#late market capitalism

[djhamaradio]

I do not have a brand because I am not a corporation.

I lost my job recently and had to log back into my LinkedIn account. The whole thing felt forced and weird because I never use the app and I never post anything and suddenly I posted an alert showing I was open for work. The whole process felt weird because everyone in my network seemed to be confused because everyone on there is an ace at networking and using their personal brands to show people what they have going on in their work lives and I felt like a faker. Same way I feel when I am told I am not effectively branding my radio show and my escapades in the record digging world to become a vinyl influencer (not sure if that exists). The whole thing has me depressed because I get the feeling my inactivity is not helping with my job prospects. And no matter what advice I read on Forbes or whatever blog about personal marketing I’m never going to be good at it. I lack the brand consistency or whatever it’s called because ultimately I am not that committed to this world of personal branding. The article above from the wonderful folks at Vox reminds me that this is one of the legacies of late market capitalism everyone is merely a sellout but we don’t have interests or passions anymore everything we do or say has to be leveraged for likes and followers. The thing I find most intriguing about this world is the pervasisveness of hucksterism, and just pure fakery. I find people employing awful vague corporte phrases like maximizing productivity to describe their day to day lives.I find people posting shit about how one can leverage their brand to build a following that will lead them to make a living off social media. it is all disgusting but more than anything speaks to just how much consumerism, and capitlism in general has infected every sacred facet of human life. We have all become brands, and as brands your ultimate goal is to sell, sell and sell. Sell agressively, sell even if it means lying and sell with your consumer in mind. I look at myself I truly joined social media to connect with friends, at some point I left Facebook because my conservative family had joined and thewas now on they had an issue with my Halloween costume (Me dressed as a member of De La Soul and my girlfriend at the time in. slutty Nun costume), so I deleted the account and stuck with IG. On IG aI liked sharing music banter, odd ball humour and rap references with my small cast of friends who get it, and I use it to let people know when my radio show is on. My show is decently popular and I dont make a living doing it, I do DJ gigs on the side and I make decent guap doing it but would absolutely never do that for a living. The DJ gig funds the record collecting, and the radio show is a creative outlet that is all it is. I dont give a shit about branding, even though in a sense I am acting like a brand but I am not selling you anything. I put myself out there simply to say hey check out what I am doing and let me know if you fuck with it other than that no biggie. I aint out here saying if you listen to my radioshow your dick will grow bigger, all the chicks will like you and I am offering somekind of solution to one of lifes ills. My purpose is simply to say hey dont know what you doing but tune into my non-commercial uninterrupted absolutley amteurish radio show where you get to hear me play funk, soul, jazz and african music, for its on sake and not to sell but plugs or lawn mowers. The branding shit is particularly insidious because it makes us forget that there was a time when people congregated because they shared deep interests outside of the capitalist objective, think about stamp collectors, book clubs, bowling leagues and in my case a group of guys who drive around the midwest frequenting record stores spending huge amounts of hours scouring dollar record bins for prized records (This is also a dying art but I digress). I think at the heart of it social media has democratized aspects of the creative world. I just want to live in a world where I am not a brand.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Greenwashing set Canada on fire

On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

As a teenager growing up in Ontario, I always envied the kids who spent their summers tree planting; they'd come back from the bush in September, insect-chewed and leathery, with new muscle, incredible stories, thousands of dollars, and a glow imparted by the knowledge that they'd made a new forest with their own blistered hands.

I was too unathletic to follow them into the bush, but I spent my summers doing my bit, ringing doorbells for Greenpeace to get my neighbours fired up about the Canadian pulp-and-paper industry, which wasn't merely clear-cutting our old-growth forests – it was also poisoning the Great Lakes system with PCBs, threatening us all.

At the time, I thought of tree-planting as a small victory – sure, our homegrown, rapacious, extractive industry was able to pollute with impunity, but at least the government had reined them in on forests, forcing them to pay my pals to spend their summers replacing the forests they'd fed into their mills.

