Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Capitalismâs Shell Game: From Robert Bork to John Deere.
John Deereâs workers are done with their employerâs bullshit.
When the 10,000 workers who keep the worldâs largest agribusiness monopoly humming walked off the job last month, it was historic. As one John Deere worker put it, âEverything John Deere did to increase its stock price is now a liability.â Deereâs 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.
Email could be the last federated internet technologyâââbut it isnât.
It feels like only yesterday that we were living through the Substack bubble, as mailing lists enjoyed a new renaissance (rebranded as ânewslettersâ), a tangible expression of the techlash and our collective disgust with the platforms and their attempts to enclose the internet and convert it to âfive giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four.â
In the abstract, mailing lists/newsletters represent the promise of a return to a Jeffersonian internet, where each of us can garden own little patch, not subject to the whims of third parties. That, after all, is the original design brief of the internet, to be an âend-to-end networkâ where any party can connect to any other party without needing permission from anyone else.
If you do much reading about antitrust, youâre sure to come across Ida Tarbell, the campaigning investigative journalist whose masterful 1904 book, The History of the Standard Oil Company (free ebook, free audiobook), brought down John D. Rockefeller and his monopolistic Standard Oil Company, which was broken up in 1911. It split into seven companies, many of which are still with usâor were, until recent mergers (think: Exxon, Mobil, Esso, Chevron, Texaco, and Amoco).
Continue reading "A Monopoly Isnât the Same as Legitimate Greatness"
