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if-you-fan-a-fire · 6 months

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"King’s administration, however, had not shown any sign of bending much in the CPR’s direction. Indeed, his government implemented Borden’s railway legislation, passing the Canadian National Railways Act of 1919, and appointed an outstanding executive, Sir Henry Thornton, to the helm of the CNR in 1922. Thornton was a U.S.-born railway executive and engineer by background who had moved up the corporate hierarchy of the Pennsylvania Railroad before taking a general manager’s position with the Great Eastern Railway in England, at the time the world’s largest commuter system. After the outbreak of war, Thornton’s technical knowledge was drawn upon in the British war effort as he was cast into the role of inspector-general for the British Expeditionary Forces and made “responsible for operation of the whole intricate system upon which the existence of the British line depended.” Embracing advanced views on unions and labour relations, Thornton was respected by Great Eastern Railway employees and was a personal friend of J.H. Thomas, a major figure within Britain’s national railway union. It was Thomas who mentioned the CNR position to Thornton – a position that had opened up following the resignation of D.B. Hanna, who resigned in protest over “political interference” in CNR affairs exercised by the recently elected Liberal administration of Mackenzie King. Knighted for his war services, the affable

Thornton had gained a reputation as a railway “superman,” though his position with the Great Eastern had been extinguished after the government passed legislation to reorganize the British railway system. Thornton was quick to charm the Canadian public as well as CNR employees. Thornton “has quite won the hearts of all who have met him,” exclaimed Flavelle. More troubling to Flavelle and moderate progressives such as Dafoe, however, were Mackenzie King’s blatant political appointments to the CNR board. This was a departure from Borden’s ideal of nonpartisan, businesslike operation. Nonetheless, with Thornton at the helm, the CNR had behind it a power of incalculable importance: popular opinion.

Beatty was quick to see public relations as the most significant challenge facing the CPR. In 1923, encouraged by Beatty’s recent public pronouncements, Lord Atholstan commenced his “Whisper of Death” campaign in the Montreal Star, which forecast an oncoming deluge resulting from a mounting national debt, made intolerable by costs associated with the CNR. Beatty considered Thornton nothing more than a “showman,” and sought to meet his challenge and correct “political misrepresentation” about the railways through an institutional advertising campaign. (Thornton, for his part, considered Beatty “a lawyer [and] not a railway man.” ) Indicative of this public relations drive, Dafoe reported in the summer of 1925 that “unfair competition invariably comes up” in discussions with high CPR officials; “[t]hey hope for the Shaughnessy plan or a merger.” In April, Clifford Sifton reported: “I do not think the Canadian Pacific has ever been as active in propaganda as it is now. Their intrigues and efforts to influence official opinion are in evidence everywhere.” Sifton asked Dafoe to have the Winnipeg Free Press “declare war on the scheme and fight it out.”

This drive had its effect in Ottawa, where a Senate committee was established to investigate the railway question in 1925. At the committee’s closed-door hearings, Beatty and Sir Herbert Holt presented cases for railway amalgamation so similar that a summary of the proceedings described their presentations as one position. The Senate proved particularly responsive to CPR influence, and the committee’s report presented an opinion generally in line with Beatty’s case, which Beatty himself would reference in arguing for railway unification in the future. Beatty and Holt, as we have seen, met with King the same summer to discuss railway policy, and Beatty continued to press King to leave the door open for railway unification later in the year. But the political bagmen who inhabited the Senate found it easier to embrace railway consolidation than the MPs who counted on popular support in their constituencies. This was somewhat stifling to the aspirations of Beatty and his moneyed allies. With neither major political party embracing his position on the railway question, Beatty remained “neutral” in the 1926 federal election, preferring to support favoured individuals in both major parties. While Beatty finessed his way around Ottawa, much of the railway battle was being waged in direct business competition, made more lucrative by the boom at the end of the 1920s as the two companies engaged in competition through line extensions, hotel construction, expansion of shipping fleets, and improvements in commuter services. While Beatty advocated consolidation of the two competing systems under private ownership, economic expansion during the 1920s made competition a viable option. Indeed, Beatty reported that $353,346,450 in dividend payments were distributed to common and preferred shareholders during the period from 1918 to 1930, representing 85 per cent of the company’s total earnings “after deducting fixed charges and pension fund appropriations.”

Thornton, meanwhile, modernized the CNR and emerged as a national icon of sorts, emblematic of the possibilities of public enterprise and cooperation between the state, capital, and labour, culminating in Thornton’s address at the American Federation of Labor’s international convention in 1929 in Toronto, where Thornton proclaimed the beginning of “a new labor era.” The “very particular conjunctures of context, character, and circumstance” that underpinned Thornton’s rise, as Allen Seager has observed, disintegrated with the arrival of the Great Depression. Thornton would be one of its first and most public victims, a public sacrifice encouraged by Beatty as he moved even deeper into political activism.

The Duff Commission and “the Tragedy of Henry Thornton” Meighen, Roger Graham has written, “was not spared the intrigues of the Montreal tycoons” as talk that R.B. Bennett would be his successor emerged in early 1926; Bennett was “known to hold more ‘businesslike’ opinions about railway matters” than Meighen, whom Bennett once famously described as “the gramophone of Mackenzie and Mann.” Bennett’s election as leader of the Conservative Party in 1927 was an encouraging sign and a small victory for Beatty and St James Street. They respected the independently wealthy Bennett, believing him to be above petty politics; they shared his deep sense of loyalty to the British Empire; and they felt assured about his protectionist tariff policies. “St. James Street favours Bennett because of his protectionist policies,” wrote Prime Minister King pessimistically before the 1930 election. King also learned that “Beatty was favourable to Bennett’s views.” The list of Montreal donors to Bennett’s campaign, observed historian Larry Glassford, “read like a Who’s Who of the Montreal financial and industrial establishment.”

