It seems now they place “promoted tweets” from unfollowed feeds (example) in the user’s newsfeed, in addition to the “promoted feeds” in the “who to follow” column. It’s a free-as-in-beer service, so I’m not complaining, but I tend to think of trends toward salesmanship and advertising playing a bigger part of business models (and of course also job descriptions) as a sort of barometer indication of tough times.
Category: Uncategorized
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Quotebag #59
“Doing business, even small business, requires mystification.”—Jack Crow
“The phrase ‘commercial in confidence’ implies a conspiracy; a conspiracy that should be unlawful.”—ejoftheweb
“You folks in the 53% movement are being played.”—Kevin Carson
“Yes there are kooks on the left, there are kooks on the right too and as far as I’m concerned all moderates are kooks.”—Skex
“I’m never shocked when powerful people abuse others. I’m shocked when they don’t.”—Mel
“Interaction can be divided into competitive and cooperative. Competition is transacted through power plays, cooperation is free of free of power plays.”—Claude Steiner
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Can anagorism survive panarchy?
By panarchy we mean pluralism in anarchist ideology, or the coexistence of different and perhaps conflicting non-authoritarian ways of life. More to the point, can anagorism succeed in a world that contains anarcho-capitalism? For this purpose I define success as independence. My optimism is generally so guarded that I assume the odds are against anarchy in any sense being achieved during my lifetime—but I think the less utopian forms such as propertarianism and agorism are more likely to become part of my reality, so it is important to me to keep the anagorist dream alive—do what I can to make sure the revolution doesn’t stop there.
Total independence, like utopia itself, may be a non-option, or as I prefer to say, an asymptotic goal. A good strategy to start may be closure seeking, or making a non-competitive “game” of seeing “how low can we go” with respect to minimizing interactions with decidedly propertarian sectors of society, be it the actually existing business sector, or for-profit entities existing in some future state of anarchy. But what other strategies are available? One is economic minimalism, or re-categorizing supposed necessities as luxuries, but reliance on that strategy alone would be a trap. My idea of the ultimate luxury is the luxury of not being in it for the money, whatever “it” is.
Independence from business entities, like independence from government, consists of ability to fend for oneself. The point behind anagorism is to minimize the need to fend for oneself, in both the martial and commercial spheres, at least to the extent that such strategy and one-upcrittership is a burden on individuals. This presents a strategic weakness for the anagorist community as a whole, as its capacity of collective self defense capabilities, or economic independence capabilities, at some level, draws on the competence of its members. Anagorism does not seek to hobble the individual! Anagorism has the competing goals of maximizing ability and minimizing non-elective challenge. It is not the only ideology with competing goals, but higher ideals do tend to make for harder tradeoffs. We should use our more exacting (or less realistic) ideals as an elective challenge to develop the skills necessary to fend for ourselves, and to produce at least some of the outcomes of business (in the form of products) without the methods of business.
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Quotebag #58
“I think property is like power, Soma. If you don’t use it, defend it, teach it and perhaps most of all, prevent others from having it — it loses not only the value determined by exclusivity, but [its] ability to grab hold of the minds of those without it. ”—Jack Crow
“Exchangeable value requires coercion and creates hierarchies.”—Anatole David
“The RIAA’s political strategy in the war on piracy has been alternately to oppose and support government regulation of the Internet, depending on what’s expedient. I wonder if rights owners and the trade groups that represent them experience any sense of cognitive dissonance when they advocate against something at one moment and for it a little while later—to the same audience, on the same issue.”—Annemarie Bridy
“If you want freedom and justice, then work towards equality and solidarity.”—Marja Erwin
“It’s worth asking, largely rhetorically, how many jobs are created by requiring public schools students to take a loyalty oath first thing in the morning.”—Eric B.
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New rallying cry
While I like “against market and state,” and even the neo-mutualist paradox of “free-market anticapitalism,” I can’t deny that I’ve been influenced by the reductionist Robinson Crusoe (“imagine a world in which the only economic goods are eggs and root beer…”) approach of libertarians, so in the spirit of paradox and mindfuckery, I give you “against coercion and competition.”