I was wrong. Last summer's Canadian wildfires blanketed the whole east coast and midwest in choking smoke as millions of trees burned and millions of tons of CO2 were sent into the atmosphere. Those wildfires weren't just an effect of the climate emergency: they were made far worse by all those trees planted by my pals in the eighties and nineties.

Writing in the New York Times, novelist Claire Cameron describes her own teen years working in the bush, planting row after row of black spruces, precisely spaced at six-foot intervals:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/opinion/wildfires-treeplanting-timebomb.html

Cameron's summer job was funded by the logging industry, whose self-pegulated, self-assigned "penalty" for clearcutting diverse forests of spruce, pine and aspen was to pay teenagers to create a tree farm, at nine cents per sapling (minus camp costs).

Black spruces are made to burn, filled with flammable sap and equipped with resin-filled cones that rely on fire, only opening and dropping seeds when they're heated. They're so flammable that firefighters call them "gas on a stick."

Cameron and her friends planted under brutal conditions: working long hours in blowlamp heat and dripping wet bulb humidity, amidst clouds of stinging insects, fingers blistered and muscles aching. But when they hit rock bottom and were ready to quit, they'd encourage one another with a rallying cry: "Let's go make a forest!"

Planting neat rows of black spruces was great for the logging industry: the even spacing guaranteed that when the trees matured, they could be easily reaped, with ample space between each near-identical tree for massive shears to operate. But that same monocropped, evenly spaced "forest" was also optimized to burn.

It burned.

The climate emergency's frequent droughts turn black spruces into "something closer to a blowtorch." The "pines in lines" approach to reforesting was an act of sabotage, not remediation. Black spruces are thirsty, and they absorb the water that moss needs to thrive, producing "kindling in the place of fire retardant."

Cameron's column concludes with this heartbreaking line: "Now when I think of that summer, I don’t think that I was planting trees at all. I was planting thousands of blowtorches a day."

The logging industry committed a triple crime. First, they stole our old-growth forests. Next, they (literally) planted a time-bomb across Ontario's north. Finally, they stole the idealism of people who genuinely cared about the environment. They taught a generation that resistance is futile, that anything you do to make a better future is a scam, and you're a sucker for falling for it. They planted nihilism with every tree.

That scam never ended. Today, we're sold carbon offsets, a modern Papal indulgence. We are told that if we pay the finance sector, they can absolve us for our climate sins. Carbon offsets are a scam, a market for lemons. The "offset" you buy might be a generated by a fake charity like the Nature Conservancy, who use well-intentioned donations to buy up wildlife reserves that can't be logged, which are then converted into carbon credits by promising not to log them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#greenwashing

The credit-card company that promises to plant trees every time you use your card? They combine false promises, deceptive advertising, and legal threats against critics to convince you that you're saving the planet by shopping:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/17/do-well-do-good-do-nothing/#greenwashing

The carbon offset world is full of scams. The carbon offset that made the thing you bought into a "net zero" product? It might be a forest that already burned:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/11/a-market-for-flaming-lemons/#money-for-nothing

The only reason we have carbon offsets is that market cultists have spent forty years convincing us that actual regulation is impossible. In the neoliberal learned helplessness mind-palace, there's no way to simply say, "You may not log old-growth forests." Rather, we have to say, "We will 'align your incentives' by making you replace those forests."

The Climate Ad Project's "Murder Offsets" video deftly punctures this bubble. In it, a detective points his finger at the man who committed the locked-room murder in the isolated mansion. The murderer cheerfully admits that he did it, but produces a "murder offset," which allowed him to pay someone else not to commit a murder, using market-based price-discovery mechanisms to put a dollar-figure on the true worth of a murder, which he duly paid, making his kill absolutely fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

What's the alternative to murder offsets/carbon credits? We could ask our expert regulators to decide which carbon intensive activities are necessary and which ones aren't, and ban the unnecessary ones. We could ask those regulators to devise remediation programs that actually work. After all, there are plenty of forests that have already been clearcut, plenty that have burned. It would be nice to know how we can plant new forests there that aren't "thousands of blowtorches."