Formerly the chief western solicitor of the CPR and a major shareholder in the Royal Bank, Bennett’s immersion in business and his history with the CPR certainly helped to make him a more reliable candidate for wealthy Montreal residents – but on the campaign trail such connections were a potential liability. With his proclamation “Amalgamation never, competition ever” in a campaign speech, Bennett sounded publicly his independence from Beatty in an attempt to assure western voters that he would not cede a railway monopoly to the CPR. Popular appeal again seemed to trump Beatty’s long-term goals. The seeds of future conflict between Bennett and Beatty were planted even before the electoral triumph of the Bennett Conservatives in 1930. Canada had more railway mileage per capita than any other nation by the 1930s. The financial strain of maintaining two competing national lines had seemingly resolved itself during the boom years of the late 1920s, only to reemerge as a sudden crisis once the economic slump set in. The financial position of the CPR worsened: in the first half of 1931, the CPR reduced dividend payments and soon after suspended payments altogether. Worse still was the position of the CNR, which was already weighed down by an unwieldy capital structure that included old debts accumulated by Mackenzie and Mann and the Grand Trunk. Company earnings fell by $46,249,000, and Thornton attempted cost-cutting measures without implementing wholesale layoffs. Philosophically opposed to public enterprise, Bennett viewed Thornton as a creature of the King government; and he supported a campaign that conflated Thornton’s lavish private lifestyle with his management of the CNR. While in London, England, in October 1930, Prime Minister Bennett wrote his minister of railways and canals, R.J. Manion, about the shopping activities of Thornton’s wife:

President’s wife here purchasing furniture. President cabled her improvements would cost eighteen thousand dollars and she must spend less for furniture. She says building requires improvements. Whatever action you take entirely satisfactory. I was only desirous [to] communicate casual information.

The CNR directors had approved funds for Lady Thornton to furnish their Pine Avenue home “in a manner appropriate for the residence of a president.” But, having received this “casual information” from Bennett, Manion reneged on the agreement. Thereupon Sir Henry perceived that “a concerted plot to ruin his personal reputation” was in the works. He pressed Manion in December to honour the agreement that $20,000 in CNR funds be made available for renovations to his house, explaining that he was “very hard up, stock losses, etc.” Manion did not bend and described his reply to Bennett:

I told him that if the case came up in the House I wanted to be able to say that we had nothing to do with the matter – that the whole arrangement had been made under the previous administration.

Thornton would serve as a sacrificial lamb for the supposed improprieties of the King administration. The following year the Railway Committee of the House of Commons provided new opportunities to undermine Thornton’s public reputation and associate him with the supposedly spendthrift ways of the Liberals. Manion, R.B. Hanson of New Brunswick, and Dr Peter McGibbon, MP for Muskoka-Ontario, were among the most active Conservative members to tar Thornton in the House, citing imprudent company expenditures on hotels, suggesting (falsely) exorbitant company salaries, and drawing attention to Thornton’s salary and personal expense account. Though Beatty admitted the unfairness of some of the attacks levelled against Thornton, he also recognized new political opportunities on the horizon.

Upon Beatty’s suggestion, a beleaguered Thornton called for the formation of a royal commission to study the railway question. And though Beatty and Holt complained about delays in getting the commission established, the Duff Commission was finally formed in November. Before the commencement of the commission’s hearings, Beatty was “very hopeful that something constructive” could be achieved and lauded its personnel as “really outstanding.” Chaired by Supreme Court Judge Lyman Duff, the commission included six other prominent figures with weighty business – and some academic – credentials: Joseph Flavelle; Beaudry Leman of Montreal, general manager of the Banque Canadienne Nationale and president of the Canadian Bankers’ Association; U.S. railway executive Leonor Fresnel Loree, president of the Delaware and Hudson Railway Company; Lord Ashfield, head of London’s underground system, the Metropolitan Railways; Walter Charles Murray, president of the University of Saskatchewan; and the Shediac, New Brunswick, physician John Clarence Webster, a respected Conservative, museum patron, and personal friend of Howard P. Robinson.

From his office in Winnipeg, Dafoe reflected upon the significance of the commission’s establishment. “Perhaps I am getting too suspicious in my old age,” he wrote Free Press correspondent John A. Stevenson

but I have a most decided ‘hunch’ that this Commission was appointed to do a particular chore, and that with perhaps two exceptions its members know what the chore is to be. I think the linked money powers in Canada and the United States, with all their subordinate and associate interests, have decided that the time is opportune to oblige Canada to remove her desire to own and operate her own railways.

Dafoe believed that – as part of this plot to gut the CNR – the same tactic deployed in England to dislodge the Labour government might be deployed in Canada: “National Government.”

Had Dafoe become “too suspicious” in old age? Not entirely. The ever-domineering Bennett had taken a personal interest in the formation of the commission and appeared to be in closer contact with St James Street than the responsible minister, Manion. Winnipeg Free Press correspondent Grant Dexter reported on 15 November that Manion was in “complete ignorance” about the commission’s personnel, but two weeks earlier a private memorandum written by Floyd Chalmers of the Financial Post revealed that Sir Herbert Holt was up to date on recent developments in the selection of commission personnel. “I want to take back anything about believing that amalgamation is off,” wrote Dexter.

Meanwhile, Thornton’s experience at the hands of the Conservatives had led him to an about-face: in a meeting with Dafoe at Winnipeg’s Fort Garry Hotel on 12 October, Thornton lamented that he had lost faith in the ideal of public enterprise – the CNR, in the interest of its own survival, would have to come under the control of some form of unified management along with the CPR. He told Dafoe that he and Beatty had been working on such a plan together, a fact later confirmed by Lady Thornton. After Thornton’s death, his biographer, D’Arcy Marsh, would write (in 1934) that Thornton had been made “constitutionally incapable” of opposing Beatty, and Dexter believed that Thornton had sold out to Beatty to save his job. Dafoe, Marsh, and Dexter were overly cynical in assessing Thornton’s actions. And though Dafoe’s suspicions had some basis, he greatly exaggerated the level of coordination between Bennett and Beatty.

