Amanda D. Lotz - Surviving Pirates, Cannibals, and Streaming Wars

How the internet disrupted the recorded music, newspaper, film, and television industries and what this tells us about surviving technological disruption.

Much of what we think we know about how the internet "disrupted" media industries is wrong. Piracy did not wreck the recording industry, Netflix isn't killing Hollywood movies, and information does not want to be free. In Media Disrupted, Amanda Lotz looks at what really happened when the recorded music, newspaper, film, and television industries were the ground zero of digital disruption. It's not that digital technologies introduced "new media," Lotz explains; rather, they offered existing media new tools for reaching people.  

For example, the MP3 unbundled recorded music; as the internet enabled new ways for people to experience and pay for music, the primary source of revenue for the recorded music industry shifted from selling music to licensing it. Cable television providers, written off as predigital dinosaurs, became the dominant internet service providers. News organizations struggled to remake businesses in the face of steep declines in advertiser spending, while the film industry split its business among movies that compelled people to go to theaters and others that are better suited for streaming. Lotz looks in detail at how and why internet distribution disrupted each industry. The stories of business transformation she tells offer lessons for surviving and even thriving in the face of epoch-making technological change.

Todd Cronan - Red Aesthetics: Rodchenko, Brecht, Eisenstein  

Red Aesthetics offers a new way to think about art and politics, focusing on the revolutionary work of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Bertolt Brecht, and Sergei Eisenstein between the wars. Todd Cronan shows how these three artists’ photographs, dramas, films, and writings centered on class conflict differ from current left orthodoxies rooted in empathy. Writing against liberal pieties, Cronan contends, following Brecht, that empathy is not the solution to our problems, but more like the source of them.

Sanjukta Paul - A Democratic Vision for Antitrust

The antitrust reform project wants to contain domination and expand autonomy
key principles of a left political project.

For decades, competition law and policy have been dominated by the neoclassical law and economics paradigm, which claims that visible market design and coordination interfere with competitive dynamics that would otherwise lead to an efficient allocation of social resources, and thus to the maximization of social welfare. While recent shifts in mainstream economic thinking have led to more discussion of imperfect competition, particularly in labor markets, the “market failures” and power imbalances that justify interventions are on this view still essentially special cases. Moreover, this idealized picture of markets still obscures certain forms of background coordination especially the often hierarchical and extractive coordination that happens within business firms while treating other coordination mechanisms as exceptional, with the potential to distort ideal market outcomes.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/a-democratic-vision-for-antitrust

Как власти используют камеры и распознавание лиц против протестующих — доклад ОВД-Инфо

В 2021 году мы узнали о том, что российкие власти начали применять камеры с системой распознавания лиц против протестующих. Этот факт мы установили, изучив дела об административном правонарушении за участие в митингах в поддержку Навального. В материалах части дел правоохранители сравнивают фото с акции и из официальных документов, а также из соцсетей, указывают процент похожести. Законно ли это? Нет, поскольку на обработку персональных данных нужно согласие человека, которое каждый из протестующих, конечно, не давал. Да и само существование распознавания лиц пока находится в «серой» правовой зоне.

https://ovdinfo.org/reports/kak-vlasti-ispolzuyut-kamery-i-raspoznavanie-lic-protiv-protestuyushchih#2

Can the Left Win Trump Country? w/ Ted Boettner

Jen Pan speaks with Ted Boettner of the Ohio River Valley Institute about the importance of unions for creating a basis of solidarity for progressive politics in places like West Virginia, how Democrats have abandoned working class voters in the state, and the importance of factoring in the needs of workers when planning for the future of the energy industry in the US.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KUnX17e8XbA

Post-Anarchism: A Reader  

Post-anarchism has been of considerable importance in the discussions of radical intellectuals across the globe in the last decade. In its most popular form, it demonstrates a desire to blend the most promising aspects of traditional anarchist theory with developments in post-structuralist and post-modernist thought. Post-Anarchism: A Reader includes the most comprehensive collection of essays about this emergent body of thought, making it an essential and accessible resource for academics, intellectuals, activists and anarchists interested in radical philosophy. Many of the chapters have been formative to the development of a distinctly 'post-anarchist' approach to politics, aesthetics, and philosophy. Others respond to the so-called 'post-anarchist turn' with caution and scepticism. The book also includes original contributions from several of today's 'post-anarchists', inviting further debate and new ways of conceiving post-anarchism across a number of disciplines.

От ужасов лавкрафтианских к ужасам нашего городка).

