#appeal to the american market like

[mishkakagehishka]

I was thinking ab giving the new bts album a listen but there's like 48 songs on there ?? Ig they wanted a big release before the enlistment or smth💀

[some-greatreward]

kinda sad that most of the bands im crazy about are so distinctly british that they have limited appeal outside the uk and so tend not to tour outside of it either :/

[soupdreamer]

absolutely love how the ART gatsby marketing team is essentially doing the exact opposite of what the broadway/paper mill gatsby has been doing

[stillness138]

between all the mummy dust 2: electric boogaloo, the usual vague 'the church is full of greed and hypocrisy' and the cum metaphors, there was this shot. and oh how i wish tf would just full on yell about this for an entire song

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst data-breach in world history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans and 15m Britons, (and 19k Canadians) into the world, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and premade identity-theft kits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just that their top execs liquidated their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach – it was also that they ignored years of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.

Things didn't improve after the breach. Indeed, the 2017 Equifax breach was the starting gun for a string of more breaches, because Equifax's servers didn't just have one fubared system – it was composed of pure, refined fubar. After one group of hackers breached the main Equifax system, other groups breached other Equifax systems, over and over, and over:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/equifax-password-username-admin-lawsuit-201118316.html

Doesn't this remind you of Boeing? It reminds me of Boeing. The spectacular 737 Max failures in 2018 weren't the end of the scandal. They weren't even the scandal's start – they were the tipping point, the moment in which a long history of lethally defective planes "breached" from the world of aviation wonks and into the wider public consciousness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he's just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won't be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they'll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.

Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn't even a teardown, it's just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn't start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It's not a toxic asset, because it's not an asset. It's just toxic.

Equifax isn't just a company: it's infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

This witch-hunts-as-a-service morphed into an official part of the economy, the backbone of the credit industry, with a license to secretly destroy your life with haphazardly assembled "facts" about your life that you had the most minimal, grudging right to appeal (or even see). Turns out there are a lot of customers for this kind of service, and the capital markets showered Equifax with the cash needed to buy almost all of its rivals, in mergers that were waved through by a generation of Reaganomics-sedated antitrust regulators.

There's a direct line from that acquisition spree to the Equifax breach(es). First of all, companies like Equifax were early adopters of technology. They're a database company, so they were the crash-test dummies for ever generation of database. These bug-riddled, heavily patched systems were overlaid with subsequent layers of new tech, with new defects to be patched and then overlaid with the next generation.

These systems are intrinsically fragile, because things fall apart at the seams, and these systems are all seams. They are tech-debt personified. Now, every kind of enterprise will eventually reach this state if it keeps going long enough, but the early digitizers are the bow-wave of that coming infopocalypse, both because they got there first and because the bottom tiers of their systems are composed of layers of punchcards and COBOL, crumbling under the geological stresses of seventy years of subsequent technology.

The single best account of this phenomenon is the British Library's postmortem of their ransomware attack, which is also in the running for "best hard-eyed assessment of how fucked things are":

https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

There's a reason libraries, cities, insurance companies, and other giant institutions keep getting breached: they started accumulating tech debt before anyone else, so they've got more asbestos in the walls, more sagging joists, more foundation cracks and more termites.

That was the starting point for Equifax – a company with a massive tech debt that it would struggle to pay down under the most ideal circumstances.

Then, Equifax deliberately made this situation infinitely worse through a series of mergers in which it bought dozens of other companies that all had their own version of this problem, and duct-taped their failing, fucked up IT systems to its own. The more seams an IT system has, the more brittle and insecure it is. Equifax deliberately added so many seams that you need to be able to visualized additional spatial dimensions to grasp them – they had fractal seams.

But wait, there's more! The reason to merge with your competitors is to create a monopoly position, and the value of a monopoly position is that it makes a company too big to fail, which makes it too big to jail, which makes it too big to care. Each Equifax acquisition took a piece off the game board, making it that much harder to replace Equifax if it fucked up. That, in turn, made it harder to punish Equifax if it fucked up. And that meant that Equifax didn't have to care if it fucked up.

Which is why the increasingly desperate pleas for more resources to shore up Equifax's crumbling IT and security infrastructure went unheeded. Top management could see that they were steaming directly into an iceberg, but they also knew that they had a guaranteed spot on the lifeboats, and that someone else would be responsible for fishing the dead passengers out of the sea. Why turn the wheel?

That's what happened to Boeing, too: the company acquired new layers of technical complexity by merging with rivals (principally McDonnell-Douglas), and then starved the departments that would have to deal with that complexity because it was being managed by execs whose driving passion was to run a company that was too big to care. Those execs then added more complexity by chasing lower costs by firing unionized, competent, senior staff and replacing them with untrained scabs in jurisdictions chosen for their lax labor and environmental enforcement regimes.

(The biggest difference was that Boeing once had a useful, high-quality product, whereas Equifax started off as an irredeemably terrible, if efficient, discrimination machine, and grew to become an equally terrible, but also ferociously incompetent, enterprise.)

This is the American story of the past four decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between "too rotten to stand" and "too big to care."

Remember last February, when we all discovered that there was a company called Change Healthcare, and that they were key to processing virtually every prescription filled in America? Remember how we discovered this? Change was hacked, went down, ransomed, and no one could fill a scrip in America for more than a week, until they paid the hackers $22m in Bitcoin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Change_Healthcare_ransomware_attack

How did we end up with Change Healthcare as the linchpin of the entire American prescription system? Well, first Unitedhealthcare became the largest health insurer in America by buying all its competitors in a series of mergers that comatose antitrust regulators failed to block. Then it combined all those other companies' IT systems into a cosmic-scale dog's breakfast that barely ran. Then it bought Change and used its monopoly power to ensure that every Rx ran through Change's servers, which were part of that asbestos-filled, termite-infested, crack-foundationed, sag-joisted teardown. Then, it got hacked.

United's execs are the kind of execs on a relentless quest to be too big to care, and so they don't care. Which is why their they had to subsequently announce that they had suffered a breach that turned the complete medical histories of one third of Americans into immortal Darknet kompromat that is – even now – being combined with breach data from Equifax and force-fed to the slaves in Cambodia and Laos's pig-butchering factories:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/data-stolen-healthcare-hack/index.html

Those slaves are beaten, tortured, and punitively raped in compounds to force them to drain the life's savings of everyone in Canada, Australia, Singapore, the UK and Europe. Remember that they are downstream of the forseeable, inevitable IT failures of companies that set out to be too big to care that this was going to happen.