The proceedings of the Duff Commission commenced on 4 December 1931 with the commissioners interviewing Sir Henry Thornton in a session closed to the public – as was the testimony of all senior railway and government officials. Thornton proposed the establishment of a ten-person “superboard,” consisting of the presidents of each railway company, two Liberal, two Conservative, and two Progressive representatives, a representative of labour, and a representative of the minister of railways and canals. Though Dafoe and others, not privy to his testimony at the time, might have considered it something of a sellout, such judgments are overly harsh. Thornton believed the board, which would oversee both railways and enforce cooperation, would be able to conciliate various interest groups, and his plan thus attempted to establish a mechanism whereby a form of democratic control over the management of the country’s railways would obtain.

It was Thornton’s embrace of the principle of democratic control that set him apart from Beatty – and here Thornton was steadfast. The very goal of exercising democratic control over Canada’s railway systems was thought dubious by commission members, however. Commissioner Loree asked CNR vice-president S.J. Hungerford whether “it be a fair statement to make that a democratic form of government is no competent agency to carry on the railroad business?” To Hungerford’s assertion that “[w]e are seeking to do it,” Loree replied: “But are they doing it? The records do not show they are, because they are going behind every year.”

With the questioning at times threatening to transgress the line of gentlemanly decorum, Thornton stressed that management of the CNR was a matter of public policy and thus did not necessarily need to justify itself on the basis of profits and losses. In response to a statement by Joseph Flavelle that such an enterprise should not be maintained, Thornton asserted that it was “a matter for the Canadian people to decide.” Beatty appeared before the commission the next day and presented a case that was ideologically much easier for the commissioners to appreciate.

If, on one hand, the privately owned system finds it is unable to maintain its credit in an unequal struggle with the long purse of the state,” Beatty said before the commission, “a grave injustice will be done to the shareholders of a corporation which has fulfilled its fifty-year old contract with the nation, and which has made its full contribution to the upbuilding [ sic ] of the Dominion. Such a consummation would cause most serious injury to the reputation of this young country as a field for private capital.

The cases of Beatty and Thornton differed at a fundamental level, centring not only on the appropriate role of the state in the nation’s economic life but on the appropriate role of public opinion in shaping economic policy. Beatty opposed government intervention, except in a helping role to private capital – steamship subsidies and protective tariffs, for example (which the CPR benefited from). He was also generally dismissive of popular opinion. Thornton, he believed, had succeeded by “showmanship” and “mob appeals.” The deluded public, in Beatty’s estimation, deserved only a very limited role in deciding public policy, and, as we shall see, he turned to “educational” work to address this issue. Thornton, by contrast, accepted some degree of “political” interference in economic affairs as inevitable under any democratic government. “After all in any form of popular government it must be accepted as axiomatic that the business of government is politics and,” Thornton stated before the commission on 4 January 1932, “irrespective of whether one likes it or not, politics is something with which a government must reckon in all its activities.” Though commission members disliked the idea of public influence over railway management, a view that would be plainly expressed in their report, they were at least equally concerned with the prospect of leaving the nation’s railways in the hands of a private monopoly. Beatty proposed a “unification” plan of the two systems under CPR management that would maintain separate ownership: CPR personnel would act as trustees of the government’s property. Commissioners Flavelle and Loree expressed concern over the de facto monopoly that Beatty’s plan would create. (Beatty privately dismissed Flavelle’s business philosophy, which stressed the role of competition, as “the Flavelle school of ruthless business brutality.” ) Commissioner Webster was somewhat less worried about monopoly.

“The fear of monopoly did not terrify me, as it so strongly impressed Sir Joseph,” he wrote to Meighen in November 1932, “nor did I shrink from submitting the responsibility of conducting so great an undertaking to a single management.” Beatty did not try to hide the monopoly implications of his plan but rather defended the principle of monopoly itself, arguing that “some of the most efficient, most widely administered and most publicspirited public corporations on this continent are monopolies.” “They are in the main,” he continued, “successful, efficient and progressive, and they are administered by men of high character and great ability.” For Beatty, who believed business enterprise to be a form of public service, the most important factor was the quality of business leadership. Since management would be composed of “business statesmen of the highest type,” he did not believe the “question of autocracy” could arise.

Beatty appeared before the commission again on 19 February and presented a memorandum outlining the benefits of unification, in which he reiterated the need to impose businesslike management over the country’s railways. Asked by commissioner Loree whether a board of directors consisting of CPR and government representatives might successfully manage a unified system, Beatty foresaw two problems. First, the government would be exercising too much active influence in railway matters; second, government involvement would render “doubtful the type [of individuals] that would be selected for appointment to the Board.” Such an arrangement could only be successful if independence from the government were established; Beatty suggested an independent tribunal might select government representatives from “the Canadian Bankers Association, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and a Judge of the Supreme Court” and be “certain to get the type of men whose ability would justify the selection.”

Beatty’s formulations were latently elitist and antidemocratic: “quality” leadership was presumed to reside in the upper echelons of the business community, and management of the railway system could not be entrusted to any other segment of the population – indeed, it was necessary to insulate such leadership from the pressures of popular opinion. According to Beatty’s beliefs, efficient railway policy required that it not be formulated outside the meritocratic order that decided success or failure in private enterprise; “political” interference was unacceptable. Beatty was not unique in this mindset; the commission’s report echoed similar sentiments.

The commission’s proceedings prefaced Thornton’s final fall from grace in public life. Thornton had been divorced and quickly remarried (to a much younger woman) several years earlier, and he was known to enjoy nightlife. These were not important problems while the CNR was operating at a profit, but once that changed, Thornton’s personal life was conflated with his management style to devastating effect. He managed the railway the way he lived, his detractors claimed. Called once again before the House of Commons to testify, the gentlemanly decorum of the commission hearings evaporated, Thornton was subjected to a verbal assault by R.B. Hanson. Thornton’s public tarring eroded his political support in the House of Commons. Teetotaller, opposition leader, and political acrobat Mackenzie King acquiesced to this portrayal of Thornton, writing in his diary: “The truth is Thornton has not measured up of late, has drunk too much – far too self-indulgent.” Thornton would later write to King that he had departed from Ottawa under the auspices of a “reign of terror,” “always ‘shadowed’ by a detective.” “The Canadian Pacific Ry. has … exercised a sinister influence in Canadian politics – It has never hesitated at bribing + corruption in all its forms and it represents the worst type of predatory capitalism,” Thornton wrote to King the following day. “It has ruined men.” Undoubtedly, Thornton counted himself among the “ruined men”: “I feel fairly certain I might have remained where I was had I cared to go along with Beatty.”

