Blick über den Tellerrand #26
For 40 years, we’ve eroded the wages of workers and transfered their share of profit and productivity to owners of capital. This is a problem, because people need money to buy things, and if they run out of money, they stop buying and profits vanish.
(Cory Doctorow: The zombie economy and digital arm-breakers)
The more time you spend on Facebook, the more ads it gets to show you. The solution to Facebook’s ads only working one in a thousand times is for the company to try to increase how much time you spend on Facebook by a factor of a thousand. Rather than thinking of Facebook as a company that has figured out how to show you exactly the right ad in exactly the right way to get you to do what its advertisers want, think of it as a company that has figured out how to make you slog through an endless torrent of arguments even though they make you miserable, spending so much time on the site that it eventually shows you at least one ad that you respond to.
(Cory Doctorow: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism)
We rarely see wealth inequality represented to scale. This is part of the reason Americans consistently under-estimate the relative wealth of the super rich. Every 10 pixels you scroll is $5 million. Let’s put this wealth in perspective by comparing it to some familiar things [like the wealth of Jeff Bezos with the annual pay of an Amazon warehouse worker].
(Matt Korostoff: Wealth shown to scale, auch auf deutsch: Reichtum, maßstabsgetreu)