#MORE CORPORATIZED BULLSHIT

[msclaritea]

Adobe Film And TV Fund To Support Underrepresented Creators And Filmmakers – Deadline

EXCEPT Adobe, highly corporatized, will be partnering w/other corporatized orgs, one of which is the Hollywood NAACP Bureau, run for a year by another Hollywood insider, Kyle Bowser, who among other things, worked for NBC FOX HBO and warner bros AND oversaw the Scientology-linked show In Living Colour. What's also interesting is how much the words 'diversity' and 'inclusion' are used by both Adobe and Bowser, but they never talk about what kind. I'm just going to say it. This is just another avenue for the Cult of Scientology and Hollywood Gay Mafia to add more people to their little army. Don't doubt for one minute that being QUEER is going to be the default. Might as well warn young heterosexual creatives not to bother with the Nuclear Family-hating Hollywood.

[kytsuine-blog]

...yes, I have, and I'm 24. And for some reason I just wrote an essay in the tags about it.

Tag your age if you wanna bc I was just thinking about how I have used floppy disks before (I'm 25 and used them in elementary computer lab) but my 22 y.o. brother hasn't which is so weird to me like 3 years isn't a long time at all to me

[ms-demeanor]

Hi! You’re in the LA area, right? I hope you and your family are okay.

Unrelatedly, I ran across a thread on Mastodon about Proton Mail, which I think you’ve talked about before, and was curious what you make of it / how credible it is: https://code4lib.social/@inthehands@hachyderm.io/113838748729664639

I'm fine thanks! Worried about some friends but I'm good.

I think that thread is not incorrect, but is also bullshit.

Email protocols do not allow for 100% anonymous communication and never will, when Proton was subpoenaed for user data that ended up with some French climate activists getting prosecuted they were transparent about what was requested and updated their logging rules to store less data. *Starting* from the assumption that protonmail is supposed to be totally secure OR sells itself as totally secure is disingenuous.

The great thing about open source software is that you never have to trust a shithead CEO when they talk about what the software does. I get why people are angry at the CEO (I think the CEO is at least half wrong in that he is claiming that Republicans will challenge monopolies, but he's not wrong about the destructive corporatism of the Democratic party even if he is *in essence* wrong about which party is more likely to gesture in the direction of breaking up tech monopolies) but A) the thread says that proton's software is "opaque" and it just. Literally is not. and B) that thread links to another thread talking about how what proton is selling is trust and nope. They don't have to sell trust; you can see what their software does if you choose to investigate it, there's no need for trust when you can verify. What they're selling is transparency and from where i'm standing they are indeed quite transparent.

God. Imagine thinking that a zero trust service is selling trust.

So I think the argument that "protonmail actually isn't as secure as it claims" is bullshit that people bring up whenever they're mad at the company (whether they have legitimate reasons to be mad at the company or not).

For the record: you should never, ever, EVER treat email as a secret. Nothing you do over email is really secret because *the rules that allow email to function as a service* require at least some very sensitive information to be an open part of the protocol.

The Proton page on end to end encryption is *very* clear that it is the contents of your email messages that are encrypted, not your email as a whole, and in the image they use to illustrate this the parts of your email that *cannot* be made private (sender, recipient, subject line, time sent) are shown unencrypted:

They're not subtle about letting people know this. Nor are they quiet about the fact that replies to encrypted emails are not encrypted by default.

So the thread is *technically* correct in that all the security "holes" described reflect reality, but it's correct like saying "McDonald's says that you can eat their food for every meal and you'll put on ten pounds of muscle but ACTUALLY putting on ten pounds of muscle requires a huge amount of dedication and a very careful diet and a lot of resistance exercise" - like, I guess yeah that's what you have to do to put on ten pounds of muscle but where exactly was McDonald's making that claim? Did they actually make that claim or are general statements like "I'm Lovin' It" being misinterpreted in bad faith by people on the internet who are mad at something a CEO did?

So. Like. Yeah the CEO is being a shithead, the social media team made a pretty bad fuckup by doubling down on his shitheadery, the product still works as described, AND the thread discussing all of that is deeply annoying.

So.

I think this thread actually does a great job of explaining why I've never seen a "hackers for social justice" group that has lasted. This reminds me a LOT of when someone tried to say that you shouldn't use firefox because the former CEO was a homophobe. There are a lot of deeply shitty people who have made important contributions to our tech ecosystem and if we threw the baby out with the bathwater every time Notch from Minecraft ended up being Notch from minecraft you'd lock yourself out of a lot of really important tools. And this isn't the same as "buying harry potter merch funds transphobia" because it literally doesn't; especially with open source tools you can continue using the software and cheerfully hate the CEO because A) fuck that guy and B) what the fuck are you going to do about it, guy, this shit's encrypted.

I don't want to get too deeply into a discussion about what is or is not cancel culture, but what I'm seeing in that thread (and what I see coming up every time someone brings up the "But the French Climate Activists!" thing) is an attempt to prioritize political alignment over real-world utility. It's attempting to cancel a *genuinely useful tool* because someone involved in the development is an asshole.

By all means, don't give protonmail money if the CEO's trump-positive comments make you feel unsafe.

