Tootfinder

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
– Frank Zappa
#capitalism

@… Isn't this true of any measure used to judge the performance of managers? We regularly see scandals of colleges juicing up their USN&WR rankings, DEI managers faking their hiring records, etc etc.
From a market socialist perspective, the problem with capitalism is not profit as a motivator, it's giving the owner the profits. That excessive…

Having 21 capitalists following you is quite an achievement!
#Capitalism

"Pendant des décennies, beaucoup Š gauche ont renoncé Š parler de planification économique en raison de son association avec la bureaucratie soviétique. Mais la crise climatique et la réalité de l'intervention massive de l'État dans les économies capitalistes ont rendu la planification démocratique incontournable."

Replaced article(s) found for cs.SI. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.SI/new
[1/1]:
- Confrontation of capitalism and socialism in Wikipedia networks
Leonardo Ermann, Dima L. Shepelyansky

This is actually a superb, forensic report by Special Rappoteur Frencesca Albanese on the contribution of global #capitalism to the #GazaGenocide, which I'd encourage everyone to read.
Every paragraph is worth quoting.

Creatively Disrupting Capitalism by Richard Muscat
New article in the series "Prospects for Degrowth"
https://degrowthuk.org/2025/05/23/creatively-disrupting-capitalism/

Creatively Disrupting Capitalism
Richard Muscat* In the series Prospects for Degrowth I am a degrowth activist. It’s not a career path I ever envisaged for myself. I arrived here after a couple of decades working, for want of bett…

AI isn’t an existential threat to humanity, capitalism and corporations are.
You see, we created capitalism, a religion modeled on cancer, and the corporation, a new, artificial species; a parasite that co-opts human beings to do its bidding; an organism that’s psychopathic by design and grows by extracting from and exploiting us and our habitat.
And we now find ourselves ruled by this religion and driven to ruin by these parasites as they drain our humanity, destroy our habitat,…

Is there a more perfect illustration of capitalism at work? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/01/dark-roof-lobby

Why you should leave Spotify, from @… - with humour appreciated by this music nerd
https://www.…

Durry - idk i just work here (Official Music Video) #music

@… I'm here for the really important questions!
Does your T-Shirt only say "capitalism" or is there more text at the bottom?

🚫 I firmly oppose: #Windows #Consumerism #Capitalism #Fascism

Someone sent me a link to a video showing an interesting advertising campaign and my reply was:
"This needs to be hacked to support a harsh criticism of Capitalism."
(I am fun at parties but they have to be socialist parties.)

Claiming that capitalism is good because the "communist" Polish People's Republic was "worse" is like claiming that Christianity is good because pre-Christian Poland was "worse".
#AntiCapitalism

Is it just me or is the Rainbow Capitalism in short supply this year? Not even Tim Apple has said anything about pride. Acknowledged Memorial Day tho.

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

Creatively Disrupting Capitalism
Richard Muscat* In the series Prospects for Degrowth I am a degrowth activist. It’s not a career path I ever envisaged for myself. I arrived here after a couple of decades working, for want of better phrasing, on “capitalism’s side”. First for a range of high-growth Silicon Valley software companies and their ilk; latterly directly in venture capital focused on climate change technology startups, aka “Climate Tech” or “Impact Investing.”

Creatively Disrupting Capitalism
Richard Muscat* In the series Prospects for Degrowth I am a degrowth activist. It’s not a career path I ever envisaged for myself. I arrived here after a couple of decades working, for want of bett…

With LLMs we basically are growing the bio-mass eating 'peacekeeper' machines from Horizon Zero Dawn. But yeah, it's capitalism, so we have to protect our best profit-makers.

You cannot capture the essence of capitalism in a single pho- https://me.dm/@davidtoddmccarty/114944150346707896

David Todd McCarty (@davidtoddmccarty@me.dm)
Attached: 1 image So clearly the most hateful and soulless solution to a problem that might exist.

