The Four

All four of these suck shit, but there's no such thing as ethical consumption under Capitalism. Kill these heads all you want, until you kill the body they'll just grow back.

Mr. White wrote:

Nodens wrote: Considering Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age took that concept to show that the few who scored a job with the Global Corporations were set up for life, had to give up any hope for control of their destiny and had to be protected from the masses of the impoverished rest of the population.

So what you're saying is...I should take a Whole Foods (Amazon) job? :/

Yes, kill the systrem from within!

I could ditch three out of the four quite easily. I don't use Apple products, I rarely use Facebook and my Amazon use is entirely a matter of price and convenience. Like Nodens, I am entirely chained to Google. Not only do I have an Android phone, but my Google account is the passport to a bunch of other, more important, accounts on other sites. I've also learned how to be pretty good at finding out the information I need via Google, and I'd struggle with another search and location ecosystem.

I'm yet to be convinced the dominance of certain tech companies is as problematic as it's often painted if - and this is a colossal, towering if - there's some consensus among governments and, to a lesser extent, consumers that their power needs to be curbed. In many respects, the situation is a mirror of what happened in the 90's with Microsoft. They had absolute and total power over home computing and near-complete control over internet access and business computing. But governments stepped up with anti-trust legislation, consumers began to perceive the problem and switch to Apple/Mozilla and then the market moved to mobile and caught MS on the hop. It's amazing how fast the technology scene can change.

The big difference with "the four" is the amount of data they now have access to - so it's not just market power, but the potential to leverage that for far more nefarious concerns. Still, I think a lot could be done with a concerted international effort on anti-trust, tax evasion, working rights and the minimum wage.

I recently read an absolutely cracking feature from 2011 which essentially predicated a lot of the predicament we find ourselves in nowadays ...

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/14/the-information

... Which suggested there are essentially three attitudes to technology. "Never better" which says it heralds utopia, "better never" which says it heralds dystopia and "always was" which suggests it's the same old shit on a different day. I am - and always have been - firmly in the latter camp. And I guess I'll stay there until the Google stasi come and take me away for reprogramming.

Amazon is just the new Walmart, no?

hotseatgames wrote:

Shellhead wrote: Amazon - Shopping is easiest now with Amazon, and I do have Prime for the shipping and the shows. But sometimes I remind myself of the Shopping tab on Google, which often yields some interesting alternatives. For example, Amazon is currently selling a boxed dvd set of the first seven seasons of Game of Thrones, for $92.97. But thanks to a Google Shopping search, I see there is a place in China selling the same product (and same dvd region) for $11.88 plus shipping.

So you'll knowingly buy a counterfeit? Because that's what that is.

To be honest, I am nearly finished binge-watching all seven seasons via various sites based in eastern Europe. The only price I have paid is the hassle of knocking down a few pop-up ads before each episode starts streaming. I'm enjoying the shows, but the books were better and I paid for those. Martin might finished at least book six by now if he hadn't gotten distracted by involvement with the show.

Apple- I just got an iPhone X and I love it. Yes, it is Mother Box. There are lots of negative things about Mother Box and it is addictive, but ultimately the level of access to information, content, communication, work, and other things I care about far, far outweighs them. I do not fucking care how big a market share Apple has or what that means for Western civilization. I do not lay in bed at night wringing my hands at how much control a giant corporation that makes handheld They make what I perceive to be the best product in its class. There are issues- such as how Mother Box gets made- but there is not at this point a viable consumer alternative if you want the top level of quality. Apple is so big because they make the best product in its class, not because of some weird dystopian thing going on.

Google- I'm sorry, I don't really get the hand-wringing here. Google is a search engine and it works really well for the most part. Maybe someone is missing Dogpile or AltaVista, I don't know. I don't really consider that an internet search engine has any control over my life. Again, they deliver the best product in its class, and they rise to the top. That is kind of how it is supposed to work.

Facebook- I have a profile but no page. I don't really get into all of that. It was a Big Deal for me to get on to Twitter, which I did solely for the purpose of cyberbullying Trump in hopes that a clever turn of phrase may cause him to abdicate. I don't really care for the whole Facebook thing, and I sort of shake my cane at it from time to time. It has virtually zero impact on my life to be honest.

