Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

Activity

You added a note
7 years, 9 months ago

economic dignity

Copying a musician's music ruins economic dignity. It doesn't necessarily deny the musician any form of income, but it does mean that the musician is restricted to a real-time economic life. That means one gets paid to perform, perhaps, but not paid for music one has recorded in the past. It is one…

—p.51 Who Owns the Future? The Ad Hoc Construction of Mass Dignity (37) by Jaron Lanier
You added a vocabulary term
7 years, 9 months ago

plutocracy

Without our system of levees, rising like a glimmering bell-curved mountain of rice paddies, capitalism would probably have decayed into Marx's "attractor nightmare" in which markets decay into plutocracy.

at least he does accept the existence of levees

—p.48 The Ad Hoc Construction of Mass Dignity (37) by Jaron Lanier
notable
You added a note
7 years, 9 months ago

markets are an information technology

Markets are an information technology. A technology is useless if it can't be tweaked. If market technology can't be fully automatic and needs some "buttons", then there's no use in trying to pretend otherwise. You don't stay attached to poorly performing quests for perfection. You fix bugs.

And…

—p.45 The Ad Hoc Construction of Mass Dignity (37) by Jaron Lanier
You added a note
7 years, 9 months ago

the middle class is good for the rich

The prominence of middle classes in the last century actually made the rich richer than would have a quest to concentrate wealth absolutely. Broad economic expansion is more lucrative than the winner taking all. Some of the very rich occasionally express doubts, but even from the most elite perspec…

—p.43 The Ad Hoc Construction of Mass Dignity (37) by Jaron Lanier
You added a note
7 years, 9 months ago

let's reject the Marxist ideal

Marx wanted something that most people, including me, don't want: a committee to make sure everyone gets what's best for them. Let's reject the Marxist ideal and instead consider the question of whether markets can be counted on to create middle classes as a matter of course.

—p.38 The Ad Hoc Construction of Mass Dignity (37) by Jaron Lanier