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No need for a CEO to ask whether a business plan is moral – only whether it is "maximizing shareholder benefit." Robinson anatomizes the most effective parts of conservative rhetoric and exhorts his leftist comrades to learn from it, and put it to better use.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/14/nathan-robinson/#arguendo
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V. A Collective Bargain by #JaneMcAlevy
An extraordinary book that is one part history lesson, one part case-study, two parts how-to manual, one part memoir, and one million parts call to action. McAlevey devotes the early chapters to the rise and fall of labor protections in America, explaining how the wealthy mounted a sustained, expensive, obsessive fight to smash union power.
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She moves into a series of case-studies of workers who tried to organize unions under these increasingly inhospitable rules and conditions. The second half of the book is two case studies of mass strikes that succeeded in spite of even stiffer opposition. For McAlevey, saving America is just a scaled up version of the union organizer’s day-job.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/
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VI. Open Circuits by #WindellOskay and #EricSchlaepfer
A drop-dead gorgeous collection of photos of electronic components, painstakingly cross-sectioned and polished. The photos illustrate layperson-friendly explanations of what each component does, how it is constructed, and why. Perhaps you've pondered a circuit board and wondered about the colorful, candy-shaped components soldered to it.
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It's natural to assume that these are indivisible, abstract functional units, a thing that is best understood as a reliable and deterministic brick that can be used to construct a specific kind of wall. Peering inside these sealed packages reveals another world, a miniature land where things get simpler – and more complex.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/14/hidden-worlds/#making-the-invisible-visible-and-beautiful
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VII. Doppelganger by #NaomiKlein
This is a very odd book. It is also a very, very good book. The premise – exploring the divergence between Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf, with whom she is often confused – is a surprisingly sturdy scaffold for an ambitious, wide-ranging exploration of this very frightening moment of polycrisis and systemic failure.
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For Klein, the transformation of Wolf from liberal icon – Democratic Party consultant and Lean-In-type feminist icon – to rifle-toting Trumpling with a regular spot on the Steve Bannon Power Hour is an entrypoint to understanding the mirror world. How did so many hippie-granola yoga types turn into vicious eugenicists whose answer to "wear a mask to protect the immunocompromised" is "they should die"?
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine
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VIII. Your Face Belongs to Us by @kashhill
A tell-all history of Clearview AI, the creepy facial recognition company whose origins are mired in far-right politics, off-the-books police misconduct, sales to authoritarian states and sleazy one-percenter one-upmanship. Facial recognition is now so easy to build that – Hill says – we're unlikely to abolish it, despite all the many horrifying ways that FR could fuck up our societies.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that
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IX. Blood In the Machine by @brianmerchant
The definitive history of the Luddites, and the clearest analysis of the automator's playbook, where "entrepreneurs'" lawless extraction from workers is called "innovation" and "inevitable." Luddism has been steadily creeping into pro-labor technological criticism, as workers and technology critics reclaim the term and its history, which is a rich and powerful tale of greed versus solidarity, slavery versus freedom.
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Luddites are not – and have never been – anti-technology. Rather, they are pro-human, and see production as a means to an end: broadly shared prosperity. The automation project says it's about replacing humans with machines, but over and over again – in machine learning, in "contactless" delivery, in on-demand workforces – the goal is to turn humans into machines.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen
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X. Technofeudalism by #YanisVaroufakis
Varoufakis makes an excellent case that capitalism died a decade ago, turning into a new form of feudalism: technofeudalism. A feudal society is one organized around people who own things, charging others to use them to produce goods and services. In a feudal society, the most important form of income isn't profit, it's rent.
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