"The coming of neo-feudalism..." (2020 book)

gggg gggg

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Jul 26, 2021, 10:47:19 PM7/26/21

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https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-coming-of-neo-feudalism-joel-kotkin/1132542627

gggg gggg

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Jul 26, 2021, 10:50:39 PM7/26/21

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On Monday, July 26, 2021 at 7:47:19 PM UTC-7, gggg gggg wrote:
> https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-coming-of-neo-feudalism-joel-kotkin/1132542627

(Recent Youtube upload):

Joel Kotkin | Elites: The New Ruling Class?

Peter Jason

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Jul 27, 2021, 2:20:09 AM7/27/21

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On Mon, 26 Jul 2021 19:47:17 -0700 (PDT), gggg gggg
<gggg...@gmail.com> wrote:

>https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-coming-of-neo-feudalism-joel-kotkin/1132542627

Yes, it's coming. The utter failure of democracy cries out for a
remedy. Severe examples are the French & Russian & Chinese
revolutions which in the long run hardly bettered the old regimes.
That is, would the world be worse off today under the Bourbons,
Romanovs & all those Emperors? Hardly. The rise of technology has
improved the lot of the common man and revolutionaries had nothing to
do with it.
Yes, there is a ruling class, skilled by experience & epigenetics, and
yes, all people are not created equal.

SolomonW

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Jul 27, 2021, 4:51:22 AM7/27/21

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On Mon, 26 Jul 2021 19:47:17 -0700 (PDT), gggg gggg wrote:

> https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-coming-of-neo-feudalism-joel-kotkin/1132542627

Serfdom in France was fairly rare in this period.

Ed Stasiak

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Jul 28, 2021, 5:05:59 PM7/28/21

to

> Peter Jason
> > gggg gggg

> >
> > https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-coming-of-neo-feudalism-joel-kotkin/1132542627
>
> Yes, it's coming.

It's already here. Jeff Bezos, Lord of Amazon Manor makes $2500 PER SECOND
while his employees piss in pop bottles because they're not allowed to leave their
work area and now the Western corporate-government nobility are pushing to
implement modern Chinese style techno-fascism.

https://i.postimg.cc/Y09TTpBS/Bezos.png

https://i.postimg.cc/qB5FzHd8/China-s-Social-Credit-System.jpg

SolomonW

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Jul 29, 2021, 12:35:18 AM7/29/21

to

On Wed, 28 Jul 2021 14:05:57 -0700 (PDT), Ed Stasiak wrote:

>> Peter Jason
>>> gggg gggg
>>>
>>> https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-coming-of-neo-feudalism-joel-kotkin/1132542627
>>
>> Yes, it's coming.
>
> It's already here. Jeff Bezos, Lord of Amazon Manor makes $2500 PER SECOND

Amazon has 798,000 employees that if spread around its not a lot of money.

> while his employees piss in pop bottles because they're not allowed to leave their
> work area

Would they even have those jobs if not for Jeff Bezos?

> and now the Western corporate-government nobility are pushing to
> implement modern Chinese style techno-fascism.

You can include the university and education system in this mix too.

>
> https://i.postimg.cc/Y09TTpBS/Bezos.png
>
> https://i.postimg.cc/qB5FzHd8/China-s-Social-Credit-System.jpg

gggg gggg

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Jul 29, 2021, 1:13:19 AM7/29/21

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Concerning "Chinese style techno-fascism, the 2020 book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" may be of interest:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff/1127581387?ean=9781541758001

gggg gggg

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Jul 29, 2021, 1:33:41 AM7/29/21

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On Wednesday, July 28, 2021 at 2:05:59 PM UTC-7, Ed Stasiak wrote:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-perfect-police-state-geoffrey-cain/1137602676?ean=9781541757035

SolomonW

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Jul 29, 2021, 2:49:34 AM7/29/21

to

Get over it, the days of privacy are long gone.

gggg gggg

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Jul 29, 2021, 3:05:43 AM7/29/21

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Orwell and privacy in the news:

https://news.google.com/search?q=orwell%20privacy&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

Ed Stasiak

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Jul 29, 2021, 4:22:21 PM7/29/21

to

> SolomonW
> > Ed Stasiak

> >
> > It's already here. Jeff Bezos, Lord of Amazon Manor makes $2500 PER SECOND
>
> Amazon has 798,000 employees that if spread around its not a lot of money.

Actually, 1.3 million employees and if Amazon was a worker owned co-operative,
they’d absolutely be doing better.

> > while his employees piss in pop bottles because they're not allowed to leave
> > their work area
>
> Would they even have those jobs if not for Jeff Bezos?