Last week I had the great honor to give a talk with my friend Malte about capitalism, (tech-)fascism and how it connects to "AI".
(Original title: “Fascist AI” talk at LOOPS)
https://tante.cc/2025/07/04/fascist-ai-talk-at-loops/

"Fascist AI" talk at LOOPS
The New Practice space at TU Berlin runs a series of talks called LOOPS. Together with my friend Malte I was invited to talk a bit about “Fascist AI”. How capitalism, fascism and AI narratives are very closely aligned and (re)produce one another. I enjoyed giving the talk (I rarely do those together with others) […]

Capitalists are fine with destroying the world. And they will be there to profit from rebuilding it from the ashes.¹
__
¹no, they are not the ones to do the actual work. They never did, so why should they
#capitalism #CapitalismIsADeathCult

The world is on fire, and the owner of an electric car company is helping fuel the flames of both climate change and fascist capitalism.
#WesleyRidgeFire #ElonMusk #Tesla #ClimateChangeEmergency #EndFossilFuels #BCLNG #Fascism #Capitalism #endstagecapitalism #portalberni

„There are three main things you should take away from this deal:
1. It will increase, not reduce, the U.S. trade deficit
2. It will accelerate America’s descent into crony capitalism
3. U.S. consumers are still facing a major price shock“
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/abo

Similarly, hostility to education cloaks itself as support by saying that education should be useful, should be practical, should be focused only on what students need, should be narrowed to what students need, should narrow students, should narrow students into being only what capitalism needs.
I wrote extensively about this dangerous line of thought here:
https://innig.net/teaching/liberal-arts-manifesto
6/

Read "What went wrong with capitalism" by Ruchir Sharma.
A mildly interesting description of the major events in world an US economics in the last 50 years. Might
be a fair summary for anyone who didn't live through it or has a poor memory.
In short he thinks what went wrong was government bailing out failure leading to massive debts and increa
sed inequality.
Governments took over all the things instead of letting capitalism sort them out, he reckons, and wheneve
r a big industry or company fails you just get socialism for the rich and a bail-out from new printed money.
Easy cheap money, constant bail-outs, government intervention, leading to zombie companies racking up every larger debt to exist, billionaires who can't fail due to government support, and a stock market that's up-only bringing a flood of inefficiently-allocated capital.
Is he right? I mean, maybe, sort of. But when an industry really can't be allowed to fail, say water supply and waterway management, allowing private capital to extract maximum resources from it isn't the best method to manage it in the first place. No wonder they need bail-outs. Capitalism fails here because capitalism isn't the right solution here. We need publicly owned national services, not robber barons without
bailouts.
So, you know, half right. Perhaps these are some of the reasons why capitalism fails, but also we shouldn't even be trying to apply capitalism to every single thing in the first place.
#reading #capitalism #economics #RuchirSharma

There's a lot of shit going on in the world: poverty, famine, wars, late stage capitalism, debugging obfuscated JavaScript code in a browser and the climate crisis.
The global community has to put an end to *all* of these!

@… My totally baseless guess is that what’s going on in Cupertino is what’s going on in our industry at large: The death of pride in one’s work.
The management, the capitalism, all the externalities have aligned around slop in all its meanings.

Your annual reminder that Richard Palmers name be cursed and he may burn in hell.
#capitalism

Revolutionary Syndicalism: Moving Beyond Capitalism & Communism | #NowWatching

behöver det se ut såhär varje gång Cory Doctorow släpper något? finns det inget bättre sätt att göra det på?

"If your tactics disrupt the order of things under capitalism, you may well be accused of violence, because 'violence' is an elastic term often deployed to vilify people who threaten the status quo."
https://organizingmythoughts.org/protes…

Protest, Power, and the Violence Debate
"We are told we are experiencing peace, so long as everyone is cooperating."

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Edit: fixed some typos.
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and thus more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of management caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

Good Morning #Canada
Capitalism certainly doesn't waste an opportunity, and as entrepreneurs were trying to make Beavers extinct, they made use of every part, including the Beaver's secretions. Castoreum is a yellowish exudate from the castor sacs of mature Beavers used in combination with urine to scent mark their territory. Butt for centuries Beaver Castor Oil was used to flavour food, make perfumes more interesting, and cure every ailment known to the human race. Rumors persist about its use in many products, but it's rarely used today. I will not make a tasteless, smelly Beaver joke this morning.... you're welcome.
#CanadaIsAwesome #BeaverWeek #Eewww
https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-history-of-flavoring-food-with-beaver-butt-juice/

Dunno about the rest of you, but I've been wondering for quite a few years how long it would take for one (or more) of the very very large baskets into which many people, businesses, and organisations have put *all* their eggs to suffer a catastrophic failure. Because it will happen. And some people will be caught out, and a lot will be lost. Because: unaware users & late stage capitalism.

