I’ve read his newsletter and that was enough.
There’s going to be a great need to properly educate the working class in the west before there’s much hope of socialism gaining any traction. They keep people just educated enough to innoculate them against critical thinking. I forget the exact statistics, but a depressing number of people have not read a single book in their entire adult lives.
There was an old episode of TrueAnon about the links between Epstein (and the CIA) to MIT that went over some of this stuff. I’m sure there’s probably a book or article about it somewhere, but I don’t have any better citation at the moment.
That doesn’t surprise me. I think he’s probably a socdem at best these days, specifically the kind of lib that thinks that we are in Bad Capitalism and if we just trust bust enough, we can go back to Good Capitalism, and all the smaller companies definitely won’t just devour each other and repeal regulations, putting us in this exact position or worse in another 20-30 years.
It’s so hard for me to read anything by Cory Doctorow or Ed Zitron these days because there’s always this giant, gaping void where class analysis should be. Is this the time they finally connect the dots, I ask myself? No! It’s never the time. It’s always enshittification this and business idiots that and never, ever a single whisper about capital. Brian Merchant and Ed Ongweso Jr. are much better in this regard - if you haven’t read anything by them I recommend you start.
As to the actual content here, this is precisely what the internet was always created to be. Do you think the DoD sorry, DoW created this as a happy accident? Just to help people? It’s always been intended as an anti-informational weapon and a surveillance network in-one. And all the attempts by vassal states to wriggle out of the trap will prove futile. China is the only country handling it the right way, and no capitalist nation will ever have the motivation to follow their example. There’s too much money to be made in making their own little tech fiefdoms.
Part of the problem is that most of these privacy-protecting search engines are just the big search engines re-packaged; DuckDuckGo is Bing, and Startpage is Google. SearchXNG is just an aggregator, and so is Kagi. What we really need are some alternative engines that function as well as Google used to. I would be willing to pay for that, as relying on ads clearly doesn’t work.
Spotify (and Pandora before that) served my purposes once upon a time to discover genres and artists I enjoy. But when I did the math, I realized I’d spent quite the pretty penny with nothing to show for it, and none of the artists I listened to were benefitting. And of course, Spotify has been happily selling my data during the interim.
Since deleting my account, I’ve switched to buying albums on Bandcamp, particularly on Bandcamp Fridays. I prefer listening to albums straight through anyway. I like to buy CDs when they’re available, but unfortunately a lot of artists stick to vinyl if they do physical media at all. CDs don’t degrade with listening, I can play them in my car, and they are compact - I simply don’t have the space for vinyl.
If the reduced usage isn’t offset by the burning oilfields, at least.
Much obliged - I’ll be adding this to my reading list so I don’t get caught without citations again.