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).

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[...] a chief ambition of fostering a more commons-centric economy is to recapture surplus value, which is now feeding speculative capital, and re-invest it in the development of open, ethical productive communities. [...] Platform cooperatives must not merely replicate false scarcities and unnecessary waste; they must become open.

after all, closed business models are based on "artificial scarcity to extract rents" (p164), either legally or technologically

—p.166 Why Platform Co-ops Should Be Open Co-ops (163) by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] technology is not the barrier to making a platform; if anything, the advances in technology have made platform-building easier. The barrier is finance. How else but with mountains of money, could a few unelected men [...] command hundreds of programmers and thousands of marketers and lawyers to build a platform they alone own and which millions depend on? It is the platform of finance, and the intensely unequal control of that platform in our world today, upon which so many other unequal platforms have been built.

very good point

—p.188 Money Is the Root of All Platforms (187) by Brendan Martin 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] While coding may sound like a solution to current market woes, in truth, it will only delay the eventual degradation of such digital labor. When everyone can code, those jobs too will go the way of other forms of work--outsourced, undervalued, underpaid, or automated. However, a digital skills curriculum anchored in labor theory and labor history--a curriculum that explores the possibilities of new forms of collectivities, organizing, and worker agency--has the potential not only to generate a new app or platform, but to reconfigure how digital labor is brought into being and how we imagine continuing to live in and through digital platforms, networks, and infrastructures.

I feel vindicated by this, after what I said in my Liam Byrne piece

—p.198 Can Code Schools Go Cooperative? (196) by Karen Gregory 7 years, 6 months ago

The blockchain is what we call a "trustless" architecture. It stands in for trust in the absence of more traditional mechanisms like social networks and co-location. It allows cooperation without trust [...] proof-of-work is not a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as social confidence and judgment in favor of an algorithmic regulation. [...] we might dispense with social institutions altogether in favor of an elegant technical solution.

This assumption [...] betrays a worrying politics--or rather a drive to replace politics (as debate and dispute and things that produce connection and difference) with economics. [...] The blockchain has more in common with the neoliberal governmentality that produces platform capitalists like Amazon and Uber and state-market coalitions than any radical alternative. Seen in this light, the call for blockchains forms part of a line of informational and administrative technologies such as punch cards, electronic ledgers, and automated record keeping systems that work to administrate populations and to make politics disappear.

—p.230 Blockchains and Their Pitfalls (228) by Rachel O'Dwyer 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] it is mistakenly assumed that human consciousness is a constant "original" which computers will either "copy" or fail to "copy". In fact, the distinction is far less sustainable, and human consciousness is already becoming computerized. This book is concerned with the question of what consciousness to come is shown by virtual reality and by gaming. It is therefore in some ways indebted to McKenzie Wark's influential idea that it is less a question of games becoming like reality but of reality becoming like games. The dialectic interplay between reality and the virtual is a site at which the future can become visible.

—p.8 Tutorial (1) by Alfie Bown 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] this means controlling the actions and paths of people to best produce profit for those with corporate interests in the city, something that is now done primarily via smartphones.

on Ingress / Pokemon GO

—p.15 Tutorial (1) by Alfie Bown 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] Our mobile phones pretend to be about fulfilling every desire [...] yet what is much scarier than the fact that the user can fulfill desire via the mobile phone is the possibility that the phone creates those desires in the first place. While the user thinks they are doing what they want, as if desires already exist and are simply facilitated by the device, in fact Google has an even greater power: the ability to create and organize desire itself. [...]

—p.17 Tutorial (1) by Alfie Bown 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] If McGonigal is right that games can seize us and affect us when we are feeling aimless, hopeless, or anxious--dealing with those feelings of fragmentation and transforming them into something concrete and apparently positive--then this should make the alarm bells ring and cause us to be very suspicious. It shows us nothing more than the extent to which games are powerful ideological tools. [...]

referring to a fairly staid TED talk by Jane McGonigal on WoW

—p.33 Level 1 (27) by Alfie Bown 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] it is essential that such games are experienced as a complete waste of time. Their purpose is in part to erase a clear distinction between work and leisure so that the worker must "pay back" their Candy Crush indulgence by answering emails in bed at night, for example.

Such games aid capitalism not by stimulating capitalist success or endorsing its principles, but by appearing to be totally useless and nothing more than a complete waste of precious time. By appearing as such they are able to make the mundane work we perform for capitalism seem so much the more "productive" and "useful" by contrast. After we have "wasted" five minutes on Cookie Clicker, we feel like we are carrying out an act that is both productive and reparative when we return to Microsoft Excel afterward. [...] these distractions not only consolidate our impression that capitalist productivity is comparatively useful and positive, but also make us feel indebted and keen to make amends to an employer after gaming. Such games are a kind of licensed transgression that not only allows society to continue unharmed, but actually reinforces our desire to pay back what we owe for our little acts of perceived nonconformism. Additionally, they renew our commitment to capitalist production when we might otherwise be reflecting on how unfulfilling our working conditions are.

p38: mentions Benjamin's theories on distraction as an alternative to contemplation

—p.36 Level 1 (27) by Alfie Bown 7 years, 6 months ago

The unprecedented success of Bernie Sanders’s run and his enduring popularity should have been a wake-up call to much of Leftworld: the country is ready for working-class politics, and even for the s-word, as long as we talk about it in everyday, tangible terms.

And yet, much of the radical left learned the opposite lesson from 2016. We have been staking out increasingly wilder terrain, moving the goalposts well beyond what most of the last century’s socialists or communists thought possible. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with horizons — we need them. But the basic challenge of left-wing politics is to train our eyes on horizons that others can see. Social democracy failed not because it traded utopianism for reform but because it swore off horizons entirely, and began to look inwards, upon its own parties and parliaments. In rhetoric, the radical left is different; but in practice, the mistake is similar: victory is defined as whatever makes the already-initiated tick. Ultra-leftism and reformism are united by their scorn for mass action.

—p.14 The New Communists (11) by Adaner Usmani, Connor Kilpatrick 7 years, 5 months ago