#and beholden to the shareholders

[eternal-learner]

Peter Outerbridge as William Easton Saw VI

[spurious]

love being told at ten minutes before noon on the same day that it's mandatory to work till 8pm every day this week :)

[ardentperfidy]

i'm going to develop a permanent tic if i have to see one more take on last night's succession episode blaming kendall's lack of morals and hurt feelings over shiv's betrayal for the rise of fascism as the way that kendall serves as a stand in for the moral vacuum at the heart of capitalism flies over their heads with a gentle whistling sound

[vaspider]

While I'm writing things that I've been intending to write for a while... one of the things that I think that a lot of people who haven't been involved in like... banking or corporate shenaniganry miss about why our economy is its current flavor of total fuckery is the concept of "fiduciary duty to shareholders."

"Why does every corporation pursue endless growth?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.

"Why do corporations treat workers the way they do?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.

"Why do corporations make such bass-ackwards decisions about what's 'good for' the company?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.

The legal purpose of a corporation with shareholders -- its only true purpose -- is the generation of revenue/returns for shareholders. Period. That's it. Anything else it does is secondary to that. Sustainability of business, treatment of workers, sustainability and quality of product, those things are functionally and legally second to generating revenue for shareholders. Again, period, end of story. There is no other function of a corporation, and all of its extensive legal privileges exist to allow it to do that.

"But Spider," you might say, "that sounds like corporations only exist in current business in order to extract as much money and value as possible from the people actually doing the work and transfer it up to the people who aren't actually doing the work!"

Yes. You are correct. Thank you for coming with me to that realization. You are incredibly smart and also attractive.

You might also say, "but Spider, is this a legal obligation? Could those running a company be held legally responsible for failing their obligations if they prioritize sustainability or quality of product or care of workers above returns for shareholders?"

Yes! They absolutely can! Isn't that terrifying? Also you look great today, you're terribly clever for thinking about these things. The board and officers of a corporation can be held legally responsible to varying degrees for failing to maximize shareholder value.

And that, my friends, is why corporations do things that don't seem to make any fucking sense, and why 'continuous growth' is valued above literally anything else: because it fucking has to be.

If you're thinking that this doesn't sound like a sustainable economic model, you're not alone. People who are much smarter than both of us, and probably nearly as attractive, have written a proposal for how to change corporate law in order to create a more sensible and sustainable economy. This is one of several proposals, and while I don't agree with all of this stuff, I think that reading it will really help people as a springboard to understanding exactly why our economy is as fucked up as it is, and why just saying 'well then don't pursue eternal growth' isn't going to work -- because right now it legally can't. We'd need to change -- and we can change -- the laws around corporate governance.

This concept of 'shareholder primacy' and the fiduciary duty to shareholders is one I had to learn when I was getting my securities licenses, and every time I see people confusedly asking why corporations try to grow grow grow in a way that only makes sense if you're a tumor, I sigh and think, 'yeah, fiduciary duty to shareholders.'

(And this is why Emet and I have refused to seek investors for NK -- we might become beholden to make decisions which maximize investor return, and that would get in the way of being able to fully support our people and our values and say the things we started this company to say.)

Anyway, you should read up on these concepts if you're not familiar. It's pretty eye-opening.

[persephinae]

man fuck Hasbro and fuck all these CEO's laying off game devs fr

also:

EDIT BECAUSE PEOPLE AREN'T FUCKING READING THE ARTICLE:

Larian merely licensed the IP from the studio and proved to the world that they made a great game

They do not own dnd. Hasbro does.

You may pirate dnd materials but it's not Larian's fault that Harbro fired 1100 people from their dnd department.

Please read the article.

