Hi, we’re a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We’re not a newspaper, we’re a content portal.
We’re not a taxi service, we’re a ride sharing app.
We’re not a pay TV service, we’re a streaming platform.
We’re not a department store, we’re an e-commerce marketplace.
We’re not a financial services firm, we’re crypto.
We’re not a space agency, we’re a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We’re not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we’re a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we’re totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don’t apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections… They totally don’t apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we’re talking about everyone else’s intellectual property.
We’re going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We’ve also raised several billion in VC funding, and we’ll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we’ll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won’t believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we’re doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don’t forget to check out our latest innovation. It’s the Uber of toothpaste!
Well, I’m not sure about arresting a bunch of graphics cards, but under American civil forfeiture laws, they could be sued, sort of. “United States vs. Approximately 7000 Computer Graphics Cards” has a certain ring to it.
“Michael was driving a car from a company that shows every private residence in the country. But it’s also a company that won’t let us show the car that takes those pictures. In fairness to them, it is their property. If you want to know what the company is, all you have to do is ‘something’ it.”
Thanks, @ajsadauskas, for summarising extractivist platform capitalism strategies. The patterns are so clear that mainstreet is getting aware these days. At least partially. Time to rebuild the economy and the internet with collective & public interest first.
@ajsadauskas@technology The one thing I don’t sympathise with in that list is the taxi services — at least here in #Ottawa, they were even more exploitative than Uber or Lyft, with a small number of plate holders acting as feudal lords for the drivers, and extracting rent from their vassals even on a bad shift with few fares.
The city could have fixed that by issuing more plates, but the plate-owner lobby was too powerful.
Ah yes, the “local taxi lobby.” Uber helped show a lot of us what a fucking joke that is, not just in Ottawa.
Innovation, choice, quality and freedom are the choice spices for capitalism soup. These shit-cook-legislators kept sprinkling in taint like protectionism, cronyism, extortion and corruption thinking nobody would notice. Well guess what? Now it’s just taint soup.
Why does it matter who’s serving you taint soup? The problem is there’s no other soup and they keep telling you it’s fine.
It’s not all black or white, those startups brought some good things like breaking highly profitable monopolies and creating well designed apps that provide a much better service which ended up being picked up by the former monopolies, overall the quality of service often improved and we sometimes have more choice now, like picking the less human exploiting alternative that still has a usable app.
While we don’t like what these services have become, lots of people forget how bad comparative services were before these came along. Example: bookstores. Everyone dreams up some ideal bookstore that didn’t exist for the majority. Growing up, my local bookstore was run by a religious nut who refused to get Devil literature like Lord of the Rings. The good bookstores were in Ann Arbor, which was a 45 minute drive away. Chains like Borders, B&N, or web stores like Amazon were a huge positive change.
Yeah Narnia was straight up unmistakable Christian allegory. I believe J.R.R. (C.S.'s drinking buddy) always insisted that LOTR was not meant to be taken in that way, or like when people hypothesized that Sauron was Hitler and so on.
There’s not really anything about Sauron that is a critique of Hitler or fascism specifically. I think Sauron, like Smaug, was a warning against human greed, for money or for power.
See how the hobbits are like the antithesis of Smaug and Sauron, and each time caused their ultimate downfall.
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
@FaeDrifter@Smatt I read Tolkein’s books more in the light of his experience serving on the front in WW1. There’s this terrible thing that you have to leave your cozy, safe home to do, and it damages you so much that even after “victory”, you can never really go back.
You’re thinking of CS Lewis. Now imagine if pre-early teen me asking this person about Neuromancer by Gibson. Their head would have exploded. One saving grace about my suburban bedroom town is that we had a good public library. If I wanted the good stuff, they either had it or could get it.
@cheese_greater@Banzai51 LOTR isn’t very Christian; Tolkein was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, at a time when Old English studies were focussing more on the pagan elements that they thought were more “pure” and corrupted by the arrival of Christianity.
C.S. Lewis’s books were allegorical Christian (very high church), but fundamentalists don’t go for that kind of thing; for them, Jesus has to be Jesus, not an anthropomorphic lion inspired by the story of the crucifixion.
This could be one of the more important social media posts of all time. And not one in 100,000 people will have enough information to appreciate a single word of it.
@ajsadauskas@technology These guys are not “libertarians”, at all. They are, in fact, the antithesis of libertarian. They are authoritarians who believe in liberty only for themselves.
Liberatianism is all about the Freedom of the Power Of Money from the Power Of The State (which in Democracies is yielded by the elected representatives of all citizens in a system which is way more even in the power each person has than Money).
