It really sickens me that the word individualism has come to denote what should logically be called privatism.
“Governments are just window-dressing for the major multinational corporations that actually run the world. They, in turn, are already run by computers.”—whlanteigne
“The sooner we restore a society where work is something we do, and not something we’re ‘given,’ a society where we’re in control of our working lives, the sooner we can do away with fake machismo, commodified rebellion, and going postal.”—Kevin Carson
“The upper class uses its mass media instruments to paint a picture of an aloof, overly idealistic, left.”—The Working Class
“Libertarian pretense that the workplace is voluntary would only make sense if people had an equal alternative to the workplace.”—Critiques of Libertarianism
“So, we do make common cause with liberals on formal equality, but radicals must push further and demand substantive equality against a world system of horrendous inequalities.”—radicalprogress
How much data privacy can you expect to have?
I’d like to see a shift to a debate which treats as the relevant question: How much information asymmetry can you expect not to have?
Or alternatively: How much machine-readable/queryable/”mineable” data can a consumer or end-user expect to be on the receiving end of? In the case of a $ell phone, this might mean access to raw dumps of one’s own GPS logs, call logs, raw network traffic feeds up & down, etc. Analogously, raw feeds for “smart” meters from Big Utility, etc.
“Perhaps this should also serve as proof that the market doesn’t always work in the favor of what’s desirable. Que: “That’s not the TW00 free market capitalism!”,”—Julia Riber Pitt
“Consumerism is not a byproduct of human nature; it is a disgusting system which turns human actions into malicious transactions.”—Anti Consumerism
“And while you would not have ‘profits over people,’ I don’t see how a market anarchist society could prevent ‘efficiency over people’ which could act in a very similar way.”—NoMoreSunsets
“I’ve got news for you: the market matrix is NOT moral. It’s quite possible to screw people over and succeed in business. It’s equally possible, and very common, to try your hardest to be ’employable’ and still get screwed-over. Your Robinson Crusoe acrobatics can’t conceal these simple facts.”—AndyN00bpwnr (h/t Jack Saturday)
Or as I’ve started calling it, Spamdroid. Too little sense of open source culture among Android devs. The overall tone one senses at Google Play is reminiscent of the DOS shareware community circa 1990. There is every imaginable combination of beggarware, crippleware [sic], adware, demowarez, etc., but added to all this, data mining, behavioral profiling, black hat SEO and all the newer black arts. One gets the impression that people are grasping at every imaginable straw in pursuit of “monetization.” Part of it is the Google cut on sales of paid app revenues, part is the opening of the dev market to emerging markets where people are unlikely to have the luxury of not “being in it for the money,” but mostly it is network operators absolutely insistent on assigning their retail customers a passive role in the network.
I am pleased to add to my blogroll the apparently defunct blog No More Sunsets. The most recent post there was titled Back soon and dated July 16, 2012, with the text
I’m in the process of moving so I’ll be out for the next couple of weeks.
I hope the author is doing OK.
I strive to keep my blogroll as on-topic as possible. By this I mean that no matter how small this list turns out to be, I want it to be a catalog of the online offerings of the “non-market, anti-state sector.” By this I mean those who, when push comes to shove, are anti-statist, and who, at least on occasion, suggest that the market mechanism—the price signals, the absolute centrality of voluntarism—might be a contributor to the problem of de facto or de jure statism.
Putting the left back in left libertarianism is definitely a recurring theme at No More Sunsets. There is an article pointing out differences between Proudhonian mutualists and “neo-mutualists.” Those ridiculously non-credible “primitive” economies in which three persons exist or two classes of economic goods exist are referred to not as Edgeworth boxes but as Imagination Island or Crusoe’s island. Also subject to questioning are such supposedly unalloyed goods as voluntarism, individualism, agorism, efficiency, etc.
I can’t read anything on this excellent blog without having a lot to say, but it is closed to comments. Apparently this has not always been the case. Perhaps I will start a series of blog posts here that are essentially comments on posts at No More Sunsets.
At any rate, my purpose in posting this is to offer gentle encouragement to a writer whose work I admire and who I’d like to think of as a fellow anagorist. This is in the spirit of NMS’ own post in that vein:
Mutualism and Solutions to the Social Problem is a new blog with extremely powerful posts. Hopefully, they continue blogging. All too often, I see people who start on a project and give up shortly after. Please show your support by checking them out.
There seems to be an uptick in businesses being used as soapboxes (Papa John’s, Whole Foods, Chick-Fil-A, ad nauseam); most often conservative soapboxes, since conservatism is the ideology of the business establishment. Time for us non-conservatives to circle the wagons…but one side’s boycott is always the other side’s buycott. At best it’s a wash. Frustration.
How far do you think I’ll get in life spouting liberal opinions in job interviews, or even doing lunch with management types? Conservative opinions are of course risky in such settings, but you know and I know liberal opinions are career suicide. But of course conservatives make oh so much hay about alleged blockage of the academic careers of conservatives; academia being, what, 1% of the workforce? For most of us, there’s a tacit understanding that it’s wise to check one’s opinions at the door when entering the workplace. I’ve always accepted that as part of the implied social contract. But now business owners are absolutely flaunting the fact that ownership has its privileges, and that one of these is the privilege of mixing commerce and politics.
Dollars are not votes, and the marketplace is not a form of democracy. In fact, it is profoundly antidemocratic.