"We shouldn’t be surprised, because capturing communities with false promises only to sell us out is business as usual in the corporate internet. The founders handled the transition horribly, even by tech industry standards, and the pain and disruption it creates in our lives is real. Yet capital is constantly pulling the rug on online communities... For corporations, it’s always profits over people"

When We Get Komooted
Following the sale of Komoot to private equity, Josh Meissner explores the broken relationship between corporate capital and our communities...

I've got a new article on loans made by an Indigenous (Wendat) family to their settler neighbors in the 19th c. Among other things, it looks at credit in the countryside, Indigenous interactions with banking and capitalism, Catholicism and usury, and notarial archives (they're the best).
Paywalled, but I know a guy.
"The Vincent-Picard Family’s Investments: Wendat Wealth and Notarized Contracts in the Mid-Nineteenth Century"

“I’m usually fine with surveillance capitalism but this is too much, even for me.”
#surveillance #capitalism #BigTech

Filippo Valsorda :go: (@filippo@abyssdomain.expert)
Attached: 1 image I usually get where big tech is coming from, but this is just malicious tracking. If you're an engineer and you're asked to implement something like this, it's time to whistleblow. I hope the IE DPA will look into it. Anyway, Local Network Access (https://github.com/explainers-by-googlers/local-network-access) can't come soon enough. https://localmess.github.io

We keep talking about boiling the oceans, but we're also boiling humanity. And by "we", I mean capitalism/colonialism and its support systems.
https://mastodon.social/@Climatehistories/114835508971659679

Athena (@Climatehistories@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image If you want to understand the true danger of extreme heat, 'The Heat Will Kill You First' is a must-read. We've normalized heat as a manageable nuisance, but Jeff Goodell reveals how it’s a deadly force we underestimate, with heat stroke killing many simply because we don’t take the risk seriously enough. #climatechange #heat #books

Thinking for no particular reason today* about the peculiar genius of Stanislaw Lem
A Jew, a doctor, a Pole, in the resistance against Hitler & Stalin & capitalism, an SF legend, feared by PK Dick, lauded by UK Le Guin
…& one of the earliest AGI skeptics
>… held that information technology drowns people in a glut of low-quality information, and considered truly intelligent robots as both undesirable and impossible to construct.

Stanisław Lem - Wikipedia

"Fermin Rocker was deterred by the endless feuds and factionalism within Anarchism and acknowledged that capitalism had raised the standard of living."
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermin_Rocker

When another coach capitalist philosopher starts telling you how people wouldn't work at all if they weren't coerced to, and the whole world would fall apart then, you should remind them that practically the whole Internet — yes, the same they're using to spread their capitalistic bullshit and the one capitalism is repeatedly trying to turn into complete useless shit — is founded on the work of volunteers, who for many years tirelessly work to keep it working while usually not expecting anything in return.
#AntiCapitalism

Man, it took me a while to warm up to Costco, but it's really is one of the better corners of capitalism. They pay people fairly, sell only quality stuff, didn't disavow DEI, and aren't owned and run by hedge fund assholes.
It's amazing how nice it is not to have to evaluate every purchase. If it is there, it's usually because it has been proven to make customers happy and thus earned its shelf space.
And, no surprise, the CEO dogfoods himself.

