We owe so much money, we’re not broke - we’re broken We’re so poor we can’t even pay attention So what do you want? You want to be famous and rich and happy But you’re terrified you have nothing to offer this world Nothing to say and no way to say it But you can say it in three languages
Google sucks at IoT so, in the time-honored tradition of monopolists, it bought a successful company, Nest, bricked much of its existing gear, failed catastrophically to integrate it for YEARS, exposing users to hacks, shuffled it around and around the corporate structure…
Locked out competing devices, hid secret microphones in new, “microphone-free” devices, and now…
…they’ve bought a $450m stake in home security giant ADT, which will turn ADT customers into nonconsensual Nest customers.
Under the deal, ADT customers’ security cameras will be “upgraded” to Nest devices whose videos will be sent to Google for long-term storage and machine-learning analysis.
Home automation and home security have become the shittiest end of the Internet of Shit. On the one hand, you have Ring, who turn your home security system into part of a warrantless, off-the-books mass-surveillance grid for local cops:
Then there were the internal empire-builders at Google that kept Nest from being properly secured, leading to a rash of voyeurs who spied on and terrorized Nest owners by screaming obscenities at them and their kids:
None of this should be happening. For decades, America’s competition law operated on the presumption of “structural separation” - the idea that companies should not be allowed to form vertical monopolies:
These monopolies are inevitably not just inefficient, plagued by “the curse of bigness,” but they also crowd out GOOD companies with superior products, by using the vertical integration to keep them from getting into the market.
We are sharing some of our favourite gifs each day this month for Antifa International’s anniversary. Today: Keep your city clean! When you see fascist trash; take it down and dispose of it properly.
On this day, 16 June 1531, England’s King Henry VIII modified the vagrancy laws he brought in the previous year, which were key in creating the working class. People kicked off communal land who were not in wage labour were designated as vagabonds, and on their first offence were to be whipped, then on the second whipped with half an ear sliced off and upon a third offence they were to be executed.
This shows that we, being the working class who have nothing to sell but our labour, is not a natural state of affairs, but one which was created over an extended period of time with massive state violence.
This short introduction to capitalism explains their importance in creating a dispossessed working class: https://libcom.org/library/capitalism-introduction
Pictured: Contemporary illustration of the punishment of a vagrant in Tudor England https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1452229701628842/?type=3
Gold amulet of a falcon found attached to the bandages of the mummy of Psusennes I, from tomb NRT III at Tanis. Third Intermediate Period, 21st Dynasty, ca. 1047-1001 BC. Now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