However: What service are you going to use that is as accessible and as secure to ensure that you actually *are* safe? There are alternatives out there. Do they actually do more than proton? Are they easier to use? Are they open source? One of the responses to that thread was "yeah, that dude seems shitty; i'd switch to another service if there was another one that I felt was as secure" and that's pretty much what I think the correct attitude is. (If you really, really still want to switch, Tuta has been the broadly recommended alternative to protonmail for years but at this point Proton has a suite of services that some users would need to replace, not just email)

IDK i think shit like this contributes to a lot of the bad kind of security nihilism where people are like "oh no, things will never be secure and even my scrappy little open source product is headed by an asshole, i may as well use google because everything sucks" when they should have the good kind of nihilism which is like "man, there are a lot of assholes out there and they're never going to stop being assholes; i'd better take proactive steps to act like the people who make tech stuff are assholes and operate from a better base of security at the start"

so the takeaways are:

Proton never claimed that anything but the message contents of your e2e encrypted messages are encrypted; as far as these things go, they do a pretty good job of being both secure and easy to use compared to other offerings.

Yeah the CEO is being kind of a shithead and I'm not a huge fan of that.

If you think the CEO is being a shithead and don't want to give the company your money, don't pay for their services, but the CEO being a shithead doesn't actually mean you can't trust their services; their services are literally built on zero trust, if the CEO literally wanted to hunt you down personally he wouldn't be any more able to decrypt your emails than he was before and he wouldn't be any more likely to respond to a subpoena than he was before (proton does respond to subpoenas when required but not otherwise; they've been compelled to produce more data in the last decade than before because law enforcement finally realized who they needed to yell at - one of the bigger issues here is the Swiss courts being more willing to grant subpoenas to international complainants than they were before)

The reason we don't go see hogwarts movies is because doing so gives JK money and that does actual real world harm; using firefox does not have an impact on Brendan Eich's ability to materially change the world. It is very weird that we're in a place where we're treating *open source encryption software that is simple enough for your grandma to use it* as though it is Orson Scott Card.

Sorry i'm still stuck on people thinking that proton, famously open source, is opaque, and that an encryption service with zero trust architecture is selling trust.

Anyway if you've ever got questions about security/privacy/whatever services privacyguides.org is a very reliable source.

OH I FIGURED OUT WHAT WAS BUGGING ME

There are a bunch of people discussing this talking about how the CEO's social media is what has made them feel unsafe and I'm going to be a dick here and say that facts don't care about your feelings.

The CEO saying stupid shit doesn't actually make you unsafe in a situation like this; if the CEO was a violent transphobe or aggressive racist or horribly misogynist that wouldn't actually make any of the users of the product less safe. That's why the SJ hacker stuff I've seen hasn't had much staying power; I think that groups that focus on making people feel included and welcome and safe to be themself within the group run into really big problems when there's a conflict between people in the group FEELING unsafe because of (genuinely important in many ways) cultural signifiers like political alignment and so in order to accommodate that feeling they end up doing things (like some kinds of collaboration/accountability practices, abandoning useful tools, WAY too much personal transparency and radical vulnerability for people who are doing crime shit) that ACTUALLY make them less safe.

The CEO being a shithead may make you feel bad, but moving to a less secure platform may actually be dangerous. One of these things can have a big impact on your life, and it is not the one that is happening on twitter.

Anyway. Email is inherently insecure and if you want a secure messaging tool use Signal.

If you are doing crime shit don't talk about it on the internet and DEFINITELY don't talk about it in any kind of unencrypted platform.

If you are a French climate activist who would like to not get arrested if Tuta gets a subpoena for data, use the email service in concert with tor and be cautious about senders/receivers and subject lines.

[artbyblastweave]

Question based on the fascinating Wild Talent's Axes post. Why do you think most adaptations of High Blue settings change them into lower Blue settings?

I think there's basically two reasons for that.

Reason one is that I think that on some level the executive-suite-level aversion to looking too silly or wacky and scaring off unfamiliar audiences was, at the time that it reigned supreme over all of these creative decisions, unfortunately just kind of correct. You're doing Spider-Man, alright, you can kind of bank on the audience's ambient knowledge of Spider-Man to buoy along the question of "How and why Spider-Man" and maybe "How and why Green Goblin." You bring in enemies outside of that paradigm, you bring in wizards, vampires, aliens, now you gotta explain those things too, you gotta spend bandwidth on that. There's a real murky middle ground here between a cynical fear of looking too silly, and a genuine scope and focus problem- how much value added is there in pulling away from the core mutant stuff to start mucking around with the Shi'ar or Cyttorak or Belasco or Dracula? I don't think it's a coincidence that I don't hear people bringing up the fact that there were aliens in Dark Phoenix.

The Suicide Squad(s) are actually a really good example of this issue. Suicide Squad, while very bad, was actually a very high blue movie, to the extent that it actually fucked with the pacing when they kept turning to the camera to introduce new origin stories, to the point of creating a tone-and-theme clash with the previous two movies where this stuff was mostly framed as much rarer and more disruptive. The Suicide Squad was equally high-blue, but also much more deliberate and naturalistic in conveying that this was a superhero setting rife with weirdos. Naturalism is a watchword with this kind of thing.

Which brings us around to issue two, right, which is that, as much as I love the high-blue bullshit of the golden and silver age, you're huffing glue if you think those settings became like that due to some deliberate creative ethos. They needed to meet monthly deadlines and they were writing for small children, it was the corporatized version of making up a bedtime story off the cuff, and over time the nonsense simply accumulated. Later writers take that precedent and run with it to do interesting and valuable things, but if you're creating a classic high-blue superhero setting from scratch these days it's almost always a form of emulation. Approached without clarity of purpose, it can make for weird or bad or messy writing!

Ultimate Spider-Man is an example of a comic adaptation that bleached the blue, and that decision- to tie all of Spidey's villains to a common origin- resulted in a really strong story. Stronger themes, stronger character dynamics, stronger worldbuilding and stronger, cohesive political messaging. Objectively the correct decision for the project they were going for. Tightening the blue can let you do things- it lets you sift through and find the strongest shared points between the disparate elements of the mythology, assemble them into something thoughtful and directed.

