Instead we do NOT have even remotely adequate coverage, of the wealthiest wresting more and more control of vital infrastructure, taking away basic essentials of those that paid the most taxes, for that very infrastructure.
#Capitalism is now approaching 'Total Loss' category, and should be graduated in every way possible - NOT just root infrastructure. And the leaders should be removed asap.
Needless to say, do not sign up for W or give them your ID information no matter how simple they eventually manage to make it.
You simply don’t need to.
You’re already in a far superior – non-corporate, federated – space.
Do not sign up for W. And warn your friends.
The only time you have any power to stop this is now. If they succeed in gaining network effects, you will be as powerless to stop them as you are with X.
And yes, they’re just another venture capital funded surveillance capitalist, people farmer, and burgeoning Nazi Bar. They just happen to be based in the EU. (As Nazi Bars traditionally have been.)
#WSocial #NoWNoX #surveillance #capitalism #BigTech #VC @_elena mastodon.social/@_elena/116770…
@ilumium@eupolicy.social @aral@mastodon.ar.al the setup process is SO CONVOLUTED: https://www.youtube.Elena Rossini 🌈 (Mastodon)
“My fear is that W Social is just another for-profit Big Tech startup that happens to be based in the EU. We don’t need that. We don’t need more European surveillance capitalists and people farmers. We need ethical alternatives working for the common good.”
– Yours truly, in @_elena’s excellent exposé on W Social.
blog.elenarossini.com/w-social…
Do read the article to the end, especially noting the bit about the composition of their board of advisors, which includes an ex-Google AI lead and an ex-Paypal Chief [Violate Your] Privacy Officer who now works at Tools for Humanity (Sam Altman’s “Sci-fi dystopia? Hold my beer…” identity farming startup that wants to scan your eyeballs).
#WSocial #EuropeWashing #PrivacyWashing #BigTech #peopleFarming #surveillance #capitalism #EU #ATProto #fediverse
European public institutions are betting big on digital sovereignty and open source software. And yet they recently moved their Bluesky accounts to W Social, a private, for profit network owned by Swedish entrepreneurs that has quietly gone closed-so…Elena Rossini
New modeling from The Lancet suggests the USAID funding cuts will kill 14 million people.
Many of them are children.
600,000 have already died.
The man who gutted the program?
Elon Musk. The world’s first trillionaire.
He has a trillionaire dollars and is murdering the poorest people on earth.
He should be in jail.
Billionaires and trillionaires should not exist in a world where millions die from poverty every year.
thelancet.com/journals/langlo/…
#usaid #disability #ableism #eugenics #musk #capitalism #poverty #publichealth #uspol
The Guardian: It was Britain’s most expensive house. Why is its only resident a homeless man who lives on the porch?
theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2…
2-8A Rutland Gate had jewel-encrusted bathroom suites and gold wastepaper bins in its 45 rooms, but has lain empty for years. With many people desperate for secure housing, what does the abandonment of this palace tell us about the UK?Sam Wollaston (the Guardian)
Texas:
"A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Massive Data Center Instead."
#ai #datacenters #climatechange #environment #capitalism #tech
i'm sidestepping pro- / anti- capitalist arguments
i'm saying #capitalism is dead
there is the fantasy foundational belief of " #freeMarkets"
they have always been manipulated
(especially with #regulations removed, which #capitalists always seem excited to do, resulting in the biggest players controlling it)
#plutocracy replaced capitalism
idiots didn't notice
they merely adopted a lie:
"this is capitalism!"
behavior: not capitalism, just licking plutocrat boots
it's rigged
#capitalists have been screaming " #COMMUNISM! #SOCIALISM! WHARGARBBBL..." as a fearmongered threat since forever. communism died in 1989
the truth is #capitalism *is* being killed
by #plutocracy
and because they don't care, don't notice, or are paid enough to not care, "capitalist" idiots have turned into plutocrat and #oligarch bootlickers without awareness or concern
it's a complete farce
and it's going to meet a reckoning
truth vs delusion is playing out
Source:
newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-c…
#Ai #Art #Capitalism #Cartoons #DataCenters #JoeDator #educationworkers #KevinMaher #students
For #fridayreads today, a return to @pluralistic , this time non-fiction.