Amazon- I just imagine some dude in the early 20th century lamenting the impact of the Sears Roebuck catalog on culture and civilization. I like to support small businesses. I want to support small businesses. But the reality of it is that I am not a welfare agency for small businesses. If there is something I want on Amazon that is $10, $20 cheaper than it is at the little Tall Tales Book Shop down the street here...I have to REALLY want to be supporting Tall Tales to take $10-$20 more out of my budget to prop them up. It's just like with game shops, too many brick and mortar stores would rather pop their clogs than actually do something to compete with Amazon. When I had my store, my #1 priority was to go head to head with the online discounters by offering competitive prices, offering a community, and offering F2F experience and buying advice. I didn't just continue to sell things at full retail and then whine about how big bad Funagain Games was stealing all of my business away. I brought the prices down to compete, made up the difference in volume, and did just fine. But most small store owners would rather hold out to make $5 more on a full price retail sale...meaning that they make $0 (and are in fact in the red on the product) when that buyer goes elsewhere to save $5.

Look, I'm an old time punk and I've done my fair share of railing against corporations. The reality of it is that if a company- no matter the size- is offering the best product, then you are kind of an idiot to not take advantage of the cost savings, time savings, or value because you are worried about some vague, nebulous sense of dystopianism...what they are doing "out there". It is true that there are moral and ethical concerns mixed up in all of this, but there is a degree to which they are inevitable in a civilization of the size, scale and scope that we are living in.

What is happening right now and has been happening for the past several years is a big shakedown over how certain things are monetized- such as music. And the old guard are getting pissy and upset because greater access and availability has destroyed the marketplace gatekeeping that used to be in place to restrict the flow of content or product. You don't have to go to the pharmacy to get an overpriced medical device. You can just order it on Amazon at a discount. You don't have to buy an $18 CD, you can pay $10 a month and listen to it and 1,000,000 others on Spotify. There again, I'm not a welfare agency for some indie band. But if they do something that I can not get easily and inexpensively- like come to my town and play a show- then I might be inclined to buy a ticket and a shirt. The incentives should be greater across the board to provide things that can't be had online or through THE FOUR. But more often the result is a lot of whining and hand-wringing rather than actually rising up to meet the challenges they present.

If you want to go after companies that ARE really damaging our society, its people, and the environment...target Monsanto. Industrial food producers.

there's no such thing as ethical consumption under Capitalism.

This. This is the hardest pill to swallow, and it's one that I think you don't realize you have to swallow until you get a little older and see capitalism for what it is- a system of mutual exploitation with all involved parties attempting to gain slightly more than the other.

The best you can do is, as Flux of Pink Indians said, "strive to survive causing the least suffering possible"- words I have lived by for 25 years.

Apple - Don't use any Apple products.
Google - Using DuckDuckGo now.
Facebook - Not on it. Never will be on it.
Amazon - I buy where I get stuff the cheapest. I sleep just fine at night.

SuperflyTNT wrote:

Chapel wrote: I read Neuromancer in the mid-80's with the excitement that the future would be filled with mega-corporations and a cool online reality...I certainly can't complain 30 years later when that reality is on the verge of coming to fruition.

I, personally, will enjoy being a Street Samurai.

Johnny immediately offers a higher bid to hire her as a bodyguard. Johnny and Molly take Ralfi as they exit the bar, but a Yakuza assassin waiting outside cuts Ralfi to pieces with a monomolecular wire hidden in a prosthetic thumb.

Black Barney wrote: Amazon is just the new Walmart, no?

Worse.

When shopping at Walmart (I don't), the dollars spend a few cycles in the local community. True depressed wages for walmart employees (which is at least some employrment), but also taxes for local services.

Shopping at Amazon sucks the dollars out of the community immediately.

Amazon is making rural life harder, faster than Walmart was able to.