[max1461]

I had this realization the other day that we're living in an incredibly dynamic era. Ok, I'm not sure I really believe in that kind of thing—how do you determine the "dynamism" of an "era"?—but like, go with me on this. You see those pictures or whatever of Russian soldiers (I think?) with anime waifus on their tank, right. And it's like...

There's a couple parts to this. The first part is that, due to the internet I suppose, people from all parts of the world, from countries that used to be largely closed off from communication with one another, etc., are now sharing in one big cultural discourse. We're all talking to each other more than we ever have been. The second part is that this discourse is decentralized, right, it's not governments facilitating this communication and choosing the topics, and it's not big centralized media institutions, it's just whatever random pop culture stuff happens to catch people's fancy. And not even the most sanitized, corporatized, mass-market pop culture stuff either. It's anime girls! It's "cringe"! It's pulp! It's horny! How very human that that's the sort of media that unites us in conversation, right—stupid horny bullshit. It makes me kind of proud.

So, then, the last part that really made this realization hit me is that the anime girls are on a tank. This is not good but it is important. It's not just that we're all having a big stupid conversation about stupid pulpy media. No, it's like... people who are fighting and killing and dying, doing real things in the world, making history in a very tangible way, are spending their time conversing on the internet about anime waifus. And presumably they're acquiring some portion of their motivation and sense of self from these conversations, as we all acquire from all our social interactions in at least some small part.

So that's really the crux of it, right. A few years ago I did kind of buy into this idea that, ok, "human history" is over. History is still going, but it's now the history of institutions, of complex economic agents, of math made flesh, human agents working for inhuman ends. And the time of human history, of diplomacy conducted via marriage and family ties, of blood feuds, of the personal loyalties between a lord and his vassals... I kind of thought all that was over.

But, for better or worse, these Russian guys with anime waifus on their tank made me realize that perspective is bullshit. The age of human history is not over. There are, you know, there are... young stupid angry horny men are out there, shifting international borders, shaping the world, because they are young and stupid and angry and horny. And this particular example is negative, but there are also young stupid angry horny men (and women, and others) out there doing good things, great things, because they are young and stupid and angry and horny. I thought that might be over, but it's not. Do you see? Human history lives!

[singsongraptor]

If liberals and white leftists were really about that master's tools, master's house bullshit, they could have and should have been gassing people up to vote third party. To organize and put forward candidates at all levels, to campaign and outreach.

A metric fuckton of people are so fucking tired of Dems and their cowardice, corporatism and impotence, so they sit out voting rather than voting for the nuclear waste on the other side of the aisle, but rather than saying "hey, there's more aisles, let me show you those" these weak-willed, lazy, privileged punk asses would rather scream for More Status Quo, because we all know they're just gonna sit back and refuse to "push them left" with the Dems.

It's not about making things better for them. It's not even about stopping the fascism. It's your classic "saying the right things is just like praxis" even though they're absolutely NOT saying the right shit either.

Of course third party "can't win" y'all make every effort possible to not only not try but actively sabotage the way out.

[tomsawyee]

the online left isn’t ready for it but at some point we should probably have that conversation about pathologizing the harms of our modern engagement-obsessed corporatized internet as “idk literally all of us have adhd”

we are already neck-deep into multiple generations being fed constant streams of infinite stimulation that only get less and less effective as our brains need more and more at every moment just to hold our attention. there’s scholarship on it, but it never gains traction because we’ve couched it as some kind of pseudo-partisan “The Olds want us off the damn phone” bullshit. it’s getting better, but it’s still not great.

infinite scrolling is rotting our brains. binge watching and algorithm slurry and FYP and buttery smooth “Convenience” and and and the monopoly of our attention is the greatest wrong of our digital age. while neurodivergence is poorly understood both medically and socially, it is our obligation to ourselves to take a step back when something (our ability to maintain focus) feels like it has drastically changed and find the common denominator. or just flick past this because it’s longer than three sentences.

[papirouge]

I think the Americans are scared deep down of protesting like the French because many are just lazy and don’t want to be too uncomfortable by protesting. The French are based in that despite the hard shit and the tragedies, shit gets done. The Americans push back a bit, get scared when getting pushback by the elites and cling to their guns without using them to go back to their homes to whine at how awful their country is. Their country is huge and and if millions can come together to protest they can do it but they just won’t. I see it as they are only looking out for themselves deep down. They don’t care about others. They aren’t and probably won’t ever be “United” and fight together. That country is doomed to collapse probably soon so if any Americans reading this want to leave, I don’t blame you. Just don’t infect other countries with your bullshit.

Americans should start protesting because walking for hours is good for health and they'd be less obese. Being regularly chased by the police is good exercise, you work your endurance AND cardio🏃🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️��🚓. Now you know why the french are so skinny🤍🇫🇷

Yeah I always clowned American conservative/libertarians flexing their guns and mUh fRrEdOm but ultimately still getting finessed by a geriatric man out of his mind lmao.

If those men were that courageous you'd think they already done yet another Capitol stunt but right now they're busy crying & shaking behind their computers, saying about how the Left™ is coming for them, how the Capitol was a pSyOp to get every pAtrIoT arrested......but ALSO, it wasn't no big deal because the Capitol doesn't represent the American people anymore - and other copium nonsense...