While reading this 2022 book, several times I got the impression that "this could have been written 20 years before" (or, more to the point, lament that we did not learn the lesson back then), but at the same time the book is still as relevant (if not more) today than it was when it was published.
Inside the billion-dollar business of getting a visa | The Take
youtube.com/watch?v=j0YJ7EGupY… #UK #Immigration #Capitalism #Racism
Getting a visa can be expensive, frustrating, and for many people, unsuccessful. So what happens when governments outsource that process to private companies...Al Jazeera English (YouTube)
For all its reputation as a country of rampant free market capitalism, the USA's corporate profitability may be in part (by some reckoning 50%) dependent on the deficit funding of the state;
which is to say that the US is actually a massive corporate welfare machine, pumping public money raised on international bond markets (through sales & holding of so-called T-bills across the world) into the private sector.
If so, US capitalism *does* look rather different!
#capitalism #USA
h/t FT
Great line by @pluralistic on page 228, to describe the rollback of antitrust laws and increased monopolisation of the economy:
"It's as though we used to put down rat poison, and we didn't have a rat problem. Then the millionaire economists convinced us to stop putting down the poison, and the rats are gnawing our faces off and the economists are all saying: 'Now, now, don't get hysterical, dears. There's no way to know if these rats have anything to do with our pro-rat policy prescriptions. Perhaps the great forces of history bore down on this moment to produce a surge in rat fecundity. Maybe this is just the Time of the Rat.'"
#enshittification #business #capitalism #socialism #neoliberalism #politics #economics #auspol #uspol
Typical abusive #Capitalism, in skewing profits toward the wealthiest.
Worse than Communism, at its opposite.
Replace #FossilFuels #TechBros #Broligarchy with #RootInfrastructure #scientists
Does anybody know what happened to Resonate (resonate.coop/)? I'm reading Rebecca Giblin and @pluralistic 's Chokepoint Capitalism and it seemed to have a very interesting business model. Really curious to know why it got dissolved.
Boosts appreciated!
#enshittification #capitalism #streaming
Resonate is the world’s first co-operative music streaming service — a multi-stakeholder platform co-operative, democratically governed by its members: artists, listeners and workers.Resonate
Re-reading "#UtopianSocialism - Its History Since 1800" by #LeoLoubere (published in 1974). In particular, chapter 6, which deals with "experimental communities" and why they fail -- citing #Capitalism, lack of practical knowledge, and how cooperation and #MutualAid were needed for communities to survive. And also how defense (against others, protecting crops, etc.), and leaders who aren't forceful are also necessary.
Ahhhh. And some truly lighter reading. The last printed issue of the Farmer's Almanac (in print since 1818). I will miss their tips and tricks as well as topics like natural pest control, #Hygge, herbs of the month, how to make #Switchel, and #Gardening tips. I noticed they also acknowledged #ClimateChange and #WeatherExtremes, and highlighted #EmergencyPreparedness.
#Bookstodon #AmReading
#SustainableLiving #BuildingCommunity #PowerStructures #MoonPhases #SpendTimeInNature #HistoryOfSocialism #Histodon #History #SolarPunkSunday
Mitigating the hate~love divide, instead of eloquently navigating mid-values...
This is why it's an increasing crime to teach single solve mindsets, like most Western #Capitalism countries do.
(1/8) As always @pluralistic writes about exactly what's on my mind a thread 🧵:
My political economy begins by taking F.A. Hayek seriously. I kid you not.