Apple- I haven't used an Apple product since the early 90s, when the University of Michigan (from whom I was borrowing computer access to write for a while) switched from Macs to PCs. I don't like proprietary systems and that's what Apple has striven to be. They've also been far more at the forefront of "information control", as it were, in many of their economic practices, as with the DMA controls on iTunes that basically caused me to forswear it forever a few years back.

Google- I'm fully wedded, I'm afraid. My only email address is a Gmail one; I use Chrome; I use Google Wallet; I use Drive and a few of their other online tools. My phone is also an Android. My appreciation for their integrated system, as opposed to Apple's, is that Google made an attempt to be inclusive, designing their stuff to work with different OSs and apps from the beginning, whereas Apple made the decision to be exclusive (i.e. this only works with Apple stuff.) Ease of access is the primary motivator here.

Facebook- I've had an account forever, but I rarely use it. I keep in touch with a few friends that are heavy users and my girlfriend would be on it, 24-7, if she could be. But I don't use it as an information source and generally look at it as the world's largest example of a newspaper site comment thread.

Amazon- So, as many of you know, I'm a Marxist. That doesn't mean I think property is theft or that the (properly guided) state is the font of all economic wisdom (i.e. 5 Year Plans and all that.) What it does mean is that I think the state is necessarily the popular tool to curb other economic entities that may be destructive. As noted earlier in the thread, there are many laws on the books that were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to deal with precisely that kind of phenomenon. Our problem today, even more than then, is that the entities that the government has the power to curb are the ones that own that government. Amazon could very easily be one of them, given Bezos' noted attempts to duck regulations and taxes and treat his workers as a disposable resource. That latter tendency extends all the way up the ladder, incidentally. There are as many horror stories about people burning out in Amazon's IT divisions as there are about people being run into the warehouse floor.

Like many here, I use Amazon in most cases for the sake of convenience. I'm not much of a materialist, so I don't spend a lot of money. I mostly use it to get blood glucose testing strips for basically half the price I could get them at Meijer, which is a family-owned retail chain here in Michigan and which historically has rock bottom prices on stuff like that. I use those things multiple times/day, so they add up if you don't have an insurance plan to cover them. The only other things I regularly buy at Amazon are music and books. Like others, it's not only the price that drives my book purchases, but also electronic access. I read most things on the Kindle app on my phone these days and I can get something new in a matter of seconds that way. If there's something I want a physical copy of that doesn't translate well to Kindle (like a great whiskey atlas I picked up a while back), I'll spend some time looking for it at the couple of small, locally-owned bookstores that still exist in Ann Arbor, but since they can't match Amazon's warehousing power, those things are rarely present when I go to look for them, so I often end up ordering from Amazon, anyway.

Music is similar, in that I use Amazon's app to listen to a lot of my current collection and have uploaded many, many CDs to their servers so that things are all in one place. MB, you actually can buy an $18 CD on Amazon, as the price of that format has been steadily rising in the last couple years. I think they've decided that the trouble of warehousing and shipping physical CDs is enough to attach a price to that format that will often dissuade people toward electronic files. I don't really use services like Spotify, not only because of the impact on artists, but because I've spent so many years hunting down new stuff on my own that I'm reluctant to move into something else. There's my bit of old-fashionedness, I suppose.

Am I concerned about the massive influence of a few large corporations? Of course. But I was concerned about that 30 years ago when the targets of that concern were oil and weaponmaking companies. I'm always concerned about that, but the tools are there to control them if people are interested in doing so. What I'm not really willing to do is hamstring other efforts in the name of making a small statement and pretending that me standing in the river alone is changing the current. I'm in the midst of setting up a union-backed co-op with some people in Madison. One of the first suggestions was that all of the co-op's activity should be off Google and use Linux-based apps and systems. I vetoed that right then and there. If you're trying to build an entity that will have mass appeal (and any union MUST have mass appeal, by definition), you're not going to do so by telling everyone that the email and apps that they're using every day aren't acceptable and, in fact, they have to learn all this new stuff to participate in the group's processes. Does not compute (almost literally.) People won't go for that and the first thing to do is get the ball rolling. Once things are up and moving and you have an organized group, then maybe you talk about making a stand against something you don't like and trying to be the first rock in the river that does build up to a dam.

