Cory Doctrow - The Internet Con - How to Seize the Means of Computation

I really enjoy the way Cory Doctrow writes and puts forth his ideas. Many of them are quite complex and technical in their aims and design but I found this book to be an excellent introduction into both the solution and the problem caused by our modern big technology infrastructure. He's also no dogmatist and although we're on the same page politically, I can see how he would still be accessible to someone further to the right.

Erudite and clear. Sorry I'm writing the review on Amazon and Google, but as he points out in the book, the challenge of Big Tech is it forces you to use it if you want to be online.

https://craphound.com/category/internetcon/

Daniel Cohen · To Monopolise Our Ears: What Spotify Wants · LRB 4 May 2023

The inevitable fate of Spotify, as it careers towards revenue free bankruptcy is an interesting case in point about who is actually making money from the way in which our economy and society is established and evolves.

Spotify seemed to have been destroying the music establishment by subverting the process by which people obtained music, but instead if one analyses the real direction of travel, it appears much more to be the outrider of the very forces who had been impacted far more by the first forces of the internet, the record labels.

Really it was they who were hammered by file sharing rather than anyone else (including musicians themselves) and it is they who coopted the streaming services to effectively become extensions of the record labels and the music industry.  

Now Spotify , despite it's success, has realized the Faustian pact it made and as it desperately tries to extract something for itself from the shitty deal it entered into, it has realized all to late that if you are the company that fronts a service but someone else makes all the money, then it is not in your company where the value lies and where the real control lies. Control is power and it has been a long time since Spotify has been in control of its own destiny.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n09/daniel-cohen/to-monopolise-our-ears 

Adam Tooze - Chartbook #185 Inflation and distributional conflict - in 2023 not 1973! Also a response to the debate around that Blanchard thread.

Just got the latest Chartbook entry from Adam Tooze who is fast becoming my favourite economic commentator of all time. You can find him on substack here. Watching the whole debate in the finance world about what the path of interest rates will be or discussing whether inflation targets should be 2 or 4 percent strike me as akin to people shifting deck chairs on the deck of a sinking ship. None of these things ever did really make a difference. The "market crash" we witnessed last year was simply the removal of some of the froth through zero interest rates being unwound. There has been literally zero transmission between those changes and the real economy thus far.  We are just at the beginning of a tightening cycle in terms of it's real implications for the real economy. The whole thing is a sham. The real problem we have is that much of the worlds productive capacity is being driven by a system which focuses productive capacity on ridiculous things which are not doing anything to address any of the worlds challenges (weaponry, financialized investment services, technological developments to sell and market products, rockets to take us to Mars, murderous self driving cars). Fortunately large parts of the world have realized this and moved away from it. However this does not include the Anglo-speaking world who also love building weapons. So that will end well.