- Don Nerbas, Dominion of Capital: The Politics of Big Business and the Crisis of the Canadian Bourgeoisie, 1914-1947. University of Toronto Press, 2013. p. 125-133.

#canadian pacific railways #canadian national railways #railway construction #track laying #train stations #railway capitalism #great depression in canada #the pressures of the great depression #capitalism in crisis #capitalism in canada #railway company #royal commission #canadian politics #canadian elite #canadian history #dominion of capital #mackenzie king #r. b. bennett

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whoxohm · 2 months

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#The Cornucopia Prism Society (IDEAL)

#The BLUTOPIA POWER PAC

# The Passenger Pigeon Party. (Now inc)

www.WHOXOHM.com

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zvaigzdelasas · 4 days

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A North Korean propaganda song extolling Kim Jong Un as “a great leader and a friendly parent” has gone viral on TikTok, with mashups and dances racking up millions of views, leading to South Korea banning the tune due to “psychological warfare.”

Seoul’s media regulator on Monday announced it was blocking access to versions of “Friendly Father,” the cheery propaganda hit that became an unlikely social media sensation.

The song was unveiled in April during a nighttime concert to mark the completion of a housing project in the capital Pyongyang, according to North Korean state-run Korean Central News Agency.

Its lyrics praise Kim [...] as “a great leader and a friendly parent,” and the music video depicts North Koreans enthusiastically belting out the orchestral song proclaiming that Kim “takes care of us with affection.”[...]

The song went viral after content creators around the world used it to make their own edits of the music video adding dances and unserious captions to their own short one-minute clips on the platform, garnering over 2 million views.

“This isn’t Gen Z suddenly declaring allegiance for the regime,” said Alexandra Leonzini, a Cambridge University scholar conducting research on North Korean music.

“They’re laughing at the regime not with the regime.”

Nonetheless, South Korean security officials came down on the parodies. The Korea Communications Standards Commission decided to block 29 videos of the song, following a request from Seoul’s National Intelligence Service. But some versions of the song on YouTube were still accessible to users in South Korea as of Wednesday.[...]

The ban was not a surprise, as the country’s National Security Act blocks access to North Korean government websites and media, restricting exposure to Kim’s autocratic regime and penalizing behaviors promoting its authoritarian and nuclear-armed neighbor.

22 May 24

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dinosaurnews · 11 months

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“…at a news conference at the Prince George’s County park Wednesday, officials and paleontologists announced the April discovery of the largest theropod fossil in eastern North America, a three-foot-long shin bone they hypothesize is from Acrocanthosaurus, a spiny, sharp-toothed carnivore from the Early Cretaceous period — about 38 feet long.

The discovery of additional dinosaur fossils soon followed, a trove of prehistory wrested from ironstone and clay. More than 100 fossils, estimated to be 115 million years old, have been found so far in a dinosaur bone bed along what had once been a river. A bone bed is the term paleontologists use to describe a concentration of bones of one or more species within a geologic layer.  The finding ‘marks a fundamental, extraordinary milestone in the field of paleontology and opens a window into our ancient world and to the species that once roamed this land,’ Peter A. Shapiro, chairman of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, said at a news conference.”

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mapsontheweb · 6 months

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Australian Indigenous Voice Referendum, 2023.

On 14 October 2023, a referendum was held to establish the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, also referred to as the First Nations Voice, the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, or just the Voice.

The Voice, a proposed amendment to the Australian Constitution, would establish a federal advisory body to represent the views of Australia’s Indigenous communities and would be a way to address the disadvantages faced by these communities. However, the Voice proposal failed to receive the double majority required by the Australian Constitution because it was rejected both nationally and by the majority in each state. The only state or territory with a majority of “yes” votes was the Australian Capital Territory. Areas with a significant Indigenous Australian population also overwhelmingly voted in favour.

Sources:

“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.” National Indigenous Australians Agency. 2023.

Advisory Report on the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice). May 2023.

Australian Electoral Commission. 31 October 2023.

by anthro.atlas

#maps #anthro.atlas #igsourced #australia #referendums #2023 #indigenous

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Tiktok's enshittification

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon’s customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we’d have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year’s worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don’t search anywhere else.

That tempted in lots of business customers — Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the “everything store” it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.

This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.

That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company’s $31b “advertising” program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

Searching Amazon doesn’t produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon’s “Most Favored Nation” requirement sellers means that they can’t sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for “cat bed” are 50% ads.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

This is why — as Cat Valente wrote in her magesterial pre-Christmas essay — platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things”:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: it showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you’d have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can’t agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it.

Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn’t follow. At first, it was media companies, who Facebook preferentially crammed down its users’ throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines and blogs.

Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook’s walled garden.

This made publications truly dependent on Facebook — their readers no longer visited the publications’ websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to “boost” their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.

Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of nonconsensually harvested personal data they’d stolen from you.

Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook’s cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you’re a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It’s a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a “pivot to video” based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

But Facebook has a new pitch. It claims to be called Meta, and it has demanded that we live out the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters.

It has promised companies that make apps for this metaverse that it won’t rug them the way it did the publishers on the old Facebook. It remains to be seen whether they’ll get any takers. As Mark Zuckerberg once candidly confessed to a peer, marvelling at all of his fellow Harvard students who sent their personal information to his new website “TheFacebook”:

> I don’t know why.

> They “trust me”

> Dumb fucks.