Failures like Ticketmaster's, which flushed 500 million users' personal information into the identity-theft mills just last month. Ticketmaster, you'll recall, grew to its current scale through (you guessed it), a series of mergers en route to "too big to care" status, that resulted in its IT systems being combined with those of Ticketron, Live Nation, and dozens of others:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hack-data-breach.html

But enough about that. Let's go car-shopping!

Good luck with that. There's a company you've never heard. It's called CDK Global. They provide "dealer management software." They are a monopolist. They got that way after being bought by a private equity fund called Brookfield. You can't complete a car purchase without their systems, and their systems have been hacked. No one can buy a car:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/business/cdk-global-cyber-attack-update/index.html

Writing for his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tells the all-too-familiar story of how CDK Global filled the walls of the nation's auto-dealers with the IT equivalent of termites and asbestos, and lays the blame where it belongs: with a legal and economics establishment that wanted it this way:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-supreme-court-justice-is-why-you

The CDK story follows the Equifax/Boeing/Change Healthcare/Ticketmaster pattern, but with an important difference. As CDK was amassing its monopoly power, one of its execs, Dan McCray, told a competitor, Authenticom founder Steve Cottrell that if he didn't sell to CDK that he would "fucking destroy" Authenticom by illegally colluding with the number two dealer management company Reynolds.

Rather than selling out, Cottrell blew the whistle, using Cottrell's own words to convince a district court that CDK had violated antitrust law. The court agreed, and ordered CDK and Reynolds – who controlled 90% of the market – to continue to allow Authenticom to participate in the DMS market.

Dealers cheered this on: CDK/Reynolds had been steadily hiking prices, while ingesting dealer data and using it to gouge the dealers on additional services, while denying dealers access to their own data. The services that Authenticom provided for $35/month cost $735/month from CDK/Reynolds (they justified this price hike by saying they needed the additional funds to cover the costs of increased information security!).

CDK/Reynolds appealed the judgment to the 7th Circuit, where a panel of economists weighed in. As Stoller writes, this panel included monopoly's most notorious (and well-compensated) cheerleader, Frank Easterbrook, and the "legendary" Democrat Diane Wood. They argued for CDK/Reynolds, demanding that the court release them from their obligations to share the market with Authenticom:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-7th-circuit/1879150.html

The 7th Circuit bought the argument, overturning the lower court and paving the way for the CDK/Reynolds monopoly, which is how we ended up with one company's objectively shitty IT systems interwoven into the sale of every car, which meant that when Russian hackers looked at that crosseyed, it split wide open, allowing them to halt auto sales nationwide. What happens next is a near-certainty: CDK will pay a multimillion dollar ransom, and the hackers will reward them by breaching the personal details of everyone who's ever bought a car, and the slaves in Cambodian pig-butchering compounds will get a fresh supply of kompromat.

But on the plus side, the need to pay these huge ransoms is key to ensuring liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets, because ransoms are now the only nondiscretionary liability that can only be settled in crypto:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

When the 7th Circuit set up every American car owner to be pig-butchered, they cited one of the most important cases in antitrust history: the 2004 unanimous Supreme Court decision in Verizon v Trinko:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2003/02-682

Trinko was a case about whether antitrust law could force Verizon, a telcoms monopolist, to share its lines with competitors, something it had been ordered to do and then cheated on. The decision was written by Antonin Scalia, and without it, Big Tech would never have been able to form. Scalia and Trinko gave us the modern, too-big-to-care versions of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and the other tech baronies.

In his Trinko opinion, Scalia said that "possessing monopoly power" and "charging monopoly prices" was "not unlawful" – rather, it was "an important element of the free-market system." Scalia – writing on behalf of a unanimous court! – said that fighting monopolists "may lessen the incentive for the monopolist…to invest in those economically beneficial facilities."

In other words, in order to prevent monopolists from being too big to care, we have to let them have monopolies. No wonder Trinko is the Zelig of shitty antitrust rulings, from the decision to dismiss the antitrust case against Facebook and Apple's defense in its own ongoing case:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/073_2021.06.28_mtd_order_memo.pdf

Trinko is the origin node of too big to care. It's the reason that our whole economy is now composed of "infrastructure" that is made of splitting seams, asbestos, termites and dry rot. It's the reason that the entire automotive sector became dependent on companies like Reynolds, whose billionaire owner intentionally and illegally destroyed evidence of his company's crimes, before going on to commit the largest tax fraud in American history:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaire-robert-brockman-accused-of-biggest-tax-fraud-in-u-s-history-dies-at-81-11660226505

Trinko begs companies to become too big to care. It ensures that they will exponentially increase their IT debt while becoming structurally important to whole swathes of the US economy. It guarantees that they will underinvest in IT security. It is the soil in which pig butchering grew.

It's why you can't buy a car.

Now, I am fond of quoting Stein's Law at moments like this: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As Stoller writes, after two decades of unchallenged rule, Trinko is looking awfully shaky. It was substantially narrowed in 2023 by the 10th Circuit, which had been briefed by Biden's antitrust division:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/22-1164/22-1164-2023-08-21.html

And the cases of 2024 have something going for them that Trinko lacked in 2004: evidence of what a fucking disaster Trinko is. The wrongness of Trinko is so increasingly undeniable that there's a chance it will be overturned.

But it won't go down easy. As Stoller writes, Trinko didn't emerge from a vacuum: the economic theories that underpinned it come from some of the heroes of orthodox economics, like Joseph Schumpeter, who is positively worshipped. Schumpeter was antitrust's OG hater, who wrote extensively that antitrust law didn't need to exist because any harmful monopoly would be overturned by an inevitable market process dictated by iron laws of economics.

Schumpeter wrote that monopolies could only be sustained by "alertness and energy" – that there would never be a monopoly so secure that its owner became too big to care. But he went further, insisting that the promise of attaining a monopoly was key to investment in great new things, because monopolists had the economic power that let them plan and execute great feats of innovation.

