A few links that my friend Andy sent over - just capturing and dropping into here for now.
Cleveland Model: How Evergreen Cooperatives Are Building Community Wealth
ThePreston Model: How Preston in the UK Takes Lessons from Cleveland
Looking at Mondragon Through a Critical Lens
Daring Fireball: ‘Capitalists or Cronyists?’
”The thing to remember is that if allowed to fail, the cruise ships won’t sink to the bottom of the ocean. The jobs won’t disappear. The companies will go into bankruptcy, existing shareholder equity will get wiped out, and new ownership will take over. A bailout won’t rescue the industry or the jobs — it will rescue the shareholders.
John Gruber
💬 observations
physical-distancing
Nobody Should Adopt Social Distancing.
Now ‘Physical Distancing’, That’s Different. Definitely Do That.
I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘Social Distancing’. It’s wrong. We should not be Social Distancing. You know I am right. You aren’t doing it either. Nobody is doing it. Now ‘physical distancing’, that’s very different. Definitely do that.
Commerce Newsletter social distancing archive.pf.business“ The financial markets are rallying because they can ‘feel that companies are soon going to be back at work’. They should really be asking when will the buyers go back to buying. ”
John Philpin
Spotted this article:
Interoperability is the solution to the Zoom fiasco
If by interoperability he means that I can use any of;
To video call one or more people on any of;
… then I agree.
But I don’t think that IS what he meant.
🔍 business.of.tech
https-bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com-public-images-224f54ff-a688-4d08-b17c-8c1042b75ca5_1280x496
The Frontline Might Be Different.
But It Is Still A Frontline.
Words of wisdom from a captain on the frontlines. His role when I met him was very different to what I expect he’s doing now, but his skills and talents will have transferred to the new reality just fine.
Commerce Language Learning Newsletter Value Work archive.pf.business“Maybe that’s something else those big companies could learn from us. If they did, we wouldn’t charge. That’s another thing - we don’t charge to learn - learning makes us all better.”
Sylvester
”The group that might have “done a Radiohead” if they’d had a single like Creep. And if they’d been younger when they started making proper headway. And if they looked different. And if the industry was wired differently.”
Time Flies: The Story Of Porcupine Tree by Rich Wilson
🎵 💬 observations“Surveillance capitalism is no longer confined to the competitive dramas of the large internet companies, where behavioral futures markets were first aimed at online advertising. Its mechanisms and economic imperatives have become the default model for most internet-based businesses. Eventually, competitive pressure drove expansion into the offline world, where the same foundational mechanisms that expropriate your online browsing, likes, and clicks are trained on your run in the park, breakfast conversation, or hunt for a parking space. Today’s prediction products are traded in behavioral futures markets that extend beyond targeted online ads to many other sectors, including insurance, retail, finance, and an ever-widening range of goods and services companies determined to participate”
💬 📚 people.first“A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.”
💬 📚 🗂 people.firstThere’s an old poker adage - if you can’t work out who the sucker is at the table - you are the sucker.
A more recent twist - ’if you aren’t paying for the product - you are the product.
And now we have … “If you aren’t tracking people you are being tracked. And, if you are being tracked you are essentially a modern day serf.
A truly excellent article from Tim Wu in The New York Times
”For much of human history, what we now call “privacy” was better known as being rich. Privacy, like wealth, was something that most people had little or none of. Farmers, slaves and serfs resided in simple dwellings, usually with other people, sometimes even sharing space with animals. They had no expectation that a meaningful part of their lives would be unwatchable or otherwise off limits to others. That would have required homes with private rooms. And only rich people had those.”
and
”The forces of wealth creation no longer favor the expansion of privacy but work to undermine it. We have witnessed the rise of what I call “attention merchants” and what the sociologist Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” — the commodification of our personal data by tech giants like Facebook and Google and their imitators in telecommunications, electronics and other industries. We face a future in which active surveillance is such a routine part of business that for most people it is nearly inescapable. In this respect, we are on the road back to serfdom.
and
”The richest companies in the world now generate wealth by putting as many trackers, devices and screens inside our homes and as close to our bodies as possible. Accumulated data creates competitive advantage, and money can be made by consolidating everything that is known about an individual.”
and
💬 📚 people.first”To be truly effective, privacy laws must seek to change the incentives that foster gratuitous surveillance and the reckless accumulation of personalized data. We need strong bans, including those that prohibit companies from sharing their customers’ personal information. New rights for consumers have to be easy to understand (like the European Union’s “right to be forgotten”) and easy to use (like a national “do not track” list). And companies that repeatedly fail to protect sensitive data need to face dire consequences.”
“Each thermostat comes with a “privacy policy,” a “terms-of-service agreement,” and an “end-user licensing agreement.”
And that’s just the start … (My bold)
“A detailed analysis of Nest’s policies by two University of London scholars concluded that were one to enter into the Nest ecosystem of connected devices and apps, each with their own equally burdensome and audacious terms, the purchase of a single home thermostat would entail the need to review nearly a thousand so-called contracts.”
💬 📚 people.first
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