Companero Re о назначенном на 27-го февраля этого года референдуме, проекте новой Конституции и «реставрации классовой власти» по-белорусски.

https://youtu.be/9UdPrkhxIzk

An interview with Massimo D’Alema: «Draghism» is an anti-democratic force

The left must reassess its strategy. While we were laying down our arms, the right was gaining ground with an ideological and brutally twentieth-century message, such as nationalism and even ethnocentrism.

https://global.ilmanifesto.it/an-interview-with-massimo-dalema-draghism-is-an-anti-democratic-force/

Donald Clark Hodges - The Latin American Revolution: Politics and Strategy from Apro-Marxism to Guevarism  

This book examines Latin American movements from the reformist tradition of Haya de la Torre's APRA to the urban guerrilla/terrorists whom Hodges has done much to publicize. Apart from its utter omission of the subject of CIA involvement in Latin America Hodges writes as if the military dictators simply spring up in their own backyards the book exhibits a frustrating kind of academicism. Though based on exclusive interviews with Latin American insurgent leaders, it remains flavorless though Hodges is a leftist, he expresses no sense of urgency about the pandemic failures of guerrilla warfare, no sense of passion about the idiocy of Guevara's Bolivian venture. The book moves along like a binary computer, drawing distinctions between Fidelism and Guevarism, Guevarism and Debrayism, Debrayism and Marighelism, with advice to the counterrevolutionary generals that mere brute coups will not control the population though he does not pursue the way the Peruvian military, for example, has taken this advice to sustain a regime of the Mussolini brand. Hodges' confidence that "the Latin Americans are now making a revolution which promises to bring to a close the epoch of U.S. "hegemony" seems wholly unconfirmed by the book itself, at whose end he can only point to Cuba, and repeat that the urban guerrillas represent the best hope of "resistance." The book's tabulation of historic trends and splits and "lines" will stultify a non-specialist but leftists and academics will want to take it on.

Аникин В. А., Слободенюк Е. Д. Бедность работающих: как изменились детерминанты в России за последние 20 лет?

В настоящей работе рассматриваются детерминанты бедности работающих и приводятся оценки вероятности попадания в бедность для различных групп российского населения в 1998 и 2018 гг. На данных репрезентативных массивов RLMS-HSE было показано, что, несмотря на масштабное сокращение бедности в стране в 1998–2018 гг., соотношение структурных и индивидуальных факторов практически не претерпело изменений. В то же время изменилась конфигурация структурных факторов. В 2018 г. индивидуальные усилия стали всё меньше влиять на снижение вероятности попадания в бедность и всё большее значение стали играть характеристики рабочих мест и поселенческих неравенств. К 2018 г. в группе наибольшего риска оказались женщины и жители сельских поселений, хотя в 1998 г. в группе риска были мужчины и преимущественно городское население. Длительная консервация «плохих» рабочих мест в сфере рутинного труда и неравное распределение выигрышей деиндустриализации между городом и селом на протяжении двух последних десятилетий рассматриваются как главное объяснение природы российской бедности среди работающих.

https://www.jour.fnisc.ru/index.php/snsp/article/view/8603/8473

Badiou, Universalism & Racial Politics — with Elisabeth Paquette

Elisabeth speaks about some of her transformative moments as a continental philosopher, including an essential question posed to her by Paget Henry, and her experience joining the Black Lives Matter Charlotte Protests in 2016. Her and Am also speak about the important questions surrounding ideas of justice, how justice can be emancipatory, and the ways that states fail in enacting justice due to its deep foundations upon race and culture.

Elisabeth spends time critiquing Badiou’s class-first philosophies that undermines possibilities for universality in the sense of race, and then discusses the histories of Marxism centering on whiteness and Eurocentric attitudes. She also speaks about the importance of positive conceptions of race, and draws from Sylvia Wynter to determine that true universal emancipation needs to be filled with the varied and particular knowledges of racialized folks.

https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/156-elisabeth-paquette.html

David Edwards & David Cromwell - Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality  

We are all too familiar with the havoc the twenty-four-hour news cycle can wreak on political campaigns. Feeding on a haze of half-facts and a fog of moral outrage, the corporate media is able to inflict maximum damage almost instantaneously. As David Edwards and David Cromwell show, these propaganda blitzes also have transnational outcomes, distorting the war reporting coming out of both right-wing and liberal media outlets.

Propaganda Blitz shows the damning effect of spin in UK media, not just in right-wing newspapers like the Sun, Times, Daily Mail, and the Express, but also in trusted liberal outlets like the BBC and the Guardian. The book uncovers a storm of top-down campaigns behind war reporting from Iraq, Syria, and Palestine, as well as the media’s destruction of the credibility of figures on the left, including Jeremy Corbyn, Russell Brand, and Hugo Chavez. Exposing propagandists at the top levels of the BBC, as well as their reporting on the Scottish Independence referendum, the dismantling of the National Health Service, and looming climate chaos, Propaganda Blitz shows how the corporate media hide the real issues from the public view, often completely reversing the truth. Outlining a new model for anti-business media activism, the authors make an impassioned plea for a return to objective journalism.

Stanley Aronowitz - False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness  

This classic study of the American working class, originally published in 1973, is now back in print with a new introduction and epilogue by the author. An innovative blend of first-person experience and original scholarship, Aronowitz traces the historical development of the American working class from post-Civil War times and shows why radical movements have failed to overcome the forces that tend to divde groups of workers from one another. The rise of labor unions is analyzed, as well as their decline as a force for social change. Aronowitz’s new introduction situates the book in the context of developments in current scholarship and the epilogue discusses the effects of recent economic and political changes in the American labor movement

Christian Fuchs - Europe needs a public service internet

Europe shouldn't try to imitate Silicon Valley. Instead, it must use its strengths to counter the threat Big Tech poses to democracy: public service

https://www.ips-journal.eu/work-and-digitalisation/europe-needs-a-public-service-internet-5674/