The idea that monopolies are benevolent dictators has pervaded our economic tale for decades. Even today, critics who deplore Facebook and Google do so on the basis that they do not wield their power wisely (say, to stamp out harassment or disinformation). When confronted with the possibility of breaking up these companies or replacing them with smaller platforms, those critics recoil, insisting that without Big Tech's scale, no one will ever have the power to accomplish their goals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

But they misunderstand the relationship between corporate power and corporate conduct. The reason corporations accumulate power is so that they can be insulated from the consequences of the harms they wreak upon the rest of us. They don't inflict those harms out of sadism: rather, they do so in order to externalize the costs of running a good system, reaping the profits of scale while we pay its costs.

The only reason to accumulate corporate power is to grow too big to care. Any corporation that amasses enough power that it need not care about us will not care about it. You can't fix Facebook by replacing Zuck with a good unelected social media czar with total power over billions of peoples' lives. We need to abolish Zuck, not fix Zuck.

Zuck is not exceptional: there were a million sociopaths whom investors would have funded to monopolistic dominance if he had balked. A monopoly like Facebook has a Zuck-shaped hole at the top of its org chart, and only someone Zuck-shaped will ever fit through that hole.

Our whole economy is now composed of companies with sociopath-shaped holes at the tops of their org chart. The reason these companies can only be run by sociopaths is the same reason that they have become infrastructure that is crumbling due to sociopathic neglect. The reckless disregard for the risk of combining companies is the source of the market power these companies accumulated, and the market power let them neglect their systems to the point of collapse.

This is the system that Schumpeter, and Easterbrook, and Wood, and Scalia – and the entire Supreme Court of 2004 – set out to make. The fact that you can't buy a car is a feature, not a bug. The pig-butcherers, wallowing in an ocean of breach data, are a feature, not a bug. The point of the system was what it did: create unimaginable wealth for a tiny cohort of the worst people on Earth without regard to the collapse this would provoke, or the plight of those of us trapped and suffocating in the rubble.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[robertreich]

Who’s to Blame for Out-Of-Control Corporate Power?    

One man is especially to blame for why corporate power is out of control. And I knew him! He was my professor, then my boss. His name… Robert Bork.

Robert Bork was a notorious conservative who believed the only legitimate purpose of antitrust — that is, anti-monopoly — law is to lower prices for consumers, no matter how big corporations get. His philosophy came to dominate the federal courts and conservative economics.

I met him in 1971, when I took his antitrust class at Yale Law School. He was a large, imposing man, with a red beard and a perpetual scowl. He seemed impatient and bored with me and my classmates, who included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, as we challenged him repeatedly on his antitrust views.

We argued with Bork that ever-expanding corporations had too much power. Not only could they undercut rivals with lower prices and suppress wages, but they were using their spoils to influence our politics with campaign contributions. Wasn’t this cause for greater antitrust enforcement?

He had a retort for everything. Undercutting rival businesses with lower prices was a good thing because consumers like lower prices. Suppressing wages didn’t matter because employees are always free to find better jobs. He argued that courts could not possibly measure political power, so why should that matter?

Even in my mid-20s, I knew this was hogwash.

But Bork’s ideology began to spread. A few years after I took his class, he wrote a book called The Antitrust Paradox summarizing his ideas. The book heavily influenced Ronald Reagan and later helped form a basic tenet of Reaganomics — the bogus theory that says government should get out of the way and allow corporations to do as they please, including growing as big and powerful as they want.

Despite our law school sparring, Bork later gave me a job in the Department of Justice when he was solicitor general for Gerald Ford. Even though we didn’t agree on much, I enjoyed his wry sense of humor. I respected his intellect. Hell, I even came to like him.

Once President Reagan appointed Bork as an appeals court judge, his rulings further dismantled antitrust. And while his later Supreme Court nomination failed, his influence over the courts continued to grow.  

Bork’s legacy is the enormous corporate power we see today, whether it’s Ticketmaster and Live Nation consolidating control over live performances, Kroger and Albertsons dominating the grocery market, or Amazon, Google, and Meta taking over the tech world.

It’s not just these high-profile companies either: in most industries, a handful of companies now control more of their markets than they did twenty years ago.

This corporate concentration costs the typical American household an estimated extra $5,000 per year. Companies have been able to jack up prices without losing customers to competitors because there is often no meaningful competition.

And huge corporations also have the power to suppress wages because workers have fewer employers from whom to get better jobs.

And how can we forget the massive flow of money these corporate giants are funneling into politics, rigging our democracy in their favor?

But the tide is beginning to turn under the Biden Administration. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are fighting the monopolization of America in court, and proposing new merger guidelines to protect consumers, workers, and society.

It’s the implementation of the view that I and my law school classmates argued for back in the 1970s — one that sees corporate concentration as a problem that outweighs any theoretical benefits Bork claimed might exist.

Robert Bork would likely regard the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts with the same disdain he had for my arguments in his class all those years ago. But instead of a few outspoken law students, Bork’s philosophy is now being challenged by the full force of the federal government.

The public is waking up to the outsized power corporations wield over our economy and democracy. It’s about time.

[transmutationisms]

can u elaborate on posture being a lie

As Beth Linker explains in her book “Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America” (Princeton), a long history of anxiety about the proximity between human and bestial nature has played out in this area of social science. Linker, a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that at the onset of the twentieth century the United States became gripped by what she characterizes as a poor-posture epidemic: a widespread social contagion of slumping that could, it was feared, have deleterious effects not just upon individual health but also upon the body politic. Sitting up straight would help remedy all kinds of failings, physical and moral [...] she sees the “past and present worries concerning posture as part of an enduring concern about so-called ‘diseases of civilization’ ”—grounded in a mythology of human ancestry that posits the hunter-gatherer as an ideal from which we have fallen.

[...]

