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#capitalists hate capitalism

mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months

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They're handing out patents for "inventions" that don't exist

Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. And on Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

Patent trolls produce nothing except lawsuits. Unlike real capitalist enterprises, a patent troll does not “practice” the art in its patent portfolio — it seeks out productive enterprises that are making things that real people use, and then uses legal threats to extract rents from them.

One of the most prolific patent trolls of the twenty-first century is Landmark Technology, whose U.S. Patent №7,010,508 nominally covers virtually anything you might do in the course of operating an online business: having a homepage, letting a customer login to your site, or having pages where customers can view and order products.

Landmark shook down more than a thousand productive businesses for $65,000 license-fees it demanded on threat of a patent lawsuit.

But that reign of terror is almost certainly over. When Landmark tried to get $65,000 out of Binders.com, the victim’s owner, NAPCO, went to court to invalidate Landmark’s patent, which never should have issued.

A North Carolina court agreed, and killed Landmark’s patent. Landmark faces further punishments in Washington State, where the attorney general has sued the company for violating state consumer protection laws in a case that has been removed to federal court.

Landmark’s patent contains “means-plus-function” claims. These a rentier’s superweapon, in which a patent can lay a claim over an invention without inventing or describing it. These claims are almost entirely used in software patents, something that has been blessed by the Federal Circuit, America’s most authoritative patent court.

A means-plus-function patent lets an “inventor” patent something they don’t know how to do. If these patents applied to pharma, a company could get a patent on “an arrangement of atoms that cure cancer,” without specifying that arrangement of atoms. Anyone who actually did cure cancer would have to pay rent to the patent-holder.

-A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

#technofeudalism #rentiers #class struggle #capitalists hate capitalism #unity #patent trolls #means-plus-function

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will-pilled · 6 months

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"Being poor is a choice, you can get out of it if you work hard."

I live with 4 people, one of which is a child. I work a full time job. So does another. And the third works two part times.

We have no heating. Our electric keeps getting shut off. We didn't have anything AT ALL to drink for 3 days.

You REALLY fucking think we choose to live like this? You think I want to fucking FREEZE right now as I type? FUCK all the out of touch lucky people saying this shit.

Is it possible to get out of a poor family? Yes. But the majority of the time your area of living is what predicts your wealth.

#I am white and am lucky #but my mother is native american (i am her only white child) and she has been treated like jack SHIT.#Her race had a lot to do with her status as I was growing up #My sister (the child) is already getting called the N word #Fucking hell I hate these motherfuckers #personal #classism #class struggle #class war #anti capitalism #anti capitalist

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whereserpentswalk · 6 months

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Its going to be 2043 and you're going to meet someone who only has hyper popular interests and is wrong about common knowledge and gets confused as to why someone would be an arts major or why you're into a neich Fandom. And they keep giving inconsistent but confident facts about their childhood. And then a couple weeks later you find out they never were a child, their genetic code and childhood memories were AI generated and then everything makes sense.

#196 #my thougts #worldbuilding #near future #cyberpunk #ai #fuck ai art #fuck ai everything #fuck ai writing #fuck ai all my homies hate ai #anticapitalist #anticapitalism #anticapitalistically #anti capitalist #anti capitalism

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tabletop-and-larp · 2 years

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I think it’s funny people are saying “Brennan sold out to capitalism” due to the insanely high prices of the D20 auction because:

A) All auctions are microcosms of American capitalism and this was what was bound to happen from the inception of the idea.

B) The whole point of this auction was to make money in order to make future seasons of D20 so it’s not like the money will be going into the pockets of a CEO or mega-corporation

And C) It’s not hypocritical to critique capitalism while participating in it. One of the main problems and things to be criticized about capitalism is that you must participate in it to survive

Also if you were going to buy a mini but got priced out and want to monetarily support things near and dear to D20s heart in other ways, consider donating to Persephone Valentine’s (player of Sam on D20 The Seven) transition fund, to the RPG Research charity that D20 is donating 25% of their auction profits to, or buy some merch on the dropout store!