Bezos would still be working out of his garage without those 1.3 million employees
doing all the work and generate all the profit, none of which they get a share of.

SolomonW

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Jul 31, 2021, 5:28:10 AM7/31/21

to

On Thu, 29 Jul 2021 13:22:20 -0700 (PDT), Ed Stasiak wrote:

>> SolomonW
>>> Ed Stasiak
>>>
>>> It's already here. Jeff Bezos, Lord of Amazon Manor makes $2500 PER SECOND
>>
>> Amazon has 798,000 employees that if spread around its not a lot of money.
>
> Actually, 1.3 million employees and if Amazon was a worker owned co-operative,
> they’d absolutely be doing better.

In my experience few worker owned co-operatives do well. Most end out with
the managers stealing everything.

>
>>> while his employees piss in pop bottles because they're not allowed to leave
>>> their work area
>>
>> Would they even have those jobs if not for Jeff Bezos?
>
> Bezos would still be working out of his garage without those 1.3 million employees
> doing all the work and generate all the profit, none of which they get a share of.

He would not be working out of his garage without electricity.

SolomonW

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Jul 31, 2021, 5:32:10 AM7/31/21

to

The expansion of universal health care system has meant today that almost
everyone is known to he authorities.

Ed Stasiak

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Jul 31, 2021, 9:36:15 AM7/31/21

to

> SolomonW
> > Ed Stasiak

> >
> > Actually, 1.3 million employees and if Amazon was a worker owned co-operative,
> > they’d absolutely be doing better.
>
> In my experience few worker owned co-operatives do well. Most end out with
> the managers stealing everything.

There are quite a few worker owned co-operatives (including utility companies)
and how is the danger of a manager stealing from the company worse then
conventional corporations, where the executives drive the company into the
ground, sell off the assets (to another corporation that did nothing to create
the profits) and float away on golden parachutes, while the workers end up on
the street?

https://i.postimg.cc/kggbW6X1/worker-owned-co-operatives-by-sector.jpg

A worker owned co-operative operates like a conventional company, except the
workers make major decisions and share in the profits they generate, with the
added benefit of the workers striving to be successful not only for themselves,
but to create jobs for their children and community.

I've long believed that any corporation above that of a "family business" ought to
be converted to a worker owned co-operative, with the owner taking a full-buyout
and leaving or a partial buyout and staying on as an employee, as once the company
grows to a certain size, the owner can no longer claim to be the reason for its success.

Bezos isn't packing those boxes, driving the trucks, balancing the books, keeping
the website up and running, etc. it's all being done by employees and he's just rubber
stamping the decisions his employee managers make.

gggg gggg

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Aug 2, 2021, 12:58:59 AM8/2/21

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On Wednesday, July 28, 2021 at 11:49:34 PM UTC-7, SolomonW wrote:

(Recent podcast on privacy):

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/the-privacy-paradox/13253116

gggg gggg

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Aug 3, 2021, 4:23:51 AM8/3/21

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On Monday, July 26, 2021 at 7:47:19 PM UTC-7, gggg gggg wrote:
> https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-coming-of-neo-feudalism-joel-kotkin/1132542627

(2020 Book review):

https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/

gggg gggg

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Aug 3, 2021, 9:21:50 PM8/3/21

to

On Wednesday, July 28, 2021 at 2:05:59 PM UTC-7, Ed Stasiak wrote:

According to this recent article:

- China’s social credit system is a combination of government and business surveillance that gives citizens a “score” that can restrict the ability of individuals to take actions — such as purchasing plane tickets, acquiring property or taking loans — because of behaviors. Given the position of several major American companies, a similar system may be coming here sooner than you think.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/565860-coming-soon-americas-own-social-credit-system

Ed Stasiak

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Aug 4, 2021, 4:52:54 AM8/4/21

to

> gggg gggg
> > Ed Stasiak
> >
> > https://i.postimg.cc/qB5FzHd8/China-s-Social-Credit-System.jpg

>
> - China’s social credit system is a combination of government and business surveillance that gives citizens a “score” that can restrict the ability of individuals to take actions — such as purchasing plane tickets, acquiring property or taking loans — because of behaviors. Given the position of several major American companies, a similar system may be coming here sooner than you think.
>
> https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/565860-coming-soon-americas-own-social-credit-system

CNN's Don Lemon said Americans who refuse the covid vaccine should be banned
from grocery stores, essentially forcing them into starvation until they obey.

gggg gggg

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Aug 4, 2021, 6:36:44 PM8/4/21

to

On Wednesday, July 28, 2021 at 2:05:59 PM UTC-7, Ed Stasiak wrote:

