• 0 Posts
  • 4 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: April 11th, 2021
  • Four-mile-circus@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.world•Big AI has PC users furious. Nvidia and Micron's weird emotional appeals make it worseEnglish
    201·
    11 days ago

    You could go further and say what’s happening now isn’t capitalism at all. Yanis Varoufakis calls the modern world economy “technofeudalism”: it’s controlled by information hypercompanies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, that make money not by producing anything, but by controlling the flow of information between consumers and producers, and charging producers rent for access to consumers.

    If you’re an app developer, you pay Google and Apple whatever they ask, and you follow their rules, or you don’t get to sell your product in their app stores; if you sell products, you give Amazon their cut, or you don’t get to sell in their market. And because Google and Apple and Amazon have so effectively entrapped customers, capitalists who don’t agree to their terms can’t get to their consumers at all.

    Capitalists aren’t the masters of the economy - they’re vassals. They pay their technofeudal lords their tribute, their 30% cut of revenue, and compete with each other for the remaining scraps. And then they raise prices and cut wages, squeeze their workers and exploit their consumers even more, in order to make enough money to survive at all.

  • Four-mile-circus@lemmy.mltoFuck Cars@lemmy.ml•Bike thefts at stations 'decriminalised'
    101·
    4 months ago

    If it helps, I think bicycle theft is (mostly) a symptom of state violence.

    What I mean is, most people who steal bikes aren’t doing it because they want a bike. They steal bikes to resell them.

    Some people do it because they’re homeless, can’t get a job, and need money to live.

    Some people do it because they’re drug addicts, can’t function well enough to do a job, and need money for drugs.

    Some people just do it because they’re broke and it’s easy money.

    In other words, because of capitalism, because of capitalism, and because of capitalism.

    And all those people are willing to risk state violence (in the form of being arrested for theft) in order to get the money they need.

    Because, in general, those groups are already the subject of state violence in so many ways that they’re not deterred by more state violence. I mean, why the fuck shouldn’t a homeless person steal a bike? Because he might be arrested? He might be arrested for sitting on the fucking sidewalk minding his own business.

    When you risk arrest every single day just for existing in public, or for using the chemicals that big pharma prescribed to you, addicted you to, and then illegalized you for being addicted, the marginally greater danger of arrest from stealing someone’s bicycle doesn’t really make a big difference.

    Fix the fucking social safety net and bicycle theft will plummet.