In America at the turn of the twentieth century, anxieties about posture inevitably collided with anxieties not just about class but also about race. Stooping was associated with poverty and with manual, industrialized labor—the conditions of working-class immigrants from European countries who, in their physical debasement, were positioned well below the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment. Linker argues that, in this environment, “posture served as a marker of social status similar to skin color.” At the same time, populations that had been colonized and enslaved were held up as posture paradigms for the élite to emulate: the American Posture League rewarded successful students with congratulatory pins that featured an image of an extremely upright Lenape man. The head-carrying customs associated with African women were also adopted as training exercises for white girls of privilege, although Linker notes that Bancroft and her peers recommended that young ladies learn to balance not baskets and basins, which signified functionality, but piles of flat, slippery books, markers of their own access to leisure and education. For Black Americans, posture was even more fraught: despite the admiration granted to the posture of African women bearing loads atop their heads, community leaders like Dr. Algernon Jackson, who helped establish the National Negro Health Movement, criticized those Black youth who “too often slump along, stoop-shouldered and walk with a careless, lazy sort of dragging gait.” If slouching among privileged white Americans could indicate an enviable carelessness, it was seen as proof of indolence when adopted by the disadvantaged.

This being America, posture panic was swiftly commercialized, with a range of products marketed to appeal to the eighty per cent of the population whose carriage had been deemed inadequate by posture surveys. The footwear industry drafted orthopedic surgeons to consult on the design of shoes that would lessen foot and back pain without the stigma of corrective footwear: one brand, Trupedic, advertised itself as “a real anatomical shoe without the freak-show look.” The indefatigable Jessie Bancroft trained her sights on children’s clothing, endorsing a company that created a “Right-Posture” jacket, whose trim cut across the upper shoulders gave its schoolboy wearer little choice but to throw his shoulders back like Jordan Baker. Bancroft’s American Posture League endorsed girdles and corsets for women; similar garments were also adopted by men, who, by the early nineteen-fifties, were purchasing abdominal “bracers” by the millions.

It was in this era that what eventually proved to be the most contentious form of posture policing reached its height, when students entering college were required to submit to mandatory posture examinations, including the taking of nude or semi-nude photographs. For decades, incoming students had been evaluated for conditions such as scoliosis by means of a medical exam, which came to incorporate photography to create a visual record. Linker writes that for many male students, particularly those who had military training, undressing for the camera was no biggie. For female students, it was often a more disquieting undertaking. Sylvia Plath, who endured it in 1950, drew upon the experience in “The Bell Jar,” whose protagonist, Esther Greenwood, discovers that undressing for her boyfriend is as uncomfortably exposing as “knowing . . . that a picture of you stark naked, both full view and side view, is going into the college gym files.” The practice of taking posture photographs was gradually abandoned by colleges, thanks in part to the rise of the women’s movement, which gave coeds a new language with which to express their discomfort. It might have been largely forgotten were it not for a 1995 article in the Times Magazine, which raised the alarming possibility that there still existed stashes of nude photographs of famous former students of the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters, such as George H. W. Bush, Bob Woodward, Meryl Streep, and Hillary Clinton. Many of the photographs in question were taken and held not by the institutions themselves but by the mid-century psychologist William Herbert Sheldon. Sheldon was best known for his later discredited theories of somatotypes, whereby he attributed personality characteristics to individuals based on whether their build was ectomorphic, endomorphic, or mesomorphic.

[...]

Today, the descendants of Jessie Bancroft are figures like Esther Gokhale, a Bay Area acupuncturist and the creator of the Gokhale Method, who teaches “primal posture” courses to tech executives and whose recommendations are consonant with other fitness trends, such as barefoot running and “paleo” eating, that romanticize an ancestral past as a remedy for the ills of the present. The compulsory mass surveillance that ended when universities ceased the practice of posture photography has been replaced by voluntary individual surveillance, with the likes of Rafi the giraffe and the Nekoze cat monitoring a user’s vulnerability to “tech neck,” a newly named complaint brought on by excessive use of the kind of devices profitably developed by those paleo-eating, barefoot-running, yoga-practicing executives. Meanwhile, Linker reports, paleoanthropologists quietly working in places other than TikTok have begun to revise the popular idea that our ancient ancestors did not get aches and pains in their backs. Analysis of fossilized spines has revealed degenerative changes suggesting that “the first upright hominids to roam the earth likely experienced back pain, or would have been predisposed to such a condition if they had lived long enough.” Slouching, far from being a disease of civilization, then, seems to be something we’ve been prone to for as long as we have stood on our own two feet.

[maxknightley]

on the one hand I do understand where people are coming from when they respond to The White American Desire For Authentic Culture by going "you already have a culture" and pointing out that this desire often has reactionary undertones

that being said, I think it's largely sidestepping the actual issue, which is that American culture fucking blows chunks. American culture is strip malls and military worship and the elevation of mass-market pablum to Bold Artistic Statements.

and subculture is only partially an escape from this, because most subcultures exist within the same constraints of American culture as a whole; they are captured and redefined by capital on such a frequent basis that it often feels impossible to hold onto them in any meaningful way.

moreover, even the parts of American culture that aren't complete garbage are more or less inextricable from the colonial, imperialist, and racially-stratified history of the country. like, I think of that post that went around a while ago talking about "America sucks but has some good parts," and one of the things it listed was national parks, and people (rightfully!) pointed out that the national park system is fundamentally flawed and tends to shit on indigenous nations by design.

the only thing I can think of that's even sort of an exception is pop culture - jazz and rock music, superhero comics, Hollywood. and all of those are, again, captured and defined by capital, and in one way or another have historically been built on screwing over the artist.

so we come to a position, one way or another, where a lot of people say something like: "I'm alienated. I'm surrounded by traditions and institutions I think are shit; I have no way to meaningfully undermine them, and I can't escape them without effectively destroying my life. the culture I was born into is a gravestone on top of another gravestone, lifeless and miserable, and people are constantly shouting that I should be grateful because it's The Greatest Country In The World."

at that point, one seeks an escape, and I think there are three major routes here.

one is to become a weird lib obsessed with the Real Soul Of America. America is really about the good parts, not the bad parts which outnumber them and which they are built upon.

another is to fixate on the Exotic, for lack of a better word. cultures which you do not have an obvious "connection" to, but which fascinate you or appeal to you. obviously this can be pretty fucking fraught, though I would argue that taking an interest in other cultures is a good thing if you aren't shitty about it. (That's its own conversation.)

the third is to fixate on the culture(s) you feel you "ought to have" had, that which was sacrificed on the altar of whiteness by grandparents or great-grandparents who, frankly, had different concerns. to look at a culture that may still be defined in many ways by cruelty and stratification - the way I would argue most human civilization has been - but that seems to have had something else going on, at least. a culture that may not have been recognizable 500 years ago, but at least it existed.

again, none of these impulses is beyond criticism, and I think it would be naive to say that the last one can't have reactionary undertones. I also doubt these impulses are unique to the USA! alienation is extremely common in today's world, and it's not as though the USA is the only settler state in existence.

what I am saying is more that I think the conditions that lead to these fixations are worth paying attention to, and that dismissing them with "you already have a culture" kind of misses the point in favor of getting in a zinger. people wouldn't want a different culture if they were happy with the one they had. like so many other things, people want one that Doesn't Completely Suck. failing that, they'd probably like to not be defined by any culture at all - but that, tragically, is just as impossible.

