You can start your own game, but then you just have two games to deal with at once. We can’t stop playing the old game, because we are not the players. We are the pieces.
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That’s a corollary to “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.”
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How many political figures outside of Lessig has Boing Boing, as an entity, ever endorsed?
Traditionally, via revolution. But that seems to be out of favour these days.
The older I get, the more I think the Marxists were right (in their analysis, if not in their proposed solution – authoritarian state socialism brings a whole truckload of other problems). People ignore the inequities described in the article, or at most grumble about them, because they identify their interests with those of business and of the rich – a phenomenom Engels labelled false consciousness.
If you haven’t read The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, I strongly recommend you do so. Although clunky in places, it’s a heart-breaking depiction of how people will defend a system that’s beggaring them, even to the point of physically assaulting those who campaign for another way.
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More important for Trump and his ilk is the period from enforcement to release from a bankruptcy order and subsequent restrictions from as acting as a company director and how he might evade these.
I don’t think BB as a whole has endorsed Lessig either, have they?
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BTW:
Robert Reich: Why Hillary Clinton Is Wrong for Refusing To Resurrect Glass-Steagall
Resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act has become an important policy difference between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
link: Robert Reich: Why Hillary Clinton Is Wrong for Refusing To Resurrect Glass-Steagall - In These Times
Robert Reich: Bernie Sanders Tells the Truth
link: http://www.alternet.org/economy/robert-reich-bernie-sanders-tells-truth
4 Reasons Why The Wall Street Journal’s Attack on Bernie is Bogus
link: Robert Reich (4 Reasons Why The Wall Street Journal’s Attack on...)
Also, stunted libertarians hate Reich’s endorsements of Sanders, so it’s a good thing.
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Those who don’t study history are the first against the wall when the revolution comes
Amen to that.
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Shhhhhhh!! Don’t give 'em any new bad ideas.
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The Sherman Anti Trust act is still on the books. Too bad no one is going to use it anymore.
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Too late.
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I’m partial to this one:
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Not only in the movies.
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Reich left out the biggest rigged carnival game, Wall Street. Hedge Funds for the rich investors are nothing more than insider trading scams, and insider trading itself has recently been all but legalized. Because the rigged banks pay virtually no interest on savings everyone now has to invest their retirement money in the Market, where it gets scraped up by these carnies.
Everyone on the Street knew both Madoff and Steven Cohen were dirty, no one made those kind of returns legally. Madoff had a pyramid, lost it all, and is in the slammer. Cohen is sitting pretty on his ill gotten billions even after his company pled guilty to insider trading. And a recent appellate ruling “in order to sustain a conviction for insider trading, the Government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the tippee knew that an insider disclosed confidential information and that he did so in exchange for a personal benefit,” means it’s virtually impossible to convict someone on this now if they try to cover their tracks in the least.
No necessarily two, others can devise their own also. So it becomes a proliferation of games, an ecosystem.
Sounds like simple defeatism to me. There are risks to any choice, but the existence of these risks in no way means that we are not still free to choose.
Just like supermarkets can bank on masses of people buying a subsidized loss-leader product to kill the competition, those who desire to control society do something analogous with the various risks of society. If it seems less risky to get a job than to work for yourself or your friends, then many will do so. If it seems less risky to use a corrupt currency than to make your own, many will do that. If it seems more convenient to eat the exploitive TOS of your utility company, bank, or social media company than to negotiate better ones, then many will do so.
The trick is to know when you are being manipulated, and to create options for yourself. Even if you do what “they” expect, it is still better to do so knowingly and deliberately.
So, it is obviously easier to use the social constructs handed to us for oppressing ourselves. But it is still a choice, and choices are empowering. There are risks to doing things differently, as well as risks to going along with oppression. The way I see it, I have nothing to loose but my agency and my autonomy, so anything is better than signing those away.
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“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
John Steinbeck (disputed) (or maybe Ronald Wright from A Short History of Progress, either way it is true.)
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I like how they freely admit their fundamental creed, that the purpose of society is to “meet demand.” That is, to deliver lots of stuff to people with lots of money. If you are not people with lots of money, you don’t exist.
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