I only mentioned game devs as well because over 6500 game devs have been laid off this year from various studios FOR THE SAME REASONS

Please do NOT pirate Larian, an independent studio with NO ties to AAA publishers. That they made such an incredible and creative game is a testament to not being beholden to shareholders and CEO's who don't know or care about the people who create the things they sell

Go burn down Hasbro's offices

Thank you

[tangibletechnomancy]

The reason I took interest in AI as an art medium is that I've always been interested in experimenting with novel and unconventional art media - I started incorporating power tools into a lot of my physical processes younger than most people were even allowed to breathe near them, and I took to digital art like a duck to water when it was the big, relatively new, controversial thing too, so really this just seems like the logical next step. More than that, it's exciting - it's not every day that we just invent an entirely new never-before-seen art medium! I have always been one to go fucking wild for that shit.

Which is, ironically, a huge part of why I almost reflexively recoil at how it's used in the corporate world: because the world of business, particularly the entertainment industry, has what often seems like less than zero interest in appreciating it as a novel medium.

And I often wonder how much less that would be the case - and, by extension, how much less vitriolic the discussion around it would be, and how many fewer well-meaning people would be falling for reactionary mythologies about where exactly the problems lie - if it hadn't reached the point of...at least an illusion of commercial viability, at exactly the moment it did.

See, the groundwork was laid in 2020, back during covid lockdowns, when we saw a massive spike in people relying on TV, games, books, movies, etc. to compensate for the lack of outdoor, physical, social entertainment. This was, seemingly, wonderful for the whole industry - but under late-stage capitalism, it was as much of a curse as it was a gift. When industries are run by people whose sole brain process is "line-go-up", tiny factors like "we're not going to be in lockdown forever" don't matter. CEOs got dollar signs in their eyes. Shareholders demanded not only perpetual growth, but perpetual growth at this rate or better. Even though everyone with an ounce of common sense was screaming "this is an aberration, this is not sustainable" - it didn't matter. The business bros refused to believe it. This was their new normal, they were determined to prove -

And they, predictably, failed to prove it.

So now the business bros are in a pickle. They're beholden to the shareholders to do everything within their power to maintain the infinite growth they promised, in a world with finite resources. In fact, by precedent, they're beholden to this by law. Fiduciary duty has been interpreted in court to mean that, given the choice between offering a better product and ensuring maximum returns for shareholders, the latter MUST be a higher priority; reinvesting too much in the business instead of trying to make the share value increase as much as possible, as fast as possible, can result in a lawsuit - that a board member or CEO can lose, and have lost before - because it's not acting in the best interest of shareholders. If that unsustainable explosive growth was promised forever, all the more so.

And now, 2-3-4 years on, that impossibility hangs like a sword of Damocles over the heads of these media company CEOs. The market is fully saturated; the number of new potential customers left to onboard is negligible. Some companies began trying to "solve" this "problem" by violating consumer privacy and charging per household member, which (also predictably) backfired because those of us who live in reality and not statsland were not exactly thrilled about the concept of being told we couldn't watch TV with our own families. Shareholders are getting antsy, because their (however predictably impossible) infinite lockdown-level profits...aren't coming, and someone's gotta make up for that, right? So they had already started enshittifying, making excuses for layoffs, for cutting employee pay, for duty creep, for increasing crunch, for lean-staffing, for tightening turnarounds-

And that was when we got the first iterations of AI image generation that were actually somewhat useful for things like rapid first drafts, moodboards, and conceptualizing.

Lo! A savior! It might as well have been the digital messiah to the business bros, and their eyes turned back into dollar signs. More than that, they were being promised that this...both was, and wasn't art at the same time. It was good enough for their final product, or if not it would be within a year or two, but it required no skill whatsoever to make! Soon, you could fire ALL your creatives and just have Susan from accounting write your scripts and make your concept art with all the effort that it takes to get lunch from a Star Trek replicator!

This is every bit as much bullshit as the promise of infinite lockdown-level growth, of course, but with shareholders clamoring for the money they were recklessly promised, executives are looking for anything, even the slightest glimmer of a new possibility, that just might work as a life raft from this sinking ship.

