Volunteer for town planning commission or whatever advisory group has an open spot in your town or county.
Run for board seat on town council. Easier is to apply for seat on local credit union board of directors.
Show up and be friendly and learn. Keep your world-changing ideas to yourself for a couple years while you learn.
Approval voting is the best simple-next-step reform.
"During the 20th century, and up to this day, workers in large capitalist oligopolistic firms (like General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, or General Motors) received approximately 80% of the company’s income. Big Tech’s workers do not even collect 1% of their employer’s revenues. This is because paid labour performs only a fraction of the work that Big Tech benefits from. Who performs the bulk of the work? Most of the rest of us! For the first time in history, almost everyone produces for free (often enthusiastically), adding to Big Tech’s capital stock (that is what it means to upload stuff on Facebook or move around while linked to Google Maps). And, moreover, this capital takes a new, far more powerful form"
What am I supposed to make of the rest of the argument when it’s predicated on a number that is probably off by 50x?
They said WORKERS not EMPLOYEES
Sure, Google puts a lot of its revenue to its EMPLOYEES. But most of the WORK is done by the rest of the public giving Google all the content and data via the way the products utilize the searching and driving around and so on.
The claim is not what's internal to Google's business accounting. The claim is that they have externalized almost all the work to the unpaid users of the systems who actually produce the value overall.
(the quote is a tad confusing because they said "employer's revenues", that seems like an error in speaking/writing; the next part makes it clear what they are aiming to say)
> paid labour performs only a fraction of the work that Big Tech benefits from
The fact that people participate in global location networks, rely on other parties for their security and so on, is contingent; it might change (I'm ever the optimist).
It's perfectly possible to simply not participate in techno-serfdom. Unless you're professionally dependent on TwitFace.
This "relevant" and "competitors" business seems to be about email marketing. There is no entitlement to use other people's mailservers and networks for your own private purposes.
This thread sounds like something from NANAE, around 2000AD.
Varoufakis assumes the current world system will continue to apply but on the scale of human history the current world system is a novelty and there is no reason to expect it to be stable in the long term.
True, the current system needs to create money at a whim so it doesn't want to bitcoin to flourish. It also needs to print money so it can't exist if bitcoin flourishes.
> I consider blockchain, and Ethereum-style mechanisms, as technologies that will prove extremely useful once private property in the means of production ends. But, on their own, these technologies will not liberate us from the extractive power of the few.
It's always surprising to me that so few people seem to notice that tech platforms, where a lot of human activity is organized on now, to a large extent have completely left behind market mechanisms, instead relying on algorithmic prediction and planning, and replacing profit generation with financialization by either the state or a sort of aristocracy.
I think this is directly visible in the different generations of tech companies. Whereas Apple and Microsoft started out as companies that relied on selling units of products at a surplus for profit and had to pay labour expenses in the form of wages to a large base of salaried employees, the modern VC funded generation of platform firms does no such thing, rather you have VC investors finance the activity of platforms who don't generate profits at times for decades, and derive value directly from the experience of their users outside of any exchange of money, and the value is largely being generated by an unpaid base of workers who are not even in any employment relationship.
"When ‘Bitcoin maximalists’, as you call them, wax lyrical about the inability to print money (and celebrate this inability as Bitcoin’s feature, rather than its bug), they are being terribly unoriginal – banal, I dare say. Capitalism nearly died in 1929, and tens of millions did die in the war that ensued, because of this toxic fallacy that underpinned the Gold Standard then and Bitcoin now. Which fallacy? The fallacy of composition, as John Maynard Keynes called it.
Its essence is a tendency to extrapolate from the personal realm to the macroeconomic one. To say that if something is good for me – if a practice is sound at the level of my family, business, etc. – it must also be good for the state, government, humanity at large"
""We seem to have forgotten how Marx and Engels had the nous and the ability, on the one hand, to admire and celebrate the technological and scientific wonders of their era and, on the other hand, grasp that these potentially liberating technologies were bound to enslave the many if they became instrumentalised by the very few. The two Germans believed in the emancipatory potential of the steam engine and of electromagnetism. But, they never believed that society would be liberated by the steam engine and/or electromagnetism. Liberation required a political movement that first overthrows the bourgeoisie and only then presses these magnificent technologies into the service of the many. This seems to me an excellent way of approaching today’s potentially liberating technologies, including blockchain"
I've seen the Fed and Congress have a gun to their heads, and now the Wall Street gang, and the Tech Bros have the world held hostage. One can only hope that this hostage negotiation ends better than it did last time in 1929.
