An issue with browsing the internet too much when you have empathy and/or sympathy is how many problems you will encounter that you can’t do anything about, and possibly don’t affect you at all, that you will feel distractingly bad about.
“Hello, yes, I’m borrowing all of these problems I can do nothing about. This will be beneficial to my mental health and overall productivity.”
twitter is going to be shut down. half of reddit is locked or completely unmoderated. the entire first page of google search results are ads. tumblr does not and will never have a functioning search system and their content moderation is 100% automated. youtube only shares ad revenue with people who make snuff films for Youtube Kids. facebook is selling your grandma’s social security number under the table for like $5. web 2.0 is completely dead right
I took the smallest, shittiest picture of a frog at the nature preserve last week and just looking at it has me in tears of laughter. Just another pea in the pea soup…
Despite all these logs, I am still just a frog in a bog.
Between the Supreme Court fuckery and whatever’s going on at Twitter, the last 48 hours have been a very clear sign that anyone who owns more than a billion dollars needs to be catapulted to Neptune
Interesting to call this “confiscating” when it’s just making the rich pay their fair share, especially considering all the stolen wealth from the bottom 99% and historic tax evasion.
Besides the obvious, the hidden benefit of this is that it provides an endpoint to runaway growth.
The biggest problem with capitalism, the reason it’s so destructive to the planet and to the workers and even, ultimately, to the capitalists, is that, after a certain point, the money’s just a way of keeping score. The number at the bottom of the column has no bearing on what you can buy or do; as a result, there’s no such thing as enough. The number can always be bigger.
Under this proposal, once you hit $1 billion, you’ve won capitalism. You beat the game, achieved the maximum score; you’re finished. There’s nothing more you can accumulate. You now have to find a purpose in life other that the relentless pursuit of profit. (And if we’re really lucky, it might be something that actually benefits other people, but even if not, it’s unlikely to be as damaging as whatever it is you were doing to get that $1 billion.)
Instead of companies expanding endlessly, like tumors, there’s a point where, when all the major stakeholders are maxing out on profit, it makes sense to just hold steady. Keep doing/making/selling whatever it is you do/sell/make, but stop trying to do/sell/make more of it every year.
The problem with a tumor–what makes it cancer–is that it keeps growing and growing, until eventually it’s taking up so much space and consuming so many resources that the surrounding tissues can’t function. The tumor doesn’t have to do anything better than the other tissues in order to crowd them out; it just does it faster. Stop the uncontrolled growth, and it’s something you can live with.
Stopping the uncontrolled growth of capital means more opportunities for multiple businesses–big and small–operating in the same sector, since it doesn’t make sense for any one company to gobble up too much of the market share. That, in turn, means more choices for customers–and workers, since they can take their skills to another employer doing similar things. It means less waste, as there’s no longer an economic upside to spewing cheap goods out of a fire-hose before you even know whether anyone wants to buy them. That could mean slower, more thoughtful use of resources in the first place, but at minimum, it’s going to mean not manufacturing products only to immediately throw them away.
My favourite thing about the latest Twitter meltdown is all the artists reanimating their dead Tumblr accounts today and immediately being greeted with hundreds of notes because even a Tumblr account they literally have not posted to in 3–5 years has more active and engaged followers than the Twitter account that they’ve been updating daily.