Concerning "...Chinese style techno-fascism", the following review of a 2021 book may be of interest:

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/geoffrey-cain/the-perfect-police-state/

gggg gggg

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Aug 7, 2021, 5:35:58 PM8/7/21

to

On Wednesday, July 28, 2021 at 11:49:34 PM UTC-7, SolomonW wrote:

(Recent Youtube upload):

Is 1984 Becoming a Reality? - George Orwell's Warning to the World

gggg gggg

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Aug 11, 2021, 10:31:05 PM8/11/21

to

On Monday, July 26, 2021 at 7:47:19 PM UTC-7, wrote:
> https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-coming-of-neo-feudalism-joel-kotkin/1132542627

(Youtube upload):

Billionaire warlords: Why the future is medieval | Sean McFate | Big Think

Message has been deleted

gggg gggg

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Aug 20, 2021, 2:00:09 AM8/20/21

to

On Monday, July 26, 2021 at 7:47:19 PM UTC-7, gggg gggg wrote:
> https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-coming-of-neo-feudalism-joel-kotkin/1132542627

(Youtube upload):

Is the World Returning to the Dark Ages? | Salman Rushdie | Big Think

gggg gggg

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Aug 21, 2021, 1:44:46 AM8/21/21

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On Monday, July 26, 2021 at 7:47:19 PM UTC-7, wrote:
> https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-coming-of-neo-feudalism-joel-kotkin/1132542627

How America could become a dictatorship in 10 years | Jared Diamond

a425couple

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Aug 21, 2021, 1:27:39 PM8/21/21

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Ed, your words, "profit, none of which they get a share of."
is a gross overstatement.

Their common labor is paid market rate. If any of those
million employees had a better offer they could have taken it.

Their management is paid very well. Real Estate in Seattle,
King County and western Washington is greatly increasing
in value.

from
https://www.comparably.com/companies/amazon/executive-salaries
mazon Executive Salaries

Total Comp
Andy Jassy CEO / President

Jeffrey Blackburn Senior Vice President of Business Development &
Entertainment
$171k
$22.19M
Diego Piacentini Senior Vice President of International Consumer
Business(leave of absence)
$110k
$23.73M

Andrew R. Jassy Chief Executive Officer of Amazon Web Services
Andrew R. Jassy
Chief Executive Officer of Amazon Web Services
$175k
$35.61M

The average Amazon executive compensation is $235,925 a year. Amazon's
highest paid executives include: Andrew R. Jassy $35,609,644, Diego
Piacentini $23,730,630, and Jeffrey Blackburn $22,194,343.

The median estimated compensation for executives at Amazon including
base salary and bonus is $232,856, or $111 per hour. read more

I personally do not care for Bezos.
But, on the other hand, he has definitely given me
great access at an excellent price to many books
and other items, that otherwise I would have not had.

gggg gggg

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Aug 22, 2021, 2:51:29 AM8/22/21

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On Wednesday, July 28, 2021 at 2:05:59 PM UTC-7, Ed Stasiak wrote:

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/taylor-owen-countering-the-new-red-tech-scare

gggg gggg

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Aug 22, 2021, 2:53:44 AM8/22/21

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https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/09/geoffrey-cain-perfect-police-state

Ed Stasiak

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Aug 22, 2021, 7:50:06 AM8/22/21

to

> gggg gggg
> > Ed Stasiak
> >
> > https://i.postimg.cc/qB5FzHd8/China-s-Social-Credit-System.jpg
>

> https://nationalpost.com/opinion/taylor-owen-countering-the-new-red-tech-scare

Good article and worth posting in-full.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/taylor-owen-countering-the-new-red-tech-scare
Aug 07, 2021

Taylor Owen: China's dystopian digital future threatens us all

The dystopia of the Chinese surveillance state should serve as a wake-up call for democratic reforms

While much of the current debate about technology and democracy rightly focuses on Silicon Valley, the reality is that there is a parallel communications-technology infrastructure that presents far greater concern. Over the past 30 years, aided by and enmeshed in the state, Chinese companies have built a full stack of technologies — including communications infrastructure, hardware and platforms — that compete directly with Western internet companies.

These companies provide many of the same capabilities and services that their Western counterparts do — access to the internet, social media, chat, mobile payments and online shopping — but in a manner that is far more co-ordinated, allows the government access to the data collected and enables an additional layer of centralized surveillance and social control. These tools have been used to monitor and share information on the behaviour of Chinese citizens — and, increasingly, citizens of other countries who have adopted the Chinese approach.