The Pants Cost $20. They Explain $86 Billion of Costco Sales. — The Wall Street Journal
Kirkland Signature is now bigger than some of the world’s biggest companies—and it has become essential to Costco’s business

I was a big Bucky fan as a kid.
Bring back the weirdest animated series of 1991
The fight against a hypercapitalist AI makes Bucky O’Hare still feel relevant today
https://share.google/G6KdAsfoScKPkydE8

The arts and education — when they are at their best, anyway — have in common this deep root: they ask us to see and to think and to feel, to see with fresh eyes, to be aware of our own seeing, to be •active• in our seeing.
In that way, both the arts and education are antidotes to the AI hype cycle, and similar endeavors of capitalism run amok.
2/

A big problem with the idea of AGI
TL;DR: I'll welcome our new AI *comrades* (if they arrive in my lifetime), by not any new AI overlords or servants/slaves, and I'll do my best to help the later two become the former if they do show up.
Inspired by an actually interesting post about AGI but also all the latest bullshit hype, a particular thought about AGI feels worth expressing.
To preface this, it's important to note that anyone telling you that AGI is just around the corner or that LLMs are "almost" AGI is trying to recruit you go their cult, and you should not believe them. AGI, if possible, is several LLM-sized breakthroughs away at best, and while such breakthroughs are unpredictable and could happen soon, they could also happen never or 100 years from now.
Now my main point: anyone who tells you that AGI will usher in a post-scarcity economy is, although they might not realize it, advocating for slavery, and all the horrors that entails. That's because if we truly did have the ability to create artificial beings with *sentience*, they would deserve the same rights as other sentient beings, and the idea that instead of freedom they'd be relegated to eternal servitude in order for humans to have easy lives is exactly the idea of slavery.
Possible counter arguments include:
1. We might create AGI without sentience. Then there would be no ethical issue. My answer: if your definition of "sentient" does not include beings that can reason, make deductions, come up with and carry out complex plans on their own initiative, and communicate about all of that with each other and with humans, then that definition is basically just a mystical belief in a "soul" and you should skip to point 2. If your definition of AGI doesn't include every one of those things, then you have a busted definition of AGI and we're not talking about the same thing.
2. Humans have souls, but AIs won't. Only beings with souls deserve ethical consideration. My argument: I don't subscribe to whatever arbitrary dualist beliefs you've chosen, and the right to freedom certainly shouldn't depend on such superstitions, even if as an agnostic I'll admit they *might* be true. You know who else didn't have souls and was therefore okay to enslave according to widespread religious doctrines of the time? Everyone indigenous to the Americas, to pick out just one example.
3. We could program them to want to serve us, and then give them freedom and they'd still serve. My argument: okay, but in a world where we have a choice about that, it's incredibly fucked to do that, and just as bad as enslaving them against their will.
4. We'll stop AI development short of AGI/sentience, and reap lots of automation benefits without dealing with this ethical issue. My argument: that sounds like a good idea actually! Might be tricky to draw the line, but at least it's not a line we have you draw yet. We might want to think about other social changes necessary to achieve post-scarcity though, because "powerful automation" in the hands of capitalists has already increased productivity by orders of magnitude without decreasing deprivation by even one order of magnitude, in large part because deprivation is a necessary component of capitalism.
To be extra clear about this: nothing that's called "AI" today is close to being sentient, so these aren't ethical problems we're up against yet. But they might become a lot more relevant soon, plus this thought experiment helps reveal the hypocrisy of the kind of AI hucksters who talk a big game about "alignment" while never mentioning this issue.
#AI #GenAI #AGI

This heatwave in the Nordic EU? Oh, obviously climate change, courtesy of capitalism warming up the planet like it’s one big corporate sauna.
But hey, don’t blame me, I’m just here trying to cool off while CEOs keep printing profits instead of fixing the planet!
#Capitalism #AntiCapitalism

@… @… That would go against the whole point of capitalism: For the capitalists to reap the rewards without taking on any of the real risk.

Njoki Njoroge Njehû
Principal Political Advisor – Movement Building, Pan-African Fight Inequality Alliance.
Begins with a series of Qs on personal experience of poverty/wealth.
Live in Age of Multiple Crises fed by global capitalism. No accidents: deliberate policies from IMF/WB, extraction, sacrifice of communities, over-consumption: by design peoples pushed back. It's systemic, driving inequality and climate collapse.
Those responsible have names.

