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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 day

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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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cheesecake-the-chicken · 5 months

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something that astounds me /pos is how every system i see on here has such aesthetic cool names for their systems. i’d love to hear any stories of how your systems got their collective names :3

(tags are for reach)

#pluralistic #plural community #plural system #plurality #actually plural #pluralgang #system #osdd system #median system #did system #traumagenic system #system stuff #dissociative system #cheesecake’s perch

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the-bottle-system · 4 months

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how it feels discussing exotrauma

#&🎀#&x!#pluralgang #plural culture #pluralistic #plural memes #median system #actually median #mediple system #plural positivity #actually plural #endo friendly #endo safe #plural community #exotrauma #exomemories #fictive #factive #introject

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mitchipedia · 1 year

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Cory Doctorow: “If you were unfortunate enough to e-file your US tax using HR Block, Taxact or Taxslayer, your most sensitive financial information was nonconsenually shared with Facebook, where it was added to the involuntary dossier the company maintains billions of people, including people who don't have Facebook accounts.”

#Pluralistic #Cory Doctorow #IRS #taxes #HR Block #Taxact #Taxslayer #Facebook #privacy #monopoly #politics #US politics #Grover Norquist #income tax #US income tax

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quirkquill · 4 months

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"Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on Earth." - Muhammad Ali

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jefffrose24 · 5 months

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winning moment

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poimandresnous · 8 months

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What is My Pluralistic Stance on Human Sacrifice/Murder? (Caution Spicy)

First, I must start by saying: I don’t think human sacrifice was justifiable in any time period, race, culture, or geographical location. I can’t imagine that’s an acceptable way to appease the gods. But in the same breath, I can also be aware that that is my perception of the Divine, gods, and powers that be. Any interpretation I muster will be my subjective interpretation of the symbols and images cast before us by the gods and, ultimately, The One.

If someone today were to think human sacrifices were still acceptable, who am I to say they are wrong and then go out to enforce my perception of what people should be doing? I am not in law enforcement, this is why we have people that do that in society, to go after murders. This is why I’m also drawn to both (Neo) Platonism and Daoism. It allows me to have and establish my morals but also allows me to flesh out my pre-existing pluralistic beliefs. I'm being taught to not make distinctions between what “is” and what “isn’t” and to let Fate naturally distinguish itself.

Zhuangzi says this: "The Dao has no boundaries. Words have never had constancy. It is because of "it is" that boundaries exist (2.14.1-3). Guo Xiang expands on the last sentence: It is because the Dao has no boundaries that each of the myriad things can fully realize the limits to its own potential.

Regarding punishment and the enforcement of things like murder, I take a very deterministic stance that if it is not in accord with Fate or Nature…whatever we are doing, Nature/Fate, or the Law of the Land will correct it, sometimes in the most brutal and disgusting ways. But we have grown as a society where murder and human sacrifice are unacceptable.

I don’t think pluralism gives the murders any “legitimacy.” I think pluralism allows for more of an understanding of all the bad stuff we do to each other and the world and to try to find the next best solution to correct our mistakes. That said, I’m also being taught/reminded that our knowledge does have limits, and that in turn means so does our understanding of things, be they bad or good.

So how can I "understand" the murder while also believing full-heartedly that their actions are completely unjust and should meet some sort of punishment? Zhuangzi says this: To know how Heaven acts and how man acts is to reach perfection. To know how Heaven acts is to live in step with Heaven. When it comes to knowing how man should act, he takes what his knowing knows and uses it to know what he does not know and so lives out the full span of his years without dying young in mid-course; such is his fullness of knowledge. (6.1.1-3)

I take the above quotes to mean spontaneously having morals but not too self-consciously pondering or enforcing them. To know how Heaven and Man act is to act in accordance with our innate principle, which is always in step with Heaven, if we cast aside the notion of "what is" and "what is not" (Zhuangzi 2.14.11).