[reasonsforhope]

"While tourists visiting Mexican beaches complain about piles of smelly seaweed, one Mexican gardener reckoned it was something like a gift.

The governments in places like Cancun have been required to clear away as much as 40,000 tons of sargassum seaweed, which smells like rotten eggs, but Omar de Jesús Vazquez Sánchez is steering it away from the landfills and into a kiln, where he makes adobe-like blocks that pass regulation as a building material.

He started SargaBlock to market the bricks, which are being highlighted by the UN Development Program as a stroke of brilliance, and a sustainable solution to a current environmental problem.

His story begins back in 2015 when, like any experienced laborer, he found rich people were stuck with a job they didn’t want to do. In this case, it was cleaning up the sargassum on the beaches of the Riviera Maya.

Omar grew up in poverty, immigrated to the US as a child to become a day laborer, and eventually dropped out of school and became a substance abuser. The American dream never appealed to him as much as a “Mexican dream”—a mix of memories from his childhood and dreams of being a gardener back home, so he moved back.

His time feeling unwanted as an addict and immigrant gave him a unique perspective on the smelly seaweed.

“When you have problems with drugs or alcohol, you’re viewed as a problem for society. No one wants anything to do with you. They look away,” Omar told Christian Science Monitor in a translated interview.

“When sargassum started arriving, it created a similar reaction. Everyone was complaining, I wanted to mold something good out of something everyone saw as bad.”

The ecology and environment offices of Quintana Roo, the legislative area that includes the city of Cancun, approved the SargaBlocks for use, and similar organic-based blocks have been reckoned as being capable of enduring 120 years.

The UN Development Program selected Omar’s work to be featured in their Accelerator Lab global broadcast to alert the world of its value and ingenuity.

There are all kinds of naturally-occurring pollutants or burdens that could be used in construction, and the UNDP hoped that by sharing Omar’s vision of the future of the Caribbean’s sargassum problem, it would inspire others to act in similar ways.

Bricks and cement can be great sources to use up naturally-occurring material that’s dangerous or burdensome—like this Filippino community using the ash from volcanic eruptions to make bricks.

Omar has been fortunate enough to be able to donate 14 “Casas Angelitas,” or homes made of SargaBlock, to families in need, and seems to be exceedingly close to achieving his “Mexican dream.”"

-via Good News Network, 4/24/23

[avelera]

"Weirdness", Decency, and the Historical Echoes of Walz's tide-turning call-out of MAGA

At the risk of writing a high school paper about American politics in 2024, I think there's a historical echo that I'd like to add to the conversation of why Walz calling MAGA people, "weird" seems to finally armed Democrats with a line of personal attacks against MAGA that resonates with voters and seems to have overall broken the spell on this, well, weird behavior by them.

I think the one line of discussion that I haven't seen explored as to why the "weird" attack seems to be working to call out this aptly-named behavior by the far right in America is its similarity to the end of another far right movement in America: McCarthy's Red Scare.

It is popularly attributed that the moment, the quote, that brought about the end of the Red Scare was this:

"Until this moment, senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness . . . . Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

Special Counsel for the U.S. Army Joseph N. Welch confronting Sen. Joseph McCarthy (source)

Many historical accounts will say this is the moment the spell broke with McCarthy. That this is the moment when Americans looked around like the naval officer at the end of Lord of the Flies and basically said, "What the hell is going on here?"

I think Walz's "weird" quote is this moment.

I've been waiting for this moment to occur with MAGA for some time. It did indeed feel as if no amount of pointing out the lunacy, the absurdity, of the movement was enough. I think other commentators might be right when saying that appealing to how dangerous they are, how scary they are, wasn't working. I could speculate on a variety of reasons for this, like that people like to be part of the winning side and being "scary" can feel good. Or that because of Godwin's Law it's nearly impossible to impress upon people how serious and swift the rise of fascism can be even when it's right in front of you, because no one wants to believe that "our sort of people" would do that sort of thing.

But calling out the MAGA movement as "weird" seems to be working because it echoes Welch's "decency" attack. It is treating childish behavior with the response it deserves. It's huff of exasperation, it's the admonishment of the social choir saying, "What the hell is wrong with you? Why do you care about other people's personal lives so much? Why the hell are you trying to ban books like the Nazis did? Why are you going after women and immigrants and trans kids? Why can't you just be a good neighbor and leave people alone? At long last have you no sense of decency?"

We're tired of it. The MAGA movement has gone too far beyond the wishes of the moderate "silent majority" (such as it is and that's its own topic of debate) and is now obsessed with its own culture war issues that have grown increasingly detached from anything anyone really cares about day to day except for their die hards. And those die hards are so out of touch they don't realize it happened.

If I may end on one last rumination, I think that part of the reason the MAGA movement has lost touch is because of Trump's skill at marketing. Now, I loathe pretty much every aspect of the man, I struggle to think of any point on which I don't, but there is one thing, one thing I'll give him credit for which is being an arguably generational talent at marketing, branding, and self-promotion. He's good at getting his name on things and making them all about him (before he inevitably runs them into the ground).

But the thing is with marketing, you do a thing called A/B testing. You see which message resonates the most. And if a feel-good ad gets you 30% response and a misogynistic ad gets you 60% response, you go with that misogynistic one because the numbers support it (I actually saw this happen with an ad campaign so it's based on personal experience).