In political discussions, this often leads to the specious argument: "Well, how can you be against X corporation when you use their products?" My response is usually akin to: "How can you be against air pollution when you're breathing?" If the stuff is out there, it's out there. If you want to be in touch with a lot of people, you use the systems that are present and you try to influence people with them. I'd be tickled to be part of a large anti-Facebook group on Facebook, not only because of the ironicalism, but because you can be certain they'd notice, which is usually part of the intent of speaking out in the first place.

Mr. White wrote:

Black Barney wrote: Amazon is just the new Walmart, no?

Worse.

When shopping at Walmart (I don't), the dollars spend a few cycles in the local community. True depressed wages for walmart employees (which is at least some employrment), but also taxes for local services.

Shopping at Amazon sucks the dollars out of the community immediately.

Amazon is making rural life harder, faster than Walmart was able to.

Until Uber came along, Walmart was the most notoriously abusive employer in modern America. They discriminated against women, the elderly and the disabled, in both hiring and compensation. They disregarded safety regulations. They forced employees to work during unpaid breaks. One store got busted for locking the overnight cleaning crew inside the door each night to prevent them from taking smoking breaks. Amazon has had some issues, too, but nowhere near as many as Walmart. Your point about the economic impact is fair.

Michael Barnes wrote: If you want to go after companies that ARE really damaging our society, its people, and the environment...target Monsanto. Industrial food producers.

I think you've grossly oversimplified a lot here.

I think you'd agree that facebook knowingly accepting russian paid ads damaged our society, no?

If one doesn't play nice with Google they can bury you pages back. Your business may as well not exist. This isnt simply being best in class this is power and control.

Small business aren't struggling because they're greedy weasels holding out for an extra fiver. Amazon can afford to take losses and offer discounts with free shipping, while drying out your community. Other business can't afford this.

And no one's suggesting being an indy band enabler. Support only what you like, not any and everyone. Artists are trying alternative platforms and availability. if I want to hear music from Darius Koski, I should skip Spotify (where he gets nothing) and go to his bandcamp, drop some cash. If you dont want to follow them, but stay within your monthly $10, that's on you...not the artists.

Monsanto is a long time, old school villain, but new enemies are going to make matters worse. If our human capitol is depressed and depleted, we have no chance to help out animals or the evironment.

Can you argue that Amazon is good for low income families?



I'll elaborate a bit on all this cuz obviously retail does not have a future. There are lots of malls in my city. Several of them, especially two big ones downtown are clearly struggling. In the last year, it seems like half the stores closed and those malls are all under major redesign projects to hide the effect that half the stores are closed. More than half even.

So investors are looking into what to do with malls because people aren't shopping the same way and retail is in big trouble. So investors are financing a few projects that will radically change what malls will contain. Three Canadian cities are part of this project and it looks like it'll be Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa (Vancouver has the most upside to develop but it's the most expensive to try stuff out in so I think if this goes well, it'll be a big thing there).. I think the Sears liquidation was the big trigger for all of this. Basically malls will become more like community hubs rather than shopping centres. They will start to focus on four main types of shops:

1. medical
2. services (I saw this one coming a while ago as more and more stores in malls became services)
3 entertainment, and
4.government agencies

I'm really curious on how this will work out, and how this transformation will be accepted. It's nuts to me that malls won't really be places you don't go to shop anymore, but i think that's where the future is.

Because you can get almost anything delivered to your house in a box with a smile on it.

I think there will still be a role for malls to play for many years to come. Not everything can be shipped to your front door, and doorstep theft has become a significant issue everywhere. There will be some changes in the composition of businesses in a mall, but most malls have always been heavy on shoes and clothes, and those are both purchases that are more easily made in person than online. My girlfriend loved the idea of buying shoes from Zappos, because they have a 100% free 365-day return policy. But she wanted to buy winter boots at the start of winter, and by the end of that winter, she still didn't have boots because she kept returning them to Zappos due to problems with the fit.