Combine Angelou's "When someone shows you who they are, believe them" with the truism that in politics, "every accusation is a confession" and you get: "Every time someone accuses you of a vice, they're showing you who they are and you should believe them."
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer
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Lisa Melton reshared this.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/2
Let's talk about some of those accusations. Remember the moral panic over the CARES Act covid stimulus checks? Hyperventilating mouthpieces for the ruling class were on every cable network, complaining that "no one wants to work anymore." The barely-submerged subtext was their belief that the only reason people show up for work is that they're afraid of losing everything - their homes, their kids, the groceries in their fridge.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/3
This isn't a new development. Back when Clinton destroyed welfare, his justification was that "handouts" make workers lazy. The way to goad workers off their sofas (and the welfare rolls) and into jobs was to instill fear in them:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/welfare-childhood/555119/
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‘Welfare Makes People Lazy’: A Myth That Needs Busting
Derek Thompson (The Atlantic)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/4
This is also the firm belief of tech bosses: for them, mass tech layoffs are great news, because they terrorize the workers you *don't* fire, so that they'll be "extremely hardcore" and put in as many extra hours as the company demands, without even requiring any extra pay in return:
https://fortune.com/2022/10/06/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-return-to-office-gentlemens-layoffs-twitter/
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Elon Musk and Jason Calacanis messaged about how return-to-office mandates could be used as a ‘gentlemen’s layoff’ to get workers to voluntarily quit
Will Daniel (Fortune)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/5
Now, there's an obvious answer to the problem of no one taking a job at the wage being offered: just increase the offer. Capitalists claim to understand this. Uber will tell you that surge pricing "incentivizes drivers" to take to the streets by offering them more money to drive during busy times:
https://www.uber.com/blog/austin/providing-rides-when-they-are-most-needed/
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/6
(Note that while Uber once handed the lion's share of surge price premiums to drivers, these days, Uber just keeps the money, because they've entered the enshittification stage where drivers are so scared of being blacklisted that Uber can push them around instead of dangling carrots.)
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/7
(Also note that this logic completely fails when it comes to other businesses, like Wendy's, who briefly promised surge-priced hamburgers during busy times, but without even the pretense that the surge premium would be used to pay additional workers to rush to the restaurant and increase the capacity:)
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/feb/27/wendys-dynamic-surge-pricing
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How much is that Frosty? Wendy’s to trial Uber-like surge pricing
Chris Michael (The Guardian)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/8
So bosses knew how to address their worker shortage: higher wages. You know: supply and demand. For bosses, the issue wasn't *supply*, it was *price*. A worker who earns $10/hour but makes the company $20 profit every hour is splitting the surplus 50:50 with their employer. The employer has overheads (rent on the shop, inventory, advertising and administration) that they have to pay out of their end of that surplus.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/9
But workers *also* have overheads: commuting costs, child-care, a professional wardrobe, and other expenses the worker incurs just so they can make money for their boss.
There's no iron law of economics that says the worker/boss split should be 50/50. Depending on the bargaining power of workers and their bosses, that split can move around a *lot*.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/10
Think of McDonald's and Walmart workers who work for wildly profitable corporate empires, but are so badly paid that they have to rely on food stamps. The split there is more like 10/90, in the boss's favor.
The pandemic changed the bargaining power. Sure, workers got a small cushion from stimulus checks, but they also benefited from changes in the fundamentals of the labor market.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/11
For example, millions of boomers just noped out of their jobs, forever, unwilling to risk catching a fatal illness and furious to realize that their bosses viewed that as an acceptable risk.
Bosses' willingness to risk their workers' lives backfired in another way: killing hundreds of thousands of workers and permanently disabling millions more.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/12
Combine the boomer exodus with the workers who sickened or died, and there's just fewer workers to go around, and so now those workers enjoy more bargaining power. They can demand a better split: say, 75/25, in their favor.
Remember the 2015 AA strike, where pilots and flight attendants got a raise? The eminently guillotineable Citibank analyst Kevin Crissey declared: "This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers":
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/american-airlines-flight-attendants-bash-citi-analyst-who-put-shareholders-before-workers-14134309
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/13
Now, obviously, the corporation doesn't *want* to offer a greater share of its surplus to its workforce, but it certainly *can* do so. The more it pays its workers, the less profitable it will be, but that's capitalism, right? Corporations *try* to become as profitable as they can be, but they can't just decree that their workers *must* work for whatever pay they want to offer (that's serfdom).