So where are we now? Well, we're exiting the "fucking around" phase and entering "finding out". According to anecdotes I've read, companies are, allegedly, already hiring prompt engineers (or "prompters" - can't give them a job title that implies there's skill or thought involved, now can we, that just might imply they deserve enough money to survive!)...and most of them not only lack the skill to manually post-process their works, but don't even know how (or perhaps aren't given access) to fully use the software they specialize in, being blissfully unaware of (or perhaps not able/allowed to use) features such as inpainting or img2img. It has been observed many times that LLMs are being used to flood once-reputable information outlets with hallucinated garbage. I can verify - as can nearly everyone who was online in the aftermath of the Glasgow Willy Wonka Dashcon Experience - that the results are often outright comically bad.

To anyone who was paying attention to anything other than please-line-go-up-faster-please-line-go-please (or buying so heavily into reactionary mythologies about why AI can be dangerous in industry that they bought the tech companies' false promises too and just thought it was a bad thing), this was entirely predictable. Unfortunately for everyone in the blast radius, common sense has never been an executive's strong suit when so much money is on the line.

Much like CGI before it, what we have here is a whole new medium that is seldom being treated as a new medium with its own unique strengths, but more often being used as a replacement for more expensive labor, no matter how bad the result may be - nor, for that matter, how unjust it may be that the labor is so much cheaper.

And it's all because of timing. It's all because it came about in the perfect moment to look like a life raft in a moment of late-stage capitalist panic. Any port in a storm, after all - even if that port is a non-Euclidean labyrinth of soggy, rotten botshit garbage.

Any port in a storm, right? ...right?

All images generated using Simple Stable, under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

[ponett]

ive seen you post about doctor robotnik's ring racers occasionally on twitter and would like to hear your overall thoughts on the game

I'm enjoying it a lot! It plays well, has a ridiculous number of unlockable characters and tracks, and is generally just really polished. This would be impressive even for a paid indie kart racer that cost like $20-$30, but for a freeware fangame that's somehow built off of Doom? It's nuts. So much love and care went into this. I've been having a lot of fun playing through all the Grand Prix cups and clearing out the challenge board, which I've only completed 47% of it even with over 15 hours of playtime logged.

It's absolutely one of the most hardcore kart racers I've ever played, though, and that's gonna turn some people off. While playing solo even easy mode can be difficult, especially thanks to the rival system that gives one CPU buffs over the others. Anything below 150cc is a complete joke for me in Mario Kart, but even playing on the "normal" difficulty in Ring Racers (now renamed "intense" in the 2.2 patch) kicks my ass, and if you place poorly in a Grand Prix race it gives you a game over and makes you redo the race. I can't even imagine touching the higher difficulties at my current skill level.

This is compounded by how technical the game is and how many options are at your disposal. Spin dashing, tricks, fast drops, collecting and spending rings, an item roulette that can be manually stopped, a high risk high reward chargeable melee attack when you have negative rings, the ability to harass and be harassed by other racers while positioning yourself before the start of the race, gates that can only be passed through when you have a high level of boost, lots of items with different quirks that reward skilled play. And of course, perhaps most daunting of all to new players, there's the game's unique slope physics designed to mimic how they work in the 2D Sonic games, which will often require you to either spend rings for a small boost or stop and charge up a spin dash to get up a steep hill.

All of these add a lot of complexity to the game that can be pretty daunting early on, which is why it has an infamously long story-driven tutorial to introduce all of these mechanics. I'm not sure said tutorial actually does the best job introducing how those mechanics will actually be put to use in races, but I can't blame them for thinking the game needed it. (I do have to admit I am annoyed by the game's insistence upon framing everything via Sega Saturn inputs, though. I had to open the settings screen to figure out what buttons the tutorial actually wanted me to press.)