And yeah the problem of individualism is a huge problem preventing Americans to resist effectively against governments. The USA is a veery young country too so its people have yet to build a sense of community ship beside the flag and the Bible - who never stopped good White Americans from treating other people as second class citizens if not barely humans flr most of its History ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯ I cringe big time whenever I see ppl fawn over the concept of the USA, the "land of the free".... when its own founders had slaves 🤡

Social class awareness is what makes people break free from the bondage of corporatism. The USA have yet to have an ideologue like Karl Marx or Jean Jacques Rousseau to peak the masses.

Every french kid has to read "Le Contrat Social" of Rousseau during highschool ; that's why french citizens are wired to understand social class self awareness. Which ultimately make them more prone to fuck shit up when they feel their 'class' threatened.

I also always said that religion was relevant on that matter too. France is Catholic. I am not Catholic but I always said that Catholics knew how to do shit when it came to help the poor, organize mass scale social initiative, etc. Everytime I see Christians seething against giving money to the poor it's Protestants.

Here in France we have Caisses de Grèves (which can be translated as "Strike Pool") were ppl can donate money and then the money is distributed to all the people striking / missing days of work which take a tool on their finance. Lately, one donor gave 30 000€ !!! So even rich people have solidarity with strikers. Because social class awareness also helps rich people to be aware of their responsibility (use their privilege to help lower class people). OG Rousseau did the work centuries ago to slap some sense into the bourgeoisie, and now modern french citizens reap the benefits of his ideas. That's the perk of living in such an old country 🤍🇫🇷

....But when I look at American (Christians), they are often very contemptuous with this kind of initiative. Or they'll be like "I hope this money isn't going to lEftisTs !!" or even stupid shit like "handing stuff for free is the beginning of Communism"......but what they don't understand is that those leftist are socially closer to them than those millionaire they're white knighting online.

[rametarin]

Paying someone's bill is nice, but

The REAL trick is to uncover the science behind manufacturing or synthesizing things in a way which is incredibly cheap, incredibly accessible (like turning common universal dirt into cancer medicine) and incredibly common (like, again. common dirt.)

The reason some things cost so much is because of either the specialist skilled labor, amount of energy and complexity required for the industry and machines to be able to manufacture it at scale, and how hard the raw materials are to acquire. If you could own your own little open source machine and didn't need to utilize any patents to create proprietary processes of your own to do things, we wouldn't need to rely on the government subsidizing megacorps just for the existence of this scarce product or resource.

It is in fact MORE capitalist to have more small companies that can turn dirt into higher value products, than it is to have bigger corporations that are only so large because the government mandates the necessity of a resource only accessible at cost and size because of the magic of mass manufacturing and borderline nationalized interest in the company that makes things.

And when those products are essential to continued existence, and can only be created by a very expensive centralized company, it's in everybody's interests to make these products at as small a scale as possible with a little technical skill and technological overhead as possible.

This is why end-user manufacturing and professional stuff is going to be such a game changer. And after that, reformation to the entire regulatory system on how medicines and other products are tested and proven.

"But patents, Ram! Copyrights! Trademarks!"

Patents do not allow someone to legally own the concept of 2+2=4, or the concept of zero, or the chemical process of turning sugar into alcohol. It can only meticulously own processes on how. Alter any step of the process even slightly and you've created a new process that can be patented for the same outcome. You cannot copyright the idea of baking dough, and not just because it has been around so long it's a public domain recipe. You can own one very specific way to formulate the chemical for pain killers. You cannot prevent other people from also patenting pain killers from the same ingredients.

You know what is a bigger obstruction to new pain killers, more drug companies to compete with the megacops? Not having the resources or education and skilled people to operate in these competing companies, taking a loss the same as any company does when they can't monopolize control of a service. What causes that is the equipment being so expensive. What causes THAT is less efficient or traveled exploration into making less expensive machines and equipment for smaller scale production, because the industry is built around a few big megacorps since that is all that can feasibly produce at scale or at cost.

So if machines are made that can be run by fewer, more distributed professionals and competing companies, suddenly the necessity of these massive, government subsidized megacorps dries up. And so does their nobles oblige of regulators and the rest of civilization and the legal system putting up with their carte blanche bullshit. That means non-corporatized accountability, rather than treating corporations like a statesman's precious heir and baby boy, but any common company that can be torn apart and replaced for fucking up.

This is where I think pharmacology is headed. And for that matter, both industry regulation for medical grade equipment, as well as this disgusting, incestous relationship between the federal government and healthcare, giving healthcare a blank check to overvalue itself, then crying about profiteering by "capitalists" as an excuse to give itself further centralization and monopoly directly over medicine and healthcare. Which increases price, which individuals can't pay, which necessitates demanding that the bill be distributed across all of society.

It is in fact in the interests of the capitalists to lower the price of healthcare from the absolute ridiculous heights it exists in today. It serves only the interests of fabian centralization and the desire for healthcare to be the monopoly of the federal government. It is unsustainable and being deliberately wielded not just to bankrupt people, but blame private enterprise for it and argue the cause is private profit and the solution is somehow more of the hair of the dog that bit you.

The law is not the opponent of private enterprise and capitalism. The use of the law and the state to apprehend this relationship in the interests of the state, to the effectively just gig the business and make them a defacto state entity, is. And it is this relationship, allegedly caused by the necessity of the desired outcomes of production of quality and scale, that is the supposed necessity for this.

Well these strings need cutting and the justifications need unfucking. To live in a world where the creation of a medicine, no matter how life saving, is a matter of dollars to tens of dollars, simply because the production is tried, known, and well trod, and not dependent on singular owned processes legally obliged to be obeyed because no one else is allowed to operate in that system, so sayeth the kingmakers of government regulations, regulators and legislation designed to keep it privileged enterprise.