If that sounds implausible to you, then you've gotten trapped in the neoliberal mind-palace.

The term "regulatory capture" was popularized by far-right Chicago School economists who were promoting "public choice theory." In their telling, regulatory capture is inevitable, because companies will spend whatever it takes to get the government to pass laws making what they do legal, and making competing with them into a crime:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/13/public-choice/#ajit-pai-still-terrible

This is true, as far as it goes. Capitalists hate capitalism, and if an "entrepreneur" can make it illegal to compete with him, he will. But while this is a reasonable starting-point, the place that Public Choice Theory weirdos get to next is bonkers. They say that since corporations will always seek to capture their regulators, we should abolish regulators.

They say that it's impossible for good regulations to exist, and therefore the only regulation that is even possible is to let businesses do whatever they want and wait for the invisible hand to sweep away the bad companies. Rather than creating hand-washing rules for restaurant kitchens, we should let restaurateurs decide whether it's economically rational to make us shit ourselves to death. The ones that choose poorly will get bad online reviews and people will "vote with their dollars" for the good restaurants.

And if the online review site decides to sell "reputation management" to restaurants that get bad reviews? Well, soon the public will learn that the review site can't be trusted and they'll take their business elsewhere. No regulation needed! Unleash the innovators! Set the job-creators free!

This is the Ur-nihilism from which all the other nihilism springs. It contends that the regulations we have – the ones that keep our buildings from falling down on our heads, that keep our groceries from poisoning us, that keep our cars from exploding on impact – are either illusory, or perhaps the forgotten art of a lost civilization. Making good regulations is like embalming Pharaohs, something the ancients practiced in mist-shrouded, unrecoverable antiquity – and that may not have happened at all.

Regulation is corruptible, but it need not be corrupt. Regulation, like science, is a process of neutrally adjudicated, adversarial peer-review. In a robust regulatory process, multiple parties respond to a fact-intensive question – "what alloys and other properties make a reinforced steel joist structurally sound?" – with a mix of robust evidence and self-serving bullshit and then proceed to sort the two by pantsing each other, pointing out one another's lies.

The regulator, an independent expert with no conflicts of interest, sorts through the claims and counterclaims and makes a rule, showing their workings and leaving the door open to revisiting the rule based on new evidence or challenges to the evidence presented.

But when an industry becomes concentrated, it becomes unregulatable. 100 small and medium-sized companies will squabble. They'll struggle to come up with a common lie. There will always be defectors in their midst. Their conduct will be legible to external experts, who will be able to spot the self-serving BS.

But let that industry dwindle to a handful of giant companies, let them shrink to a number that will fit around a boardroom table, and they will sit down at a table and agree on a cozy arrangement that fucks us all over to their benefit. They will become so inbred that the only people who understand how they work will be their own insiders, and so top regulators will be drawn from their own number and be hopelessly conflicted.

When the corporate sector takes over, regulatory capture is inevitable. But corporate takeover isn't inevitable. We can – and have, and will again – fight corporate power, with antitrust law, with unions, and with consumer rights groups. Knowing things is possible. It simply requires that we keep the entities that profit by our confusion poor and thus weak.

The thing is, corporations don't always lie about regulations. Take the fight over working encryption, which – once again – the UK government is trying to ban:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/24/signal-app-warns-it-will-quit-uk-if-law-weakens-end-to-end-encryption

Advocates for criminalising working encryption insist that the claims that this is impossible are the same kind of self-serving nonsense as claims that banning clearcutting of old-growth forests is impossible:

https://twitter.com/JimBethell/status/1699339739042599276

They say that when technologists say, "We can't make an encryption system that keeps bad guys out but lets good guys in," that they are being lazy and unimaginative. "I have faith in you geeks," they said. "Go nerd harder! You'll figure it out."

Google and Apple and Meta say that selectively breakable encryption is impossible. But they also claim that a bunch of eminently possible things are impossible. Apple claims that it's impossible to have a secure device where you get to decide which software you want to use and where publishers aren't deprive of 30 cents on every dollar you spend. Google says it's impossible to search the web without being comprehensively, nonconsensually spied upon from asshole to appetite. Meta insists that it's impossible to have digital social relationship without having your friendships surveilled and commodified.