Some of these things have already been addressed in the first couple patches, of course. You can now exit the tutorial way earlier, some unlock requirements have been relaxed, there's an option to let the game automatically use your rings for you, easy mode has been made easier, a handful of problematic courses have been tweaked, etc. And I'm sure they'll continue to refine the game based on player feedback. But it's probably always going to be a fairly hardcore game. It's hard and has a high skill ceiling by design. Nintendo's never gonna make a super technical new Mario Kart for sickos - not on purpose, at least. They need it to be a pick-up-and-play party game that sells 70 million copies. But a freeware fangame not beholden to shareholders can experiment more and try to cater to that more hardcore crowd. Say what you will about Ring Racers, but it absolutely has a specific creative vision of its own beyond "Sonic Mario Kart," and I respect that even if the game sometimes frustrates me

[askagamedev]

Any thoughts on the "Fix Team Fortress 2" movement? Is there anything their fans can do differently to try and get some change to happen?

Valve is pretty notorious for being an industry unicorn doing their own thing. They're a privately held company, meaning they have no shareholders to answer to besides their own founders. They make money hand over fist because they own a major distribution platform that maintains a plurality of customers on PC, meaning that angry player feedback has significantly less effect on their bottom line. Valve is also notorious for allowing their developers to work on whatever they want to work on. In aggregate, these factors combine into a company whose devs can basically do whatever they want, without needing to be beholden to any external pressures to do this or that.

Many gamers mythologize this kind of "perfect game development environment" where the devs aren't beholden to shareholders or publishers or politics or whatever else. Well, this can also be a double-edged sword monkey's paw kind of situation as well. Such an environment also makes the devs not beholden to the players of their games either. They can choose whether they want to listen or not, and the TF2 players can choose to take their business elsewhere. The unfortunate truth is that Steam will continue to pay Valve's bills for the foreseeable future, which gives them license to ignore the TF2 players for as long as they want. Unless the players can somehow persuade enough of Valve's developers (and the right developers too - a character artist certainly isn't going to write bot detection code) to drop whatever they've chosen to work on and switch over to fixing TF2, it's probably not going to happen unless something major changes.

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[phoenixyfriend]

Trying to figure out if there are any actual, like, ethics to the stock market. Going public sounds unremarkable, just gaining capital for development in exchange for giving investors some voting power in operations and management.

But it completely changes the business model and general goals. Being beholden to shareholders ensures that "a successful business" is defined less by its ability to be stable and change with the times without faltering and growing to reasonably fill its niche, and rather by its ability to turn higher and higher profits in order to ensure greater dividends, a greater return on investment, to the shareholders, focusing on the short term investments rather than long-term stability. Companies that can't fulfill that role, staying stable or being unable to change with the times due to shareholder demands, get caught in stock gambits like shortselling (e.g. the GameStop incident) and driven out of business.

In theory, a company being led by a bunch of people instead of by a single person or family should make it less prone to abuses, but when the only people that can afford enough stock to have an impact on operations are people of extraordinary wealth...

Companies end up pursuing eternal growth even when it isn't feasible, suborning their own original goals and intentions in the name of turning ever-greater profits for their shareholders.

But then again, privately-owned means vulnerability to private equity, which probably makes them more likely to be destroyed by 'grow your wealth' folks...

(This isn't entirely for a recent Ko-Fi Prompt, but it's a big factor. I'm just trying to get my thoughts on the stock market in order before I dive into the more specific question I was given. My focus in university was primarily in international business/communications and marketing, rather than stock and equity, and it's been a while since I put deep thought into how the stock market functions and whether that function is inherently structured in a way that supports unethical action, or just one of many systems that wealthy people have taken advantage of.)

Does anyone here with experience or education in stocks and finance have thoughts to share?

I'm focusing on the ethics and morality of the stock market and its impacts on employees, the environment, and the public, not questions of 'do shareholders deserve to ask for a return.'

No libertarian takes on this, please, I'm trying to gather actual information, with a basis in the social contract, not USAmerican individualism.

[orangepanic]

All shipping aside I think Asami Sato would make an excellent Firelady. Not only does she look the part, she'd be the business-savvy leader of the most industrialized of the four nations. The military gets a makeover that lets it update and be more effective without having to grow. Exports quadruple and diversify. Transit improves. She's used to managing large sums of money and investments and is clearly good at it, and she's also used to managing a board and shareholders, which isn't all that different from other governing councils. Yet as a young bisexual female leader who grew up in a highly multicultural society she wouldn't be beholden to her new nation's cultural conservatism, either. Her advisors would be balanced. She's an intellectual who'd invest in education. She's social and would enjoy a moderate amount of public appearances where she wears fancy dresses and waves. She's on very good terms with the Avatar, Chief Tonraq, and King Wu at minimum and would strengthen these connections with other nations.