And a friend in Discord raised a good point: how much understanding can we give until we give that bad or good thing a platform? The answer will vary for everyone, as I don't wish to dictate how much "understanding" or "knowledge" one should have. According to the words of Zhuangzi and Guo Xiang, we are allotted a certain amount of understanding or knowledge. This doesn't mean it's futile to study or try to gain understanding or knowledge, but it's to recognize your own limits. If Law enforcement and politics are in one's innate nature, then one should most definitely pursue that. For me, I know that's not in my nature. We are encouraged to have "fullness of knowledge," but this is not as good as completely discarding knowledge entirely and leaving it up to Heaven to naturally divide and distinguish. (Zhuangzi 6.2.1). The act of "not knowing" and "knowing" results in a sort of wholeness that our knowledge nourishes what we "don't know," according to Guo Xiang comments on 6.2.1.

We "don't know" why people thought human sacrifice was okay and justifiable. Today, we "don't know" why people murder and why some people have a greater understanding of why the murderer murders. So for each of us, we use what we know to furnish what we "don't know." This is why so many of us have different answers for this spicy topic: Murder and Human sacrifice.

I was explaining a little bit of what I’ve been reading on Daoism to my father, and he’s skeptical too of how “loose” and lacking the ethics are. But that’s a wrong takeaway from what I was saying and pluralism in general. Daoism calls us to act spontaneously when we know something in our innate principle (nature) to be wrong. If we are perfectly aligned with Fate, in harmony with it, we can act in accord with what naturally is and isn’t good for the world. But first, we must cast aside the very notion that things are and that they are not. It’s very similar to Hermeticism in that respect, as in we must cast aside the physical world and all its illusions to truly find the images of God(The One).

#daoism #pluralism #pluralistic #human sacrifice

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the-prairie-collective · 2 years

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🌻 Terms For Endos🌻

Fellow endos, I support you. But we must remember that, since we (most of us) are not medical, we should not use medical terms. That could cause confusion- say, you tell a doctor you are a system. They misinterpret that as you saying you have DID/OSDD/UDD and set you up with a therapist dedicated to those conditions. This would be not only be now what you need, but also taking away from DID/OSDD/UDD patients. So we've made a list of terms that don't have medical connotations that endos should use more! We also added alternative words for "Tulpa" because that is sometimes considered cultural appropriation. System -> collective, plural, community Alter -> headmate, mindmate, headfriend, member Fronting -> in control, in front Switching -> changing, transferring consciousness Inner World -> headspace Tulpa -> Thoughtform, mindform, mental creation

You aren't 'invalid' if you don't use these terms but we highly recommend doing so!

#syscourse #plural #plural community #plural positivity #pluralism #pluralistic #plurality #plural posting #endo #endogenic #headmates

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infinitemonkeytheory · 2 years

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In 2018, Tumblr announced a ban on "adult content." That call was made by Verizon, Tumblr's erstwhile owner, and to call the resulting mess "a shitshow" is an insult to good, hardworking shitshows all over the world.

Verizon enforced this policy with an automated filter, which was charged with analyzing images and categorizing them as "sexual" or "nonsexual." This is risible enough, like asking a computer to sort videos into "virtuous" or "sinful" but that was just for starters.

Verizon's ban included a ban on "female-presenting nipples" – a canonically hard-to-define category – but included exceptions for non-sexual nipple images. Hard to imagine that any serious, disinterested computer scientist promising that an algorithm could cleave "female-presenting nipples" from "male-presenting" ones, let alone decide which ones were "sexual" or not.

The filters were…not good. Verizon posted a selection of images that were explicitly permitted under its policies. That post was blocked by Tumblr's filter.

#cory doctorow #tumblr #pluralistic

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 days

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Greedflation, but for prisoners

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Apr 21) in TORINO, then Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Today in "Capitalists Hate Capitalism" news: The Appeal has published the first-ever survey of national prison commissary prices, revealing just how badly the prison profiteer system gouges American's all-time, world-record-beating prison population:

https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-commissary-prices/

Like every aspect of the prison contracting system, prison commissaries – the stores where prisoners are able to buy food, sundries, toiletries and other items – are dominated by private equity funds that have bought out all the smaller players. Private equity deals always involve gigantic amounts of debt (typically, the first thing PE companies do after acquiring a company is to borrow heavily against it and then pay themselves a hefty dividend).

The need to service this debt drives PE companies to cut quality, squeeze suppliers, and raise prices. That's why PE loves to buy up the kinds of businesses you must spend your money at: dialysis clinics, long-term care facilities, funeral homes, and prison services.