Now, if you notice that 16 year old boys really like your product and if you sell to them, you move more product, even if you lost the interest of everyone else, you're still doing a good job at moving your product (see Hollywood for the last few decades). Because a large, certain audience is better in marketing than trying to achieve broad but tepid appeal.

But the thing in politics is that you actually do have to expand your appeal. You have to get over 50% in the US. That means expanding the coalition, appealing to more people. But that runs counter to the way a lot of product marketing would work, where you'd single out your best audience and market aggressively to them because you'll get a better return. That, I think, is why Trump risks losing the middle even as he has the right locked down. He is a marketer, not a politician. He has his reliable audience. But that reliable audience isn't enough to win office. It's just enough to get reliable buyers of his product. And he doesn't know how to expand beyond them.

To bring this all back to "weirdness" and "decency", I think this too plays into what we're seeing. The MAGA movement has turned in on itself through its constant marketing to itself, always seeking a bigger outrage, a bigger sequel to bring people to the theater. That has put it out of touch with the wider mainstream. It's made them weird, a weird subculture within America that is not in touch with what most people want out of their government.

At least, that's what I hope. We'll find out in a few months now, won't we?

[centrally-unplanned]

I watched two documentaries recently that were very "2000's nerd culture" which I thought were very fun! In like a meta way as cultural commentary, of course, it is me after all. The first was Indie Game: The Movie, a 2012 documentary on the making Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Fez. It is a "creator-focused" documentary and in particular for the latter two games the film crew actually filmed them mid-production & release, which does make for some authentically heartfelt scenes.

So in a certain sense all eras of documentary will contain this, but the 2000's going into the 2010's was absolutely rife with a new wave of films, often supported by crowdsourcing funds like Indie Game was, primarily concerned with the self-legitimization of niche subcultures. By creating something cohesive, academic, and prestigious like a documentary, the film can codify the subculture as "real" and "worthy", and additionally lend credence to narratives about the subculture that have grown prevalent. And to be clear, this is not a criticism, even if there are parts that are - all meaning and identity is forged in similar ways. But for nerd culture in the 2000's, there was a particularly intense need for this process, because this was the era of nerdom going mainstream. That level of culture shift generated demand for all the above, which films like this aim to supply. There were lot of films of this type - we made a brony "documentary" propaganda film guys, nothing was exempt.

Indie Game is overwhelmingly the story of outsider artists bleeding and dying for their art, which will triumph above all odds. And it leans, heavily, into the bleed; at one point Phil Fish (creator of Fez), openly states he might commit suicide if his game fails. Much screen time is spent on personal sacrifice, financial poverty, the "doubters", etc. This is of course a classic tale for artists, but if I may be so bold that is something of an easy sell - emotionally, narratively - for someone writing the Great American Novel. It is maybe harder to sell if you are making this?

(Cover art by Bryan Lee O'Malley btw - very era appropriate!) How do we make "dude in hat solves puzzles" worth the Starving Artist life?

We do that by positioning these games not as games, but as paradigms. These games, by dint of being the independent vision of unitary creators, are making games that Big Gaming never could. New digital means of distribution are allowing artists to cut out the middleman of publishers, groups that corrupt the real vision of creators. And with no barriers to development, now anyone (maybe...even you?) can make games that can compete in the big leagues. Indie games through this lens are a different product than mainstream titles, and these creators are opening doors. And their suffering is going to be financially rewarded with success and money to boot! That is the narrative Indie Game is selling to its audience of gamers, to understand why the indie games they bought and loved are meaningful.

And to be clear, as much as I am about to deconstruct this, it isn't like totally false or anything. Starting in the late 2000's digital platforms like Steam, more accessible development tools like Unity (released in 2005), and so on did in fact make smaller games appealing to more niche markets more viable, and by virtue of their nicheness yeah they can do things big budget games maybe can't. These creators absolutely had passionate visions for their games, sacrifice for your passions is fine (not bashing that part here), hats off to them. Indie games in this era would absolutely "change gaming".

But not really in the ways this narrative wants them to, nor with the "meaning" people of the time expected it to have. For one, there is a conflict in this documentary of them wanting to highlight "bold new visions" and also wanting to highlight...popular indie games. This is Super Meat Boy, for example:

Yeah, never had a 2D platformer blob guy dodging traps before in gaming! "No see its retro" yeah retro to what, old games? Like those Nintendo made back in the 90's, which you explicitly mention in your documentary? You know, niche indie studio Nintendo? This isn't a bash, at all, at the game itself, but instead the idea that "AAA Studios would never"; they totally would, and always did. There has never been an era where the large gaming studios weren't also making creative games, but for this narrative they need to be propped up as static for it to make sense. And the actual niche indie stuff that big studios wouldn't touch don't sell well enough to justify being in this film!

And the idea of the "solo developer" is also, hm, let us say a bit sus. Not that these developers weren't solo or small teams, they were (though ofc a solo core creator will often have dozens of helpers on supporting roles that get sidelined in this "unitary vision" narrative); but that such a model is all that new? How big do you think development teams were in the 90's for so many classic games? The original Pokemon Red/Blue game had less than a dozen core developers (the total staff list, including American localizers, is ~30 people - Super Meat Boy meanwhile seems to have 16 for comparison). You wanna bring up the dev teams for PC-98 visual novels? They were made in an Akihabara cave with a box of pixel art scraps by like 6 people! You think those games didn't have "unitary creative visions"? Small gaming companies have always been a part of the ecosystem, getting niche titles funded & published using insane magic and pure luck. The "indie boom" is better seen as a change in the numerator.

Though what did change is that, by being self-published, development was approachable by outsiders in new ways. Though even then, this is a bit of a lie - Jonathan Blow of Braid was an industry veteran, and everyone here plays the "convention circuit" and networks with people like the PAX crew and Xbox representatives. But with the games being published by an individual over a studio, even a studio of a half dozen people, it is far easier for the audience to see the creators as "one of them". No office, no suits, just a man in his gamer den banging out his dream. That aesthetic is core to why this narrative was potent at the time, and why making a documentary to codify it was seen as compelling. It takes an already ascendant idea, polishes it, packages it as nonfiction, and then sells the idea back to the people who invented it. LIke so much media, to be clear! I always enjoy seeing it, it is the dialectic of culture in action.