As someone who is concerned about the power and accountability of Big Tech, the question of China looms large. All of the problems arising from the flawed design or use of Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook (the data surveillance, threats to democracy and lack of competition) are all far worse when it comes to Chinese companies. The challenge is that understanding Chinese technology and its role in both domestic and international affairs is immensely difficult. There are barriers of language and culture, real limitations on the free flow of information and limited academic research.

Add to these challenges a perception that the rise of the tech-enabled Chinese surveillance state was not a geopolitical project, with global implications, but a domestic one. This narrative, however, is increasingly untenable. Chinese technologies are embedded in our global tech infrastructure, Chinese tech companies are an integral part of the digital economy and the tools of social control initially developed for Chinese citizens are now being exported around the world.

The recent political and economic history of China’s high-tech industry is important to understand because it is also a story about the direction the world is going — toward a society of increased surveillance, social control and centralized industrial power. China is a canary in the coal mine of where our own technology is headed. The dystopia of the Chinese surveillance state should serve as a wake-up call for democratic reforms.

Two books published within the last few weeks, whose authors I recently interviewed, provide a helpful entry point to understanding this wider topic: Hong Shen’s “Alibaba: Infrastructuring Global China” and Geoffrey Cain’s “The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future.”

To learn more about the economic rise of Chinese tech, the antitrust crackdowns on Alibaba and the recent fate (including the three-month disappearance) of its CEO, Jack Ma, I spoke with Hong Shen, a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon.

A common narrative about the internet in China is that the government built the “Great Firewall” in order to suppress its democratizing potential. Many Western liberals thought free trade would nudge China toward democracy, and that the access to information provided by an open internet would have similar influence. So when China walled off much of its internet from the outside world, it was reasonable to think the government was doing so to squelch dissent and stem the tide of democracy.

But Shen argues that there was another purpose: the Chinese firewall was also a tool of protectionist industrial policy intended to insulate Chinese tech companies from global competitors, so they could scale first in the Chinese market. In other words, while the desire to control the political activity of their citizens may have been a big part of the Chinese firewall, it also served as a form of industrial protection, allowing Chinese tech companies to become the economic powerhouses they are today.

As the companies grew, they needed both money and markets from outside of China. Chinese tech is therefore now deeply intertwined with transnational capital and global capitalism. Alibaba, for instance, was, at one time, primarily owned by Yahoo! and SoftBank. And Western companies often rely on Chinese labour to build their hardware and train their artificial intelligence (AI). In order to grow a user base beyond China, the reach of these companies has been expanded through a component of China’s massive global Belt and Road infrastructure project called the Digital Silk Road.

Shen argues that the Digital Silk Road is intended to serve a number of purposes: to find markets for surplus production, in order to “mitigate industrial overcapacity”; to build infrastructure that will allow Chinese companies to go overseas (for example, Alibaba’s overseas data centres); to support the internalization of the renminbi (China is trying to build alternatives to American-led financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank); to expand China’s geopolitical sphere of influence — tying countries “more closely to China through submarine, terrestrial and satellite links”; and, somewhat ironically, “promoting an internet-enabled inclusive globalism” (in contrast to former U.S. president Donald Trump’s “America first” rhetoric).

This threefold strategy — initial industrial protectionism via the firewall, followed by a surge of foreign capital and an expansion into global markets — goes a long way in explaining the rise of the Chinese tech giants. And because of this global interconnection, Shen argues that Chinese tech shouldn’t be considered a direct extension of the state. But Shen also says that this strategy has allowed some companies to get too big for the comfort of the state. That’s why we are now seeing the emergence of swift and far-reaching competition policy in China, exemplified by the halting of Ant Group’s initial public offering and the broader antitrust action against Alibaba.

Alongside the reasons put forth by Shen to explain the meteoric rise of Chinese Big Tech, these companies were also aided by government contracts to build out the Chinese surveillance state — in particular, to build the capacity to use social media data, facial recognition software and AI to monitor and control China’s Uighur population and, ultimately, to help facilitate the ongoing atrocities in Xinjiang province.

To better understand how technology is being used in China to facilitate the monitoring, control and mass incarceration of the Uighur population, I spoke to American journalist Geoffrey Cain. Cain spent three years interviewing Uighur refugees, Chinese tech workers and government officials and the resulting book — “The Perfect Police State” — is a window into the Orwellian dystopia the Chinese Communist party has developed.

The plight of the Uighurs is one of those stories that’s never really left the news cycle, but somehow still hasn’t fully captured the attention it warrants. Maybe this is because it’s notoriously difficult to do investigative journalism in China. Or maybe it’s because Western business interests are so entrenched there. Or maybe it’s because, unlike with other, past atrocities, images of violence aren’t filling our screens.