It was never about Freedom For People, which is why, for example, Libertarians want Private Education (a major gatekeeper into being monetarily better off), they absolutelly do not want communal Land Ownership (as it stands, most people are born landless, so having to pay for a place to sleep in and for food to eat - rather than having the chance to build their own house and grow their own food - so they are forced to work and do so within the constraints of the system, to pay the owners of the land (directly or indirectly) for food and shelter, both essentials, the very opposite of being born Free) and they certainly don’t want Money to loose its ability to buy different outcomes in the Justice System being in countries with such systems strong defenders of defunding things like Public Defenders.
Libertarianism is all about freedom for the larges yielders of the Power Of Money from the power of the elected representatives of citizens in a Democracy, not about freedom for the riff-raff.
There are no “true” libertarians. There are more libertarian denominations than their are people who identify as libertarian. And all denominations are orthodox. A group of libertarians is called an impasse.
It’s not an accident that people who identify that way are incapable of getting along: the individual is the weakest political unit. Add in the fact that libertarians will eschew government benefits for themselves just to spite those lower on the ladder, and I can’t think of a better friend to the ruling class. What can we say about people who’d rather live in a fiefdom than a democracy? That they all imagine themselves as lords I guess.
(I’m told people in Europe identify as libertarians and oppose government power to hurt people. I’m talking about US libertarians who oppose government power to help)
@ajsadauskas@technology
And we’ll change our TOS and user agreement to our advantage whenever we feel like it but won’t tell you what changed or why or how it’ll effect you. But legally we told you so f*ck off if you have a problem with that.
Wow. This is a Mastodon account posting to Lemmy and we are getting cross platform engagement and it’s all working pretty seamlessly. This is the first time I’ve seen this kind of thing on Lemmy. The Mastodon users don’t get to see the upvotes though, right? The @ thing when they reply is kind of annoying but it seems like a fairly easy fix to hide those when browsing from Lemmy.
It’s pretty awesome, but generally Kbin does it even better in my experience. It’s designed to be able to interact with both. Looking forward to the API!
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@ajsadauskas @technology
>“A.I.”
>”libertarian”
Nope.
“It’s all on the blockchain now, so it’s not even us who’s doing it.
What are you gonna do, arrest me and these 7,000 graphics cards?”
Its weird how Uber isn’t already possible to replicate via blockchain akin to the way cryptocurrencies transact and perpetuate
Well, I’m not sure about arresting a bunch of graphics cards, but under American civil forfeiture laws, they could be sued, sort of. “United States vs. Approximately 7000 Computer Graphics Cards” has a certain ring to it.
You just gotta put very tiny handcuffs on the fan blades.
But they might overheat then! And if too many of them die in custody, the public might take notice and turn on the police.
“Michael was driving a car from a company that shows every private residence in the country. But it’s also a company that won’t let us show the car that takes those pictures. In fairness to them, it is their property. If you want to know what the company is, all you have to do is ‘something’ it.”
@CannaVet @ajsadauskas I laughed so hard at this, I wanted to thank you. I’ve been with DuckDuckGo for as long as I can remember.
Investors: shut up and take my money!
@ajsadauskas @technology #fuckingcapitalists #bitcoinscam #tetherfraud
@ajsadauskas @technology fucking amen
Thanks, @ajsadauskas, for summarising extractivist platform capitalism strategies. The patterns are so clear that mainstreet is getting aware these days. At least partially. Time to rebuild the economy and the internet with collective & public interest first.
@technology
@wtebbens
hope you’re aware that this means to abolish #capitalism!
@ajsadauskas @technology
Wow. You just somehow accurately summed up the modern day result of late stage capitalism in one post. Nicely done
@ajsadauskas @technology The one thing I don’t sympathise with in that list is the taxi services — at least here in #Ottawa, they were even more exploitative than Uber or Lyft, with a small number of plate holders acting as feudal lords for the drivers, and extracting rent from their vassals even on a bad shift with few fares.
The city could have fixed that by issuing more plates, but the plate-owner lobby was too powerful.
Ah yes, the “local taxi lobby.” Uber helped show a lot of us what a fucking joke that is, not just in Ottawa.
Innovation, choice, quality and freedom are the choice spices for capitalism soup. These shit-cook-legislators kept sprinkling in taint like protectionism, cronyism, extortion and corruption thinking nobody would notice. Well guess what? Now it’s just taint soup.
Why does it matter who’s serving you taint soup? The problem is there’s no other soup and they keep telling you it’s fine.
It’s not all black or white, those startups brought some good things like breaking highly profitable monopolies and creating well designed apps that provide a much better service which ended up being picked up by the former monopolies, overall the quality of service often improved and we sometimes have more choice now, like picking the less human exploiting alternative that still has a usable app.
Exact same system in Paris, with the same issues.
While we don’t like what these services have become, lots of people forget how bad comparative services were before these came along. Example: bookstores. Everyone dreams up some ideal bookstore that didn’t exist for the majority. Growing up, my local bookstore was run by a religious nut who refused to get Devil literature like Lord of the Rings. The good bookstores were in Ann Arbor, which was a 45 minute drive away. Chains like Borders, B&N, or web stores like Amazon were a huge positive change.