Not where insurance or artificial programs designed to suck up absurd amounts of private wealth in order to afford pie-in-the-sky programs designed to produce results with as many hands in a bucket brigade, all writing their own checks and the only game in town by law, as possible. The idea that centralizing these systems is a solution is like marrying a robber to keep them from stealing from you; you're only going to give them legal unfettered access to your bank account, and the pain will not stop. They'll just have more control over you, and what you do.

If the best scenario pans out, healthcare costs are going to start to plummet with reform that makes it so financially expedient that centralizing it would actually be detrimental to service and care. It's in the interest of industry to break away from a system that ultimately wants to get rid of the actual business side and just move on to being a fourth ring of government, where abuse, monopoly and laziness will mean stagnation and ownership for the sake of ownership.

But all of this hinges on making those pharmacological, technological, scientific and biological discoveries. Largess must be defeated with decentralization- save, obviously, a sturdy and good faith regulatory system in charge of monitoring business violations and quality controls. Of course.

I hope to see the day when everything from lice shampoo to antibiotics and anti-cancer theraputics can be bought from a drug store for about five dollars, requiring no insurance or government subsidization program.

[wheretheeternalare]

with the heavy caveat that it is slightly soulless (though really most corporate jobs are) - amazon corporate pretty much has what you’re describing. i’ve been with them about 3 years and right now i’m working hybrid out of one of the corp offices, M-F 8 hr shifts, 2 days in office and 3 days at home, with the ability to come in more as wanted or needed. Depending on the team or role you still have to talk to people but because it’s all regional it’s over slack/email, never really face to face or over phone, and with a lot of free time for personal projects (or slacking off). on slower days i’ll usually bring my knitting to work and stick on an audiobook which is pretty common. def not perfect but it fits the bill for what i need (e.g. ‘leave me alone with my spreadsheets and music and i’ll get back to you when my project’s done’)

oh interesting! that definitely does sound like the kind of structure I want, although I have to say that I have also found that I need to at least somewhat agree with the mission of my workplace to really get along. not saying this to shame you because yeah all corporate jobs are pretty much equally soulless, just that I definitely had a better time working at a library and a museum than I’m having working for a university, which is ostensibly something I agree with principles-wise but is actually hugely corporatized/tied up in bureaucratic bullshit. but I will keep this in mind bc I also like to get paid a living wage and libraries and museums aren’t known for that lmao

[vvatchword]

I don't want to minimize what happened to the previous commenter here. I was also made aware of "earring-on-the-wrong-side" by elementary school (mid-90s).

However, I also feel like these are both good perspectives for this concept alone: the Internet made all information pass faster, and the Internet broke down barriers for the transference of that information. I cannot stress this concept enough. We want to judge past cultures for behaving in very specific ways, but for information to shape a culture en masse, that meant it had to have a large reach. Pre-Internet, what you knew could be limited by geological location alone.

There was a point we were all always offline. Our perspectives were shaped by our immediate surroundings. Family, friends, and religious spaces taught us cultural expectations and shared information from the outside world. So for information about "wrong-side earrings" to pass to a young person like me in the middle of homophobic Texas, it had to be passed by word of mouth. And for information to pass by word of mouth, it had to be perceived as important and proper enough to share between parties. I wasn't going to hear about sexual peccadilloes from adults--they didn't want me to know those things, so I just went blissfully unaware of them. Kids liked to whisper those things on the bus, but that didn't mean I could ask an adult and get a straight answer. That meant I was getting borked information from borked sources and I often didn't even know why it was salacious to begin with--just that it was. And the weird-ass conclusions you could come to, holy shit.

Information could also be passed by media, but media had "watchers at the gates." It had standards and expectations for proper behavior. Information was far more censored, limited, and suspect than it is today--yeah, I said "suspect." Because what were the media's standards? In the same way that sometimes you got your info from your friend's Uncle Tony, who got it from who-knew-whom, who might also have an axe to grind, who might also be dumber than a box of hammers--well, the media was full of people who were just as limited as you were, and they would only express what was deemed acceptable between strangers (read: watered down, edges sanded off, certain elements carefully alluded to and never spoken outright). And Uncle Tony might be the only source you got for that piece of information ever. And as half of the way you develop opinions and belief systems is by testing them against the world at large, and your circumstances might never demand you use that information...

In other words: information was passed much slower, and when you got a perspective on rare information, it was often the only perspective you'd ever receive, and you could only receive singular viewpoints that rarely had to be tested and thus never flourished.

oh, man, I can't stress enough how weird and solipsistic the world was for me. Maybe half of it was that I was a child, and at least a third of it was autism, but damn. What a time to be alive.

Pre-Internet, there was far more of a sensation of out-groups and in-groups. Half of the reason the Internet was exciting was because suddenly I could talk to people in groups I'd never even known existed before, and with the veil of anonymity, I could learn all kinds of bullshit that I had never been intended to touch. I could see a subject in its full spectrum of colors and light.

The Internet may have been corporatized all to hell and back, but at least you can still find pockets of real humanity and weird fuckery. At least you can learn about all kinds of viewpoints and it doesn't really take you that long to dig. You don't have to dig through a card catalog only to discover yet more information that's only alluded to and not discussed outright. You don't have to fuck up by asking the wrong authority figures and get bad reputations in-town or whatever the fuck I was doing (I was doing very badly). Anyway, just my two cents.

Listen.

The average American in the early 90s did not have the context to see Earring Magic Ken as gay.

And there was no internet to spread the idea.

Sure, gay people and gay adjacent people saw it, but most people--and especially kids--just saw it as Cool Guy Like On MTV, with a necklace that could hold charms like Earring Magic Barbie (and Midge) earrings

and yeah, those Cool Guys On MTV may very well have been gay, but, again, the average American did not have the context to see that.

