Pluralistic: 16 Nov 2021


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Jam To-Day

Liberating Big Tech’s hostages on day one

A half-empty jam jar on a table; the jar is labelled with Tenniel’s engraving of the Red Queen wagging her finger at Alice in Through the Looking-Glass.
Oleg Sidorenko/CC BY 2.0

“The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day.”

-The Red Queen, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (Lewis Carroll)

The new, surging antitrust movement has given hope to many who yearn to throw off the yoke of Big Tech. After all, the tech giants’ dominance was attained through solidly illegal conduct, such as anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions, predatory pricing, and price-fixing. This produced conditions in which the companies were able to engage in more flagrant illegal conduct, including unambiguous, multi-billion-dollar acts of fraud.

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Pluralistic: 14 Nov 2021


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Pluralistic: 13 Nov 2021


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Pluralistic: 12 Nov 2021


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Pluralistic: 10 Nov 2021


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Pluralistic: 09 Nov 2021


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Pluralistic: 08 Nov 2021


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Bait and Switch

Capitalism’s Shell Game: From Robert Bork to John Deere.

A con artist playing the shell game lifts a shell to reveal a dancing Rich Uncle Pennybags who has removed his face to reveal a grinning skull.

John Deere’s workers are done with their employer’s bullshit.

When the 10,000 workers who keep the world’s largest agribusiness monopoly humming walked off the job last month, it was historic. As one John Deere worker put it, “Everything John Deere did to increase its stock price is now a liability.” Deere’s workforce loyalty had been eroded by decades of reduced pay, reduced benefits and increased hours, all amid skyrocketing profits, stock prices, and executive compensation,.

As the day of the strike vote drew nearer, the company put on a charm offensive, painting its workers as greedy and lazy, unhappy with $60,000 a year.

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Now, Put It Back!

What the tech giants' content replacement systems tell us about our free expression priorities

A CRT television in a darkened room, turned to static; on the screen is a drawing of a butler with a towel folded over his arm; his head has been replaced with the “sad Youtube” icon displayed for content that’s been taken offline.
Samy Menai/Noun Project/CC BY (modified)

Last week, the leftist British Novara Media (disclosure, I have been a guest on some Novara programs) was kicked off YouTube for “repeated violations” of the service’s policies. Novara’s workers were alarmed, dismayed and outraged in equal measure. After all, the channel had only ever attracted one violation warning from YouTube, and that had been an error — something YouTube itself had acknowledged after further investigation.

A few hours later, Novara’s channel was restored. The New York Times took notice, saying that the incident “shows [YouTube’s] power over media.” Which, you know, fair enough. YouTube is dominant, thanks to its parent company (Google, masquerading as a holding company called Alphabet that exists as an account fiction). Google is able to self-preference by giving pride of place to YouTube in its search results, and it is able to plug YouTube into its rigged ad-auction business, where it illegally colludes with Facebook to maximize its profits from ads while minimizing the amount it passes on to the creators who make the videos those ads run on.

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