capitalism

Delta’s AI-based price-gouging

“It’s a scam. AI agents aren’t going to replace human labor. The only way we’ll replace human labor with software agents is by redesigning all these heterogeneous, competing systems owned by people who benefit from the status quo and have every motivation to obstruct this project. Good luck with that.”

Cory Doctorow reviews the ways in which companies such as Delta Air Lines, British Airways, Uber, McDonald’s and many others around the world are using nonconsensually harvested personal data and AI to further increase your costs.

pluralistic.net

When we get komooted

“Digital enclosure is the continuation of the physical enclosure of land. This sophisticated form of digital extraction is so common that it’s almost unremarkable. But there’s a wrenching contradiction here between Komoot’s stated mission of ‘enabling access’ to public land while privatizing and exclusively profiting from those very movements. They take our most meaningful encounters with nature and ourselves and sell them back to us for a quick buck.”

Using Komoot as an example, Joshua Meissner illustrates why today’s digital communities require better tools based on federation and interoperability.

bikepacking.com

Boomerang

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“The Boomerang is hitting Britain hard, especially right now. Empire wasn’t just something that happened to the Colonies, it’s something that happened to Britain. It created some of Britain’s most well-loved institutions, from the NHS to its greatest talents. But it also created the unequal Britain we see today.”

Kojo Koram

How legacies of empire are breaking Britain’s economy: Q&A with Owen Jones, Kojo Koram and Dalia Gebrial

The secrets of surveillance capitalism

“The game is no longer about sending you a mail order catalogue or even about targeting online advertising. The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life—your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit.” According to Shoshana Zuboff, we need to revoke the collective agreement with practices that result in dispossession of behavior.

www.faz.net

Nimm, was du kriegen kannst!

“Der Westen, der so stolz auf seine Werte ist, verschließt seine Grenzen für verängstige Menschen auf der Suche nach einem besseren Leben. Aber er öffnet sie für schmutziges Geld auf der Suche nach einer besseren Anlage.” Jakob Augstein identifiziert nicht die Flüchtlinge als unser Problem—sondern die Steuerflüchtlinge.

www.spiegel.de

Forget Panama: it’s easier to hide your money in the US than almost anywhere.

Ein Dank an die Lokführer

“Wenn Manager ‘Personal abbauen’, nehmen wir es hin. Wenn die Abhängigen für ihre Interessen kämpfen, herrscht Empörung. Der Bahnstreik ist kein Skandal, sondern ein Geschenk.” Jakob Augstein sieht sich durch den gegenwärtigen Bahnstreik an die Macht der Arbeitnehmer erinnert.

www.spiegel.de

The Piketty Panic

“But how do you make that defense if the rich derive much of their income not from the work they do but from the assets they own? And what if great wealth comes increasingly not from enterprise but from inheritance?” After reviewing Capital in the Twenty-First Century by french professor Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman reflects on why this particular book is reshaping the debate on wealth and inequality.

www.nytimes.com

What the fluck!

“I think there is an equally diffuse malaise today—waiting for a new kind of journalism to bring it into focus. Like with McClure’s it won’t be just a catalogue of shocking facts—it will be an imaginative leap that pulls all the scandals together and shows how they are part of some new system of power that we don’t fully comprehend.” Adam Curtis attempts to define the point at which journalism fails and modern power begins.