Prisoners, after all, are a literal captive market. Unlike capitalist ventures, which involve the risk that a customer will take their business elsewhere, prison commissary providers have the most airtight of monopolies over prisoners' shopping.

Not that prisoners have a lot of money to spend. The 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of convicted criminals, and so even though many prisoners are subject to forced labor, they aren't necessarily paid for it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Six states ban paying prisoners anything. North Carolina caps prisoners' pay at one dollar per day. Nationally, prisoners earn $0.52/hour, while producing $11b/year in goods and services:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

So there's a double cruelty to prison commissary price-gouging. Prisoners earn far less than any other kind of worker, and they pay vastly inflated prices for the necessities of life. There's also a triple cruelty: prisoners' families – deprived of an incarcerated breadwinner's earnings – are called upon to make up the difference for jacked up commissary prices out of their own strained finances.

So what does prison profiteering look like, in dollars and sense? Here's the first-of-its-kind database tracking the costs of food, hygiene items and religious items in 46 states:

https://theappeal.org/commissary-database/

Prisoners rely heavily on commissaries for food. Prisons serve spoiled, inedible food, and often there isn't enough to go around – prisoners who rely on the food provided by their institutions literally starve. This is worst in prisons where private equity funds have taken over the cafeteria, which is inevitable accompanied by swingeing cuts to food quality and portions:

https://theappeal.org/prison-food-virginia-fluvanna-correctional-center/

So you have one private equity fund starving prisoners, and another that's gouging them on food. Or sometimes it's the same company. Keefe Group, owned by HIG Capital, provides commissaries to prisons whose cafeterias are managed by other HIG Capital portfolio companies like Trinity Services Group. HIG also owns the prison health-care company Wellpath – so if they give you food poisoning, they get paid twice.

Wellpath delivers "grossly inadequate healthcare":

https://theappeal.org/massachusetts-prisons-wellpath-dentures-teeth/

And Trinity serves "meager portions of inedible food":

https://theappeal.org/clayton-county-jail-sheriff-election/

When prison commissaries gouge on food, no part of the inventory is spared, even the cheapest items. In Florida, a packet of ramen costs $1.06, 300% more inside the prison than it does at the Target down the street:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24444312-fl_doc_combined_commissary_lists#document/p6/a2444049

America's prisoners aren't just hungry, they're also hot. The climate emergency is sending temperatures in America's largely un-air-conditioned prisons soaring to dangerous levels. Commissaries capitalize on this, too: an 8" fan costs $40 in Delaware's Sussex Correctional Institution. In Georgia, that fan goes for $32 (but prisoners are not paid for their labor in Georgia pens). And in scorching Texas, the commissary raised the price of water by 50% last summer:

https://www.tpr.org/criminal-justice/2023-07-20/texas-charges-prisoners-50-more-for-water-for-as-heat-wave-continues

Toiletries are also sold at prices that would make an airport gift-shop blush. Need denture adhesive? That's $12.28 in an Idaho pen, triple the retail price. 15% of America's prisoners are over 55. The Keefe Group – sister company to the "grossly inadequate" healthcare company Wellpath – operates that commissary. In Oregon, the commissary charges a 200% markup on hearing-aid batteries. Vermont charges a 500% markup on reading glasses. Imagine spending decades in prison: toothless, blind, and deaf.

Then there's the religious items. Bibles and Christmas cards are surprisingly reasonable, but a Qaran will run you $26 in Vermont, where a Bible is a mere $4.55. Kufi caps – which cost $3 or less in the free world – go for $12 in Indiana prisons. A Virginia prisoner needs to work for 8 hours to earn enough to buy a commissary Ramadan card (you can buy a Christmas card after three hours' labor).

Prison price-gougers are finally facing a comeuppance. California's new BASIC Act caps prison commissary markups at 35% (California commissaries used to charge 63-200% markups):

https://theappeal.org/price-gouging-in-california-prisons-newsom-signature/

Last year, Nevada banned any markup on hygiene items:

https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/82nd2023/Bill/10425/Overview

And prison tech monopolist Securus has been driven to the brink of bankruptcy, thanks to the activism of Worth Rises and its coalition partners:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/

When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. Prisons show us how businesses would treat us if they could get away with it.

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/2024/04/20/captive-market/#locked-in

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