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time and energy into:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/11/coercion-v-cooperation/#the-machine-is-listening

Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won’t tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you’d figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

The situation is so dire that organizations like Tracking Exposed have enlisted an human army of volunteers and a robot army of headless browsers to try to unwind the logic behind the arbitrary machine judgments of The Algorithm, both to give users the option to tune the recommendations they receive, and to help creators avoid the wage theft that comes from being shadow banned:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform’s priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you’ll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he’d carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers — as a convincer in a “Big Store” con, a way to rope in other suckers who’ll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Which brings me to Tiktok. Tiktok is many different things, including “a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones.”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-fragments-of-media-you-consume

But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, Tiktok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1093882880

By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, Tiktok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like Youtube and Instagram. Now that Tiktok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to Youtube and Insta.

Yesterday, Forbes’s Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of Bytedance, Tiktok’s parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a “heating tool” that Tiktok employees use push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers’ feeds:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

These videos go into Tiktok users’ ForYou feeds, which Tiktok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos “ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app.” In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that Tiktok thinks will add value to your experience — the rest of the time, it’s full of videos that Tiktok has inserted in order to make creators think that Tiktok is a great place to reach an audience.

“Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships — at the expense of others with whom it has not.”

In other words, Tiktok is handing out giant teddy bears.

But Tiktok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. Tiktok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. Tiktok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.

“Monetize” is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an “Attention Economy.” You can’t use attention as a medium of exchange. You can’t use it as a store of value. You can’t use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with “fiat” currency in exchange for it. You have to “monetize” it — that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and “projects” handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves.

But deception only produces so much “liquidity provision.” Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get lots of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion. Think of how US companies ended the defined benefits pension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based 401(k) pensions that forced you to gamble your savings in a rigged casino, making you the sucker at the table, ripe for the picking:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money.

The next phase of crypto coercion was Web3: converting the web into a series of tollbooths that you could only pass through by trading real money for fake crypto money. The internet is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, a prerequisite for full participation in employment, education, family life, health, politics, civics, even romance. By holding all those things to ransom behind crypto tollbooths, the hodlers hoped to convert their tokens to real money:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by “heating” the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that Tiktok’s format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for Tiktok to circulate on rival platforms).

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: Tiktok will withdraw the “heating” that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven’t asked to see their videos. Tiktok is performing a delicate dance here: there’s only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users’ feeds, and Tiktok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.

Tiktok won’t just starve performers of the “free” attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing.

This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its “monetization” changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands.

I just handed Twitter $8 for Twitter Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money. This is the latest battle in one of the internet’s longest-simmering wars: the fight over end-to-end:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

In the beginning, there were Bellheads and Netheads. The Bellheads worked for big telcos, and they believed that all the value of the network rightly belonged to the carrier. If someone invented a new feature — say, Caller ID — it should only be rolled out in a way that allows the carrier to charge you every month for its use. This is Software-As-a-Service, Ma Bell style.

The Netheads, by contrast, believed that value should move to the edges of the network — spread out, pluralized. In theory, Compuserve could have “monetized” its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the “From:” line on email before you opened the message — charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening — but they didn’t.

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability). Some wanted this because they believed that the net would someday be woven into the world, and they didn’t want to live in a world of rent-seeking landlords. Others were true believers in market competition as a source of innovation. Some believed both things. Either way, they saw the risk of network capture, the drive to monetization through trickery and coercion, and they wanted to head it off.

They conceived of the end-to-end principle: the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers’ messages would be delivered to willing listeners’ end-points as quickly and reliably as they could be. That is, irrespective of whether a network operator could make money by sending you the data it wanted to receive, its duty would be to provide you with the data you wanted to see.

The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today. Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was “woke shadowbanning,” whereby the things you said wouldn’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter’s deep state didn’t like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them.

As I said at the start of this essay, enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism. It’s just too easy to turn the enshittification dial up to eleven. Twitter was able to fire the majority of its skilled staff and still crank the dial all the way over, even with a skeleton crew of desperate, demoralized H1B workers who are shackled to Twitter’s sinking ship by the threat of deportation.

The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: when Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure.

Twitter is not going to be a “protocol.” I’ll bet you a testicle¹ that projects like Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform, because if Bluesky were implemented and Twitter users could order their feeds for minimal enshittification and leave the service without sacrificing their social networks, it would kill the majority of Twitter’s “monetization” strategies.

¹Not one of mine.

An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed. The villagers of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks' violent raids and pogroms for years, until they were finally forced to flee to Krakow, New York and Chicago:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

For enshittification-addled companies, that balance is hard to strike. Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

With the market sewn up by a group of cozy monopolists, better alternatives don’t pop up and lure us away, and if they do, the monopolists just buy them out and integrate them into your enshittification strategies, like when Mark Zuckerberg noticed a mass exodus of Facebook users who were switching to Instagram, and so he bought Instagram. As Zuck says, “It is better to buy than to compete.”

This is the hidden dynamic behind the rise and fall of Amazon Smile, the program whereby Amazon gave a small amount of money to charities of your choice when you shopped there, but only if you used Amazon’s own search tool to locate the products you purchased. This provided an incentive for Amazon customers to use its own increasingly enshittified search, which it could cram full of products from sellers who coughed up payola, as well as its own lookalike products. The alternative was to use Google, whose search tool would send you directly to the product you were looking for, and then charge Amazon a commission for sending you to it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/comment/j4znb8y/

The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house. All its other successes were bought from other companies: video, docs, cloud, ads, mobile; while its own products are either flops like Google Video, clones (Gmail is a Hotmail clone), or adapted from other companies’ products, like Chrome.

Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s landmark 1998 paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/

Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today’s Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren’t good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.

Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees, and the company is in a full-blown “panic” over the rise of “AI” chatbots, and is making a full-court press for an AI-driven search tool — that is, a tool that won’t show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23563851/google-search-ai-chatbot-demo-chatgpt

Now, it’s possible to imagine that such a tool will produce good recommendations, like Tiktok’s pre-enshittified algorithm did. But it’s hard to see how Google will be able to design a non-enshittified chatbot front-end to search, given the strong incentives for product managers, executives, and shareholders to enshittify results to the precise threshold at which users are nearly pissed off enough to leave, but not quite.

