#i hate shareholder capitalism! i hate it i hate it i hate it!!

[haarute]

i am going to tear apart microsoft and zenimax media with my bare hands for what they did to tango gameworks

[spursthatjinglejanglejingle]

Watching a video about the development of starfield where the guy goes into detail about how zenimax wanted all their studios to create live service games and push microtransactions to inflate their revenue and make the company worth more before they get sold to microsoft and that's why fallout 76 sucked ass and bethesda started pushing paid mods and so many of their studios started making trash live service games and it's making me feel like this thinking about it

[pyreshe]

like yea i also didn't like this season of s&b but i don't blame the cast & crew or even the writers for it that much. like considering they were told by netflix, "hey you need to fit as much about this world and these characters as you can into about 8 hours of content- but you can't show anything or linger on things that aren't ✨marketable✨, we're also going to slash your budget, you get a 6 months to a year tops, and it's going to take an act of god to get you guys a third season. good luck!"

[celestialorcas]

Doctor Who S1/14 E3: Boom Spoilers Thoughts:

WOOOOOHOOOO Fuck me that was GOOOOOOOD Loving the anticapitalism stuff as always hell yea doctor you fucking tell them. Caught on with the stuff about the truth of the war around half way through and enjoyed it, Susan Twist was the ambulance! Girl is everywhere fr God they really crafted this episode perfectly so you could feel the stress, i was trying to calm down as the doctor was everytime a free moment was got something else happened- Can see him thinking "REALLY?? JUST LET ME BREATHE AND RELAX" "it is killing you just the right amount to keep you buying more" goes SO HARD Next weeks is looking good fr fr wont say much about it here in case some people dont watch the next time (dont blame you theyve been spoilery in the past but so far they dont show too much i dont think) but yea im real excited for next week Reminded me of oxygen a bit, obv god im a sucker for capitalism, ai and algorithm hate, was such a clever episode though, combat activated the ai, so the ai kept them buying weapons and killing them the right amount to meet its quota, anything for the shareholders am i right Really seeing the range of emotion with the doctor here too which i love, hes crying at companions "dying" and him being in a VERY bad situation Didnt see the dadbot taking over as the ending, what I thought was gonna happen was the doctor would explain to the ai that if he blows up, it'd cost the Villengard (loving the call back btw, RTD and Moffat are good at that) AI and algorithm a lot of money, and itd actually be more cost effective to keep them alive, but to be fair that would have been very derivative of Oxygen so, fair. Overall....wow, think it was better the The Devil's Chord which I wasnt expecting, loved it

[drunkenskunk]

Welcome to another Drunk Skunk™ rant!

So.

I've had some time to sit and stew on the Fallout show, and I think I've finally figured out exactly what I want to say. Because kids? I got Opinions™ about this fucking series. I sincerely wish I didn't have all these Opinions™, because that would almost certainly cause me significantly less stress.

But here we are.

The Fallout show annoys me, but not for the reasons you think.

Let's get the good out of the way first. And by "good" I mean "damning with faint praise."

The Fallout show, as a piece of entertainment and experienced in a vacuum with no prior knowledge or context of the rest of the series or any of the other video games, is... fine. It's an entertaining television show. It's not great, but it's not terrible. It's okay.

The best part of the show is, unquestionably, Walton Goggins. Which is probably the coldest take here, everyone agrees that he's fantastic in this. And it's true! Granted, he doesn't look nearly as gnarly as he should, as the makeup is really giving Ryan Reynolds Deadpool Hugo Weaving Red Skull vibes, but I can honestly give that a pass. He steals every single scene he's in. He has all the best lines. Plus, all the pre-war flashbacks with him are excellent. That first scene when the bombs drop is fucking harrowing.

SPEAKING OF THE BOMBS!

The big reveal that Vault Tec were the ones to kickstart the apocalypse. My initial gut reaction to that was... Not Great. I didn't like it. In fact, I kinda hated it. I thought it was an answer to a question that nobody asked, because nobody cared, because it was never supposed to matter who shot first. The original point was that the end of the world was the inevitable outcome after so many years of war, so many years of stockpiling nuclear weapons, and so many bad decisions from everyone in positions of power on all sides of the conflict.

