Tag: Corporatism

The Daily (or whenever) Eruption


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Unwrapping a Novel in Progress: Friday 2/4/2021

Athens, looking South toward Piraeus. Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

It’s been hard to pick a genre for my new novel Her Own Devices. Call it Literary Fiction cloaked as Contemporary Women’s Crime. After sweating over it for close to 20 months, I feel it’s almost a wrap and so am starting to unwrap it online to get some reactions.

Set in Athens and Piraeus, Greece not long ago, Devices carries on where Turkey Shoot left off, but in a different key and genre. To enjoy this one you don’t need to have read the first one, but you might want to once you’re done. Find more about both at Perfidy Press.

You can read a new excerpt of Devices in the February issue of the literary journal The Write Launch. I am most grateful to editor Sandra Fluck for her support by publishing this and previous excerpts. The new one is Chapter 8 (of 31), and begins Part Two (of four). Find it here, and go to my author page at The Write Launch to find the other two excerpted chapters.

Lastly, be the first on your block to receive my eclectic quasi-monthly newsletter Perfidy Press Pronouncements. Please sign up here to partake. It’s even easier to unsubscribe if it fails to satisfy. Continue reading “The Daily (or whenever) Eruption”

Undoing Dystopia

Douglas Rushkoff Wants Us to Rewind

Buy Team Human from an indie bookstore

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff (W.W. Norton, 2019, 256 p. hardbound), ISBN 987-0-393-65169-0, $23.95. Also available in eBook and audiobook formats.

The entities called computers were originally human beings, people like the accounts clerk Bob Cratchit in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. In the mid-20th century, computers were (mostly) women who worked calculators and slide rules, tasked with tabulating data and solving numerical problems. Nowadays, says Douglas Rushkoff, computers run us as extensions of applications that abuse us for fun and profit. Rushkoff has had it with the soul-sucking “innovation economy”; to retrieve the human agency and dignity that technocracy has usurped, he proposes not a revolution but a renaissance of pre-industrial, even pre-enlightenment, societal values. Rushkoff emerged as an early member of the digerati, but has since been a longstanding critic of those who control digital media and manipulate its users, not to mention capitalism itself. Now a professor of media studies (CUNY Queens), public intellectual, and podcast host, he’s quietly assembling an army of change agents. Their mission is to “challenge the operating system that drives our society” by organizing the (better-educated) masses to throw off their (block) chains by imagining and building human-scale alternatives to giant financial institutions, public corporations, and their enablers. Given how overarching and well-wired global capitalism is, that’s a tall order, but Rushkoff asserts that the battle can be won if we stick together. Continue reading “Undoing Dystopia”

Why High Technology’s Double-Edged Sword Is So Hard to Swallow

this article

 

“If big tech companies are going to turn their back on US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble…We are going to continue to support the DOD and I think we should.”

~ Amazon founder and DoD contractor Jeff Bezos at the WIRED25 summit

The world’s wealthiest individual went on to acknowledge, “Technologies always are two-sided. There are ways they can be misused.” Convinced that they are being misused, Google employees mounted a protest that caused Alphabet (Google’s parent company) to step back from a contract to develop AI pattern recognition technology for targeting military drones, worrying the Pentagon. Continue reading “Why High Technology’s Double-Edged Sword Is So Hard to Swallow”

Guest Post: The Pieties of the Liberal Class

In this weekend’s CounterPunch, Jason Hirtler masterfully dissects the bankruptcy of the (neo)liberal world order, in which Trump’s policies are bad, bad, bad even when they hardly differ substantively from those of Obama or any other president.

That America’s policies foreign and domestic scarcely vary from one administration to the next seems beyond the mass media’s myopic ken, but doesn’t escape the clear-eyed Mr. Hirtler. His well-chosen words both sting and entertain.

Read his analysis of the Democrat’s duplicity and overreaching and let us know if you think he’s off the mark or not. And while you’re over there, please chip in, because CounterPunch is entirely a reader-supported enterprise, and one of the few fearless publications willing to speak truth to power. A world without such blowback would be unthinkable, and perhaps uninhabitable.

So give. A better world will thank you.

The Pieties of the Liberal Class by Jason Hirthler

Fair and Balanced Opinion at the Times

via Wikipedia

Democratic Socialism is awful as a slogan and catastrophic as a policy. And “social democracy”—a term that better fits the beliefs of ordinary liberals who want, say, Medicare for all—is a politically dying force. Democrats who aren’t yet sick of all their losing should feel free to embrace them both.

~ Bret Stephens, “Democratic Socialism is Dem Doom,” New York Times op-ed, 7/7/19, p. A19.