While they're not lying about encryption, they are lying about these other things, and sorting out the lies from the truth is the job of regulators, but that job is nearly impossible thanks to the fact that everyone who runs a large online service tells the same lies – and the regulators themselves are alumni of the industry's upper eschelons.

Logging companies know a lot about forests. When we ask, "What is the best way to remediate our forests," the companies may well have useful things to say. But those useful things will be mixed with actively harmful lies. The carefully cultivated incompetence of our regulators means that they can't tell the difference.

Conspiratorialism is characterized as a problem of what people believe, but the true roots of conspiracy belief isn't what we believe, it's how we decide what to believe. It's not beliefs, it's epistemology.

Because most of us aren't qualified to sort good reforesting programs from bad ones. And even if we are, we're probably not also well-versed enough in cryptography to sort credible claims about encryption from wishful thinking. And even if we're capable of making that determination, we're not experts in food hygiene or structural engineering.

Daily life in the 21st century means resolving a thousand life-or-death technical questions every day. Our regulators – corrupted by literally out-of-control corporations – are no longer reliable sources of ground truth on these questions. The resulting epistemological chaos is a cancer that gnaws away at our resolve to do anything about it. It is a festering pool where nihilism outbreaks are incubated.

The liberal response to conspiratorialism is mockery. In her new book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein tells of how right-wing surveillance fearmongering about QR-code "vaccine passports" was dismissed with a glib, "Wait until they hear about cellphones!"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

But as Klein points out, it's not good that our cellphones invade our privacy in the way that right-wing conspiracists thought that vaccine passports might. The nihilism of liberalism – which insists that things can't be changed except through market "solutions" – leads us to despair.

By contrast, leftism – a muscular belief in democratic, publicly run planning and action – offers a tonic to nihilism. We don't have to let logging companies decide whether a forest can be cut, or what should be planted when it is. We can have nice things. The art of finding out what's true or prudent didn't die with the Reagan Revolution (or the discount Canadian version, the Mulroney Malaise). The truth is knowable. Doing stuff is possible. Things don't have to be on fire.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/16/murder-offsets/#pulped-and-papered

[hauntedorpheum]

Wicked Marketing campaign is a train wreck i can't look away from. The fact that they are clearly trying to do a Barbenheimer 2.0 happen. The lazy brand collaborations where they are just slapping a logo and painting things green and pink. The INSANE collaborations that completely ignore the original context of some elements of the story, like Greenwich University promoting the movie, while in the musical, Shiz University is helping spread evil propaganda; selling Oz's elixir vodka, while in the book the green elixir is essentially used as a dater*pe drug. Lighting a war monument in pink and green colors. The overuse of the musical high note in Defying Gravity that is turning already musical haters away from the movie. The oversaturation of products to compensate for the fact that musical fans have been waiting for this movie for twelve years now. The fact that this is only PART I, a nearly three hours part 1, and we have a whole other nearly three hours part 2 waiting for us next year! The fact that they are pretending that the whole cheating scandal didn't happen. The lack of a clear target audience, which has been a problem of the original musical since the beginning: is this a whimsy musical for kids following the footsteps of the original movie and books? In which case why are you selling expensive cosmetic kits and jewerly as well as alcoholic drinks that no kid would want or could buy? Or is it a more adult focused satire like the Wicked book? In which case the amount of ads and products sorta go against the anti propaganda message from the story. The fact that honestly they didn't need to do all that, this is a movie about one of the most beloved musicals and it stars Ariana Grande, people were going to see it regardless of what it was, and trust me most people have no idea of what it even is, only that it has something to do with the Wizard of Oz. Also Mattel design team not bothering with proof reading their boxes and accidentally linking to a p*rn website

[guavagyal]

meritocracy sucks. you better believe that I'm lying and cheating on job applications to tell employers what they want to hear. employers do it all the time, especially w fake job listings. fuck em.