#d20 #d20 auction #dimension 20 #acoc #the seven #dropout tv #dropout.tv #brennan lee mulligan #capitalism #d20 acoc #i never use this account but I don’t want to get hate on my main :)#i know people are mostly joking abt the capitalist thing but

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toothpulpart · 28 days

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This is a wip for now, but I’m pretty happy about what I have produced in the time I did. The quality of my pictures are kinda garbage but I can’t figure out why. I have been on a fallout kick recently and wanted to draw Nick Valentine, one of my favorites and someone who despite his brain coming from a cop has a decent character build. Which obviously all cops are bastards, even the original Nick Valentine. They uphold the interests of the capital owners with violence against the workers and lower class. And we are starting to see the late stages of it already with cop cities being built so they can better use war tactics on citizens. This is what late stage capitalism has wet dreams about. I don’t know what options we have left some days and the further things progress the more worried I get.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 days

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Paying for it doesn't make it a market

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Anyone who says "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product" has been suckered in by Big Tech, whose cargo-cult version of markets and the discipline they impose on companies.

Here's the way that story goes: companies that fear losing your business will treat you better, because treating you worse will cost them money. Since ad-supported media gets paid by advertisers, they are fine with abusing you to make advertisers happy, because the advertiser is the customer, and you are the product.

This represents a profound misunderstanding of how even capitalism's champions describe its workings. The purported virtue of capitalism is that it transforms the capitalist's greed into something of broad public value, by appealing to the capitalist's fear. A successful capitalist isn't merely someone figures out how to please their customers – they're also someone who figures out how to please their suppliers.

That's why tech platforms were – until recently – very good to (some of) their workforce. Technical labor was scarce and so platforms built whimsical "campuses" for tech workers, with amenities ranging from stock options to gourmet cafeterias to egg-freezing services for those workers planning to stay at their desks through their fertile years. Those workers weren't the "customer" – but they were treated better than any advertiser or user.

But when it came to easily replaced labor – testers, cleaning crew, the staff in those fancy cafeterias – the situation was much worse. Those workers were hired through cut-out shell companies, denied benefits, even made to enter via separate entrances on shifts that were scheduled to minimize the chance that they would ever interact with one of the highly paid tech workers at the firm.

Likewise, advertisers may be the tech companies' "customers" but that doesn't mean the platforms treat them well. Advertisers get ripped off just like the rest of us. The platforms gouge them on price, lie to them about advertising reach, and collude with one another to fix prices and defraud advertisers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

Now, it's true that the advertisers used to get a good deal from the platforms, and that it came at the expense of the users. Facebook lured in users by falsely promising never to spy on them. Then, once the users were locked in, Facebook flipped a switch, started spying on users from asshole to appetite, and then offered rock-bottom-priced, fine-grained, highly reliable ad-targeting to advertisers:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

But once those advertisers were locked in, Facebook turned on them, too. Of course they did. The point of monopoly power isn't just getting too big to fail and too big to jail – it's getting too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

This is the thing that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" fails to comprehend. "If you're not paying for the product" is grounded in a cartoonish vision of markets in which "the customer is king" and successful businesses are those who cater to their customers – even at the expense of their workers and suppliers – will succeed.

In this frame, the advertiser is the platforms' customer, the customer is king, the platform inflicts unlimited harm upon all other stakeholders in service to those advertisers, the advertisers are so pleased with this white-glove service that they willingly pay a handsome premium to use the platform, and so the platform grows unimaginably wealthy.

But of course, if the platforms inflict unlimited harms upon their users, those users will depart, and then no amount of obsequious catering to advertisers will convince them to spend money on ads that no one sees. In the cargo-cult conception of platform capitalism, the platforms are able to solve this problem by "hacking our dopamine loops" – depriving us of our free will with "addictive" technologies that keep us locked to their platforms even when they grow so terrible that we all hate using them.

This means that we can divide the platform economy into "capitalists" who sell you things, and "surveillance capitalists" who use surveillance data to control your mind, then sell your compulsive use of their products to their cherished customers, the advertisers.

Surveillance capitalists like Google are thus said to have only been shamming when they offered us a high-quality product. That was just a means to an end: the good service Google offered in its golden age was just bait to trick us into handing over enough surveillance data that they could tune their mind-control technology, strip us of our free will, and then sell us to their beloved advertisers, for whom nothing is too good.