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/14
Companies *also* don't get to tell us to buy their goods at whatever price they set (the would be a planned economy, not a market). There's no law that says that when the cost of making something goes up, its price should go up, too. A business that spends $10 to make a widget you pay $15 for has a $5 margin to play with. If the business's costs go up to $11, they can still charge $15 and take $1 less in profits. Or they can raise the price to $15.50 and split the difference.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/15
But when businesses don't face competition, they can make *you* eat their increased costs. Take Verizon. They made $79b in profit last year, and also just imposed a $4/month service charge on their mobile customers due to "rising operational costs":
https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1c53c4p/79bn_in_profits_last_year_but_you_need_an_extra/
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/16
Now, Verizon is very possibly lying about these rising costs. Excuseflation is rampant and rising, as one CEO told his investors, when the news is full of inflation-talk, "it’s an opportunity to increase the prices without getting a whole bunch of complaining from the customers":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power
But even stipulating that Verizon is telling the truth about these "rising costs," why should *we* eat those costs?
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Pluralistic: Excuseflation (11 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/17
There's $79b worth of surplus between Verizon's costs and its gross revenue. Why not take it out of Verizon's bottom line?
For 40 years, neoliberal economists have emphasized our role as "consumers" (as though consumers weren't also workers!). This let them play us off against one-another: "Sure, you don't want the person who rings up your groceries to get evicted because they can't pay their rent, but do you care about it *enough* to pay an extra nickel for these eggs?"
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/18
But again, there's no obvious reason why *you* should pay that extra nickel. If you have the buying power to hold prices down, and workers have the labor power to keep wages up, then the *business* has to absorb that nickel. We can have a world where workers can pay their rent *and* you can afford your groceries.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/19
So how do we get bosses to agree to take less so we can have more? They've told us how: for bosses, the thing that motivates workers to show up for shitty jobs is *fear* - fear of losing their homes, fear of going hungry.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/20
When your boss says, "If you don't want to do this job for minimum wage, there's someone else who will," they're telling you that the way to get a raise out of them is to engineer things so that *you* can say, "If you don't want to pay me a living wage for this job, there's someone else who will."
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Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/17
Even ignoring the fact that the nickel in question could theoretically come out of the business's bottom line, sometimes the attempts to pit people against each other are absurd on their face. Papa John's is on my shit list for saying something to the effect of, "But if we gave our workers sick leave, we'd have to charge *25 whole more cents*" for a pizza! You don't want that, do you?!"
...why yes, I *would* pay 25 cents to be sure no one sneezed on my pizza.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
fanf42
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/12
Dana das Grau 🧝♂️🇺🇸
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/10
Privatised Sentient Water
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Michael
in reply to Privatised Sentient Water • • •Robin Adams
in reply to Michael • • •@MPgh @sentient_water "The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich." - In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell
https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell (Harper's Magazine)zombiecide
in reply to Privatised Sentient Water • • •@sentient_water I mentally replace the word 'lazy' with 'I don't know why you're not doing what I expect you to to do and I don't care why, I feel entitled to you doing it so I demand you do' and it usually fits
and I wonder at which point destigmatization would happen, at the point where some people think they're entitled to others behaving like they expect them to do (said people not being directly affected), or at the point where they believe they can pressurize others that way
Dana das Grau 🧝♂️🇺🇸
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/2
Dana das Grau 🧝♂️🇺🇸
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/2
Cory Doctorow
Unknown parent • • •Content warning: Long thread/32
@InsertUser
@InsertUser No, the laws have a good and expansive definition, but we stopped enforcing them for 40 years and a body of caselaw that incorrectly interprets the statutes has built up and needs to be swept away.
InsertUser
Unknown parent • • •Content warning: Long thread/32
Cory Doctorow
Unknown parent • • •Content warning: Long thread/32
How do we get capitalists to work harder to make their workers and customers better off? Capitalists tell us how, every day. We need to make them afraid.
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Cory Doctorow
Unknown parent • • •Content warning: Long thread/31
If you're Google, you can either spend tens of billions on R&D to keep up with spam and SEO scumbags, or you can spend less money buying the default search spot on every platform, so no one ever tries another search engine and switches:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi
Compared to its monopoly earnings, the tech sector's R&D spending is *infinitesimal*:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor-glom-of-nit/#capitalists-hate-competition
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Pluralistic: 11 Aug 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
Unknown parent • • •Content warning: Long thread/30
Monopoly apologists like to argue that monopolists can rake in the giant profits necessary to fund big, ambitious projects the produce better products at lower prices and make us all better off. But even if monopolists *can* spend their monopoly windfalls on big, ambitious projects, they *don't*. Why would they?