(I was in college at the time and did not have the context to see it, and I saw nothing indicating any outrage over the doll, and I was very actively a Doll Person then, too)

When people don't know what they don't see, they don't get outraged, y'know?

[rametarin]

please stop doing this

Some Dude: “American Liberals and conservatives are the exact same thing.”

Also Some Dude: “I am so tired of people conflating socialists with communists! They’re not even remotely similar!”

wish even half of you that felt like they were the exact same would stop platforming the democrats/democrat party, and grow some gonads to actually A.) have some integrity and join the actual pro-socialism parties B.) actually join the American communist parties C.) go green, where the other people that are actually crypto-socialists/communists can continue pretending to be ecologists in the interest of ecology and not advancing policy, are living.

But I understand. Being what you are is, “bad optics right now,” probably due to, “CIA propaganda,” or whatever bullshit that takes the onus of responsibility from being associated with a violent, conspiratorial and totalitarian culture of usurpers away from defeating your own arguments.

Since a great deal of you unironically use the fact the US has HAD slavery and concentration camps historically as a reason why things can’t be fixed or modified to be better, they HAVE to be destroyed and replaced in order to not have the stigma or guilt of a thing anymore, it’d make sense you don’t want to speak up and declare what you really are and vote in the appropriate parties. You whom fly the god damned red and black and yellows would have to willingly associate with every bit of imperialism-in-all-but-name that was the Soviet Union, and any Socialist Republic that bore those colors, used those symbols and spoke those memes and slokans. So, given actual history, the famines, the pogroms of the supposed “anti-classist, anti-discrimination, anti-barbarism” parties and movements that turned into piles of pestilence, famine and pyramids of dead skulls don’t want your symbols associated with that.

And yet many of you that’d openly wave a hammer and sickle flag, think a statue of Lincoln erected and financed by freed slaves is too spicy to have without declaring, “LINCOLN WAS A WHITE SUPREMACIST” everywhere. That the United States can never clean the blemishes of its history and that that’s an argument as to why it needs to be snuffed out as a concept and paved over with a Year Zero and something else in its place.

Instead, you spineless fucking interlopers continue to commandeer the democrats. There’s been some headway by the russo-supremacists to commandeer the republicans by tricking some of them into thinking Putin is the cure to the worst of your shit, but by and large the republicans remain more entrenched in religious moralism or plutocratic corporatism and “small government statism,” which one way or another prevents the worst of your intrusions. Yes, the republicans and them doing that present their own sets of problems. They’re different problems from the ones you represent.

You know it suits you better to pretend to be liberals when it suits you, using the term and stretching it, hoping to make it synonymous with you- and you’ve managed to succeed, for the most part. Except; you that aren’t liberal, but pretend to be liberal for ideological convenience sake; the mask has been slipping, of late. You’ve seen that this vessel has taken you as far as it can go.

And I’ve been enjoying seeing this. The holes opening up, exposing the parasite or predatory mimic pretending to be the real deal. You are not liberal. You are anti-private property and pro government (”society,” that you dub a government declaring itself to be the voice of society) control over natural resources and employment opportunities.

I look forwards to seeing some of you actually arguing openly and honestly from the actual parties and stop trying to railroad another party towards your values and goals by pretending to be liberals. And you’d best do it quickly, because between liberal ownership of self, free market capitalism and the advancement of science and technology from both private and public outlets hurriedly bringing us towards an era of affordable miracles and quality of life improvements that just 30-40 years ago WOULD have required megawealth to even imagine, there’s not going to be much of a difference between the opportunities for a wealthy person and a middle classed one, much longer.

Then you’ll be back to trying to rally ‘comrades’ with bluster and insistence that everybody stop imagining the situation just between what’s fair for individuals and instead demanding we imagine some game rules where the rich are a nefarious and inherently evil force unto themselves while ‘the poor’ (those that aren’t rich) are inherently victims of their exploitation and oppression. Assigning malice to things not on the basis of the actual malice of actual assholes doing actual asshole things, but characterizing people as assholes because they have things, and someone whom has poor is automatically a victim because he’s not rich.

When stripped of your cover, and no longer given the benefit of the doubt, and denied the ability to play off peoples unfamilarity of your snake oil, you’ll eventually have to argue for what you really believe. And what you really believe is shit. Even the parts that sound good, are mere cover used to declare would be the positive outcome of your shit systems.

That’s why people will conflate the two systems and not care about the difference. One system will see the crimes of another, and alchemically transmute itself to claim it’s not affiliated with the other, that that behavior is characteristic only of the other guy, and they must be mistaken for presuming you the same. While you in fact engage in the same crimes.

Meanwhile, you cannot argue a secular liberal constitutionalist republic that can and has historically been a limit to social hegemony of religious authority, a federated and regulated secular system has been essential in filing down the much of the worst kinds of trade abuses by cartels and organizations, isn’t worlds different from a fucking religiously fascist ethnostate. American liberalism bears little resemblance to American conservatism outside the fact both to varying degrees and populations have and respect the right to private property, and use capitalism. When those are the only things you care about, your ideology may as well be the only religion you see as valid, and everything that is not your faith may as well be paganism when it’s not the antithetical Satanism to your beliefs.

[pakeithpsy]

How about you use that ad money to fix your barely functional mobile site? Or maybe not cover up the content I'm trying to look at with shitty messages begging me to re-enable ads that cover up the content I'm trying to look at?

