Actually-existing capitalism
2014-12-31 — 2025-01-06
Wherein a Compendium of Satirical Links on Gig‑economy Fraud, Algorithmic Arbitrage, Corporate Climate Calculus, VR Cows, and the Commodification of Human Contact Is Presented.
Content warning:
No deep analysis here, just a collection of amusing failure modes of our current economic system.
The market economy twin to the planned economy’s Actually Existing Socialism.
A link list of cheap laffs about the current economic system. Solutions, root-cause analysis, and deep thoughts are elsewhere. For that see, e.g. fake production, Moloch, capitalism_end_game, misinformation…
A Turkish Farmer Tests Out VR Goggles on Cows To Get More Milk (Is this even real? It is a meme now for sure)
People on TikTok are paying elderly women to sit in stagnant mud for hours and cry
Apparently William Gibson did not write this article about Peter Thiel funding a hipster New York film festival run by a poor queer Black experimental filmmaker
Pizza arbitrage is a small essay on the dominant business model of the moment (burn billions in shareholder capital to acquire, or at least seem to be on course to acquire, a monopoly in some middle-man market).
Malcolm Harris reports on a Shell Climate Change conference where they discuss how corporate interests will manage the climate transition. He speculates
According to the geoscientist, one of the ways Shell incorporates climate change into its calculations is that when it looks to develop a new fuel source, it tries to figure out how much it’ll be able to sell it off for when the company transitions out of fossil energy — when the reputational costs start to exceed the returns. Whoever buys it will almost certainly continue extracting but at a lower cost of production, maybe because it has better technology or, more likely, because it cuts corners on labour and safety. What this means: Unregulated fossil-fuel production might come to look a lot like the narcotics trade, with its brutal criminal organisations that thrive in conjunction with corrupt state elements regardless of international agreements. The problem is that once reserves are discovered, there’s no way to undiscover them. “We don’t plan to lose money,” the geoscientist turned finance analyst said, and he meant it in the most general way.
China’s Newest Dating Craze: Real-Life Meetups With Virtual Boyfriends
Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good
Screens used to be for the elite. Now avoiding them is a status symbol.
I Went to the Premiere of the First Commercially Streaming AI-Generated Movies
Catherine Zhang, TCL’s vice president of content services and partnerships, then explained to the audience that TCL’s streaming strategy is to “offer a lean-back binge-watching experience” in which content passively washes over the people watching it. “Data told us that our users don’t want to work that hard,” she said. “Half of them don’t even change the channel.”
Anomalies: Jón Gnarr, Mayor of Reykjavik
Are we ready for companies that run themselves?. Charlie Stross’s near-future fiction of Accelerando comes closer to realization:
Malice — revenge for waking him up — sharpens Manfred’s voice. “The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!” He thumps the bedside phone control and sits up, yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb button before it can interrupt again. After a moment he stands up and stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human being managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to bug him.
(via Nate Torkington)
Amusing diatribe from Rick Perlstein, The Long Con. Some interesting ideas and phrases, shamelessly partisan tho’.
Quinn Slobodian opines on how far we are along the path to Freedom of movement for capital, but people must die where they stand