Meanwhile, the traditional capitalists – the companies that sell you things – are the good capitalists. Apple and Microsoft are disciplined by market dynamics. They won't spy on you because you're their customer, and so they have to keep you happy.

All this leads to an inexorable conclusion: unless we pay for things with money, we are doomed. Any attempt to pay with attention will end in a free-for-all where the platforms use their Big Data mind-control rays to drain us of all our attention. It is only when we pay with money that we can dicker over price and arrive at a fair and freely chosen offer.

This theory is great for tech companies: it elevates giving them money to a democracy-preserving virtue. It reframes handing your cash over to a multi-trillion dollar tech monopolist as good civics. It's easy to see why those tech giants would like that story, but boy, are you a sap if you buy it.

Because all capitalists are surveillance capitalists…when they can get away with it. Sure, Apple blocked Facebook from spying on Ios users…and then started illegally, secretly spying on those users and lying about it, in order to target ads to those users:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

And Microsoft spies on every Office 365 user and rats them out to their bosses ("Marge, this analytics dashboard says you're the division's eleventh-worst speller and twelfth-worst typist. Shape up or ship out!"). But the joke's on your boss: Microsoft also spies on your whole company and sells the data about it to your competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revengel

The platforms screw anyone they can. Sure, they lured in advertisers with good treatment, but once those advertisers were locked in, they fucked them over just as surely as they fucked over their users.

The surveillance capitalism hypothesis depends on the existence of a hypothetical – and wildly improbably – Big Data mind-control technology that keeps users locked to platforms even when the platform decays. Mind-control rays are an extraordinary claim supported by the thinnest of evidence (marketing materials from the companies as they seek to justify charging a premium to advertisers, combined with the self-serving humblebrags of millionaire Prodigal Tech Bros who claim to have awakened to the evil of using their dopamine-hacking sorcerous powers on behalf of their billionaire employers).

There is a much simpler explanation for why users stay on platforms even as they decline in quality: they are enmeshed in a social service that encompasses their friends, loved ones, customers, and communities. Even if everyone in this sprawling set of interlocking communities agrees that the platform is terrible, they will struggle to agree on what to do about it: where to go next and when to leave. This is the economists' "collective action problem" – a phenomenon with a much better evidentiary basis than the hypothetical, far-fetched "dopamine loop" theory.

To understand whom a platform treats well and whom it abuses, look not to who pays it and who doesn't. Instead, ask yourself: who has the platform managed to lock in? The more any stakeholder to a platform stands to lose by leaving, the worse the platform can treat them without risking their departure. Thus the beneficent face that tech companies turn to their most cherished tech workers, and the hierarchy of progressively more-abusive conditions for other workers – worse treatment for those whose work-visas are tied to their employment, and the very worst treatment for contractors testing the code, writing the documentation, labelling the data or cleaning the toilets.

If you care about how people are treated by platforms, you can't just tell them to pay for services instead of using ad-supported media. The most important factor in getting decent treatment out of a tech company isn't whether you pay with cash instead of attention – it's whether you're locked in, and thus a flight risk whom the platform must cater to.

It's perfectly possible for market dynamics to play out in a system in which we pay with our attention by watching ads. More than 50% of all web users have installed an ad-blocker, the largest boycott in the history of civilization:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Ad-supported companies make an offer: How about in exchange for looking at this content, you let us spy on you in ways that would make Orwell blush and then cram a torrent of targeted ads into your eyeballs?" Ad-blockers let you make a counter-offer: "How about 'nah'?"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

But ad-blocking is only possible on an open platform. A closed, locked-down platform that is illegal to modify isn't a walled garden, a fortress that keeps out the bad guys – it's a walled prison that locks you in, a prisoner of the worst impulses of the tech giant that built it. Apple can defend you from other companies' spying ways, but when Apple decides to spy on you, it's a felony to jailbreak your Iphone and block Apple's surveillance:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

I am no true believer in markets – but the people who say that paying for products will "align incentives" and make tech better claim to believe in the power of markets to make everyone better off. But real markets aren't just places where companies sell things – they're also places where companies buy things. Monopolies short-circuit the power of customer choice to force companies to do better. But monopsonies – markets dominated by powerful buyers – are just as poisonous to the claimed benefits of markets.