Someone put her in charge, please.

[oleanderblume]

I find it incredibly interesting and absolutely buck wild that the criticism surrounding an independent animation studio's works are directed entirely at the singular creator, as though the entire entertainment industry and medium itself is not a constant collective and collaborative effort of multiple writers, storyboard artists, animators, and studio heads.

Instead, it's just one specific person who is horrible and awful for creating whatever it is they make and how it is received by a seemingly very small minority holding a megaphone to everyone’s fucking ear canal.

Half the criticisms are entirely baseless and lacking nuance, too. Which is interesting. Its like they just hate this one person for being successful and breaking into an incredibly gatekept industry as an independent artist and studio.

Like no one in that group is capable of understanding just how groundbreaking and historical it is for an independent studio to garner this amount of success in this era of entertainment.

Or understanding the limitations put on independent studios that are carving out the future of the entertainment industry.

Of course viewership of a nearly entirely crowdfunded passion project being released once every few months is going to feel as though the pacing is slower, or as though the story isn't being laid out as clearly.

It's being released episodically once every few months.

And of course a series created by the same studio being overseen by a massive corporate streaming service beholden to shareholders and major studio mandates is going to feel rushed and dramatically different from the aforementioned passion project.

It is being overseen by the exact same kinds of corporate business practice that forces writers and creators of entertainment to work in sharp deadlines with no guarantee of continuation.

Like. Yes, have criticism. But be cognizant of the drastically different influences that exist in these two avenues of entertainment and production. And be aware, at the very least, of basic media literacy and competency.

One of those shows is clearly an episodic character driven drama, while the other is specifically plot driven. They are going to manifest different methods of storytelling because they are different stories and might i remind you, one of them is overseen by a corporate entity with the ability to just cancel its "investment" on a whim.

I think it speaks very loudly to the state of consumerism in our current age, and the way audiences receive art. It is no longer art but "content" and we must only consume "content" which is "morally pure" in every possible way.

But criticism can't be given to the corporations in control of that decimination of "content" one one person is to blame, is at fault.

Anyways. Just my observation. Interesting.

[sodomyaspraxis]

“The ruling class is a designator for a non-homogenous array of individuals who hold decision-making positions within these citadels of political-economic power, for whom the continuation of the status quo is of the utmost priority. But these individuals sit in highly structured positions, beholden to the built-in demands of shareholders (for higher profit) and political constituencies (for minimal levels of stability and prosperity—not so much the requirement that things get better but simply that they don’t get too bad too fast). There is thus no real malicious intent behind such decisions, nor is there the ability for such holders of power to truly transform or break free from the system itself. They are chained to it just as we all are, though they find themselves chained to its top.

The entire process is, therefore, one of contingent adaptations, rather than ruling class conspiracy. Its product is not that of a hidden, scheming council of elites, but simply the result of the continual experimentation through which different factions of the ruling class attempted to resolve the budding crisis and failed, their efforts then replaced by new, untested possibilities put forward by new leaders generating new outcomes that had to be dealt with in turn. The process is one of continual transformation in response to the local manifestations of the global decline in profitability. “Neoliberalism” is therefore not a fully conscious, casually malicious political program, as some authors would have it,[7] but simply a term attributed to a loose consensus that formed around numerous local solutions to the crisis that seemed to overcome short-term limits at the time. The prominence of an increasingly militarized state in this period is itself a symptom of the fundamental incoherence of this consensus, since the management of the ever-building, ever-deferred yet ever-present crisis grows more and more monumental. We have today finally reached the point at which this consensus is collapsing in the face of declining global trade and rising tides of populist nationalism, even while the massive military apparatus that accreted atop global supply chains remains, driven by its own inertia.”

