Capitalism
From Tucker Carlson to Larry Summers, free market devotees are blaming inflation on Joe Biden’s “big government” economic policies. In reality, the administration has done far too little to insulate Americans from the economic effects of the pandemic. The inauguration decorations had barely been cleared from the West Lawn when the neoliberal industrial complex started
Capitalism
Mark Zuckerberg’s turn toward the “metaverse” claims to put an extra digital layer on top of the real world. But Facebook’s new Meta brand isn’t augmenting your reality — it just wants to suck more money out of it. On Thursday, Facebook changed its name to Meta, as part of a broader shift toward the
Capitalism
The pandemic accelerated the rise of this digital piecework where humans support AI “For a penny, you might pay for a person to tell you if there is a human in a photo,” Jeff Bezos explained, at the public opening of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), the first and most infamous of such sites. Like other
Capitalism
In June, the Hungarian parliament voted overwhelmingly to eliminate from public schools all teaching related to “homosexuality and gender change”, associating LGBTQI rights and education with pedophilia and totalitarian cultural politics. In late May, Danish MPs passed a resolution against “excessive activism” in academic research environments, including gender studies, race theory, postcolonial and immigration studies
Capitalism
Ursula K. Le Guin was born on this day in 1929. She used science fiction to explore the failures of capitalist society — and the alternative worlds we could build in its place. You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution.” This is the core of the
Capitalism
The extraordinary success of Netflix’s Squid Game demonstrates how many people relate to a portrayal of capitalism’s miseries — and how few feel there is any way to escape. Squid Game has been described as an allegory for capitalism more generally, but these masked VIPs suggest it refers to a particular kind of capitalism at a particular moment.