But the more I think about Vault Tec being the ones to destroy the world... I dunno, the more I... kinda like it? In a fashion. Sort of. As you can see by the remaining length of this fucking rant, I have Complicated Feelings about this!

See, Fallout has never exactly been subtle with its themes, but the show drops all pretense, and openly embraces a staunchly (and honestly, extremely surprising) anti-capitalist narrative.

The Fallout show pulls a Garth Marenghi unironically, and it honestly... kinda works?

Vault Tec were the ones to drop the bombs because they wanted to recreate the world in their image of a capitalist "paradise" free of any and all government regulation. The inevitable end result of the "great game" of capitalism is the literal end of the world, and the capitalists will do everything they can to destroy any attempts to rebuild any civilization not explicitly under their direct control. Because that's what capitalists do: they pursue an ultimately self-destructive goal that is not, and never was, sustainable, and will destroy everything else in their pursuit of endless, infinite, exponential growth, forever. Nothing else matters except Make Number Line Go Up.

Side note: it is extremely funny to me that Bethesda - a hollow shell of greed and excess who have been releasing the same game with different wallpapers over and over again since Oblivion - and Amazon - which is fucking Amazon - bankrolled a show where the villains are greedy capitalists who explicitly destroyed the world because of fiduciary duty to the shareholders. Like... guys, you do realize you two are Vault Tec in this scenario, right?

Ah well. That's capitalist realism for ya.

Anyway, the more I think about it, the more sense it makes that Vault Tec were the ones to drop the bombs.

HOWEVER.

Maybe this is just me being a cynical, drunken asshole here, but... it feels like this was a decision that was made, not because it was the best way to take the narrative, but instead as a means of enforcing the Status Quo of Bethesda Fallout.

See, the thing I liked about the west coast Fallout games was that it showed a world ravaged by the apocalypse, but it also showed that world beginning to heal. 200 years after The End, and civilization was returning. It was a natural evolution of things, emphasizing the post part of "post-apocalypse." It showed us a world that really sucked a lot of the time... but also gave us a small sliver of hope that, no matter what nightmares existed after The End, things could - and would - get better, so long as we put in the work to make it better. It was a world that showed us that nothing was ever so broken that it couldn't be repaired. We just had to fucking EARN that happy ending.

Bethesda Fallout, on the other hand, is just Wacky Wasteland Adventure Time. They are not interested in showing a world evolving or changing or growing, they just want a blasted hellscape that looks like it was freshly nuked yesterday. Why? Because that's the surface-level Aesthetic of Fallout. That is what is recognizable. And Aesthetic is all they know how to do. That's the mother fucking Brand.

Doing something different would risk changing the Brand, and if that kind of change happens, then it's no longer easily marketable. So they just keep with what's familiar: freshly irradiated hellscapes, caps as currency, makeshift weapons, psychotic raiders with no purpose or goals beyond Fuck You, and more of the fucking Brotherhood of Steel. It's all the stuff we remember, so we can point at the screen and go "I recognize that!" instead of allowing the setting to evolve and creating something new.

And that's what annoys me the most. Because even though Vault Tec destroying the world in 2077 makes a certain amount of sense, it also feels like it only exists as a means of artificially enforcing the status quo of the setting. Which means that nothing will ever matter in Fallout ever again. It doesn't matter what happens, or what changes in the future, or who wins the next ideological conflict between the same factions that keep reappearing over and over again like radroaches. Because whenever something strays too far from the established setting, Vault Tec (or, more accurately, Bethesda) is just going to nuke it again, like what happened to Shady Sands.

And, y'know, Shady Sands getting nuked like that really does rankle. Not because I ever had any attachment to the NCR, but because destroying it in the way that they did just felt so fucking lazy. If they wanted to get rid of the NCR, there were easily half a dozen other things they could've done that would've made far more sense. The NCR was a fantastically corrupt government, making the same mistakes as the same governments that (up until the show) were responsible for destroying the world. California was running out of food and clean drinking water because of gross negligence and mismanagement, public unrest was high because of excessive taxation and the "stop tolls" of corrupt border guards shaking down people, and both the military and bureaucracy of the NCR was spread fucking paper-thin, due to their policies of violent imperialist expansionism trying to take far more territory than they could reasonably hold, far more quickly than they could ever manage.

And did any of that matter? No. Not at all. Pursuing any of those plot threads would've required the writers to actually come up with some new ideas. So, instead, it was destroyed because of a cryogenically frozen Vault Tec middle manager with family problems. It was such a fucking lazy solution to a problem that should never have existed in the first place. It felt like the Fallout equivalent of "Somehow, Palpatine has returned."

That's why this show annoys me so much. Because this show that exists without subtlety or subtext, is telling us, to our face:

Don't hope for a better future, because it will never come. The world of Fallout is a destroyed, irradiated hellscape, entirely devoid of hope, and it will never, ever change, ever again.

Because that's the Fallout Brand, and that's what fucking sells.

[pakeithpsy]

You know what, I'm just gonna fuckin say it (cw: Israel/Palestine, police brutality)

When one singular black person died y'all and the rest of the Social Media Warriors™ were out there rioting in the streets, smashing windows and setting fire to the establishment and attacking random passerby but when THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS of Palestinians are dying your only solution is to yell "SWIPER NO SWIPING!" into the void on Not-Twitter and forcibly shove horrific, graphic images of human suffering down my throat while offering no actual solutions to prevent further atrocities from happening other than worthless boycotts of every single company in America that are all doomed to fail because it's basically public knowledge at this point that CEOs are vile, irredeemable filth obsessed with greed and will gladly lay off hundreds of their employees just so they and their shareholders can buy another yacht yet y'all seem to think we live in A Christmas Carol or Steven Universe where all it takes to convince heartless, selfish, genocidal monsters to change is to sing a dopey little song about "feewings" and they'll immediately see the error of their ways and repent.

You are not radicalizing anyone, you are desensitizing people by harassing us for not spending every waking moment of our lives watching death and destruction while giving us no sense of hope or ways to prevent this from happening. I know what's happening, I FUCKING HATE IT, IT'S DISGUSTING AND INHUMANE, but what am I supposed to do about it? It feels like nothing will actually help - boycotts will only punish innocent employees and rich assholes with way too much money can immediately undo all our hard work with the press of a button. It feels like we can't do anything to prevent this and anything we can do doesn't matter because we're trapped in late-stage capitalism where rich and powerful people can do whatever the hell they want as long as it benefits them personally, rest of the world or even basic human survival be DAMNED.

Happy fucking Independence Day. Probably the last one we're ever gonna have before congress brings back dictatorships and church and state. This country is a fucking embarrassment to humanity and you people are a bunch of hypocritical, self-righteous blowhards who don't believe any of the shit you actually say and only want to be on the "right side" of history to make yourself feel better about the fact that you've done nothing meaningful or worthwhile with your life and that we're all fucking doomed because we had to treat the 2016 election like a fucking reality show because the memes were too damn hilarious. What a sick joke. Australia has an arts program that is giving hundreds of struggling artists the funding and platform they need while our country is destroying all our breathable oxygen in the name of not having to pay artists. Fuck this country and especially fuck all you worthless loudmouths who have done nothing but spout meaningless words while refusing to take any action out of fear of scraping your knee. You've been shouting "FREE PALESTINE!" when all you really wanted was Free Attention. The pandemic was a sign from God that He was sick of our shit and we should have let Him finish us off before we could make things worse.

[yourtoradorasextendedwarranty]

People don't understand stocks at all.

Recently I've seen a Marxists economics professor *yes I know*

But he's basically lying to people, because that IS what Marxists do, and not at all making any valid points about Capitalism.

But to my first point. Stocks. A company at any given time, has a limited number of stocks. Those stocks represent an asset amount of that company. However, it is never worth the same amount. Meaning that if the company is doing well, that stock is worth more. However, stocks are at the end of the day A FINANCIAL RISK. Because you by stock that's a representation of the value of that company. So if you sink 100$ into that company, and value goes up. That 100$ could be worth 1000$ at some point. HOWEVER, that 100$ could also go down to 1$.

Fact of the matter is stocks are not just MAGIC money. THEY HAVE a worth. And that worth can dry up because it's AGAIN representative of assets of the company the stocks are for.

Said "Prof" also goes on to say companies intentionally pay you less than the labor you produce when you work hourly but I'd argue that's actually less true than almost anything he says throughout the rest of the video.

Fact is. A company can be going under. And if you are being paid 20$ and hr. No matter how little that company makes throughout the year, you will most likely continue to get paid that amount even up until that company goes under. They could be LOSING money on you as an asset, but keep you because you are the best at what you do, and end up making no money. Meaning you not just produce MORE than your worth to the company, but also meaning you are a net loss for them to keep employed.

And that's what I HATE about critiques of Capitalism. They do not take ANY of the net negatives into consideration when looking at companies at all. UNLESS it supports their narrative. During the video said professor also likes about stakeholders AND shareholders. Saying they "Randomly throughout the year get payments for doing literally nothing" except that's a MASSIVE lie. Putting your OWN assets at risk for the potential of a gain based on the potential of a company's success or failure. Asset risk IS work, because it's based on how much YOU put in. And if you worked for that money, THAT MONEY is based on your effort.

The risk alone that the money could end up LOSING value in the end is an equal trade against the possibility of those assets GAINING value and you making money. Labor isn't theft. And the Marxist POS that said working hourly is theft is a liar.

Marxists are slimy, disgusting liars who fancy themselves to be/become the rich, and lie to keep power and influence. They are basically cultists.

[frogs-with-tea]

Hey y'all!!!! I'm on Cara now!!! :D

I've been wanting to make an art insta for a while so I'd have a place to put all of my polished pieces in a portfolio, and so I could have a place where more normie fandom people could follow me. But as you all probably know, Instagram sucks cock and balls and hates artists more than anything. I dragged my feet for a while on making an art insta, but then I started hearing about Cara and decided to move over there instead. It's a platform made by artists for other artists, and AI is strictly banned.

Other than the wonderful in house protections they have against AI scraping, it's also not funded by investment capital, which is one of the biggest issues with all these social media companies (tumblr included). It has no shareholders to appease and no incentive to try to grow indefinitely. The founder Jingna Zhang is paying out of pocket to fund the site.

I think this site has a lot of promise and has the possibility to breath life back into the dying fandom ecosystem. It feels really nice to see like project like this blossom, and I hope is grows into something beautiful.

Also at present moment they don't allow NSFW work to be posted, but that's simply due to the fact that it's run by a small team, and have stated that they want to make it possible to start hosting NSFW stuff in the future. Sooooo if that pans out maybe I could have an NSFW page that's not fucking twitter LMAO

I'm not leaving tumblr anytime soon, this is still my favorite place to do my weird fandom stuff (*cough* mpreg) but now I have a more polished portfolio and that makes me very happy :D

[uncloseted]

Am I the only one who feels that we've jumped timelines into a crazy alternate reality where tech companies are building ai that take parts of humanity away instead of doing the jobs people hate to free up time for humanity? It's targeted art, writing, film, photography, and now they're pushing ai dating where an ai you talks to another ai match before you decide if you want to talk to the real person or not. It's destroying what makes us human and further isolating us from one and other

I get this for sure, but I think that our current use of AI is more a symptom of late stage capitalism than it is a problem within itself. In a system where the accumulation of capital is the ultimate goal, there will always be a race to the bottom in terms of production costs. Corporations don't care if people like their jobs or not; they care about how much value is being created for their shareholders. *All* jobs are being targeted by AI, not just the ones that people like, because all human labor more expensive than a corporation wants it to be.

In a human-centered system, I think AI would be a tool instead of a threat. It can help people who struggle with fine motor skills to create art, or help jog people's memories or get them over writer's block, or fix all the fiddly parts of photo editing that nobody really likes to do. It could make it easier for people with neurological disabilities to navigate the world. It could allow people who speak different languages to have a seamless conversation, and it could match people to create meaningful and lasting friendships. It could help teach people how to improve their interpersonal and empathetic skills. I don't think AI is necessarily a bad thing. I think unbridled capitalism is the ultimate problem here, and I think more than AI technologies, that's what's destroying what makes us human and isolating us from each other. Not to be like, a Marx apologist on main or whatever, but I think he was right when he said that capitalism "estranges from man… his human aspect" and "(leads to)…the estrangement of man from man".

But. We don't have to let that happen, at least not on an interpersonal level. If art is what makes you feel human, keep creating art. Opt to meet new friends and significant others in the real world instead of on an app. Bake your neighbor a pie. I know those things feel small in the face of a world that's becoming increasingly digitized, but I really do think that banding together and building community with one another is the only way we're going to be able to make any real impact on this issue or any others.

[blazehedgehog]

Isn't Steam a paradox from an economic point of view? They have the first mover adventage, they have a de facto monopoly, but they are not at all greedy -- not to the point of being anti-consumer, at least. And the innovations they bring to the table are actually useful stuff (Proton above all). Valve is just.. there, operating their business, making good money with nobody really complaining.

It depends on what economic values you subscribe to. A lot of guys like EA want to take the shortcut to easy money. EA even tried to compete with Steam, remember. They had their "Origin" client. They gave away free games for over a year and still nobody would use it. The hope was to give them something comparable to Valve's firehose of money. An easy profit stream where they could get a cut of every game sold on PC just by the simple fact they existed.

Rather than just do good work, they hoped to pry people off of Steam with the promise of regular freebies... except it was a client nobody wanted to use and in a lot of cases actively hated. It lacked most of the features of Steam, was a little bloated, and came at a time where EA was starting to push increasingly aggressive DRM that limited how many "activations" you were allowed per-game. So, it struggled.

The same thing happened with Uplay. Ubisoft thought they could make their own Steam, but the greed was too evident and annoying. It was a hassle to work with, added nothing of real value, and nobody wanted to use it. So most people didn't, unless they were forced to use it.

That's the thing with these corporations, right? Nothing is ever enough. They can't just sell well on Steam, they have to make their own platform so they can have all the money. And the profit lines must not only always go up, it has to go up faster. More and faster and more and faster and more and faster until the wheels come off and everything breaks.

Then these board of director weirdos, now among the richest 5% of people on earth, pull the ripcord and parachute over to the next corporation and start over. All the money, more and faster and more and faster...

What separates Valve is that Valve never seems to have treated it like much of a race. Like, sure, they do things to boost sales (even recently had a really ugly "capitalism celebration" sale event) but they seem pretty comfortable being themselves and not cranking all the dials until they break off.

Some of that is arguably down to the fact that Valve never became a publicly traded company. Once you get listed on the stock market, investors enter the picture, and the whole dynamic of how a company exists changes. Publicly traded companies rely on investors for some amount of operating costs, and the highest ranking investors can even legally control some part of your company as if they were employed there.

But there's never any guarantee that an investor knows what is good for your company. They just gave you a lot of money and expect you to pay it back at some point (by increasing shareholder value). And its created this culture of people who race to maximize everything at the expense of the structural integrity of the company and its employees. It's like (spoilers for one of the most famous movie trilogies of all time) the end of Back to the Future 3, right, where they need to get this old 1800's locomotive up to 88mph.

Feeding it that much fuel, getting the heat up that high, it builds up extreme pressure in the boiler and the train will eventually explode. Except for a lot of these business types, exploding the boiler is the point. Exploding the boiler is a successful operation. Like I said: more and faster and more and faster, right?

Some companies need investor money to survive. But... not all do. Many of them still go public anyway, because the race to explode the boiler matters more than just being comfortable. We're still in the era of people starting companies just to sell them.

Valve got lucky. They established an emerging market, gave people exactly what they wanted, and became the defacto home for PC gaming. Steam was such a comfortable, welcoming platform that nobody even thought about competing with them until they had already gained too much momentum to ever be slowed down.

And the only reasons most people can come up with to compete with Valve is "We want more money." Valve wants 30% of my earnings? A whole 30%??? Unreasonable! I'll start my own storefront! With blackjack! And etc.!

As someone who works with Youtube and gets a 55/45 split, I guess I don't have perspective on how 30% is some kind of horrible offense. Only in my wildest dreams would Youtube give me 70/30.

But really, that's all this is. Valve did good work and got themselves into a position where they now can't really be out-spent into obsolescence. I mean, Epic Games is currently trying to do that, and they're burning something in the realm of $275,000,000 a year (according to this website I am unfamiliar with and have never read before today). By Epic's own statistics, most people registered to the EGS client spend less than a dollar on the platform (723m users apparently spent $820m).

Valve has so much momentum with Steam that they can (and often do) just coast, granting them a reputation for taking a very long time fine-tuning most of their products until they are perfect. Gabe Newell is so rich he owns and operates multiple fully-staffed private yachts. Not by more and faster, but by getting to the race track before anyone even knew it was open and just doing the job so consistently they are now ten laps ahead.

To compare with what happened with Netflix, which also established an emerging market: Netflix also didn't want to just coast. Movie disc rentals by mail became streaming movies. That turned into streaming TV. That turned into Netflix wanting to make their own original content so they wouldn't have to pay to license anyone else's movies. That turned into Netflix wanting to offer games. And lest we forget, the founder of Netflix specifically has a vendetta against theatrical movies and continues to deliberately erode that market.

There is no "coasting" for Netflix. There is only more and faster. Netflix put out 17 original films in 2016. Last year, 2023, Netflix put out 153 original films, 49 original documentaries, 11 TV specials, 11 short films, 28 stand-up comedy shows, and at least 26 new original TV shows. The aim is not to maintain a good platform, the aim is to dominate and make all the money there is to make in multiple industries. The line must always goes up until the boiler explodes.

Anyone could just do what Valve did, but nobody wants to because it's too slow and takes too much actual work (and luck) making genuinely good products. It also theoretically leads to a "dead end" where growth slows or even stops. That means the line doesn't go up anymore, it just levels out and stays there. Outrageous! You mean the man who owns a fleet of yachts doesn't want make infinitely more money forever? The nerve of some people.

It's easier to crack the whip on someone else and crank up the heat until the boiler explodes. Especially when that's what all the competition is doing, too.

[catbookcat]

Anyone else stop watching tv shows in any meaningful way because your can't trust media production companies anymore? There is no guarantee that any new show will:

1: continue after the first season even if it's literally won a bazillion awards (looking at you netflix. Julie and the phantoms was and is amazing)

2: that you will be able to access the show even if you stay subscribed to the service (hello infinity train)

i just read books and things on royalroad now. it's too much work to get invested in something and have it disappear forever.

i hate how catering to shareholders is the most important thing. capitalism destroys art

[codewitch]

The thing about shareholder capitalism is that these companies could actually share their profits with their employees if they wanted to. It helps to understand tech to know that software engineers earn a large percentage of their compensation in stock grants. Like, I get my salary and then I also get paid like another 50% of that in stocks.

This illustrates two things:

1. Why software engineers seem to hate their employers less, because they actually do get rewarded if the stocks do well (note: not every tech company employee gets stocks, only their favoritist specialist boys. If you’re in QA or something they still hate you and might throw you a pittance while the SWE who keeps making bugs is getting 15x what you’re getting).

2. Companies could very easily share their record profits with their employees while not really hurting the stock price because if they give stocks to their employees then more people are still buying the company stock (the company is buying it to give to their employees).

This is not to say that they should pivot to “good shareholder capitalism” though because shareholder capitalism is still a terrible way to do things because it encourages growth at all cost. But like it doesn’t even have to be as shit for everyone as it already did. They’re just choosing to be extra bad.

[felidaefatigue]

id like to fight every woman in a management position. probably men tto but honestly ive only worked for women... weird. anyways.

i DESPISE capitalism. i do not wish to make their job easy in any way when you really ask me right. but the thing is. i understand capitalism. intimately. and nONE OF THEM. NONE. can seem to FIGURE IT OUT. and it drives me BONKERS. you cannot be a nice person and also succeed at the numbers game to the degree your shareholders want. you CANT. learn that. burn it into your brain meat. and then fucking aCT ACCORDINGLY. You have to fucking decide what thing you are doing for what reason. you cant be fucking wanting BOTH RESULTS from NEITHER STRATEGY.

sick of people thinking they can like. keep long term staff, overwork them, and not pay them, and expect that to make them money also.

like no. if you want longevity for the perks of longevity. you need to pay the longevity cost. if youre only willing to pay high turn over cost. expect high turn over to happen and STRUCTURE ACCORDINGLY YOU FUCKING DOOFUSES.

apply this principle to basically every aspect of the business ever because theyre fuckin dumb and i hate it because like dude if u want to play capitalist ill play with you i know the rules but stop acting like ur not!!!! caude id prefer that game! id kick ass and be so excited to play that game! but u dONT KNOW THE RULES.

[jarmes]

One of the fucked up things about capitalism is that Warner Brothers executives are legally obligated to fund the extermination of trans people. Like regardless of their personal beliefs, they have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits. Harry Potter is a profitable IP, thus they are required to make more Harry Potter. Thus they are required to give money to JKR, who gives it to genocidal hate groups.

These executives are assholes, but most of them are probably apathetic towards trans people, not outwardly hateful, at least when compared to Rowling. But, they have to make money for stockholders, so they are forced to give money to her. Warner Bros is funding genocide, despite the people making decisions sitting down and deciding that is their end goal.

And we see this constantly. Exon Mobile executives didn’t sit down one day and decide to burn the entire planet down. They did what they were required to, maximize profits. And lying about climate change was good for business. Tobacco companies killed millions, not out of a desire for slaughter, but out of a desire for money.

This does not absolve their sins, obviously. The Nuremberg defense isn’t a real defense. But, I don’t know. Maybe it’s bad that our economic system requires people to fall back on such a defense. It’s probably not good that businessmen are ordered to murder millions of people if doing so will give a 5% increase in shareholder money.

[lucymelonbun]

Actually fuck it I'm making this it's own post.

I don't really use AO3 I don't donate to it. But the do this every year twice a year and there's always some outrage about "how can people be giving them money when x is happening" and I always just have to wonder, do you have a Netflix account, or Hulu, do you have cable? How can you stand to give money to those corporations that support far right extremists and hate unions and make their profits by over charging you and under paying everyone they can.

Do you buy chocolate? It's made with salve labor. Your shirt was made in a sweatshop for pennies. Why aren't you spending your money on charities instead of all these useless indulgences? Why are you lining the pockets of CEOs and shareholders when people are dying? Don't you have any empathy you monster?

Or maybe you're just a normal person who lives in a fucked up horrible world and you need a little comfort sometimes because if you put everything you have into trying to save the world you're going to burn out and die before you make a difference.

Maybe you really some perfect minimalist who gives everything you can to help those worse off then you, but I don't think you'd be on tumbler at that point and think you'd be more mad at people supporting Nestle and Disney and Google than over a non profit fanfic archive.

There's no ethical consumption under capitalism but that's no reason to starve yourself. And just because you engage with an unethical world doesn't mean you don't care. I've donated to try and help the people of Palestine in what little way I can. I also bought myself a small pizza earlier even though I had food at home. Should I have given that money to charity as well? Probably, but I bet you've had a soda or some fast food since this started too.

[unmotivational-motivation]

a note on why we shouldn’t trust business majors with the arts:

only people who did a degree in business would look at the advent (as I was there in the mid 2000s when suiting up with a tricorn hat and sailing the digital seas was the style of the time) of torrenting and online piracy as a BAD THING tm

“but unmotivational-motivation, aren’t you encouraging the stealing of BREAD DIRECTLY from the MOUTHS of authors of creative works?!” You might be asking, you ravishing simpleton.

yes, but ONLY if you did what the business majors working at the IP hoarding gentry companies did when this situation arose; and try to only suggest official releases. Previous to the internet and widespread card payment processing (even then the RIAA used to argue that taping from the radio to make your own mixtapes was killing recording) you had to put some effort into making copies of things, like reverse engineering the stamps for vinyl records (which incidentally was how a lot of western music ended up being distributed in east of the iron curtain. See bone records for more info) and there was no way to compensate the artists (assuming they paid back their advance) except by mailing “paper” (it’s actually cotton) money or writing out this thing called a cheque (or check if you use freedom units called ironically imperial) to the film distributor or record label.

now we have: card payment processing that’s, for a given value of safe, safe for online usage. See the problem at this point is the IP hoarding gentry see a problem where you have some money that’s theirs that you’re not: giving to them, in the process of giving to them, or having given to them and about to give them more. They want to have all of the money as opposed to just some of it. This is a core concept of shareholder capitalism as well as wanting stable, infinite growth. So the idea of giving up the control of (theoretically) selling you ownership of a copy of their work and being able to set the price and have all the money is a problem. You can see this in the current media landscape where taking a gamble on something exciting and new and might be a big hit BUT IT COULD ALSO FAIL, is replaced by making the same slop on a regular basis. Hello Disney.

a slightly less brain damaged individual would look at the rise of piracy, and see a few positives: 1 no distribution costs 2 your market is significantly expanded and 3 a more consistent revenue stream IF YOU DID THINGS correctly.

a sane rights holder would look at piracy and go: what’s the easiest way I can make so people can pay for a license to make it legal? There are people existing with terabytes of plunder from the digital seas. It takes around 1,200 720p movies to fill a terabyte. You guilt one person to pay $5 for 100 movies over a few months and suddenly these lost sales (which have next to no overhead for their distribution) has just earnt you $500, which after processing fees would probs be around $491 assuming 0.3% in fees. Not every download will be a sale, but I bet it’d be a better hit rate than a retail setting.

dead or orphaned or unavable media? Never heard of her or her siblings. Shit seeding? Try again. Spending millions on digital rights management? Well that’s gone as well. Need info on what to green light? Here’s what’s making money boss, in real time. Want extras? Our physical media still exists. Want to share with a friend and they like it and want their own license? Hey look they can get license for the file they already have the same fucking way.

And suddenly you’ve also turned what was a huge existential issue to your company in the capitalist sense and turned it into a solid positive. In fact this how a SURPRISING amount of band camp works.

”but,” you, a simpleton that fucks, ask “don’t you want those ancillary to the project to make money as well?” Yes, I’d prefer they do it by practicing their trade and then residuals are a nice bonus. I also have a hate boner for IP law, as the life of the author + 120 years is an absurd length of time for an idea being unable to be remixed, reused, repurposed by the public because you have exclusive use over it. Sure the drums from when the levee breaks sound amazing. It was also recorded in the 1970s, are you telling me that song is still worth the same as new music? I would prefer artists make a living, by being able and motivated to be artists. The Doug Anthony all stars have some of the best comedy music in history and it’s next to impossible to legally obtain their works. I WANT TO GIVE THEM MONEY BUT I DONT HAVE A WAY TO PURCHASE THEIR PRODUCT. with what I term project reconcile, I fucking could. And then I would pay to mail this to people as a troll.

Also in the US, for something like close to 40 years hasn’t had IP enter the public domain, thanks to Mickey-fucking-Mouse (thanks Disney!). Copyright should be by default 20 years, with an option to extend for 20 more in ten year increments. If you haven’t made a return on investment plus a profit in that time frame I have bad news for you kiddo.

anyways. I spent a fucking hour at around midnight typing this out so I’m going to bed now. I bid you farewell, yes you 10/90 (ten in looks, 90 in iq even though iq is bullshit)

And yes this has had an edit for clarity