Even if it manages the trick, this-almost-but-not-quite-unusuable equilibrium is fragile. Any exogenous shock — a new competitor like Tiktok that penetrates the anticompetitive “moats and walls” of Big Tech, a privacy scandal, a worker uprising — can send it into wild oscillations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other:

https://doctorow.medium.com/end-to-end-d6046dca366f

And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit — the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

The Netheads were right: technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom — our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.

For many years, even Tiktok’s critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn’t resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.

It's too late to save Tiktok. Now that it has been infected by enshittifcation, the only thing left is to kill it with fire.

[Image ID: Hansel and Gretel in front of the witch's candy house. Hansel and Gretel have been replaced with line-drawings of influencers, taking selfies of themselves with the candy house. In front of the candy house stands a portly man in a business suit; his head is a sack of money with a dollar-sign on it. He wears a crooked witch's hat. The cottage has the Tiktok logo on it.]

#pluralistic #Lauren Leffer #tiktok #surplus allocation #fauximation #potemkin ai #the algorithm #creative labor #algorithms exposed #enshittification #bytedance #giant teddy bears #convincers #big store con #pivot to video #scissor bucket #Emily Baker-White

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robertreich · 2 years

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youtube

Is Crypto Really Going To Crash? (Yes)

Crypto is going to crash and could take your savings with it.

In June 2022, Bitcoin dropped over 30 percent to its lowest values since December 2020, and Ethereum, the second-most valuable cryptocurrency, fell about 35 percent. TerraUSD, a so-called “stablecoin,” also collapsed when its underlying cryptocurrency LUNA lost 97 percent of its value in just 24 hours, apparently destroying some investors’ life savings. The implosion helped trigger a crypto meltdown that erased $300 billion in value across the market.

As cryptocurrency prices plummeted, Celsius Network — an experimental cryptocurrency lender — announced it was freezing withdrawals “due to extreme market conditions.”

These crypto crashes and freezes have fueled worries that the complex crypto banking and lending system is on the brink of ruin.

But this crash shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the industry – or anyone who remembers the financial crashes of 1929 and 2008.

Let me explain.

In the murky world of crypto decentralized finance, known as DeFi, it’s hard to understand who provides money for loans, where the money flows, or how easy it is to trigger currency meltdowns.

There are no standards for issues of custody, risk management, or capital reserves. There are no transparency requirements. Investors often don’t know how their money is being handled. Deposits are not insured.

It’s a Ponzi scheme. Like all Ponzi schemes, getting rich depends on how many other investors follow you into it – until somebody’s left holding the worthless crypto coin.

Why isn’t this market regulated? Follow the money.

The crypto industry is pouring huge amounts into political campaigns. It has hired scores of former government officials and regulators to lobby on its behalf — including three former chairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission, three former chairs of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, three former U.S. senators, and even former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

In the past, cryptocurrencies kept rising by attracting new investors and big Wall Street money, along with celebrity endorsements. But all Ponzi schemes topple eventually – just like the Wild West finances of the 1920s did.

Back then, Americans had been getting rich by speculating on shares of stock, as other investors followed them into these risky assets — pushing their values ever upwards. When the toppling occurred in 1929, it plunged the nation and the world into the Great Depression.

That crash resulted in the Glass-Steagall Act, signed into law by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. Glass-Steagall separated commercial banking from investment banking, putting an end to the giant Ponzi scheme that had overtaken the American economy and led to the Great Crash of 1929.

It took a full generation to forget that crash and allow the forces that caused it to repeat their havoc.

By the mid-1980s, as the stock market soared, speculators noticed they could make even more money if they gambled with other people’s money, as speculators did in the 1920s. They pushed Congress to deregulate Wall Street, arguing that the United States financial sector would otherwise lose its competitive standing internationally.

The final blow was in 1999, when the Clinton administration succumbed to intensive lobbying and ditched what remained of Glass-Steagall. With its repeal, American finance once again became a betting parlor.

Inevitably, Wall Street suffered another near-death experience when its Ponzi schemes began toppling in 2008, just as they had in 1929. While the U.S. government bailed out the biggest banks and financial institutions, millions of Americans lost their jobs, their savings, and their homes – but only a single banking executive went to jail. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a new but watered-down version of Glass-Steagall was enacted — the Dodd-Frank Act.

Which brings us — nearly a century after Glass-Steagall — to today’s crypto crash.

If we should have learned anything from the crashes of 1929 and 2008, it’s that regulation of financial markets is essential. Otherwise they turn into Ponzi schemes — leaving small investors with nothing and endangering the entire economy.

It’s time for the Biden administration and Congress to end the crypto Ponzi scheme. In the meantime, share this video so your friends and family don’t fall for it.

#crypto #fraud #Ponzi #Glass-Steagall #finance #regulation #video #videos

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yuyubeans · 7 days

Text

my muse

pairing: painter!reader x nakedmuse!san

genre: fluff

wc: ??

everyone knows it, everyone hates it, a broke artist, and guess what? you just won the lottery!!! (screaming in the background)

finding your general insurance from human form, loving when you got commisions, cos yk, who doesn't love capitalism (me), when you received a unique commission from a mysterious patrion named San, who requested a portrait unlike any other u

you'd ever done. paying for being drawn in the rawest form, completely nude.

him coming to your house on his birthday, stripping off his clothes and laying on your bed, beginning to sketch, realizing as you drew his lower half that he wasn't just another subject but your muse. With each movement of your pencil as you looked at his delicate form, gently licking your lips exploring the subtle curves and contours of his body

as your progressed, a connection blossomed between you and San, moving past the wall between artist and muse. Uncovering the art he was past paper.

the final portrait emerged, more than just a drawing of his naked body, it was almost proof of his vulnerability, or strength in it, itself. it was a mirror, reflecting his inner most beauty and the resilience he held. forever changed in the way this simple $30 changed your life and his forever

a/c: average right leaning person after I don't like capitalism:

of what nation are you a citizen? are you a nation of any other nation? have you ever applied for Chinese citizenship? do you have an american passport? do you have any other passports from any other nation/s? both your wife an children are american citizens, have you ever applied for american citizenship? have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party? have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?

#choi san #san #san x reader #san x #san smut #choi san smut #choi san x reader #choi san x y/n #choi san x you #ateez san #ateez fanfiction #ateez fluff #ateez #ateez angst #ateez atiny

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allthecanadianpolitics · 7 months

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government unveiled details of its plan to cut $500 million from government spending Thursday — and not all departments are going to be feeling the same impacts. While some agencies like the Canadian Space Agency and the Invest in Canada Hub will see more than one per cent of their spending frozen and returned to government coffers, 61 departments and agencies don't appear on the list of government bodies taking cuts. The government said the cost-cutting initiative excluded agents of Parliament and small organizations with budgets under $25 million a year. But many of those not included on the list of organizations affected — such as the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the National Capital Commission — have budgets much higher than $25 million.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

#austerity #justin trudeau #cdnpoli #canada #canadian politics #canadian news #LPC #liberal party of canada

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fatehbaz · 7 months

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[In] the making and unmaking of amphibious urban modernity in Recife in the Northeast of Brazil [...] the transformation of the city was predicated on [...] [a] notion of whiteness that required the enclosure of wet, amphibious space to make dry land. [...] Racialised groups – of black, indigenous, and mixed heritages – and the houses, marshlands, and mangroves where they lived, were subject to eradication [...]. [F]rom the 1920s to 1950s, during the rise to hegemony in Brazil of [a form of nationalism,] [...] [the] idea's heartland [was] the Northeast. This period gave birth to Brazilian urban modernity [...]. [F]orests, wetness, and the spectre of commonly held land were understood as threats to whiteness and its self-association with order, purity [...]. To answer the question of why the racial division of nature was so important, [...] turn to the hygienic, boundary-making practices of the Brazilian Estado Novo [...] [and its] eugenic visions [...].

Nature is deeply imbricated in the processes of white supremacy [...]. Recife is one of the largest cities in Brazil, and one of the oldest. [...] Recife is also a centre of Brazilian black culture [...]. One of the key sites in Brazil's slave and sugar trades [...], the city was [...] [a] hub. Many of these people lived in what came to be called mocambos, a word that designated an informal dwelling, but came to mean much more. The population of the mocambos included not only black Brazilians, but sertanejos from the backlands, black and indigenous caboclos, and others [...]. Enclosure was the crucial mechanism of this division.

---

The Recifense geographer Josué de Castro contended that the mangroves were a kind of commons [...]. Zélia de Oliveira Gominho (2012) characterises the city's transformation [from 1920 to 1950] through the oscillation between its twin faces of “mucambópolis” and Veneza Americana (the Venice of the Americas). [...]

Mocambos were seen as [...] the place where exploited labour was kept out of sight. [...] They were also [...] the inheritance [...] of the quilombo - the community of escaped slaves. [...]

Gilberto Freyre was perhaps the single most influential figure in producing this defining national myth in Brazil. In 1936, he wrote a book on the Mucambos do Nordeste [...]. Josué de Castro wrote very differently about the mangroves and mocambos. [...] He analysed Recife as “amphibious”: built half in and half out of the water [...]. When Josué de Castro [...] [wrote] in the early 1930s, the city was in the midst of political turbulence. As land values increased, the city expanded, and [...] [oppressive] politics intensified [...].

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With the installment of the [...] [oppressive] Estado Novo regime in 1937, and its project of creating a “new man,” hygienist modernisation gathered speed. In July 1939, the proto-fascist administration [...] of Agamenon Magalhães, put in place by Getúlio Vargas' repressive Estado Novo, launched the Liga Social Contra o Mocambo (Social League Against the Mocambo, LSCM). The League emerged out of a tellingly named “Crusade” against the mocambos. [...]

Mocambos were characterised as repellent, unhygienic, and dangerous: “the mocambo which repels. The mocambo which is the tomb of a race … a sombre landscape of human misery … which mutilates human energy and annuls work [...].

The LSCM couched its civilisational, modernising mission in the conjuncture of techno-scientific discourses of medicine and planning with clear eugenic tones [...]. [T]he LSCM commissioned a fresh census of the 45,000 mocambos in the city. They brought the mocambos/mangroves into being as objects of knowledge on behalf of the economic elite and local, national, and international capital. In the 1923 census in Recife, “of 39,026 dwellings surveyed, 51.1% were considered ‘deficient’ mocambos.” [...]

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These were the decades of the embranquecimento of the Brazilian population through public policies of immigration, miscegenation, and sterilisation [...]. This white supremacist ideology was inseparably a politics of nature. Magalhães wrote:

The idle life, the life that the income of the mocambos provides, is a life without restlessness and without greatness. It is a life of stagnant water. … [that] generates in its breast the venom of larvae, which are the enemies of life. Enemies of life, as are the mocambos and the sub-soil of cities, where the polluted waters contaminate pure waters, which come from the deepest layers of the earth. (Magalhães, 1939c, n.p.)

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Attempts to “cleanse” the city functioned through a distinct process: aterramento, the making of land. [...]

Or as 1990s mangue beat [mangrove beat] musicians [...] put it, “the fastest way also to obstruct and evacuate the soul of a city like Recife is to kill its rivers and fill up its estuaries” [...]. This racial division of nature - in alliance with, bound up with, a racial division of space - facilitated the production of spacialised white supremacy.

---

All above text by: Archie Davies. "The racial division of nature: Making land in Recife". Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Volume 46, Issue 2, pp. 270-283. First published 29 November 2020. [Bold emphasis and paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for teaching, commentary, criticism purposes.]

#forests #abolition #imperial #colonial #ecology #caribbean #landscape #temporality #indigenous #multispecies #wetlands #temporal #haunted #carceral #mangroves

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carlocarrasco · 2 months

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Only cash and manager’s checks will be accepted by Muntinlupa Treasurer’s Office

Recently in the progressive City of Muntinlupa, the City Government announced that its Treasurer’s Office will no longer accept personal and company checks as forms of payment, according to a Manila Bulletin news report. This effectively means that only cash and manager’s checks will be accepted by the said office on-site (over the counter). To put things in perspective, posted below is an…

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 1 year

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"STREET RAILWAY OFFICIALS WHO SOME DAY MAY BE CITY OFFICIALS," Toronto Star. April 21, 1913. Page 2. ---- MR. MS CULLOCH, SUPT.

MR. SMITH, COMPTROLLER.

MR GUNN, SUPT.

MR MCRAE., MASTER MECHANIC.

MR. FORREST, CLAIMS AGENT.

The above are photographs of officials in the service of the Toronto Railway Company, who may be taken over by the city should the negotiations now pending result in the acquisition of the railways by the city. Superintendent John McCulloch has for years been the right-hand man of General Manager Fleming in the operation of the car lines. Superintendent Jas. Gunn has probably the longest record of anyone in the service. Comptroller J. M. Smith has charge of the department handling the finance and banking. Mr. W. R. McRae is in charge of the construction and repair shops, and. Mr. J. H. Forrest attends to all claims for damages.

#toronto #toronto street railways #municipal politics #municipal government #nationalization #toronto transit commission #street railways #mass transit #transit capitalism #railway capitalism

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loneberry · 9 months

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September 11, 1973: On the 50th Anniversary of the Coup in Chile

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état in Chile, when a fascist junta led by dictator Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. For those of us who are on the left, the story should be familiar by now: Allende had charted a ‘Chilean way to socialism' ("La vía chilena al socialismo") quite distinct from the Soviet Union and communist China, a peaceful path to socialism that was fundamentally anti-authoritarian, combining worker power with respect for civil liberties, freedom of the press, and a principled commitment to democratic process. For leftists who had become disillusioned with the Soviet drift into authoritarianism, Chile was a bright spot on an otherwise gloomy Cold War map.

What happened in Chile was one of the darkest chapters in the history of US interventionism. In August 1970, Henry Kissinger, who was then Nixon’s national security adviser, commissioned a study on the consequences of a possible Allende victory in the upcoming Chilean presidential election. Kissinger, Nixon, and the CIA—all under the spell of Cold War derangement syndrome—determined the US should pursue a policy of blocking the ascent of Allende, lest a socialist Chile generate a “domino effect” in the region.

When Allende won the presidency, the US did everything in their power to destroy his government: they meddled in Chilean elections, leveraged their control of the international financial system to destroy the economy of Chile (which they also did through an economic boycott), and sowed social chaos through sponsoring terrorism and a shutdown of the transportation sector, bringing the country to the brink of civil war. Particularly infuriating to the Americans was Allende’s nationalization of the copper mining industry, which was around 70% of Chile’s economy at the time and was controlled by US mining companies like Anaconda, Kennecott and the Cerro Corporation. When the CIA’s campaign of sabotage failed to destroy the socialist experiment in Chile, they resorted to assisting general Augusto Pinochet's plot to overthrow the democratically elected government. What followed was a gruesome campaign of repression against workers, leftists, poets, activists, students, and ordinary Chileans—stadiums were turned into concentration camps where supporters of Allende’s Popular Unity government were tortured and murdered. During Pinochet’s 17-year reign of terror, 3,200 people were executed and 40,000 people were detained, tortured, or disappeared, 1,469 of whom remain unaccounted for. Chile was then used as a laboratory for neoliberal economic policies, where the Chicago boys and their ilk tested out their terrible ideas on a population forced to live under a military dictatorship.

It shatters my heart, thinking about this history. I feel a personal attachment to Chile, not only because my partner is Chilean (his father left during the dictatorship), but because I’ve always considered Chile to be a world capital of poetry and anti-authoritarian leftism. The filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky asks, “In how many countries does a real poetic atmosphere exist? Without a doubt, ancient China was a land of poetry. But I think, in the 1950s in Chile, we lived poetically like in no other country in the world.” (Poetry left China long ago — oh how I wish I’d been around to witness the poetic flowering of the Tang era!) Chile has one of the greatest literary traditions of the twentieth century, producing such giants as Bolaño and Neruda, and more recently, Cecilia Vicuña and Raúl Zurita, among others.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the coup, the Harvard Film Archive has been screening Patricio Guzmán’s magisterial trilogy, The Battle of Chile, along with a program of Chilean cinema. I watched part I and II the last two nights and will watch part III tonight. It’s no secret that I am a huge fan of Guzmán’s work, and even quoted his beautiful film Nostalgia for the Light in the conclusion of my book Carceral Capitalism, when I wrote about the Chilean political prisoners who studied astronomy while incarcerated in the Atacama Desert. Bless Patricio Guzmán. This man has devoted his life and filmmaking career to the excavation of the Chilean soul.

Parts I and II utterly destroyed me. I left the theater last night shaken to my core, my face covered in tears.

The films are all the more remarkable when you consider it was made by a scrappy team of six people using film stock provided by the great documentarian Chris Marker. After the coup, four of the filmmakers were arrested. The footage was smuggled out of Chile and the exiled filmmakers completed the films in Cuba. Sadly, in 1974, the Pinochet regime disappeared cameraman Jorge Müller Silva, who is assumed dead.

It’s one thing to know the macro-story of what happened in Chile and quite another to see the view from the ground: the footage of the upswell of support for radical transformation, the marches, the street battles, the internal debates on the left about how to stop the fascist creep, the descent into chaos, the face of the military officer as he aims his pistol at the Argentine cameraman Leonard Hendrickson during the failed putsch of June 1973 (an ominous prelude to the September coup), the audio recordings of Allende on the morning of September 11, the bombing of Palacio de La Moneda—the military is closing in. Allende is dead. The crumbling edifice of the presidential palace becomes the rubble of revolutionary dreams—the bombs, a dirge for what was never even given a chance to live.

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