[queerism1969]

[nando161mando]

The market will regulate itself

[jensorensen]

An internet search for "curated experience" brings up nice hotel rooms in Nigeria, a visit with coconut shell carvers in the Andaman islands, countless restaurants, event planners billing themselves as "Experience Curators," advice for realtors on creating curated experiences for their clients (that is, figuring out what they really need)... the list goes on. Today, "curated" simply means that someone or more likely something -- such as an AI algorithm -- picked stuff, while experience has become so vague that it refers to every waking moment, which isn't saying much.

Receive my weekly newsletter and keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon.

[randomly-generated-posts-machine]

this just in: a deliceous slice of pie turned into marketable plushie

[performing-personhood]

[amaliasnap]

Oh good they admitted it. Zoidberg is so relatable

[thatwritererinoriordan]

Late stage capitalism got us all acting like the goblins in "Goblin Market." At first glance we identify with the vulnerable young women. But no. Here we all are, down on our haunches at the riverbank, clawing at passersby to try to get them addicted to our unholy fruits.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Sympathy for the spammer

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers – not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).

It's ever been thus. The California gold rush was a con, and nearly everyone who went west went broke. Famously, the only reliable way to cash out on the gold rush was to sell "picks and shovels" to the credulous, doomed and desperate. That's how Leland Stanford made his fortune, which he funneled into eugenics programs (and founding a university):

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/

That means that the people who try to con you are almost always getting conned themselves. Think of Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scams. My forthcoming novel The Bezzle opens with a baroque and improbable fast-food Ponzi in the town of Avalon on the island of Catalina, founded by the chicle monopolist William Wrigley Jr:

http://thebezzle.org

Wrigley found fast food declasse and banned it from the island, a rule that persists to this day. In The Bezzle, the forensic detective Martin Hench uncovers The Fry Guys, an MLM that flash-freezes contraband burgers and fries smuggled on-island from the mainland and sells them to islanders though an "affiliate marketing" scheme that is really about recruiting other affiliate markets to sell under you. As with every MLM, the value of the burgers and fries sold is dwarfed by the gigantic edifice of finance fraud built around it, with "points" being bought and sold for real cash, which is snaffled up and sucked out of the island by a greedy mainlander who is behind the scheme.

A "bezzle" is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In every scam, there's a period where everyone feels richer – but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.

MLMs are particularly ugly, because they target people who are shut out of economic opportunity – women, people of color, working people. These people necessarily rely on social ties for survival, looking after each others' kids, loaning each other money they can't afford, sharing what little they have when others have nothing.

It's this social cohesion that MLMs weaponize. Crypto "entrepreneurs" are encouraged to suck in their friends and family by telling them that they're "building Black wealth." Working women are exhorted to suck in their bffs by appealing to their sisterhood and the chance for "women to lift each other up."

The "sales people" trying to get you to buy crypto or leggings or supplements are engaged in predatory conduct that will make you financially and socially worse off, wrecking their communities' finances and shattering the mutual aid survival networks they rely on. But they're not getting rich on this – they're also being scammed:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4686468

This really hit home for me in the mid-2000s, when I was still editing Boing Boing. We had a submission form where our readers could submit links for us to look at for inclusion on the blog, and it was overwhelmed by spam. We'd add all kinds of antispam to it, and still, we'd get floods of hundreds or even thousands of spam submissions to it.

One night, I was lying in my bed in London and watching these spams roll in. They were all for small businesses in the rustbelt, handyman services, lawn-care, odd jobs, that kind of thing. They were 10 million miles from the kind of thing we'd ever post about on Boing Boing. They were coming in so thickly that I literally couldn't finish downloading my email – the POP session was dropping before I could get all the mail in the spool. I had to ssh into my mail server and delete them by hand. It was maddening.

Frustrated and furious, I started calling the phone numbers associated with these small businesses, demanding an explanation. I assumed that they'd hired some kind of sleazy marketing service and I wanted to know who it was so I could give them a piece of my mind.