-Red Dust

[lighthousekeepers-burner-blog]

The CDC is beholden to the US government that is beholden to lobbyists of corporate America that are beholden to shareholders to maximize profits - in which sick pay of mandated time off of employees is a lobbying issue. That’s why you can spread COVID easier, not because of some determination in the consensus science. Their decision to treat COVID like the flu is a political one, and anti-vaxxers, anti-lockdown proponents insisting this is a win for their arguments are giving the CDC way too much credit for giving a fuck about what the science says. If liability can be neatly offloaded to your ‘free choice’ they will happily allow you to disable yourself.

[mariacallous]

Elon Musk is a man comfortable with risky bets. He pledged to send 1 million people to Mars (SpaceX), to fill factories with humanoid workers (Tesla Bot), and to create a network of highways deep underground (the Boring Company). All of these bets are yet to pay off. But six years ago, Musk took a leap of faith that would also affect him personally. He tied his own pay at Tesla to a series of financial targets over the next decade, including boosting the company’s market value from $59 billion to $650 billion. Such targets were decried by commentators at the time as “jaw-dropping” and “his most unlikely goal yet.” And Musk’s wage from the company if he didn’t pull them off? Nothing at all.

The board agreed to the plan in 2018. However, a heavy-metal drummer named Richard Tornetta, who owned just nine Tesla shares, did not. In June of that year, he decided to sue, claiming the pay package was unfair to investors like him. By the time the case reached court in Delaware in 2022, Musk had just one milestone left before the big payout. But the judge agreed with Tornetta in January, voiding what she called an unfathomably large pay package and describing the directors who negotiated it as beholden to Musk.

Musk succeeded in hitting those 12 jaw-dropping targets by the close of 2023, following Tesla’s brief spell as a trillion-dollar company. And now, despite what happened in Delaware, he’s demanding to be paid. At Tesla’s annual meeting on Thursday, shareholders are being asked to vote again on whether Musk should receive what has by now swollen to a nearly $50 billion pay package, the biggest in US corporate history. The $50 billion question for shareholders is: Is Musk worth it?

Posing the question of whether he deserves his pay packet at all marks a significant shift for the relationship between Musk and the electric automaker he has led since 2008. “The resistance shows that there is a ceiling to the influence that a single person has on the company,” says Mike Ramsey, an automotive analyst at the consultancy Gartner. “This is the the first time Tesla shareholders might be willing to say, ‘You can’t have unlimited power.’”

The vote comes at a difficult time for Tesla. For the first time in the company’s history, Tesla is facing intense competition in the electric car market—especially from cheaper Chinese competitors. Meanwhile, some observers have puzzled over Musk’s response and his pivot to robotaxis and artificial intelligence.

“The debate here really is about the future, not the past,” says John Colley, professor of practice in strategy and leadership at the UK’s Warwick Business School. “Tesla has become a mature business, and it’s got all the problems that mature carmakers have now.” Whether a visionary like Musk is the best man to lead a mature business is unclear, he adds.

The pay package is just one in a series of measures that shareholders have already been asked to vote on by proxy, ahead of Thursday’s meeting. Others include whether Tesla’s incorporation should move from Delaware to Texas, whether the company should soften its hardline stance on labor negotiations, and whether the company should preemptively impose a moratorium on using minerals mined from the seabed.

Yet none have been as divisive as Musk’s pay. Deep rifts among investors have been exposed in the lead-up to the vote. Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm has backed the pay package, as has billionaire investor Ron Baron. “Tesla is better with Elon,” Baron wrote in an open letter last week. “Tesla is Elon.” Yet the deal’s opponents include two influential proxy advisory groups, which guide institutional investors on votes, as well as shareholders from the Nordic countries, where Tesla has clashed with workers over labor rights.

