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It is, then, increasingly clear that Facebook is far from a neutral space in which users’ timelines are organically shaped by their networked interactions. Facebook is a publisher; it’s just a giant monopolistic one, driven at base by market incentives. As Zeynep Tufekci puts it, at its core, the…

Designating the market as natural and the state as unnatural is a convenient fiction for those wedded to the status quo. It makes the current distribution of power, wealth, and resources seem natural and thus inevitable and uncontestable.

But of course this isn’t true. States shape, sustain, and…

Today, the dominant discourse governing discussion of markets, states, and companies is neoliberalism, and Mackey’s free-market business model and historical narrative fit neatly within this framework. In this vision, the economic sphere is “an autonomous, self-adjusting, and self-regulated system …

[...] if you can’t conceive of social life organized in any terms except commodities, if you can’t conceive of any right that isn’t a property right, if you can’t conceive of any sort of goal or organizing principle of collective productive activity except maximizing profit or some kind of stand-in…

But in the real world, the constraint the market imposes on you is that you can’t spend more today than the money available to you today. Which, in the most extreme form, means that the income you’ve collected in the past is the hard limit on how much you can spend today. That’s the ultimate form o…