remembrance that the patterns of evil which exploded across the Axis did emerge within our sacred bastions of liberty and freedom, and that these evils are fomenting again right now.
So I appreciate Doctorow's polemics even as I too regard the details of his claims with skepticism.