Morning Comrades! Heaps to unpack today but let’s start with some BL updates. Starting this week, fingers crossed, I will be working together with a fulfillment company that will deal with all my shipping, knowing full well that that was always the weakest link my chain. I’ve just gotten a bunch of product to send out to you which I will do this week but as of the Patagonia Drop said fulfillment company will take over. You’ll still talk to me, you’ll still be getting stickers etc- it’s just someone else doing the work for me that will free up about 2 days a week for me to be better at emails and comms. This change will have no effect on pricing but will massively shorten your delivery times, again, something that’s been bugging me for some time.
Secondly, we are taking a little break from the brandalism Fall / Winter trope as the angry letters from various bored corporate lawyers have been piling up and I need to take a wee break from that to let the dust settle. I will be bringing the above back for the first time in 3 years this weekend as well as adding a little surprise. Links will be going out Friday with this newsletter.
Thirdly, collabs are finally coming back. The lack thereof is definitely due to the long lasting psychological side effects of this pandemic if I am being totally honest. The necessary physical isolation certainly brought a communicative isolation with it that I haven’t really been able to shake this year, however, we have three exciting collabs in the pipeline. I started teasing some of these in our Telegram Group and will continue to do so there and here as the samples are getting made.
We are all going to be hearing heaps about FB these next few weeks and rightly so, however, I’ll immediately say that most of it will be inconsequential US corporate bullshit to be immediately ignored.
I am not going to waste anyone’s time on here stating the obvious. FB Inc. and Zuckerberg, as well as his team are some of the most destructive forces this world has seen in the last ten years, if not longer. If the Cambridge Analytica Revelations weren’t enough to convince anyone that their business model and their corruption were incompatible with, well, just about anything, the most recent Facebook Papers should be the end all of all discussion.
The key takeaways, generally speaking are:
Facebook gives right-wing politicians and publications special treatment.
Zuckerberg's Congressional testimony appears inconsistent with Facebook's research.
“Last year, for example, Zuckerberg told Congress "that the company removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds." But inside Facebook, "researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5 percent of all hate speech."
Facebook is used for human trafficking.
Internal Facebook documents, detailed by CNN, reveal the company was aware its platform was used to facilitate "domestic servitude," which is defined as "a form of trafficking of people for the purpose of working inside private homes through the use of force, fraud, coercion or deception."
The documents describe women trafficked on Facebook as subject "to physical and sexual abuse, being deprived of food and pay, and having their travel documents confiscated so they can't escape." The issue was prevalent enough on Facebook to merit its own acronym, "HEx," or “human exploitation."
In 2019, Apple became so concerned with the issue that it "threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram's access to the App Store." Facebook was able to mollify Apple's concerns but an internal report from this year stated "gaps still exist in our detection of on-platform entities engaged in domestic servitude."
Zuckerberg nixed plans to provide accurate voting information in Spanish.
For Zuckerberg, profit trumps free speech
Ahem. Yeah. Hardly surprising.
Again, none of this really should come, and I assume doesn’t come as a surprise. It’s Capitalism in its purest form except that we no longer colonize foreign nations but offer ourselves as the raw materials to be ravaged and accept the breakdown of societal communication as the side effect thereof. The interesting part are the bullshit solutions being offered by US and EU talking heads. “Break Up Facebook” “Nationalize FB” and so forth - nothing but a smoke screen without any reality of this happening at all.
It is vital to understand, because, again, all this comes down to money, greed and frankly, small dick energy, that it is is ego and money behind this latest push against Zuckerberg - make no mistake, I am far from defending the little prick- and an important figure here is: Pierre Omidyar.
Currently, I believe this to be 26th richest person on the planet, with a reported personal wealth of 22 BILLION USD. Throughout Trump’s reign he wholly bought into the RussianGate concept and is currently, through a number of trusts and SuperPacs, financing the FB Whistleblower Haugen, whilst using his considerable influence to push for the continued hell for Snowden and Assange. Digging a little deeper it becomes clear that there is potential for nothing but greed and ego as the main driver behind all that.
Sure, as far as I am concerned, I don’t give a rats ass if these billionaire lunatics all take themselves out but, as history has proven countless times over, it is you and me that will pay the ultimate price for this battle of the egos.
But guess what, it get’s a little crazier and it’s not just FB that is at the heart of some serious fuckening, Google - in all it’s entirety is not only in bed with Zuck but pulling some seriously corrupt bullshit.
Google’s antitrust headache
Meanwhile, Facebook’s main competitor is facing big questions over its business model. Per The Wall Street Journal, an unredacted lawsuit from state attorneys general shows that Google takes a 22%-42% of transactions on its ad network (2-4x competing digital exchanges).
A viral Twitter thread highlights other allegations from the lawsuit:
Google had an ad deal with Facebook that was “so illegal” that the documents have “a whole section describing how they’ll cover for each other if anyone finds out”
Google’s ad exchanges are rigged “so that Google wins on bids where they aren’t the highest bidder”
Google’s attempt to turn the web into a walled garden by forcing logins with the Chrome browser
Google’s dominant position in the ad business is described by one employee like this: “The analogy would be if Goldman Sachs owned the New York Stock Exchange.”
Long story short, it’s not just FB but Google - or rather all of Silicon Valley - that is so deeply anti-democratic and disruptive that all calls from the usual Wet Wipes fall short of everything that needs to be done.
Evan generally has really solid takes on a lot the tech business and whilst I agree with them on the above, it is just shy of saying the obvious aloud. Demonetize the entire fucking internet, the infrastructure was paid for by tax money as it is - as in YOUR LABOUR - and destroy any and all monopolies clearly dominating the net - and abusing it to their advantage, yes, I am specifically talking about Amazon and AWS, who to make shit even more more dystopian have just signed an agreement with British Intelligence. The abuse at the heart of the Silicon Valley Philosophy is utterly destructive and needs to be stopped. Immediately. As always, any wrong in our societies is relatively easy to right, it’s just a question of political will.
That is, at this point, the most sickening and equally pathetically boring take away from all this. There is no deep-seated, philosophical conspiracy against set against us billions of workers, it all just sadly comes down to small men with big egos and greed. It’s just about money and the power that comes along with it. There is no New World Order, it’s just little pathetic assholes that want to be the richest person on the planet. There is a part of me that finds that realization so utterly disappointing, that, with everything at their disposal, they couldn’t even come up with a grand new plan, nah, it’s just money. No Death Star to go down fighting against, just a bunch of assholes with overprices houses in California.
Luckily, that fact just means that the solution is equally easy.
I am going to leave with you a number of hot shots for now, stay tuned for teasers, links and tunes over in our Telegram Group and I shall see you there comrades.