Month: June 2018

The JEDI contract (chortle).

The JEDI contract (chortle).

JEDI is the military’s next-generation cloud that will network American forces all over the world and integrate them with AI. It’s basically Skynet. And all the big cloud providers want to win the contract because it’s worth $10 billion.

[Management] would say, “Ethics is complicated. Ethics is hard.” Yep.

Great work by the internal dissenters at Google. Don’t expect this to be the end of it though. Don’t imagine for moment that Google’s management won’t lie again.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/google-project-maven-military-tech-workers

This Forbes piece is serving as a useful place for people to share stories about the collapse in the bargaining…

This Forbes piece is serving as a useful place for people to share stories about the collapse in the bargaining power of labour.

Bezos and the internet mediated capitalism that he helped to pioneer delivers us a world that is completely recognisable in Marx’s original conception. Everything old is new again and we are heading back into the eighteen hundreds, Baby.

Why did this take so long? How did Marx seem to be wrong before he was right? Because for about a century and a half (and in no small part due to the influence of Marx himself), labour was able to mount a decently formidable opposition to capitalism. You saw it with the rise of the labour movement, you saw it with states acting to nationalise the means of production, you saw it with capitalists selling us Keynesian economics and buying our support through welfare and social democracy. These things were products of capitalism under threat.

There is no such opposition now.

All of those countervailing forces are growing weaker by the day. Their foundations were knocked out from under them forty years ago but the real gains for capitalism are happening right now. We are being reduced, step by step back into our collective places as proletarians, We are nothing but our labour to be sold at a steadily diminishing price.

Note: capitalism is a global phenomenon. This process of exploitation and impoverishment has always been the case for the Third World. By living in the West most of us have been sheltered from the full brutality of capitalism. This is likely to go on for some time longer but the collapse of the collective bargaining power of labour is starting to affect workers even in the world’s wealthiest countries as everyone becomes poorer relative to the newly resurgent capitalist class.

Originally shared by Teodor Poparescu

How is it even legal be so obscenely and pathologically greedy??

Oh, I know how – ppl have been propagandized that a corporation is someone’s own property and no one else should decide how much s/he pays “his” workers. Stockholm syndrome at country level (and soon at global level, thanks to the efficient propaganda arm of this system aka “credible news”).

Btw, this is literally “if you work hard enough, your boss might buy another yacht”.