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Ad blocking is tantamount to theft, or at the very least running a toll booth without paying.
this facile comment inadvertently inspired some thoughts on toll booths and why this analogy is excellent in its accuracy but an utter failure in terms of its intent
In Havana, my cousins were forced to listen to rambling speeches about maintaining core values inside a one-dimensional cult of personality. In Menlo Park, I was sitting in a tent full of people wearing identical uniforms of Facebook swag and doing the same.
[...]
Meanwhile, I was walking around Facebook, surrounded by stenciled portraits of Mark and equally exhortatory posters: PROCEED AND BE BOLD! GET IN OVER YOUR HEAD! MAKE AN IMPACT!
At their extremes, capitalism and communism become equivalent:
Endless toil motivated by lapidary ideals handed down by a revered and unquestioned leader, and put into practice by a leadership caste selected for its adherence to aforementioned principles, and richly rewarded for its willingness to grind whatever human grist the mill required?
[...]
Foot soldiers who sacrifice their families and personal lives for the efficient running of the system, and who view their sole human value through the prism of advancement within that system?
[...]
As for the actual ability to opt out under capitalism: look at Seattle or SF real estate prices, and the cost of a decent US education, and consider whether Amazon or Facebook employees could really opt out of their treadmill. I've never known one who did, and I know many.
Ask your average family proviers, even those in a two-income family, whether they felt they could simply quit when they liked. They could barely get a few weeks off when they had a child, much less opt out. Switching jobs would amount to nothing more than changing the color of the shackles.
his thoughts on communism are a bit underwhelming but he makes some good points I guess (though there is a lot to be unpacked and examined here)
Similarly, capitalism is the worst form of managing the means of production, except for yet worse ways. We should treat it as such rather than turning it into the Blue State secular religion, alongside yoga and John Oliver.
What's my big beef with capitalism? That it desacralizes everything, robs the world of wonder, and leaves it as nothing more than a vulgar market. The fastest way to cheapen anything--be it a woman, a favor, or a work of art--is to put a price tag on it. And that's what capitalism is, a busy greengorcer going through his store with a price-sticker machine--ka-CHUNK! ka-CHUNK!--$4.10 for eggs, $5 for coffee at Sightglass, $5,000 per month for a run-down one-bedroom in the Mission.
[...]
Stop and think for a moment what this whole IPO ritual was about. For the first time, Facebook shares would have a public price. For all the pageantry and cheering, this was Mr. Market coming along with his price-sticker machine and--ka-CHUNK!--putting one on Facebook for $38 a share. And everyone was ecstatic about it. It was one of the highlights of the technology industry, and one of the "once in a lifetime" moments of our age. In pre-postmodern times, only a divine ritual of ancient origin, victory in war, or the direct experience of meaningful culture via shared songs, dances or art would cause anybody such revelry. Now we're driven to ecstasies of delirium because we have a price tag, and our life's labors are validated by the fact it does. That's the smoldering ambition of every entrepreneur: to one day create an organization that society deems worthy of a price tag.
These are the only real values we have left in the twilight of history, the tired dead end of liberal democratic capitalism, at least here in the California fringes of Western civilization. Clap at the clever people getting rich, and hope you're among them.
Is it a wonder that the inhabitants of such a world clamor for contrived rituals of artificial significance like Burning Man, given the utter bankruptcy of meaning in their corporatized culture? Should we be surprised that they cling to identities, clusters of consumption patterns, that seem lifted from the ads-targeting system at Facebook: "hipster millennials," "urban mommies," "affluent suburbanites"?
Ortega y Gasset wrote: "Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy whcih is actually being staged in the civilized world."
the balance between this passage and the rest of the book (and what it reveals about his mindset and lifestyle) is striking - of course no one can truly reconcile living in a capitalist world with anti-capitalist beliefs, but with this guy it just feels really out of balance
also the use of the word "cheapen" here is interesting; can't tell if it's intentional or not
I contributed a slab of cash every month, per California support guidelines, but it would be my Facebook stock vesting yet to come that would pay for private high schools and Stanford, so Zoe and Noah wouldn't have to sneak into this country's elite through the back door from cattle class, as I had to do.
lots to unpack here
In Milwaukee's poorest black neighborhoods, eviction had become commonplace--especially for women. In those neighborhoods, 1 female renter in 17 was evicted through the court system each year, which was twice as often as men from those neighborhoods and nine times as often as women from the city's poorest white areas. Women from black neighborhoods made up 9 percent of Milwaukee's population and 30% of its evicted tenants.
If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were evicted.
[...] He thought a kind of collective denial set in among tenants facing eviction, as if they were unable to accept or imagine that one day soon, two armed sheriff's deputies would show up, order them out, and usher in a team of movers who would make it look like they had never lived there. Psychologists might agree with him, citing research showing that under conditions of scarcity people prioritize the now and lose sight of the future, often at great cost. Or they might quote How the Ohter Half Lives, published over a century ago: "There is nothing in the prospect of a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessties of life to encourage looking ahead, everything to discourage the effort ... The evil day of reckoning is put off till a to-morrow that may never come. When it does come ... it simply adds another hardship to a life measured from the cradle by such incidents."
Pastor Daryl felt torn. On the one hand, he thought it was the job of the church, not the government, to care for the poor and hungry. That, to him, was "pure Christianity." When it came to Larraine, though, Pastor Daryl believed a lot of hardship was self-inflicted. "She made some stupid choices, spending her money foolishly ... Making her go without for a while may be the best thing for her, so that she can be reminded, 'Hey when I make foolish choices there are consequences.'" It was easy to go on about helping "the poor." Helping a poor person with a name, a face, a history, and many needs, a person whose mistakes and lapses of judgment you have recorded--that was a more trying matter.
because poor people need to be perfect to deserve to live
[...] They say the foreclosure crisis started on Wall Street, with men in power ties trading toxic assets and engineering credit default swaps. But in the ghetto, all you needed was a rapid rescore coach and a low-income tenant hungry for a shot at the American dream.
on Sherrena the landlord rapaciously selling tenants houses--a great deal for her, usually a terrible deal for them, but what choice did they have if they wanted to own a house?
Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience--this kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision. "For a protest movement to arise out of [the] traumas of daily life," the sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have observed, "the social arrangements that are ordinarily perceived as just and immutable must come to seem both unjust and mutable." This usually happened during extraordinary times, when large-scale social transformations or economics disturbances--the postwar housing shortage, say--profoundly upset the status quo. But it was not simply enough to perceive injustice. Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them--which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do.
When people began to view their neighborhood as briming with deprivation and vice, full of "all sorts of shipwrecked humanity," they lost confidence in its political capacity. Milwaukee renters who perceived higher levels of neighborhood trauma--believing that their neighbors had experienced incarceration, abuse, addiction, and other harrowing events--were far less likely to believe that people in their community could come together to improve their lives. This lack of faith had less to do with their neighborhood's actual poverty and crime rates than with the level of concentrated suffering they perceived around them. A community that saw so clearly its own pain had a difficult time also sensing its potential.