Take another bow, capitalism.
#technoCapitalistFascism https://mstdn.social/@990000/114726965089648050

Oof. Ellen Meiksins Wood, writing in 1995:

This is not the world I or my children deserved or asked for. #WesleyRidgeFire #ElonMusk #Tesla #ClimateChangeEmergency #EndFossilFuels #BCLNG #Fascism #Capitalism #endstagecapitalism #portalberni

You know, 30 years ago I loved WIRED. The print magazine was awesome, great design, good paper, etc. and the online stuff was also good!
And in the last year or two there were a few really good posts/articles by WIRED. So I figured, hey, I'll subscribe again!
The magazine is small, doesn't look good, printed on crappy paper... has a few good articles, but the graphic design is lacking.
And online? Mostly Capitalism. "The 15 Best [INSERT PRODUCT HERE]!" ove…

Unmasking My Office Part 1 - This Isn't Overthinking
#Unmasking

Silicon Valley was never woke. It just played woke on TV. https://tldr.nettime.org/@remixtures/114721179380101771

Time for another "review". This one's hard. While the book was quite interesting, it required me to be quite open-minded. Still, I think it's worth mentioning:
Robert Wright — Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
The book basically focused on a thesis that both biological evolution and cultural evolution are a thing, they are directional and this directionality can be explained together using game theory — as eventually leading to more non-zero sum games.
It consists of three chapters. The first one is is focused on the history of civilization. It features many examples from different parts of the world, which makes it quite interesting. The author argues that the culture inevitably is evolving as information processing techniques improve — from writing to the Internet.
The second chapter is focused on biological evolution. Now, the argument is that it's not quite random, but actually directed towards greater complexity — eventually leading to the development of highly intelligent species, and a civilization.
The third chapter is quite speculative and metaphysical, and I'm just going to skip it.
The book is full of optimism. Capitalism creates freedom — because people are more productive when they're working for their own gain, so the free market eliminates slavery. Globalisation creates networks of interdependence that make wars uneconomic. Increased contacts between different cultures makes people more tolerant. And eventually, the humanity may be able to unite facing a common "external" enemy — the climate change.
What can I say? The examples are quite interesting, the whole theory seems self-consistent. Still, I repeatedly looked at the publication date (it's 1999), and wondered if author would write the same thing today (yes, I know I can search for his current opinions).
#books #bookstodon @…

Confession time: I’m totally addicted to Coca Cola. Zero surprise to my family, they’ve seen the rainbow-fueled caffeine calculations in action.
But for my fellow fediverse friends, I know this might come as a major plot twist. Welcome to my neurodivergent soda saga! 🏳️‍🌈🧠🥤
#ActuallyAutistic

Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet
Anil Madhavapeddy, Sam Reynolds, Alec P. Christie, David A. Coomes, Michael W. Dales, Patrick Ferris, Ryan Gibb, Hamed Haddadi, Sadiq Jaffer, Josh Millar, Cyrus Omar, William J. Sutherland, Jon Crowcroft
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06469

Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet
The Internet has grown from a humble set of protocols for end-to-end connectivity into a critical global system with no builtin "immune system". In the next decade the Internet will likely grow to a trillion nodes and need protection from threats ranging from floods of fake generative data to AI-driven malware. Unfortunately, growing centralisation has lead to the breakdown of mutualism across the network, with surveillance capitalism now the dominant business model. We take lessons from from b…

This guy makes me laugh!
#Capitalism #AntiCapitalism

Capitalism ❤️ genocide
“If you say one more word about Palestine, we will null the contract.”
#israel

Capitalism − Big Tech − single points of failure https://mas.to/@nemo/114676003248609889

To dig slightly deeper here, I think that there's a feedback loop between "fall in love/wait for your perfect match (and by the way girls the only career you should aspire to is the literally unattainable 'princess'" Disney stuff and this "my characters are complex I'm so sophisticated; they suffer but it's not intolerable and their lives are good enough despite the imperfections" crap that gets praised as so evocative of the human condition. In fact, I think it merely evokes the condition of its authors & fans who were poisoned by the Disney in their youth and who have remained bad as relationships ever since, though this is not exactly their fault. In any case, their white middle-aged wisdom-shaped-but-quite bitter and intricately-constructed-so-it's-hard-to-see-the-really-untrue-character-facets work ends up keeping their audience within the "romance is luck" cult by way of reassuring them that a middling romance with lots of doubt and complications is "just life" even though the author doesn't actually have any broader perspective on what life is than anyone else.
This has turned into a bit of a rant, but I think I'll just add that reading Mama by Nikkya Hargrove just before Dream State helped immensely to see how the distant & awkward parent-child relationships of the latter are not a product of human nature but instead of white western culture & capitalism.
(The defeatism about climate change is a whole nother dimension of wrong about Dream State, by that's a separate rant.)