Whatever the case, we’re certainly not paying enough attention to what people in Xinjiang, a region that is home to many ethnic minority groups, call “the situation” — the largest internment of an ethnic minority since the Holocaust. It’s a situation that the U.S. State Department, the Canadian Parliament and independent investigators have called a genocide. The Chinese government’s broad range of abuses in Xinjiang have been condemned as crimes against humanity by numerous international human rights organizations.

Cain argues that these atrocities have been enabled by a confluence of three technological advances: the ability to collect vast data about online behaviour; the ability to capture and process the physical world through digital cameras; and the ability to make sense of these vast data sets using AI. Many of the Chinese tech giants built key components of this system in Xinjiang, which has facilitated the atrocities that are now being committed.

The stories that Cain unearthed about the violence being perpetrated against the Uighur people are harrowing, and align with what international human rights organizations have documented. They include near-complete surveillance, including cameras inside of homes, the forced sterilization of women, predictive arrests based on AI-determined “future crimes” and mass incarceration in concentration camps intended to “re-educate” the Muslim minority.

But this set of technologies is not just being used in one discrete, if horrific, case. They are being deployed against the wider Chinese population through a social credit system that ranks, and seeks to shape, citizen behaviour. Even more worryingly, this model is now being exported to illiberal countries around the world. In other words, the dystopian reality that the Uighurs are living in is not just a human rights atrocity; it also presents real challenges to democracy itself.

There is a dominant argument emerging from Silicon Valley that in order to compete against rising Chinese tech giants, particularly in the development of AI, U.S. companies must remain unencumbered by regulation. Following this logic, regulation on the use of data, on content moderation and on antitrust will tie the hands of the “democratic” internet and further embolden the illiberal Chinese model. This is deeply self-serving for Silicon Valley, and it is also precisely the wrong approach, for two reasons.

First, Cain argues that Western tech companies themselves are not separate from Chinese technology interests. Many of our tech products and the components that make up our communications infrastructure are manufactured in China, often in Xinjiang, and at times on the backs of forced Uighur labour.

There are many Western tech companies that have acquiesced to Chinese state demands, such as censoring search results in order to get access to the massive Chinese market, thereby becoming complicit in the regime of surveillance and censorship. And, of course, Western capital markets and high-tech venture capitalists are benefiting from the growth of the Chinese tech giants. Given this reality, it is difficult to create a clear dichotomy between U.S. and Chinese tech, let alone to draw distinctions with clear moral certainty.

Second, the idea that we should not democratically govern our own technologies because we fear the rise of the undemocratic Chinese model only hastens a race to the bottom, where all digital communications are vulnerable to illiberal influences. How China or other illiberal regimes choose to govern themselves should have no bearing on whether we democratically govern our own societies. The realm of tech is no different.

Finally, we should be gravely concerned about the spread of tools of digital authoritarianism to not only those regimes around the world that are already illiberal, but also to those that have authoritarian tendencies. The use of tools developed to monitor and control the behaviour of citizens could hasten the illiberal backsliding that we are seeing in many countries that were once thought to be on a path toward democratization.

The best way to counter this slide is not to join the race to bottom, but to show that the internet can be governed in a manner that preserves human rights and democratic principles. The best way to counter the threat of an illiberal Chinese internet is to make sure ours is democratic. We can only do that by governing it, rather than by letting it run rampant.

gggg gggg

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Aug 22, 2021, 6:23:08 PM8/22/21

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Concerning gov't trampling on the rights of its citizens:

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.politics/c/s4J4N3o-H6Q/m/3VbAssCiBAAJ

gggg gggg

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Aug 23, 2021, 11:53:32 AM8/23/21

to

On Monday, July 26, 2021 at 11:20:09 PM UTC-7, Peter Jason wrote:

> On Mon, 26 Jul 2021 19:47:17 -0700 (PDT), wrote:
>
> >https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-coming-of-neo-feudalism-joel-kotkin/1132542627
>

> Yes, it's coming. The utter failure of democracy cries out for a
> remedy. Severe examples are the French & Russian & Chinese
> revolutions which in the long run hardly bettered the old regimes.
> That is, would the world be worse off today under the Bourbons,
> Romanovs & all those Emperors? Hardly. The rise of technology has
> improved the lot of the common man and revolutionaries had nothing to
> do with it.
> Yes, there is a ruling class, skilled by experience & epigenetics, and
> yes, all people are not created equal.

(Recent Youtube upload):

“The Rise of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class” by Joel Kotkin