07.02.14
Best quotes from today’s Culture of Lickspittle
On Facebook and it’s experiment:
“Only a fraction of our connections on social media are people we love. The rest are people we already probably dislike.”
Better, on what Facebook should do next, or what it already does, if you catch my drift:
Notifications of career success from an acquaintance who is in the same field as you, but younger
Mushy “Happy anniversary, baby!” notes from your ex’s new significant other
Cute snapshots of your friends’ young child who they say is doing so well since they opted not to get him vaccinated
Triumphant posts of celebration from people who root for a different team/candidate than you
Memes involving a photo of a beach or flower overlaid with encouraging platitudes with at least two obvious typos
Do you think you were part of the Facebook experiment? From this end, all I can tell you is that I dislike virtually everything FB puts in my feed. If I hand out a “like,” it’s from courtesy and a desire to be seen as civil.
The group mechanization of manipulation, sincerity trolling, favored figure or agency bootlicking and “upworthiness” isn’t something with which I have anything in common. I suspect there are hundreds of thousands of people who are the same. Like me, at one time now in the past, we were persuaded the social networks were good.
From Truth-Out, a long but not at all unreadable bit from Noam Chomsky:
In the 1950s, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles explained quite clearly the dilemma that the U.S. faced. They complained that the Communists had an unfair advantage. They were able to “appeal directly to the masses??? and “get control of mass movements, something we have no capacity to duplicate. The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich.???
That causes problems. The U.S. somehow finds it difficult to appeal to the poor with its doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.
Early in the past century, there was a true socialist movement in the United States, and in the postwar years the Soviet Union seemed to offer the possibility of a meaningful alternative to capitalism. Small wonder that the tycoons of those days were so eager to channel populist agitation into reform. Today, by contrast, corporate chieftains have little to fear, other than mildly higher taxes and the complaints of people who have read Thomas Piketty. Moguls complain about their feelings because that’s all anyone can really threaten.
I believe this is more accurate than Nick Hanauer’s semi-regular essays on how “the pitchforks” will eventually come out.
Hanauer is the venture capitalist who has made a second career as a celebrity billionaire, one who is on the side of the little people.
Being a well-heeled spokesperson for those ground underfoot is the new really cool gig. In the past, I wrote this:
I recently watched Robert Reich’s Inequality for All documentary and Hanauer is all through it, the wealthy and wise-sounding man (venture capitalist, author, activist, philanthropist, true patriot and civic leader, according to his bio) delivering the same clarion call: Inequality is wrecking the country, the wealthy need to be taxed more, the people need to be paid more.
The documentary’s Hanauer bits are taken from his home. In the back of the shot, an acoustic guitar is tastefully set …
Here are framing questions for this post: How many people maimed by the American economy have been given the marquee treatment by the big newsmedia for the sheer audaciousness of their thinking about our trying times?
Hanauer, last week, with the same message in a big essay at Politico on how “pitchforks” will come for the “plutocrats” unless more the spoil is more fairly doled out. Of which I only excerpt the remarkable lead:
You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane, etc., etc. You know what I’m talking about …