I can't take this fucking bullshit anymore, every single website is impossible to use now because these incompetent greedy asshats care more about money than having a functional, user-friendly layout. This shit is exactly why people use adblockers and instead of actually putting in the effort to make your site better so people would actually be willing to monetarily support your site, you make everyone's life a living hell because your billionaire CEO can't stand the thought of being ten cents poorer from ads that are obnoxious at best and outright harmful at worst. Capitalism and corporatism were goddamn mistakes.

[leviathan-supersystem]

just gonna copy-paste my previous response to this talking point to save myself some time- but you're gonna get a special little post-script, just for you, for being such a Special Little Guy

hey, fun fact! did you know that the bullshit definition of capitalism you’re using was invented about a century after the term was invented, and that the correct definition of the term that i’m using was both how the term was invented and how it has been used by most people the entire time it has existed? we can even pinpoint the exact moment when the bullshit definition you’re using started emerging! here’s the essay where Murray Rothbard coined the bullshit definition, and it’s Very Interesting for a few reasons [x]:

In order to discuss the “future of capitalism,” we must first decide what the meaning of the term “capitalism” really is. Unfortunately, the term “capitalism” was coined by its greatest and most famous enemy, Karl Marx. We really can’t rely upon him for correct and subtle usage. And, in fact, what Marx and later writers have done is to lump together two extremely different and even contradictory concepts and actions under the same portmanteau term. These two contradictory concepts are what I would call “free-market capitalism” on the one hand, and “state capitalism” on the other.

a few interesting points here! first off, way back then ancap charlatans hadn’t started misappropriating the word “corporatism” yet, and were instead trying to distinguish between “free market cspitalism” and “state capitalism”- the concept of calling the latter “corporatism” instead in an attempt to fully exonerate capitalism hadn’t yet entered the conversation. second, he acknowledges, right at the beginning of the essay, that the term capitalism was, in fact, invented by anti-capitalists! (not Marx, to be clear, it was Louis Blanc, another socialist theorist from around the same time, though Marx did expand on the concept greatly- Rothbard got this wrong because he is stupid)

obviously, Rothbard deciding a century after the fact that the word “capitalism” doesn’t mean what it was invented to mean is utter nonsense on his part, an obvious attempt to obfuscate and distract from Marx’s critique of capitalism critique of capitalism by re-defining words on a whim. moreover, his attempt to delineate between “free market capitalism” and “state capitalism” (or as his ideological descendants would put it capitalism vs corporatism) ignores that large-scale land ownership, which is key to many of the relations that Marx analyzed and critiqued, (relation between landlord and tenant, relation between farm owner and farm worker, relation between factory owner and factory worker, etc) depend on state violence to enforce that claim on land in the first place. in other words, the two cannot be so easily separated.

i’m sure, of course, you will freely acknowledge that you were in error, and will edit your post to reflect this.

/alright, that's the end of the pre-written segment, now on to the epilogue:

but the working class are capitalists, black Rock is not.

lmaoooooooooooo hooooly shit

alright, so the term "capitalist" as meaning someone who makes their money primarily off of their ownership of capital rather than their labor (larger business owners, landlords, etc) actually pre-dates the use of the term "capitalism", it's earliest use being in the mid 1600's in the Hollantse Mercurius. this is both how the term was coined, and the definition that is still commonly used today:

that said, let's be charitable here- sure, you're absolutely wrong about black rock not being capitalists, but the term "capitalist" as a noun is sometimes also used to refer people who advocate for capitalism, and not just for the owners of capital. so perhaps advocacy for capitalism is especially widespread among working class people?

no, wrong again. as you can see here, the working class overwhelmingly is more likely to oppose capitalism- and support socialism- than the wealthy. so unfortunately it would seem your argument is completely wrong even by the most charitable possible interpretation.

(please accuse me of using source with a pro-socialist bias for that last chart, it would be really funny if you did.)

i know the entire point of the media is to turn working class people against each other and protect ruling class capitalists, but this is a little on the nose

[rotationalsymmetry]

I’m trying to come up with fake pride discourse and all I’m coming up with is real bullshit (ie bullshit discourse that people actually argue) and real things worth worrying about. Like how language tends to center western concepts of sexual orientation and gender, and how pride isn’t necessarily accessible to people who have issues with mobility and/or crowds and loud noises, and the perennial corporatization and cops thing.

Ok lemme try one more time: clothes should be banned at Pride because historically clothing is used to signify cultural and class distinctions, so a truly egalitarian society requires abolishing clothes.

How’s that?

[t4t4t]

Such a distrust has solid foundations, not only in the criminal management of the pandemic, but more generally in a matter of fact which comrades of ours who succumbed to the blindest scientism [14] now deny: in a capitalist society, medicine operates according to capitalist logic. Do antivaxxers draw absurd conclusions from this premise? Yes they do, but the premise doesn't disappear because of that.

For all these reasons, we refuse to discard the views of those who don't want to vaccinate, even if we made a different choice; nor do we consider those people, as many "leftists" seem to do, our enemies any more so than the ruling class that put us all in this situation. 

Obviously, when antivaxxers spew bullshit and spread fake news and conspiracy fantasies, we refute them to the extent that we're able to do so, as Wu Ming 1 did in his book La Q di Qomplotto [The Q of Qonspiracy]. What we won't do is join those who incite crowds against the "No Vax" scapegoat. We oppose this hate campaign, which only serves to absolve the government and the bosses.

Once again, one needn’t be against vaccines to grasp a basic fact: to focus only on the vaccine as if upon the arrival of the cavalry has contributed to repressing the structural causes of the pandemic, its impact, and its management under the sign of emergency which has for some time formed the logic of contemporary capitalist governance. Our health care system was progressively dismantled, corporatized and rendered unfit to withstand any critical situation, but when the vaccine arrived, no one spoke of reversing course on this dismantling of the system. 