Hayek saw markets as a form of decentralized processing a logical “spontaneous order” that aggregates knowledge. He saw this pattern everywhere, including within the human mind (I'm sure like Dawkins he'd have been one-shotted by Claude).
mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11652724…
#capitalism #economics #markets #oligarchy
The theory of capitalism holds that markets are a kind of distributed computer that aggregates trillions of decisions from billions of market participants in order to optimize production and distribution of goods and services, creating a "Pareto-optimal" world where no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.2/
Today's dose of Doctorow's De-programming:
"This is the kind of doctrine you can only fully embrace after sustaining the kind of highly specific neurological injury that is induced by taking an economics degree, an injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power. Under the doctrine of revealed preferences, someone who sells their kidney to make the rent has a revealed preference for only having one kidney"
#capitalism #economics #NeoclassicalEconNonsense
One of my bedrock beliefs is that capitalists *really* hate capitalism. They may name their beloved institutes after the likes of Adam Smith, but they ignore everything Smith had to say about the necessity of competition to keep markets from turning into monopolies:pluralistic.net/2023/06/09/com…
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2026/05/06/cha…
1/
Pluralistic: In praise of vultures (06 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic: In praise of vultures (06 May 2026)Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow)
Just finished #NaomiKlein 's 1999 (classic?) book No Logo. Just about to start @pluralistic 's Enshittification. I get the feeling this is going to feel a bit like a sequel.
From here:
There is no 'free' market, and there never has been. The 'free' market is predicated on the belief that all players will act honestly, and make informed choices based on available information. This is a completely false assumption, and has been proven so time after time.It completely ignores human nature whereby someone will always lie, cheat, and steal to achieve their own ends -- this is what we see here.Industry players will always form cartels and collude in anti-consumer behavior -- price fixing being the prime example.
Without someone to keep corporations in line, the market would steadily skew to all of the power being in the hands of a few.
There is no such thing as a 'free' market, and there simply never has been. It's a utopian myth which can never be true.
People who go around spouting about the 'free' market are either naive, self deluded, or actively lying.
Gaining a lot less coverage than the World Economic Foundation's annual shindig in Davos, next week in Oxford the annual Skoll World Forum focusses on the idea of social entrepreneurship (not least the B-Corp movement) to look at how capitalism might be done differently.
While this will be of little interest to those of you who think capitalism is the problem, for reformists who see a range of capitalist models, this might be something to look at?
Skoll World Forum Update The next Skoll World Forum will take place April 21–24, 2026. Explore details related to attendance, the schedule, program and travel, or register for virtual participation […]Padmaja Sathyamoorthy (Skoll.org)
KTLA: Coachella attendees say Airbnb hosts canceled stays, relisted rentals at last minute
As Hettie O'Brien observes when capitalism seems stalled (especially in the UK), the rise of Private Equity's business model (of asset stripping & use of debt to extract cash from businesses) is just one more example of a zero-sum economics that now dominates the social relations of inequality & impoverishment.
The Q. is whether this is the end-stage of this form of capitalism or the final contradictions that will cause the entire edifice to collapse?
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
These companies now own everything from nurseries to care homes, squeezing vital services for profit while we foot the bill, says Hettie O’Brien, author of The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against ItselfHettie O'Brien (the Guardian)
As Roy Lilley (NHSManagers.net) argues:
'The real growth [in the problems of public health] is in the vast middle ground. Millions of people who are not acutely ill, but not entirely well.
People dealing with anxiety, stress, poor sleep, financial pressure, job insecurity, loneliness.
People functioning, coping, but steadily ground down'.
The increasingly precarious, insecure capitalism our political class has facilitated is taking its toll on our mental health.
At a time of looming crisis for private credit groups.... distressed debt investors (who buy debt at steeply discounted prices in the expectation that they *will* be able to recover a higher proportion of the debt later on) are reportedly expecting a bonanza as great as the money they made from buying up distressed debt(s) in 2008.
Yup, looks like another leading indicator of the forthcoming crash (now over-determined by the Iran war & the AI crash).
#FinancialServices #capitalism
h/t FT