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Quotebag #57
“The fact that music and the arts is argued for inclusion in our schools primarily as a way to raise math scores shows you how useless the whole exercise in education ‘reform’ is.”—Purple
“If I somehow manage to come into the classroom every day and keep my religion to myself, I don’t understand why a politician, a judge, a doctor, anybody else cannot do the same.”—Clarissa
“Well, there are plenty of historical societies that dealt in people rather than money. I personally believe that printed money maintains a separation — a boundary, if you will — between the individual and the work that the money symbolizes. Money, as a result, allows us to look past the humanity and excuse atrocious behavior like layoffs and cut benefits as ‘only business.’ When in fact it is extremely personal and inhumane.”—Academic Monkey
“If I sell my TV and other ‘gadgets’ that are always used to show how rich poor people are compared to earlier days, it will get me exactly nowhere today as far as paying my rent.”—Isabel
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Quotebag #56
“I agree about the negative consequences of ‘crony capitalism’. But is crony capitalism only defined as an unwholesome alliance between government and business? What about unwholesome alliances between businesses?”—Poor Richard
“A common job interview question is ‘Why do you want this job?’ And the true answer, ‘Because it’s a job,’ is not acceptable.”—impudent strumpet
“Contempt is the only way to manage others.”—Jack Crow
“The last thing the European left ever needs to do is follow America’s lead of all things when it comes to resistance, just as the last thing US Occupiers need is to lose themselves in a narcissistic fantasy that they are leading the world only to be lead by the nose by incumbent-elites to domesticate a real possibility for organized resistance into another Burning Man.”—Dale Carrico
“I also have a sense that many of the most ardent reactionaries hold to a very strange version of the labor theory of value, wherein the unworthy poor are sapping surplus off of the vigorous masters.”—Nerdy McGee
“Remember, modern elites are trained to think in terms of cost-benefit analyses. If the cost to them of not giving in is less than the cost of not giving in, they won’t give in. It took trillions of dollars to bail out Wall Street. They take home billions of dollars in personal bonuses. You must cost them, personally, more than that, for them to want to give in.”—Ian Welsh
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Geek Code of the majority: PE>$
It’s official. The Washington Post (h/t John Robb) informs us that solid majorities of Democrats, Republicans and “independents” alike have unfavorable views of both Wall Street (“jump”) and Washington (“how high?”). As the people who devised the Geek Code put it, “distrust both government and business.”
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The 53% backlash, and other reactionary tendencies
Take a look at the McFadden cartoon posted by laura k at wmtc. The transition from the second panel “don’t be haters, we’re job creators” to the third “increase productivity, not employment” is one of the strongest arguments for dealing with the backlash known as “53%.” Our side should definitely exploit the inevitable tension between the ideology of “get a job” and the ideology of “life doesn’t owe you a job.” The editorial statement that keeps coming back like a bad penny in the 53% signage is the implication that life is supposed to be frustrating. Making one’s way in the world (“getting established” as my mom called it) is apparently supposed to be some kind of Chinese puzzle. Even the hackneyed cliché about pulling oneself up by the bootstraps refers to a gravity-defying stunt, and keeping one’s nose to the grindstone refers to an act of self-mutilation.
In the fifth panel in the cartoon, someone is saying “giving away food only encourages the poor not to starve.” Words to that effect were expressed in complete seriousness and non-irony by the 19th century Social Darwinists. One of the reasons I refuse to jump on the post-left bandwagon is because I sincerely believe that the statist left, even though statist, is on vastly higher moral ground than the statist or libertarian rightist tendencies. When I was a kid, one of the most aggressively parroted talking points of the populist right (particularly those elements with Bircher tendencies) was about all the planks of an earlier Socialist Party platform having been adopted as American economic policy. It’s a propaganda meme that’s still being catapulted. If we take statist socialism to be the abolition of the private sector by political means, then is not its exact opposite, the abolition of the public sector, an equally “extremist” position? And is not the abolition of the civilian public sector implied by the laissez-faire doctrine of “separation of economy and state” almost as extreme? Maybe not quite as extreme as abolition of the whole public sector, but their “night watchman state” is, first and foremost, an armed agent; a practitioner of deadly force, so what it lacks in extremism, it makes up for in statism. At least the principled among the anarcho-capitalists call for total abolition of the state. I call not for separation of economy and state, but a third alternative, which I will find, or die trying. My point for the purpose of this discussion is that there was a time that laissez-faire was considered an extremist doctrine, and that there are reasons why a reasonable person should still consider it to be such. I would also suggest that large portions of the laissez-faire program have already been implemented in the policy sphere, in a world in which any foray by nation states into “mixed economy” (or any failure to depart from previously established mixed economies) can be challenged as a violation of “free trade” treaties. In America, most of the safety net has been rolled back, as has almost all progress won by the political left in the workplace and in labor law. It is true of the political right, as it is of any political tendency, that if you give ’em an inch, they’ll take a mile. It is in that spirit that “center is the new left,” and the tendency called “small government conservatism” has (without any substantial changes in its tenets) gone from being (by reputation) a fringe-right element of Social Darwinism, laissez-faire capitalism and reactionary anticommunism to being the yardstick against which even people about as right of center as Reagan are now (by equally widespread reputation) RINO’s, according to sectors of public opinion who (seemingly mockingly) call themselves “independents” or even “moderates.”
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The whole apparatus of economic incentives and state enforcement
In We Don’t Want Full Employment, We Want Full Lives! (h/t Jack Saturday) we find a typical statement of the ideas of post-scarcity, full unemployment, etc. This particular essay stands out from the pack, if nothing else, for this gem of a way of stating the obvious (emphasis, as always, mine):
In a sane society, the elimination of all these absurd jobs (not only those that produce or market ridiculous and unnecessary commodities, but the far larger number directly or indirectly involved in promoting and protecting the whole commodity system) would reduce necessary tasks to such a trivial level (probably less than 10 hours per week) that they could easily be taken care of voluntarily and cooperatively, eliminating the need for the whole apparatus of economic incentives and state enforcement.(1)
It is always so very refreshing to see economic incentives and state enforcement lumped together as one side of the same coin than the usual libertopian formulation in which those harsh mistresses called economic incentives are held out as the natural antidote to state enforcement, or more depressingly, the only possible alternative.
I also simply love how promotion is classified as an “absurd job.”