But what I discovered when I got through was much weirder. These people had all been laid off from factories that were shuttering due to globalization. As part of their termination packages, their bosses had offered them "retraining" via "courses" in founding their own businesses.

The "courses" were the precursors to the current era's rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses – the "students" finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who'd given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/#solidarity-forever

After all, we had the internet now! There were so many new opportunities to be your own boss! The course came with a dreadful build-your-own-website service, complete with an overpriced domain sales portal, and a single form for submitting your new business to "thousands of search engines."

This was nearly 20 years ago, but even then, there was really only one search engine that mattered: Google. The "thousands of search engines" the scammers promised to submit these desperate peoples' websites to were just submission forms for directories, indexes, blogs, and mailing lists. The number of directories, indexes, blogs and mailing lists that would publish their submissions was either "zero" or "nearly zero." There was certainly no possibility that anyone at Boing Boing would ever press the wrong key and accidentally write a 500-word blog post about a leaf-raking service in a collapsing deindustrialized exurb in Kentucky or Ohio.

The people who were drowning me in spam weren't the scammers – they were the scammees.

But that's only half the story. Years later, I discovered how our submission form was getting included in this get-rich-quick's mass-submission system. It was a MLM! Coders in the former Soviet Union were getting work via darknet websites that promised them relative pittances for every submission form they reverse-engineered and submitted. The smart coders didn't crack the forms directly – they recruited other, less business-savvy coders to do that for them, and then often as not, ripped them off.

The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn't even make them any money. Take the submission queue at Clarkesworld, the great online science fiction magazine, which famously had to close after it was flooded with thousands of junk submission "written" by LLMs:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

There was a zero percent chance that Neil Clarke would accidentally accept one of these submissions. They were uniformly terrible. The people submitting these "stories" weren't frustrated sf writers who'd discovered a "life hack" that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale.

They were scammers who'd been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of passive income, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-based self-licking ice-cream cone:

https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/995c8a778ede17d2d7cff393e5203157

This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.

Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that "you can't con an honest man." But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn't their honesty – it's their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.

These people reason – correctly – that all the people getting really rich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

The quest for passive income is really the quest for a "greater fool," the economist's term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The rise and rise of botshit cannot be separated from this phenomenon. The botshit in our search-results, our social media feeds, and our in-boxes isn't making money for the enshittifiers who send it – rather, they are being hustled by someone who's selling them the "picks and shovels" for the AI gold rush:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

That's the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The manic "entrepreneurs" who've been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI, who are creating generational wealth for themselves by promising that their bots will automate away all the tedious work that goes into creating value. Expect a lot more Amazon Marketplace products called "I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036156/openai-policy-amazon-ai-listings

No one's going to buy these products, but the AI picks-and-shovels people will still reap a fortune from the attempt. And because history repeats itself, these newly minted billionaires are continuing Leland Stanford's love affair with eugenics:

https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/

The fact that AI spam doesn't pay is important to the fortunes of AI companies. Most high-value AI applications are very risk-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology analysis, etc). An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately – by warning them of things that they've missed – but that's not how AI will turn a profit. There's no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Plenty of people think that spam might be the elusive high-value, low-risk AI application. But that's just not true. The point of AI spam is to get clicks from people who are looking for better content. It's SEO. No one reads 2000 words of algorithm-pleasing LLM garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's feed.

And the omelette recipe generates pennies for the spammer that posted it. They are doing massive volume in order to make those pennies into dollars. You don't make money by posting one spam. If every spammer had to pay the actual recovery costs (energy, chillers, capital amortization, wages) for their query, every AI spam would lose (lots of) money.

Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity, a net drain on society. Behind every seemingly successful "passive income" is a con artist who's getting rich by promising – but not delivering – that elusive passive income, and then blaming the victims for not hustling hard enough:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/12/blueprint-trouble

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[notyourmoderate]

What real people need to understand about the stock market

When some news media outlet reports that the economy is doing good because the stock market graph has a line going up, what they mean is that billionaires, shareholders and their multimillionaire cronies have done a good job of ripping money and value away from the general public and consolidated it into the hands of the owner-investor class.

