Reply To: Random

A family member has passed on some links with a political bent including one for this guy whose antics have landed him in court opposite rather powerful and colourful opponents on several occasions. Also in the invidious predicament of riling up Joe Hildebrand, someone who comes off as generally being tolerant and of good nature. Still, Jordie is one that likes a bit of street theatre and fun, so we’re on common ground there, wonder where he will be 15-20 years on when his youthful looks and charms have all fled?
Of interest as well is this author and economist, Yanis Varoufakis, and his last work, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 2023, also read by him. Here’s a snippet from that books:

From factory owners in America’s Midwest to poets struggling to sell their latest anthology, from London Uber drivers to Indonesian street hawkers, all are now dependent on some cloud fief for access to customers. It is progress, of sorts. Gone is the time when, to collect their rent, feudal lords employed thugs to break their vassals’ knees or spill their blood. The cloudalists don’t need to deploy bailiffs to confiscate or to evict. Instead, every vassal capitalist knows that with the removal of a link from their cloud vassal’s site they could lose access to the bulk of their customers. And with the removal of a link or two from Google’s search engine or from a couple of ecommerce and social media sites, they could disappear from the online world altogether. A sanitized tech-terror is the bedrock of technofeudalism. Looked at in totality, it becomes apparent that the world economy is lubricated less and less with profit and increasingly with cloud rent. And so the delightful antinomy of our era comes into focus: capitalist activity is growing within the same process of energetic capital accumulation that degrades capitalist profit and gradually replaces capitalist markets with cloud fiefs. In short, capitalism is withering as a result of burgeoning capitalist activity. It is through capitalist activity that technofeudalism was born and is now sweeping to power.

Does all this matter to the way we live and experience our lives? It certainly does. Recognizing that our world has become technofeudal helps us dissolve puzzles great and small: from the elusive green energy revolution and Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter to the New Cold War between the USA and China and how the war in Ukraine is threatening the dollar’s reign; from the death of the liberal individual and the impossibility of social democracy to the false promise of crypto and the burning question of how we may recover our autonomy, perhaps our freedom too. Today, to own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively. It’s the only way we can turn our cloud-based artifacts from automated means of behavior modification, that poison our social reality, to automated means of human collaboration and emancipation.

And, being an obedient and faithful technoderf (typo intented), went and proposed an idea to make the names of all deleted Wikipedia articles accessible, downside is they don’t like it much for the sheer bulk of the undertaking, upside is that it would take a little pressure off Wayback resources.
Edit: Oops, they do have a deletion log!