I also find it very funny to see a documentary made in 2012 playing tropes that will become far more ~problematic~ just around the corner. Burnout and work-life balance - in a documentary where a developer, crying, discusses suicide if his game fails, to remind you - is pretty much never mentioned, and a successful game launch is absolutely presented as justifying endless crunch. You would never see that today. The only women in this documentary are wives and parents - which is very amusing, because the co-creator of the film is a woman! No one thinks gender is relevant to mention. Boy would that change in a few years.

Indie games today, of course, are just a segment of the gaming market. They are incredibly common now, so much so that most people lose money making them, people discuss oversaturation, big studio companies have "indie wings" to cover consumer preference ranges, etc. There is no magic in it anymore, it is just dev strategy. So yeah, very enjoyable as a representative time capsule in a strain of culture that is pretty much gone now! The Capital-R Romantic Era of indie gaming; what a time.

In the next post, we are going much more niche, so stay tuned for that. Or don't, I don't know you, and like this was a loooot of writing. Maybe i'll, idk work on that for the next one? ...I probably won't -_-

[swingsetindecember]

quebec's language laws have protected quebec in a weird way from late stage capitalism. by no means to idealize quebec, i just don't see it wildly talked about how a language barrier has stalled capitalism.

i am sure there are socio-economic papers written on this. like because you need to have french contracts, terms of service and signage, a lot of american companies and global conglomerates don't go to quebec. like a lot of businesses just don't exist in quebec compared to the rest of canada. like franchise restaurants. quebec has a lot less franchise restaurants. oh there are a couple but they are like very specific to quebec and also just in the more metropolitan areas. usually in suburbs you don't have a lot of franchise restaurants.

this is also sweepstakes. because in quebec a mail in entry is required for any sweepstakes. you don't have to buy the product. also a lot of brands need to have their labels in french so a lot of products just don't get to quebec market

also a lot of the population wants to be serviced in french so they prefer quebec companies. this is why there are quebec specific internet and telephone companies. bootlegging is wild popular because there was usually a lag before you could get english content because they needed to make the french dub.

its also why movie rental stores stayed open for a long time in quebec because they catered to french language dubbed movies. like blockbuster did come to quebec but it didn't have the same chokehold on the market. like i rarely went to blockbuster growing up, there were 3 local video rental places that had more titles than blockbuster because the blockbuster business model didn't appeal to quebec residents. especially if you wanted to rent french versions of video games.

anyway, just interesting to think about

[razistoricharka]

Very interesting + concise article, pertinent with how much I've seen the joke about that "sadness in his eyes you only see in east european gay porn". Warning for pretty much everything you can expect.

Describing the wave of Eastern European gay pornography that flooded the US market following the dissolution of the USSR, Jones said: “They were products of a crude imperialist enterprise: cheap and nasty looking, with an atmosphere of coercion and cultural misunderstanding pervading them. Customers adored these videos, and expressed their breathless admiration whenever given the chance”

It gets pretty rough from here onward.

The Fall… opens with a short clip of a young man in profile, undressing. He looks uncomfortable, alternating between staring forward and glancing in the direction of the camera, his eyes showing a mix of discomfort and contempt. Jones’ voiceover states: “even in an unlikely place, it is possible to find traces of recent history” followed by b-roll taken from the aforementioned porn films including maps of the former USSR, market scenes, beggars and street footage. Their purpose in the aforementioned films appears to be part exoticism and part poverty fetishism, attempting to show the former glory of the Eastern nations as an emphasis on their subsequent fall. They’re an essential part of the set-up, speaking directly to what made this genre of pornography appealing to a western, primarily American, market. It’s easy to comprehend the mixture of exploitation and exoticism that made these videos popular in the US, but Jones goes further, aiming to establish a firm link between the booming Western economy and a more global, less visible form of exploitation.

The latter half of the film compounds the atmosphere of coercion, focusing specifically on the casting and screen tests of performers. The voice from behind the camera probes the subject on their sexual preferences, their motivations for being filmed: “I’m doing it for the money” “That’s a very good reason” Western audiences were turned on by the idea that the performers were under some form of duress—the ostensibly straight man either consuming their sexuality through the guise of pornography, or in the case of several scenes, the performer showing visible discomfort at either the sex or the presence of the camera. The films are low budget, low production value and low brow—by intention, rather than necessity. Jones speculates that the developing Eastern European sex industry, with the influx of Western producers and a Western market in mind, could be seen as an indicator of fertile ground for fascist ideologies—an aspersion confirmed by the global rise of far-right ideologies in tandem with the economic pressure of late-stage capitalism, a point at which more contemporary comparisons can be made.

The brief conclusion on the contemporary form of this exploitation aesthetic is also noteworthy:

In the same way that the fall of communism was exploited by the West, the financial and social insecurity of a generation living in recession, under permanent austerity, is exploited now. The aesthetics utilised in Jones’ film are still broadly present, albeit perhaps in a slightly altered form, now accompanied by a new visual language born from a culture numb to being told to “like, comment, share and subscribe”.

[vintagerpg]

This is The Price of Freedom (1986). The game begins as Soviet forces begin their occupation of America. I don’t know why so much of this stuff came out in 1986, but they did (I mean, obviously they draw from Red Dawn, but it’s weird to have all of them in one grouping like this).

I do not know who this game is for. On the surface, it seems aimed at the same conservative-minded, Red Scare-fearing folks that Year of the Phoenix was aimed at. Certainly it was marketed toward them. The designer, Greg Cosikyan, though, was a liberal New Yorker (he considered himself a left libertarian at the time). I’ve seen him claim it was an experiment, I’ve also seen him express embarrassment over it. But this is also the guy who wrote Violence, Paranoia and Toon. I can’t help but see this as a send-up, or perhaps a Trojan horse.

The cover art is perhaps a good Rorschach test. I can see how that image would both unnerve and appeal someone under the spell of the Red Scare. But to me, the looming Lenin, the headbands and the lady (wrongly) carrying the massive RPG scream farce. The liberal use of “commie” in the text similarly undercuts the seriousness for me (Paranoia, which does something similar, came out two years prior).

