Yaarrr.
Avast, ye swabs, let it be known that the Pirate Revolution starts November 28! What happens on November 28, ask ye?
Self-proclaimed "content providers" (pigopolists), having learned absolutely nothing from the epic flaming defeat of PIPA and SOPA, will have sole discretionary power to determine whether your download infringed on their precious (in the Gollumesque sense) copyrights. The system is automated, admits of no legal recourse, and blocks users from any site the pigopolists can pull out of their overcapacious corporate orifices. Oh, and they can even use your personal data culled from aforesaid providers to sue you.
Not. Making. This. Up. Quote: “After the fifth alert, the content owner may pursue legal action against the customer, and may seek a court order requiring AT&T to turn over personal information to assist the litigation.” (It's not just ATT, it's also Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable).
That's right. 310 million Americans are about to go to digital jail.
I seem to recall a small spot of bother when a certain Middle Eastern dictator attempted to shut down the country's cellphones. That little spot of bother is nothing compared to what will happen when the digital commons mobilizes.
So bring it on, pigopolists. Make the revolution not just possible, but inevitable!
Monday, October 15, 2012
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Euroliberalism: A Preliminary Postmortem
Since I'm based in the US, most of my critiques of neoliberalism, a.k.a. market fundamentalism, a.k.a. the freedom of plutocrats to steal trillions from debt slaves, have been focused on Wall Street. But it should be recognized neoliberalism is and always was a transnational system.
This is most obvious in Wall Street's leading overseas subsidiary, euroliberalism, a.k.a. the plundering of Europe and its Middle Eastern, North African and Eurasian peripheries for the benefit of a few plutobanksters.
Ordinary Europeans, though, are starting to fight back. Example: an eye-opening article in Finnish newszine Taskamura which investigates the meltdown of Nokia. Nokia was once a competitive firm which excelled in delivering products customers wanted, but the virus of euroliberalism has begun to rot the place from inside. Here's one key citation:
Outsourcing is a polite way of saying, crushing Finland's unionized workforce and sweating its workers for more surplus (never mind Nokia had 30% profit margins during the early 2000s -- too much excess is never enough for the plutocrats). The result was a predictable debacle, as short-term greed destroyed the company's long-term position. The full article is available here.
This is most obvious in Wall Street's leading overseas subsidiary, euroliberalism, a.k.a. the plundering of Europe and its Middle Eastern, North African and Eurasian peripheries for the benefit of a few plutobanksters.
Ordinary Europeans, though, are starting to fight back. Example: an eye-opening article in Finnish newszine Taskamura which investigates the meltdown of Nokia. Nokia was once a competitive firm which excelled in delivering products customers wanted, but the virus of euroliberalism has begun to rot the place from inside. Here's one key citation:
There were a lot of problems, it was difficult to keep hold of the quality of the subcontractors’ work and the contracts weren’t supervised properly. The subcontractors could cheat in the contracts by changing the best experts, who were there in the beginning, to less qualified people. Examples given included bad code written in India and the communication problems with the Chinese and the Japanese because of their poor English skills. All this resulted in more additional work and delays for the project managers in Finland, when they had to take measures to repair the errors and poor quality.At the same time the team size grew and so did the bureaucracy with it. This caused lessening of agility in the software development, which slowed down the development.
Outsourcing is a polite way of saying, crushing Finland's unionized workforce and sweating its workers for more surplus (never mind Nokia had 30% profit margins during the early 2000s -- too much excess is never enough for the plutocrats). The result was a predictable debacle, as short-term greed destroyed the company's long-term position. The full article is available here.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Prison Furlough
My country is a jail cell.
This painful truth hit home when I crossed back into the US after an international flight. Weary, jet-lagged, but dressed professionally (this was a business trip -- yep, I'm moving up in the world, finally had an actual business trip).
Things were fine until I got to the final checkpoint. Showed my papers, everything in order. Then the questioning began. Where had I been. What was I doing. How long did I stay. Etc. Delivered in a blankly menacing undertone, similar to the one I had heard before in a junior Illinois cop. The cop was jacked up on the Drug War, had me sit down in his squad car for no reason, and worked me over with some of the most ludicrous leading questions ever devised while the police dog in the back of the car barked its head off in my ear. "You from Oregon? What do you think of marijuana legalization?" (Seriously. The cop actually asked me that. Couldn't make this up if I tried.)
But in retrospect, the cop was just a wanna-be centurion. The immigration official was the real deal, the beating heart of the Terror War. Just that faint menace which announced that I could be stripped of any rights and deported to a torture-cell in some overseas barracks at the press of a button.
It was exactly the sensation of being an inmate returning from a prison furlough.
In fairness to the immigration officials, most of them were decent, especially the staffers of color, who were noticeably humane. But the ideology of empire has clearly led some of the others over the deep end.
These days, I can't even be angry at this shambles of a former empire, its elites neck-deep in systemic self-delusion. To paraphrase Patrick McGoohan, I do not approve of the proceedings, I note them -- in hopes that whatever I write down will be passed down, like a message in a bottle, to more fortunate galaxies.
This painful truth hit home when I crossed back into the US after an international flight. Weary, jet-lagged, but dressed professionally (this was a business trip -- yep, I'm moving up in the world, finally had an actual business trip).
Things were fine until I got to the final checkpoint. Showed my papers, everything in order. Then the questioning began. Where had I been. What was I doing. How long did I stay. Etc. Delivered in a blankly menacing undertone, similar to the one I had heard before in a junior Illinois cop. The cop was jacked up on the Drug War, had me sit down in his squad car for no reason, and worked me over with some of the most ludicrous leading questions ever devised while the police dog in the back of the car barked its head off in my ear. "You from Oregon? What do you think of marijuana legalization?" (Seriously. The cop actually asked me that. Couldn't make this up if I tried.)
But in retrospect, the cop was just a wanna-be centurion. The immigration official was the real deal, the beating heart of the Terror War. Just that faint menace which announced that I could be stripped of any rights and deported to a torture-cell in some overseas barracks at the press of a button.
It was exactly the sensation of being an inmate returning from a prison furlough.
In fairness to the immigration officials, most of them were decent, especially the staffers of color, who were noticeably humane. But the ideology of empire has clearly led some of the others over the deep end.
These days, I can't even be angry at this shambles of a former empire, its elites neck-deep in systemic self-delusion. To paraphrase Patrick McGoohan, I do not approve of the proceedings, I note them -- in hopes that whatever I write down will be passed down, like a message in a bottle, to more fortunate galaxies.
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