Here's a weird consequence of our shift from capitalism (where riches come from profits) to feudalism (where riches come from rents): increasingly, your rights to your property (physical stuff you own) are trumped by corporations' metaphorical "intellectual property" claims.
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That's a lot to unpack! Let's start with a quick primer on profits and rents. Capitalists invest money in buying equipment, then they pay workers *wages* to use that equipment to produce goods and services.
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Three companies control the market for school lunch payments. They take as much as 60 cents out of every dollar poor kids' parents put into the system to the tune of $100m/year. They're literally stealing poor kids' lunch money.
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When I took my kid to New Zealand with me on a book-tour, I was delighted to learn that grocery stores had special aisles where all the kids'-eye-level candy had been removed, to minimize nagging. What a great idea!
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The telegraph and the telephone have a special place in the history and future of competition and Big Tech. After all, they were the original tech monopolists. Every discussion of tech and monopoly takes place in their shadow.
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Back in 2010, @SuperWuster published *The Master Switch*, his bestselling, wildly influential history of "The Bell System" and the struggle to de-monopolize America from its first telecoms barons:
Like you, I've heard a *lot* about Project 2025, Heritage Foundation's roadmap for Trump, should he win the presidency. Given the Heritage Foundation's centrality to the American authoritarian project, it's about as awful and frightening as you might expect.
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In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst breach in history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans, 15m Britons and 19k Canadians, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and readymade identity-theft:
Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just their top execs liquidating their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach - it was also that they ignored *years* of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.
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