You mentioned La Q di Qomplotto, a book in which one of you, Wu Ming 1, dissects “conspiracism” in search of its "kernels of truth." Can you briefly explain this concept, and how it applies to the pandemic situation? 

In the massive and transversal diffusion of conspiracy fantasies — including fantasies on the subject of vaccines — we identify the expression of a malaise, a discontent, a confused awareness that capitalist society is unlivable, dehumanizing, alienating. These are what we refer to as "kernels of truth," and they're both of a more general and more specific truth.

Even QAnon has some truth at its core: the system is indeed monstrous, and the Democratic Party in the US really does serve the interests of a loathsome elite. The fact that from these premises and intuitions, rather than arriving at a consistently anticapitalist consciousness, instead generate a belief in a secret society of bloodsucking pedophile satanists who keep millions of children enslaved underground is a huge problem but, again, the kernels of truth don't disappear because of that. We could describe QAnon as an unconscious allegory and unintentional parody of anticapitalist critique.

By kernels of truth we mean general premises, truncated intuitions, vague discontent, poorly elaborated outbursts of anger brought about by the sickness of living in capitalist society. And if we can find them in QAnon, a fortiori we can find them in antivaccinism. They're the same kernels from which the best strands of an anticapitalist critique of medicine developed in the past, from Ivan Illich to Franco Basaglia and Franca Ongaro Basaglia, from Michel Foucault to the German SPK15, from Félix Guattari to British antipsychiatry.

The subordination of medicine to the search for profit, the morbid relationship between medicine and capital, the dependence of medico-pharmaceutical research on big corporations, the increasing bureaucratization and depersonalization of care, the lack of confidence in the health care system after a long string of scandals... These are, or would be, our issues, anticapitalist issues, but we'll never intercept that discontent — and by extension, we'll never shift it in more sensible and fruitful directions — as long as we refuse to see it and remain content to treat those who express it as our enemies. In doing so, we reduce ourselves to gatekeepers of the system, defenders of the status quo, and we leave the field open to grifters and fascists. 

Then there are kernels of an even more specific truth, those concerning the political management of the pandemic: all the lies told by the government, all the terror and sensationalism, all the blatant disinformation that accompanies the vaccination campaign.

...

Appendix: On Post-Pandemic Climate Activism

by Wu Ming 1

We have to be more and more careful about how we fight for the climate. What Andreas Malm writes in his How To Blow Up A Pipeline is right: a big problem of the climate movement is that it's been too respectable, too "modest," too loyal to a certain imperative, too compliant to rules it didn't give itself autonomously. After the Covid emergency, there's a risk that it will become even more so. 

From the diversionary management of the pandemic, and especially from the deficit of critical response to such management, the ruling class learned a whole host of lessons. We, on the other hand, have learned far too few.

The offloading of responsibility from the ruling class downwards was already a practice before, with the emphasis on individual consumer choices (at the expense of collective action and systemic change), or with forms of regressive eco-taxation such as the increase in the TICPE fuel tax which sparked the Yellow Vest protests in France.

Now the enemy knows that the offloading can be more effective thanks to a mix of authoritarianism, paternalism and narratives of contrition and atonement inoculated into the social body. Emergency as a method of governance works best if I, the citizen, internalize a sense of guilt and convince myself that I must do penance "for the sake of others,” obey power "to save others,” even adopting behaviors "as a memento to myself" and "out of respect for others.” This is what justified the domestic confinement and the demonization of all outdoor activities while factories continued to operate, the obligation to wear a mask outdoors even though contagion in those situations is almost impossible, the curfew that "does not have a scientific reason, but serves to remind us that we have to make sacrifices" (the virologist Antonella Viola said that on November 4th 2020), the Green Pass with all its incongruities... Il faut, once again, défendre la société.

The "society" that we should defend by discipline and obedience is capitalist society, that is, the Economy. This big "phony cooperative" of which we are all members-employees is like the protagonist of Fabrizio De Andrè's Ballata dell'amore cieco [Ballad of Blind Love]: to prove that you love her you have to castrate and immolate yourself, tralalalalla tralallaleru. What's new is that they now ask you to do so for the climate. For "sustainability." Because "transition has costs'” and you have to pay them. You have to pay them because it's your fault and therefore, honey, “if you love me, cut the four veins in your wrists.”

This is also why those who denounce the "dictatorship of health" are wrong: they believe that the point was the content of the emergency, while the system continues to experiment with its form. Once the outcome has been achieved, once the system has regained its homeostasis18, it can move beyond the pandemic-centered narrative. In Italy, where the aftermath of virocentrism persists more than elsewhere, this "gap" is still hard to notice, but it will happen here too.

Now, we know very well that during the pandemic emergency it was the younger generations that were most singled out, blamed, infantilized and browbeaten into respecting the rules. The same people who, in great majority, are present in movements around the climate. When the sirens of capital sing the songs of ecosacrifice, they will need earplugs like those of Odysseus.

A song that can have a thousand covers and rearrangements, depending on the cultural substrata: ecofascism, ecostalinism, Protestant ecofrugality, ecocatholicism with echoes of the Counter-Reformation, ecorighteousness focused on "ecorespectability" and so on.

We should all meditate on Mario Draghi's declaration, as it was reported by Italian newspapers on September 21: "The climate emergency is like the pandemic.” At the level of system homeostasis, this means: we will manage the climate the same way thay we managed the pandemic, i.e. by passing off all the blame on you — and many of you will be only too happy to take it on.

-Bologna, October 25-28 (notes added November 4-5, 2021) 

Translated by Wu Ming