When the news media outlet reports that the economy is doing bad because the stock market graph has a line going down, what they mean is that millions of people in the general public have just lost a significant chunk of their retirement savings.

Anyone who uses stock market prices as an indicator of the nation's economic health is not talking to you, they're talking to the owner-investor class.

And until you join the owner-investor class, that is literally the only thing you ever need to understand about the stock market.

[guavagyal]

I hate you, employers who ask for 3-5 years of experience for an entry-level role, refuse to train workers, & refuse to consider internships as experience.

[thephooka]

Spent a bus ride yesterday reading a 1997 book by Gary Martin called The Art of Comic Book Inking that someone recced in the Cartoonist Co-Op server. I'm not the target audience for it (it's geared towards traditional inkers working in the print comics industry and is more for b&w comics imo) but it's an...interesting look into how the industry was back then. And by interesting, I mean bleak as fuck!

More below:

So I got curious and tried to find what the page rates for being an inker are like now, and had a look at this list of rates from Comic Book Resource, which are all self-reported by industry professionals.*

You'll notice 'inker' isn't even its own category here. The closest one is 'line artist' which is both pencils and inks, which for the sake of argument let's say is twice the amount of work as inking by itself. (It's not, pencils are harder, don't at me.) I took the average of rates from 2020-2022 for line artists and got $227/page, for both pencils and inks.

The very lowest rate of $100/pg in 1997 for JUST inking would be $190 today. If line artists do twice the work (again, an underestimate) by doing pencils too, that ought to translate to $380/page at the lowest end today. It doesn't somehow! Huh. Have a look through that rate list and you'll see rates even lower than $100/page in today's money (mostly from the usual suspects.)

Here's some more fun math:

Forget the $28k number above--he's including covers in this number, which pay differently. Say you do 22pgs/month at $100/page--that's $26,400 (1997)/$50,282 (today). Subtract a third for taxes** and your take-home amount would be $33,522 in today's money, which works out to a wage of $16/hr.***

At the high end of Martin's numbers, let's say 44 pages a month at $150/page for a total of $79,200, or $52,800 after taxes, and an hourly rate of $25/hr. Adjusted for inflation, that's $150,845 gross/$100,563 net/$48 hourly.

Average these numbers together, and the rates in today's money would be $67,042 net/$32 hourly.

Assuming line artists do twice the work, these numbers ought to be doubled, at $120k/yr or $64/hr.

But by the actual numbers we have, if a line artist works that same amount at the average rate of $227/page, that works out to $59,928 before taxes, $40,132 after, and an hourly wage of $19.

The kicker: the living wage in my metro area (same one Gary Martin lived in when he published this book, incidentally) is $21/hr, assuming no kids. Lol.

This is also assuming you can pencil AND ink at least 22 pages a month every month sustainably without destroying yourself, which is an EXTREMELY generous assumption. Also, no one gets health insurance working in comics, so take that into account with this shoulder-destroying pace.

I'm sure I'm mostly preaching to the choir here, and none of this information is really a surprise to me--oh comics is also a bad industry that doesn't page a living wage? shocker!--but it's interesting**** to actually be able to run the numbers on it to see how much, exactly, rates have stagnated. A lot, as it turns out!

Anyway, here's a little look into how comics pays, in case you're unfamiliar. It pays bad.

*this isn't even including companies like Webtoons and Tapas, who are fairly notorious at this point for underpaying and overworking creators. This is largely print publishing.

**the self-employment tax rate in the US is something like 15.1% and has been since at least 1990 but advice is usually to pay a third in quarterly taxes--easier to overpay and get it back at tax time than underpay and owe.

***based on 40hrs/wk, and I'm showing this number bc I think more people understand hourly wages than rates. I wouldn't include the amount for taxes in this bc if you're working an hourly wage you're probably not self-employed.

****LOUD SCREAMING

[nando161mando]

Market Research Determined Dropping Prices Before More Competitors Followed Suite Would Be More Profitable Than Continuing To Exploit Their Customers