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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Dead letters

Email could be the last federated internet technology — but it isn’t.

Vintage engraving of a dead letter office where postal officials struggle to decipher addressing information; captioned “Who is it for? A scene in the dead letter office experts trying to decipher an illegible address”

It feels like only yesterday that we were living through the Substack bubble, as mailing lists enjoyed a new renaissance (rebranded as “newsletters”), a tangible expression of the techlash and our collective disgust with the platforms and their attempts to enclose the internet and convert it to “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four.

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 “end-to-end network” where any party can connect to any other party without needing permission from anyone else.

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Pluralistic: 27 Sep 2021


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Pluralistic: 24 Sep 2021


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Pluralistic: 07 Jul 2021


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A Monopoly Isn’t the Same as Legitimate Greatness

Competent monopolists aren’t good monopolists

Ida Tarbell’s uses her writing to kindle a fire on a tree labelled “Standard Oil Traditional Policy of Silence.” A panicked John D Rockefeller peers out of a squirrel-hole, screaming in alarm.

If you do much reading about antitrust, you’re 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 us—or were, until recent mergers (think: Exxon, Mobil, Esso, Chevron, Texaco, and Amoco).

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Pluralistic: 11 Jun 2021


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Pluralistic: 30 Apr 2021


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Pluralistic: 25 Mar 2021


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Pluralistic: 18 Feb 2021


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