The game is D20 and skill based. Its tightly designed, veers towards wargames for its action and is fairly unremarkable mechanically. There isn’t much in the rules about roleplaying, really, but the pre-gens have a lot of roleplay cues that support the idea that this is meant to subvert the conservatism the game appeals to. Maria is a Trotskyite Marxist, Billy’s hero is Bruce (no last name given, but of course it means Springsteen). Jake idolizes Bernie Goetz (keep an eye on Jake, jeeze), Johnson’s passion is money. Its a big spectrum of American personalities united against the commies, including some commies!

Added bonus: the intro scenario takes place on the Communipaw bridge connecting Kearny to Jersey City, making it the only RPG I know of that takes place in my good old hometown.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Greedflation, but for prisoners

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Apr 21) in TORINO, then Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Today in "Capitalists Hate Capitalism" news: The Appeal has published the first-ever survey of national prison commissary prices, revealing just how badly the prison profiteer system gouges American's all-time, world-record-beating prison population:

https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-commissary-prices/

Like every aspect of the prison contracting system, prison commissaries – the stores where prisoners are able to buy food, sundries, toiletries and other items – are dominated by private equity funds that have bought out all the smaller players. Private equity deals always involve gigantic amounts of debt (typically, the first thing PE companies do after acquiring a company is to borrow heavily against it and then pay themselves a hefty dividend).

The need to service this debt drives PE companies to cut quality, squeeze suppliers, and raise prices. That's why PE loves to buy up the kinds of businesses you must spend your money at: dialysis clinics, long-term care facilities, funeral homes, and prison services.

Prisoners, after all, are a literal captive market. Unlike capitalist ventures, which involve the risk that a customer will take their business elsewhere, prison commissary providers have the most airtight of monopolies over prisoners' shopping.

Not that prisoners have a lot of money to spend. The 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of convicted criminals, and so even though many prisoners are subject to forced labor, they aren't necessarily paid for it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Six states ban paying prisoners anything. North Carolina caps prisoners' pay at one dollar per day. Nationally, prisoners earn $0.52/hour, while producing $11b/year in goods and services:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

So there's a double cruelty to prison commissary price-gouging. Prisoners earn far less than any other kind of worker, and they pay vastly inflated prices for the necessities of life. There's also a triple cruelty: prisoners' families – deprived of an incarcerated breadwinner's earnings – are called upon to make up the difference for jacked up commissary prices out of their own strained finances.

So what does prison profiteering look like, in dollars and sense? Here's the first-of-its-kind database tracking the costs of food, hygiene items and religious items in 46 states:

https://theappeal.org/commissary-database/

Prisoners rely heavily on commissaries for food. Prisons serve spoiled, inedible food, and often there isn't enough to go around – prisoners who rely on the food provided by their institutions literally starve. This is worst in prisons where private equity funds have taken over the cafeteria, which is inevitable accompanied by swingeing cuts to food quality and portions:

https://theappeal.org/prison-food-virginia-fluvanna-correctional-center/

So you have one private equity fund starving prisoners, and another that's gouging them on food. Or sometimes it's the same company. Keefe Group, owned by HIG Capital, provides commissaries to prisons whose cafeterias are managed by other HIG Capital portfolio companies like Trinity Services Group. HIG also owns the prison health-care company Wellpath – so if they give you food poisoning, they get paid twice.

Wellpath delivers "grossly inadequate healthcare":

https://theappeal.org/massachusetts-prisons-wellpath-dentures-teeth/

And Trinity serves "meager portions of inedible food":

https://theappeal.org/clayton-county-jail-sheriff-election/

When prison commissaries gouge on food, no part of the inventory is spared, even the cheapest items. In Florida, a packet of ramen costs $1.06, 300% more inside the prison than it does at the Target down the street:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24444312-fl_doc_combined_commissary_lists#document/p6/a2444049

America's prisoners aren't just hungry, they're also hot. The climate emergency is sending temperatures in America's largely un-air-conditioned prisons soaring to dangerous levels. Commissaries capitalize on this, too: an 8" fan costs $40 in Delaware's Sussex Correctional Institution. In Georgia, that fan goes for $32 (but prisoners are not paid for their labor in Georgia pens). And in scorching Texas, the commissary raised the price of water by 50% last summer:

https://www.tpr.org/criminal-justice/2023-07-20/texas-charges-prisoners-50-more-for-water-for-as-heat-wave-continues

Toiletries are also sold at prices that would make an airport gift-shop blush. Need denture adhesive? That's $12.28 in an Idaho pen, triple the retail price. 15% of America's prisoners are over 55. The Keefe Group – sister company to the "grossly inadequate" healthcare company Wellpath – operates that commissary. In Oregon, the commissary charges a 200% markup on hearing-aid batteries. Vermont charges a 500% markup on reading glasses. Imagine spending decades in prison: toothless, blind, and deaf.

Then there's the religious items. Bibles and Christmas cards are surprisingly reasonable, but a Qaran will run you $26 in Vermont, where a Bible is a mere $4.55. Kufi caps – which cost $3 or less in the free world – go for $12 in Indiana prisons. A Virginia prisoner needs to work for 8 hours to earn enough to buy a commissary Ramadan card (you can buy a Christmas card after three hours' labor).

Prison price-gougers are finally facing a comeuppance. California's new BASIC Act caps prison commissary markups at 35% (California commissaries used to charge 63-200% markups):

https://theappeal.org/price-gouging-in-california-prisons-newsom-signature/

Last year, Nevada banned any markup on hygiene items:

https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/82nd2023/Bill/10425/Overview

And prison tech monopolist Securus has been driven to the brink of bankruptcy, thanks to the activism of Worth Rises and its coalition partners:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/

When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. Prisons show us how businesses would treat us if they could get away with it.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/20/captive-market/#locked-in

[sporesgalaxy]

dragging myself across the floor pathetically like a wounded animal. what if theres intertext between one piece and popeye the sailor. and is anyone picking apart how tiki culture (appropriative American-originated commercial fad beginning in the 30s) is presented in one piece. does anyone care about how one piece represents a constantly-evolving modern re-exploration and sometimes even deconstruction of the tropical adventure marketing that's been used for decades to appeal neocolonialism to the middle class of wealthy countries like the u.s. by way of tourism. can anyone hear me. coughs and dies