Isn’t LOTR “Christian”, somehow? Maybe I’m thinking of C.S. Lewis 🤔
Yeah Narnia was straight up unmistakable Christian allegory. I believe J.R.R. (C.S.'s drinking buddy) always insisted that LOTR was not meant to be taken in that way, or like when people hypothesized that Sauron was Hitler and so on.
There’s not really anything about Sauron that is a critique of Hitler or fascism specifically. I think Sauron, like Smaug, was a warning against human greed, for money or for power.
See how the hobbits are like the antithesis of Smaug and Sauron, and each time caused their ultimate downfall.
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
@FaeDrifter @Smatt I read Tolkein’s books more in the light of his experience serving on the front in WW1. There’s this terrible thing that you have to leave your cozy, safe home to do, and it damages you so much that even after “victory”, you can never really go back.
You’re thinking of CS Lewis. Now imagine if pre-early teen me asking this person about Neuromancer by Gibson. Their head would have exploded. One saving grace about my suburban bedroom town is that we had a good public library. If I wanted the good stuff, they either had it or could get it.
@cheese_greater @Banzai51 LOTR isn’t very Christian; Tolkein was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, at a time when Old English studies were focussing more on the pagan elements that they thought were more “pure” and corrupted by the arrival of Christianity.
C.S. Lewis’s books were allegorical Christian (very high church), but fundamentalists don’t go for that kind of thing; for them, Jesus has to be Jesus, not an anthropomorphic lion inspired by the story of the crucifixion.
Sun of God
People with strong beliefs are often not exactly rational or analytical.
Amazing work. Aren’t you the person who guessed exactly what Elon was going to do with Twitter?
@ajsadauskas @technology “enshitify” is my new favorite word.
Here’s the source of that term. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Excellent article.
@ajsadauskas @technology
This could be one of the more important social media posts of all time. And not one in 100,000 people will have enough information to appreciate a single word of it.
Source: @ajsadauskas
https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/110762848575512188
@ajsadauskas @technology These guys are not “libertarians”, at all. They are, in fact, the antithesis of libertarian. They are authoritarians who believe in liberty only for themselves.
Liberatianism is all about the Freedom of the Power Of Money from the Power Of The State (which in Democracies is yielded by the elected representatives of all citizens in a system which is way more even in the power each person has than Money).
It was never about Freedom For People, which is why, for example, Libertarians want Private Education (a major gatekeeper into being monetarily better off), they absolutelly do not want communal Land Ownership (as it stands, most people are born landless, so having to pay for a place to sleep in and for food to eat - rather than having the chance to build their own house and grow their own food - so they are forced to work and do so within the constraints of the system, to pay the owners of the land (directly or indirectly) for food and shelter, both essentials, the very opposite of being born Free) and they certainly don’t want Money to loose its ability to buy different outcomes in the Justice System being in countries with such systems strong defenders of defunding things like Public Defenders.
Libertarianism is all about freedom for the larges yielders of the Power Of Money from the power of the elected representatives of citizens in a Democracy, not about freedom for the riff-raff.
Seems like a fair description of many who would call themselves “libertarian”, even if not the going definition.
Every libertarian thinks every other libertarian isn’t really because they don’t subscribe to every set of their specific beliefs.
@GarlicBender Unfortunately. Such people give the very idea of Liberty a bad name. They have now become what libertarianism is in the public’s eye.
There are no “true” libertarians. There are more libertarian denominations than their are people who identify as libertarian. And all denominations are orthodox. A group of libertarians is called an impasse.
It’s not an accident that people who identify that way are incapable of getting along: the individual is the weakest political unit. Add in the fact that libertarians will eschew government benefits for themselves just to spite those lower on the ladder, and I can’t think of a better friend to the ruling class. What can we say about people who’d rather live in a fiefdom than a democracy? That they all imagine themselves as lords I guess.
(I’m told people in Europe identify as libertarians and oppose government power to hurt people. I’m talking about US libertarians who oppose government power to help)
@ajsadauskas @technology
And we’ll change our TOS and user agreement to our advantage whenever we feel like it but won’t tell you what changed or why or how it’ll effect you. But legally we told you so f*ck off if you have a problem with that.
The changes should just be highlighted like a fucking git commit.
Wow. This is a Mastodon account posting to Lemmy and we are getting cross platform engagement and it’s all working pretty seamlessly. This is the first time I’ve seen this kind of thing on Lemmy. The Mastodon users don’t get to see the upvotes though, right? The @ thing when they reply is kind of annoying but it seems like a fairly easy fix to hide those when browsing from Lemmy.
It’s pretty awesome, but generally Kbin does it even better in my experience. It’s designed to be able to interact with both. Looking forward to the API!
That is so, so cool.
so, sO, SO COOL