So much for my false hopes for a progressive renaissance. Bret Stephens, the Great Gray Lady’s newest white male conservative columnist hath spoken. He came on board a little over a year ago, straightaway from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. When he was hired, NYT’s Editorial Page Editor James Bennet gushed “Bret, who won the 2013 Pulitzer prize for commentary, brings to the job profound intellectual depth, honesty and bravery – the qualities our audience expects from a Times columnist. He’s a beautiful writer who ranges across politics, international affairs, culture and business, and, for The Times, he will bring a new perspective to bear on the news.”

So now, out of a dozen regular Times columnists there are three white male Republican opinionators who don’t like Trump. I guess it’s up to Bret Stephens, Ross Douhat, and David Brooks to change the hearts and minds of the 7 out of 10 Republicans who do like him. Be my guest. Continue reading “Fair and Balanced Opinion at the Times”

Pity the Immigrant Warrior

Quartz

How NPR Elides Facts to Further Hegemony

It’s universal. We all gripe about how news media—TV and radio network news, newspapers, and Internet news sites—intentionally distort and selectively oversimplify reality, and we like to say so in letters to the editor and online comments. Complaints about media bias are as old as the town crier, and today are institutionalized online. A bunch of watchdog groups, such as FAIR and Media Matters on the left (progressive foes of corporate media) and Media Research Center to the right (whose “sole mission is to expose and neutralize the propaganda arm of the Left: the national news media”), specialize in skewering the press. They’re all worth considering if a balanced view is what you aspire to.

Both sides regularly take aim at the same targets for different reasons. One of them is NPR (National Pubic Radio), criticized by the right as a card-carrying member of the “liberal media” conspiracy and by the left as a corporatist sell-out. While it tends to steer left of and does more investigative reporting than our TV networks, its political liberalism stops just to the left of David Brooks. (Speaking of whom, should it appeal and you can spare $15, you can buy a roll of toilet paper printed with his visage and quotations. Monies fund The Baffler magazine’s crankiness.) Continue reading “Pity the Immigrant Warrior”

Deep State 101: A primer and prescription

Every nation worth its salt has a deep state, a loose network of rich and powerful players who ratify, veto or formulate state social, economic and military policies. Whether monarchy, dictatorship, or constitutional republic, no government worthy of the name lacks for a shadowy unelected élite with hands on the tiller and in the till, influential persons with inherited or recent wealth, upper crust social connections, and old school ties, often found sitting on boards of directors and golf carts in isolated settings.

Like Sand Hill Cranes, they are rare and difficult to spot in their habitats, seamlessly blending as they do with their inaccessible surroundings. Amongst themselves, however, they are highly convivial. Partial to receptions, they bibulate and circulate as they joust over canapés. Not to worry they are but degenerates just killing time, important things get done under the buzz. Small talk can have big consequences and decadent environs make deal-making a sport. Continue reading “Deep State 101: A primer and prescription”

One Regime to Rule them All

Wallpaper Best

It is considered bad form for journalists to refer to the US government as a “regime.” Apparently, that moniker is reserved for our country’s enemies, of late Russia, North Korea, Iran, and Syria. Maybe Myanmar too; that’s still being sorted out. But what is a regime, really, and is it really true that we don’t have one here? Continue reading “One Regime to Rule them All”

The Net’s Good Old Boys (3)

WikiLeaks
Part 3: Dr. (Don’t Be) Evil Meets Dr. Strangelove

Continued from If We Only Knew Then

Former Google EC Dr. Eric Schmidt has called for intelligence agencies to stop illegally prying into personal information and has been doing his best to convince the government to pay Google to do it legally instead. That said, in 2009 he was widely rebuked for telling CNBC:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities. ~ Dr. Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, 2009

Schmidt didn’t add that Google is obliged to turn over email content under court order and not tell users it did so. He didn’t have to. We all know about FISA and PATRIOT. Same goes for Hotmail, AOL, or any US email provider, only Google has much more to give. Continue reading “The Net’s Good Old Boys (3)”

NPR, the CIA, and Assault of Corporatism

In her five-minute interview with Ursula Wilder, a CIA psychologist whose job there involves counseling returning spies, NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly (their alleged National Security Correspondent) went over what makes someone who reveals state secrets tick. Kelly failed big-time to probe Wilder about whether she ever thought an insider might ever have a patriotic motivation to inform the public of illegal behavior on the part of the agency. Based on Wilders’ profile of leakers, the answer would surely have been No, but it sure would have been nice to ask.

Continue reading “NPR, the CIA, and Assault of Corporatism”