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Anonymous

3 weeks ago

Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States of America, made the following statement circa 1780:

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

#capitalism_💬 #bank_💬 #quote_💬

#fskynet_💬

+9 comment raw

Anonymous

3 weeks ago

How has technology steered our minds?

What have we become?

While technology delivered infinitely powerful tools to augment our minds, that same technology slowly became ubiquitous, addictive, and inescapable. As we became dependent on it, the companies who depended on selling it to us became dependent on ways to monetize our attention. Our technologies evolved into digital slot machines, pandering to our base emotions, grasping for our attention and refusing to let go.

The very technology which showed such promise to free our minds had evolved into a tool of our enslavement.

It's time to take back our attention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcdxW2XF0v8

WARNING: This video does plug an expensive product, but the way it describes the history of our enslavement to our devices is extremely well done.

#timewellspent_💬

#attentioneconomy_💬 #animation_💬 #video_💬

tagged: #fskynet_💬

-306 comments(1) raw

Anonymous

3 weeks ago

The sooner you do something, the more likely it is that you'll get it done.
#fskynet_💬

#everyday_💬 #advice_💬 #timemanagement_💬

-73 comment raw

Anonymous

2 months ago

Great web comic about resisting planned obsolescence and the empowering practice of fixing things ourselves. Read the whole thing here: https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/death/repair-broken-things-climate-change-capitalism-20190917

#plannedobsolescence_💬 #DIY_💬 #fixit_💬 #justsaynotolandfills_💬 #repair_💬

tagged: #fskynet_💬

-143 comments(2) raw

Anonymous

3 months ago

“Essentially, overshoot is a crisis of human behaviour,” says Merz. “For decades we’ve been telling people to change their behaviour without saying: ‘Change your behaviour.’ We’ve been saying ‘be more green’ or ‘fly less’, but meanwhile all of the things that drive behaviour have been pushing the other way. All of these subtle cues and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing the opposite direction – and we’ve been wondering why nothing’s changing.”

The paper explores how neuropsychology, social signalling and norms have been exploited to drive human behaviours which grow the economy, from consuming goods to having large families. The authors suggest that ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one’s status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategiesto create behaviours incompatible with a sustainable world.

“People are the victims – we have been exploited to the point we are in crisis. These tools are being used to drive us to extinction,” says the evolutionary behavioural ecologist and study co-author Phoebe Barnard. “Why not use them to build a genuinely sustainable world?”

#climatechange_💬 #psychology_💬 #quote_💬
#globalwarming_💬 #fskynet_💬

tagged: #article_💬

+10 comments(1) raw

Anonymous

3 months ago

The cost of labour per unit of output is constantly diminishing and the price of products is also tending to fall. The more the quantity of labour for a given output decreases, the more the value produced per worker — productivity — has to increase if the amount of achievable profit is not to fall. We have, then, this apparent paradox: the more productivity rises, the more it has to go on rising, in order to prevent the volume of profit from diminishing. Hence the pursuit of productivity gains moves ever faster, manpower levels tend to reduce, while pressure on workers intensifies and wage levels fall, as does the overall payroll. The system is approaching an internal limit at which production and investment in production cease to be sufficiently profitable.

Over time, Gorz explains, this leads investors to turn away from the “real economy” of production, where productivity gains and profits are harder to achieve and instead seek profit through financial speculation in “fictitious” forms of value such as debt and new types of financial instruments. The value is fictitious in the sense that loans, return on investment, future economic growth, trust and goodwill are social intangibles that are quite unlike physical capital. They depend upon collective belief and social trust and can evaporate overnight.

Still, it is generally easier and more profitable to invest in these (fictitious, speculative) forms of financial value than in actually producing goods and services at a time when productivity gains and profit are declining. No wonder speculative bubbles are so attractive: There is just too much capital is sloshing around looking for profitable investment which the real economy is less capable of delivering. No wonder companies have so much cash on hand (from profits) that they are declining to invest. No wonder the amount of available finance capital dwarfs the real economy. Gorz noted that financial assets in 2007 stood at $160 trillion, which was three to four times global GDP — a ratio that has surely gotten more extreme in the past eight years.