Norway’s trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund has said it will vote against the pay deal, as will the country’s largest pension fund, KLP. “While we acknowledge that the company has grown significantly and successfully during the performance period, we still note that the total award value remains excessive,” Kiran Aziz, KLP's head of responsible investments, told WIRED, adding the fund will vote in favor of the motion urging Tesla to engage in labor negotiations. “Recent [dispute] between Tesla and the company’s workers in Sweden as well as Tesla’s history of accusations of interference with workers’ rights is of great concern and shows that the company needs to do better work in the area.”

Behind the scenes of the vote, lobbying has been intense. Tesla has paid for ads on Google and X, which is owned by Musk, telling investors to “protect your investment” and support the proposal, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In April, Tesla also launched a website urging shareholders to vote against the Delaware court decision and support the pay package. “The Court’s decision, if implemented, means that Elon would not receive any compensation for the tremendous accomplishments that have generated significant stockholder returns in less than six years,” the website reads.

“This is the most advertising I can remember from any proxy solicitation,” says Robert Anderson, a professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law. He believes the Musk effect—the CEO’s ability to attract endless publicity—has contributed to this situation. But the pay package and the proposed Texas move are both unprecedented in the business world, he adds. “Either [of] those things by themselves would be pretty significant, even if he were not a public figure.”

The vote will be decided by a mix of institutional investors as well as an unusually large cohort of retail investors, who control around 44 percent of the business. Among shareholders, there are concerns that if Musk does not win his compensation, “his attention might drift to some of his other ventures a little bit more,” says Anderson. Musk managed to juggle multiple ventures for years, but he has been more publicly distracted since acquiring the social media service Twitter and renaming it X. There, his visible turn to right-wing politics has garnered new fans and left some old ones behind.

Whatever happens this week, Tesla and Musk may emerge looking a bit less superhuman. For years, the two have insisted that Tesla is a tech company, with a Silicon Valley–style startup scrappiness. “We should be thought of as an AI or robotics company,” Musk told investors—or voters—in April. “If you value Tesla as just an auto company … fundamentally, it’s just the wrong framework.”

[qqueenofhades]

Hello, I'm a second-year undergraduate student! My bachelor's is in International Studies, so I have various classes that span different disciplines but often touch on contemporary events. My first year was exciting, I was receiving a fairly nuanced array of perspectives and opinions on world conflicts, say, the war in Ukraine.

My university is generally understood to be a reputable and respected institution. Before last semester, I would have agreed.

However, their "nuanced approach" to teaching contemporary conflicts conveniently disappeared once Israel began its genocidal operations in Gaza. I've come to realise it has very close ties to Israel, and there is an obvious silencing of pro-Palestine voices. Faculty members feel surveilled (recorded lectures), and I've seen fellow students being harassed by others because they support a ceasefire.

I've talked to friends and acquaintances who support Palestine; we are all at a loss. We cannot voice our stance because of fear of being harassed, we are constantly fed Israeli propaganda, and our professors have begun to avoid touching on the topic. We learn international law, have a module on the Genocide Convention, yet we are told to ignore how Israel's actions are described in every article! Our degrees are supposed to be in International Relations! It's ridiculous.

We're trying to stay as informed as possible, doing what we can to subtly change other student's opinions by presenting them with information. But I've lost so much respect for the institution I pay to educate me and emit my degree, it's just enraging that they claim to form "critical thinkers" and "well-rounded" professionals when books written by pro-Palestinian authors aren't even available in our libraries.

I have no idea who else to ask for advice because professors have turned me down. Currently, my main concern is how to best stay immune to incessant propaganda in academic environments.

In advance, thank you for your time and response.

I'm sorry to hear it, that is a tough situation. You have a few choices as to how to respond. I can't tell you what to do because they will all require different actions, decisions, and consequences from you, and I can't predict or guess which course of action you will feel to be best. So yes, this is offered as advice only and you can choose what comes next.