Even if you are "the product" – that is, even if you're selling your attention to a platform to package up and sell to an advertiser – that in no way precludes your getting decent treatment from the platform. A world where we can avail ourselves of blockers, where interoperablity eases our exodus from abusive platforms, where privacy law sets a floor below which we cannot bargain is a world where it doesn't matter if you're "the product" or "the customer" – you can still get a square deal.

The platforms used to treat us well and now treat us badly. That's not because they were setting a patient trap, luring us in with good treatment in the expectation of locking us in and turning on us. Tech bosses do not have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years.

Rather, as tech platforms eliminated competition, captured their regulators and expanded their IP rights so that interoperability was no longer a threat, they became too big to care whether any of their stakeholders were happy. First they came for the users, sure, but then they turned on the publishers, the advertisers, and finally, even their once-pampered tech workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

MLK said that "the law can't make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me." It's impossible to get tech bosses to believe you deserve care and decency, but you can stop them from abusing you. The way to do that is by making them fear you – by abolishing the laws that create lock-in, by legally enshrining a right to privacy, by protecting competition.

It's not by giving them money. Paying for a service does not make a company fear you, and anyone who thinks they can buy a platform's loyalty by paying for a service is a simp. A corporation is an immortal, transhuman colony organism that uses us as inconvenient gut-flora: no matter how much you love it, it will never love you back. It can't experience love – only fear.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

#pluralistic #if youre not paying for the product youre the product #competition #capitalists hate capitalism #discipline #market discipline #the old good internet

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thoughts-of-the-unheard · 5 months

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have i mentioned how utterly pissed off i am about the hunger games movies all being remonetized in just the last week because the prequel came out, four movies that have been free to watch for a decade, now all cost like $4 each to watch once, you cannot find it on any reputable service for free anymore, i own half of them on dvd which were probably $5 each when I got them and if you want to own them online now its like $15, i hate it here

#capitalism #america #capitalist america #i hate them all #i hate paywalls #i had to watch catching fire for an assignment last year #if i took that class this year instead #i would not be able to do the assignment #thats so fucked #i hate it here #the hunger games #catching fire #mockingjay #thg #thg movies #monetized #the ballad of songbirds and snakes

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starberrywander · 1 year

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Y’know, while I haven’t complied a complete list of examples to test and prove this theory, every interaction I’ve had with pro-capitalist vs anti-capitalist debate has led me to the conclusions:

Everything good that happens in Capitalism can happen outside of Capitalism.

Every problem solved in Capitalism can be solved outside of Capitalism.

Every problem that “can only be solved by Capitalism” is a result of Capitalism.

And everything truly unique to Capitalism is shitty and not worth maintaining.

I see no reason why this system is genuinely worth maintaining unless you are a rich bastard who gets to live in an earthly heaven sustained by everyone else’s suffering. And we can’t all be rich bastards because if we were there would be no suffering left to give us heaven, richness would mean nothing, and we wouldn’t live in Capitalism anymore.

#anti capitalist #anti capitalism #capitalism #I hate capitalism #anarchy #anarchism #anarchocommunism #lets make a human world not a rich bitch world #we should all get live for ourselves #we should all get choose our own fates #we should all get to enjoy the fruits of our labor #and we should all be free

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superanimepirate · 8 months

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Why do airlines want you to create a booking before they help you.

Bitch. I'm trying to find a flight that fits my needs, because traveling with a large dog is approximately 10x more complicated and expensive that it has any right to be.

Why would I book a flight, then ask if I'm allowed to bring my dog on the flight, and get told no and hope I can refund the flight, when I can make sure he can fly BEFORE I give you my money??? Why is that so hard to understand???

#i have been engaged in psychological warfare against capitalism for days now #i just want to go home #why do i have to shell out a couple of grand just to hug my mom #i hate this capitalist hellscape #late stage capitalism #airlines #airplanes #flying #travel #vent post #rant #my post

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