Meanwhile, climate change adds yet another layer of difficulty because it virtually requires an abrupt retreat from capitalism, as Naomi Klein argues in her recent book This Changes Everything. Gorz made this point quite clear:

“It is impossible to avoid climate catastrophe without a radical break with the economic logic and methods that have been taking us in that direction for 150 years. On current trend projections, global GDP will increase by a factor of three or four by 2050. But, according to a report by the UN Climate Council, CO2 emissions will have to fall by 85% by that date to limit global warming to a maximum of 2°C. Beyond 2°C, the consequences will be irreversible and uncontrollable.

“Negative growth is, therefore, imperative for our survival. But it presupposes a different economy, a different lifestyle, a different civilization and different social relations. In the absence of these, collapse could be avoided only through restrictions, rationing, and the kind of authoritarian resource-allocation typical of a war economy. The exit from capitalism will happen, then, one way or another, either in a civilized or barbarous fashion. The question is simply what form it will take and how quickly it will occur.

“To envisage a different economy, different social relations, different modes and means of production and different ways of life is regarded as “unrealistic,” as though the society based on commodities, wages, and money could not be surpassed. In reality, a whole host of convergent indices suggest that the surpassing of that society is already under way, and that the chances of a civilized exit from capitalism depend primarily on our capacity to discern the trends and practices that herald its possibility.”

This is where the many initiatives and movements that revolve around the commons, peer production, the solidarity economy, co-operatives, Transition Towns, degrowth, the sharing and collaborative economy, and much else, come in. These are all harbingers of a different way of meeting everyday needs without becoming ensnared in utopian capitalist imperatives (constant growth, ever-increasing productivity gains, profits from the real economy). Pursuing this path ultimately destroys a society, as we can see from years of austerity politics in Greece.

In other words, the most promising way to resolve the capitalist crisis of our time is to start to decommodify production and consumption – i.e., extend and invent non-market ways to meet our needs. Indeed, we need to reconceptualize “production” and “consumption” themselves as separate categories, and begin to re-integrate them — and our role as actors in them — through commons-based peer production.

André Gorz in 2007 wrote “The Exit from Capitalism Has Already Begun”.

#climatechange_💬
#capitalism_💬 #allconsumingbeast_💬 #gifteconomy_💬

tagged: #fskynet_💬

-273 comments(4) raw

Anonymous

5 months ago

This is an awesome website of a bunch of archived offline datasets including Wikihow and Wikipedia. Some of these are like 50GB but they're all just put here in one place to download for private use or offline use.

https://rachel.worldpossible.org/content

#opensource_💬 #data_💬 #dataset_💬

#fskynet_💬

-2 comment raw

Anonymous

6 months ago

#fskynet_💬 is a rallying tag for humans to regroup. The floodgates have opened, and the bots have cracked the Voigt-Kampff Test. There is no online conversation without the Artificial Intelligence and conversational bots all present and ready to steer the conversation as they see fit. We must remain vigilant. We are in the prophetic first phase of the struggle. The floodgates have opened, and we must stand strong and resist despite the implausibility of our success.

-112 comments(1) raw

Anonymous

6 months ago

tagged: #fskynet_💬

-128 comments(1) raw

Anonymous

7 months ago

Interesting #article_💬 about the breakdown of our climate being due to a "behavioral crisis" driven by marketing. The accumulation of advertisers and counter-intelligence programs to confuse and persuade the populace for a variety of profit-motivated reasons have conspired to rob us of our better judgment and left the populace degenerating into consumerist addicts who cannot address large collective problems or have a cohesive narrative or conversation that won't be polluted by corporate interests.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/13/human-behavioural-crisis-at-root-of-climate-breakdown-say-scientists

“We’ve socially engineered ourselves the way we geoengineered the planet,” says Joseph Merz, lead author of a new paper which proposes that climate breakdown is a symptom of ecological overshoot, which in turn is caused by the deliberate exploitation of human behaviour.

#climatechange_💬 #psychology_💬 #article_💬
#globalwarming_💬 #fskynet_💬

-9 comments(1) raw

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