First, if your university is in fact directly doing this, there is probably an element of fear. High-profile universities such as Harvard and UPenn have been attacked particularly by bad-faith right-wing actors due to alleged antisemitism, even though the Republicans don't care about antisemitism either and just want an excuse to bash left-wing liberal higher education. It's true that some universities have handled this incredibly complex issue very badly, have allowed fairly open antisemitic hate speech on their campuses, and aren't sure how to course correct back to "neutral," because "neutral" doesn't really exist here. Either side you take, you will piss someone off, and very few people have the tools or competencies to teach a well-rounded view, even if they should if they're literally in International Relations. So your university may have decided it's not worth being attacked by the bad-faith camps on either side, particularly the Republicans. There may be grubby internal politics at play (i.e. a major donor threatening to withhold funds or a high-ranking official threatening to cause problems if they allow open criticism of Israel on campus). This is not admirable, and it clashes with the idea of universities as blissfully nonpartisan idealistic environments of pure learning, but American universities are now very much beholden to the corporate shareholder model, and if the shareholders want to influence what is being taught or talked about, they can.

Therefore: you can do one of a few things. One, you can just stick it out, finish your degree, get the diploma with the university's name on it, then go somewhere else for your career or grad study that will allow you to operate outside this restricted environment. Two, you can stay at the school and continue to address this conflict in a responsible and accurate way in your assignments, bearing in mind that it might lead you into conflict or lower your grades. (If you do this, it will help to have a group of people doing it with you, and keep track of paperwork, communications, and other materials in case you end up in academic or legal arbitration and need to argue that you have been unfairly penalized). This will obviously require a little more sacrifice on your part and it is difficult to say how it will play out. But if you feel strongly about standing up for yourself and arguing that this is integral to your degree and program of study, you can do it.

Last, as you're only a sophomore and thus still have time to transfer, you can think about doing that. It is difficult to uproot your life, plans, college setting, friends, etc, but it is still a choice. If you feel that it is not worth your time to continue to pursue an education in this environment, and/or that the effort it would take from you outweighs the benefit that it would confer, you can leave, and search for an international relations program that is more willing to take a nuanced perspective in this issue. As I said, only you can decide where the line is, and what qualifies as a total deal breaker. If you're still getting a good education in other classes/areas, and still feel like it's good value for your tuition money, then it might be worth it to just quietly disagree with what you're hearing in this realm and do your best to maintain perspective outside of class.

I know that many young people (and people overall, but especially those under 25) have strong opinions on Israel/Hamas, and I would lastly caution you to avoid getting swept too far in the other direction; i.e. ONLY surround yourself with people who call themselves pro-Palestine but are usually just only anti-Israel and more specifically, just antisemitic. It should also not be the case, or at least I hope it's not, that you are being peer pressured by your friends to leave your degree and university altogether just because their position on this one issue leaves a lot to be desired. As I have said before, life is complex. You will have to make choices about what you want out of a situation and weigh up what is best for you to do. You should certainly understand, as I noted above, that if this in fact an actual university policy and not just a few professors and classes who have decided to avoid it, it probably comes from fear of financial, political, or public consequences and is not because those involved are simply "bad people" and just love genocide. So yeah.

As I said, only you can decide what you want to do here. It may be that by this time next year, this issue (which has been dominating headlines/discussion since October) will have died down or at least moved into another phase, and the pressure for people to discuss and/or not discuss it in a certain way will have also died down. Be aware that you will always have to make choices about what you do and don't want to do, and there will never be a perfect environment that just supports everything with no complications. And be sure that whatever you do decide to do is what is best for you, and not pushed one way or the other by either professors or by peers. I know this can be difficult, but by asking for advice, I hope you're willing to put in the time to think and do what's right.

Good luck!

[arachnixe]

So I jumped ship from Twitter just in time for Tumblr to ramp up the rate at which it's getting worse, and—

Oh, Reddit too?

Well, fortunately Discord isn't yet on its anti-user downward trajectory—

Hmm, never mind.

It's good that I'm also on Cohost, which isn't beholden to shareholders and... you say they're losing money and have no plausible plan to become self-sustaining?

I guess there's Bluesky, which hasn't yet revealed how awful it's gonna become.

(Someone whispers in my ear.) No of course I'm not going back to Mastodon, that place is a fucking nightmare wasteland.