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Cory Doctorow
Unknown parent • • •Content warning: Long thread/29
But when capitalists escape their fears, the alchemical conversion of greed to prosperity fizzles, leaving nothing behind but greed and its comorbidity, enshittification. Google search is in the toilet, getting worse every year, but rather than taking reduced margins and spending more fighting spam, the company did a $80b stock-buyback and fired 12,000 technologists, rather than using that 80 bil to pay their wages for the next *twenty-seven years*:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task
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Pluralistic: Google reneged on the monopolistic bargain; The Bezzle excerpt (Part IV) (21 Feb 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
Unknown parent • • •Content warning: Long thread/28
Capitalists hate capitalism. You know who didn't hate capitalism? Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. The first chapter of *The Communist Manifesto* is just these two guys *totally geeking out* about how much cool stuff we get when capitalists are afraid and therefore productive:
https://pluralistic.net/SpectreHaunting
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Cory Doctorow
Unknown parent • • •Content warning: Long thread/27
It's because it *de-risks* their lives: monopolies and cartels can pass on any extra costs to consumers, who'll eat shit and take it:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#overinflated
A workforce that goes to bed every night worrying about making the rent is a workforce that put in unpaid overtime and thank you for it.
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Pluralistic: 02 Feb 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
Unknown parent • • •Content warning: Long thread/26
Being in a constant precarious state makes people *lose their minds*, and capitalists know it. That's why they work so hard to precaratize the rest of us, saddling us with health debt, education debt, housing debt, stagnating wages and rising prices. It's not just because that makes them more money in the short term from our interest payments and penalties.
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InsertUser
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/32
Zauberlehrling
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
yianiris
in reply to Zauberlehrling • • •All corporations are mini dictatorships, some not so mini, and some much larger than countries that lived through dictatorships.
But, all government institutions are ruled as dictatorships, and NGOs, and many NPs are dictatorships as well.
So to what parts of our social life do we experience democracy, family, village/community, neighborhood, municipality, school? During work we definitely live under dictatorial rule, without a justice that even dictatorships had.
@rvaughnmd @pluralistic
Zauberlehrling
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •And there you have it:
"Capitalists hate capitalism, because capitalism only works if the capitalists are in a constant state of terror inspired by the knowledge that tomorrow, someone smarter could come along and open a better business, poaching their customers and workers, and putting the capitalist on the breadline."
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Brett Coulstock
Unknown parent • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
Love your work and words, but next 30 chain post I'm blocking you. Not in an harsh way, but 30 "show more" posts is sucking a lot of oxygen from my Mastodon feed. I'd rather read 30 different voices about 30 different cool things.
Blogs are great and maybe just a taster and a link was all you needed there.
🙄
Cory Doctorow
Unknown parent • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
Image:
Vlad Lazarenko (modified)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_Street_Sign_%281-9%29.jpg
CC BY-SA 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
eof/
File:Wall Street Sign (1-9).jpg - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.orgCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/33
I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel *The Bezzle*! Catch me SUNDAY (Apr 21) in TORINO, then Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour
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Pluralistic: Come see me on tour; How America’s oligarchs lull us with the be-your-own-boss fairy tale (16 Feb 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Brett Coulstock • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
@BrettCoulstock You can find out more about how to manage your feed here:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/
How To Make the Least-Worst Mastodon Threads – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netMother Bones
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Josh
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
Mick 🇨🇦
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Mick 🇨🇦 • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Josh • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
Thought Punks
Unknown parent • • •Brett Coulstock
Unknown parent • • •@sysop408
I like reading Doctorow, I just don't like drivers blocking all the lanes of the highway for 10 minutes. If the driver can be persuaded not to do that, then that's more productive.
I don't measure my worth in eyeballs, but I do value my time and channels of information.
Sheldon Chang 🇺🇸
in reply to Brett Coulstock • • •@BrettCoulstock I love your griping and words, but the next "I'm blocking you" grouch bomb I read from you, I'm blocking you. I'd rather not read someone's wrongheaded rants when all they need to do is unfollow, mute, or block without any theatrics.
@pluralistic
Mister Moo 🐮
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Chris Johnson
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/28
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Mister Moo 🐮 • • •Content warning: Long thread/eof
Ton Chrysoprase
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •