Side View: God bless capitalism!

GOD BLESS CAPITALISM AND ALL WHO SALE IN HER

While everyone wants to reduce the size of Facebook, it’s been on a buying spree to grow its way into the “metaverse”. A guide to the trust-busting bills currently before the US Congress that could start the break-up of big tech. Irresistible hype meets immoveable propaganda: what if a quarter of all Bitcoins could be stolen in a single attack? That’s one scenario that could occur when one relentlessly hyped technology — quantum computing — meets another — blockchain (gamechanger! etc).

Jobs boom for robots. “Following your passion” is a recipe for low pay and exploitation. Better to work less for more money. And… some particularly impressive shit from Washington DC.

INSERT COP-RELATED PUN *HERE*

It’s official: COP26 leaves us on track to 2.4 degrees warming. Fossil fuel companies are angry at the media for pointing out that carbon offsets are a scam. And they’re not afraid to show it! Following on from my recent Crikey piece on Greenpeace’s research on Australian climate aid, it’s not clear how $80 billion in climate aid was spent in 2019. While global emissions fell in 2020, in Brazil they rose due to deforestation.

THE DYSTOPIA GAZETTE

Long-term Crikey readers, if they cared sufficiently, might recall that a decade or so ago I was a rather naive spruiker for the connective possibilities of the internet and social media, with the idea that, while it would help amplify some of the negative aspects of human interaction, it would also enable the positive and that would be a good thing.

Pretty much ever since I’ve been on a long, long slide away from that sunny optimism to the point where I see the internet pretty much as a hellscape littered with the smoking ruins of our privacy, our freedom from government and corporate surveillance, our attention spans and good taste and judgment. I suspect (on a good day) about one-third of that is growing old white male grumpiness and Get Off My Lawnery, but it’s increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that the bad guys have won and, well, we just have to lump it.

Why have I introduced this week’s internet news with such a lament? No reason especially — so herewith:

A new report has chapter and verse on the boom in online surveillance tools being sold by Western companies. An outbreak of TikTok Tourette’s? Samsung is forcing owners of its new TVs to permanently endure advertising built into the display. When users complained, it responded that people actually liked it. Think that’s bad? Meet the television manufacturer that makes more money spying on people who buy its TVs than it does from TVs.

Oh but wait, there’s more. The new cryptocurrency that’s yours as long as you offer it your irises. What kind of people are more likely to share fake news? From the What Can Go Wrong? files: pharmaceutical companies’ lax attitude to cybersecurity. Online business is booming for organised crime in Europe. And how attempts to “inoculate” people against disinformation and conspiracy theories might simply be the same phenomenon that has given rise to it all in the first place.

CORRUPTION

How corrupt is the British government? That’s a question increasingly being asked under Boris Johnson (not that Australians can talk, given the corruption of the Morrison government). The Byline Times has a long list that proves Johnson’s denial of corruption wrong. Evangelicalism in the United States has become a commodity, not a community, two pastors write. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and its appalling treatment of rape victims. Where’s inflation coming from? Well there are supply chain problems and worker shortages, but the main cause is a murderous religious zealot in Saudi Arabia having a tanty because Joe Biden has snubbed him. And why are German authorities only now bringing prosecutions against very elderly concentration camp workers?

FINALLY

In a world where time goes backwards and forwards… Daylight Saving: The Movie. Serious scientific question: what would happen to dogs without humans? (I think we know what would happen with cats if humans disappeared). And Kabosu of Dogecoin fame is 16!