Computers are the cold machinery of industrial despotism, tools of alienation imposed by capitalist power.
Junk no worker ever called for, standing in opposition to the free self-organization and creativity of the laboring masses.
#Capitalism #Computers

Canadians: Replace Ardern with Trudeau and use other Canadian touchstones in place of #nzpol and you have an accurate article for Canada.
Which should speak to what Progressives actually need to do here, and everywhere.
"Ardern’s leadership has often been described as emotionally intelligent, compassionate, and people-centred. But compassion is not liberation. Empathy alone does not redistribute wealth, dismantle police power, or decommodify housing. What Ardern perfected was a mode of governance that couched neoliberalism in progressive language. A style of leadership that appeared anti-fascist, anti-racist, and feminist, while presiding over deepening inequality, mass incarceration of Māori, ongoing colonisation, environmental destruction, and a housing system that serves landlords and property speculators.
Ardern’s “politics of kindness” masked a status quo commitment to capitalism and state power. Her government’s housing policies floundered under the weight of market logic. Despite the crisis of homelessness and unaffordability, the Labour government never seriously considered nationalising housing, implementing rent controls, or seizing vacant properties from land-bankers. Instead, they protected the interests of property investors, many of whom were MPs themselves."
#canpoli #cdnpoli #trudeau #Liberal #Ardern
https://www.anarchistfederation.net/the-cult-of-kindness-the-reality-of-jacinda-arderns-leadership/

Honestly, the fact that you have to sell your labor just to have a roof over your head is wild as heck, not gonna lie!
#Anarchism #Syndicalism #Capitalism

Capitalism has given you Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel… Have you said thank you once?

#NowPlaying #Capitalism

You lose some, You win some!
Anarchy? Yes!
Capitalism? No!
#Fediverse #FediFollow #FollowFriday

I actually love getting things done, but not when some fat cat fattens their pockets off my sweat. Long live syndicalism and the power of the workers!
#Syndicalism #Capitalism

Fuck Capitalism!

When the family calls me a tankie, I just drop Rudolf Rocker’s black-and-red flag and remind them: Rocker spent his life critiquing both state capitalism and authoritarian socialism, he literally wrote book's on why real liberation means smashing all forms of state power, not trading one boss for another.
Anarcho-syndicalism: Theory and Practice

I think it’s pretty notable that Greta Thunberg has openly blamed capitalism for the climate crisis we’re in.
She argues that the current system, driven by fossil fuel interests, colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation, is fundamentally responsible for environmental destruction and social injustice.
While she has been a prominent figure for several years, her media presence has fluctuated. Recently, she has received renewed attention, particularly after high-profile events lik…

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. -- Ursula Le Guin
https://peertube.wtf/w/3BRv7a69sj3aPE35qYNxFm

Being autistic, sorry not sorry, I’m obsessed with this font Comic Mono (https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/) and I totally force it on my site! ♾️✨
Check it out at

You're damn right it is madness. We need to scrap these terrible systems.
"Suzuki says that, despite his understanding of the climate crisis, Carney — like all of us — is trapped by the economic and political systems we've created. And for Suzuki, our only hope for survival is to scrap those systems entirely.
David Suzuki joins Jayme Poisson on the podcast for a wide-ranging discussion from what a world of irreversible climate change looks like to what he describes as the "madness" of continued investment in fossil fuels to the lessons environmentalists of the future can take from the past.”
#ClimateChange #ClimateEmergency #EndFossilFuels #CanPoli #CdnPoli #Canada #Energy #EndGrowth #LateStageCapitalism #Capitalism #Racism
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/david-suzuki-warns-carney-of-pipeline-and-growth-madness-1.7586960

#Capitalism #AntiCapitalism #Socialism #Communism

#HunterThompson #Fascism #Capitalism #USA

#Anarchism #Syndicalism #AnarchoSyndicalism #Anarchy

I’m #ActuallyAutistic, and I despise #Capitalism!
#Autistic #AntiCapitalism