“In Black Ops Advertising, Mara Einstein… suggests a future in which
advertising increasingly subsumes all content. Everything will look
free, but hidden agendas, data collection and fakery will be everywhere.
This is the internet as con trick, where the natural human instinct to
share news and gossip is co-opted as low-cost marketing for brands and
others who do not fundamentally care about us except as sources of
revenue.”
To read more, visit ZDNet
“One of Tom Slee’s motivations for writing What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy—published in February by OR Books—was to push back against people in the tech industry appropriating the language of “collective action and progressive politics” for private financial gain. “I wrote this book because the Sharing Economy agenda appeals to ideals with which I and many others identify; ideals such as equality, sustainability, and community,” he writes. “The Sharing Economy continues to have the support and allegiance of many progressive-minded people … [but evokes] those ideals to build massive private fortunes, to erode real communities, to encourage a more entitled form of consumerism, and to create a future that is more precarious and more unequal than ever.”
…
Slee’s book provides much needed historical context on the sharing economy phenomenon: a history of digital “openness” being leveraged for private profit, as well as a history of the commodification of the internet, pointing out key moments in time where legislation changed to first allow commercial activity on the web. “There was vociferous argument over the ethics of pursuing profit over the internet,” he writes. It’s a book about the sharing economy, but also more: it’s about how we got to this conflicting place where we all are seemingly beholden to commercial platforms that we don’t totally understand, mined for data by corporations profiting from users’ micro-work.”
To hear more, visit Liz Pelly
“Mara Einstein’s Black Ops Advertising details the many ways in which corporate PR operations have sought to colonise social media.”
To read more, visit Philosophy Football
“It’s really hard to be everything to everybody, because then you end up being nothing to nobody.”
To read more, visit Marketplace.
“In most economies there are always folks who need a job, and you can have very low paying jobs that people will apply to and will work for, but here in Canada we have labor standards, and we have them for a reason. We have them because that kind of race to the bottom, a purely free market approach encourages does not end up in a good place.”
To read more, visit The Agenda.
“In terms of the darker side of shared economy, this new model has raised a bunch of questions about how it fits in with existing policies. I think those are fair questions, but that does not mean the idea (of shared economy) is bad. We have to have conversations about how new models get reconciled with existing rules.”
To read more, visit Business Standard.
Uber enthusiasts, he writes, attribute its success to technology. But the real reason Uber thrives is that it avoids paying many of the costs borne by regulated taxi services, including insurance and mechanical fitness tests.
To read more, visit The Star.
But the big picture is remarkably clear. “The Sharing Economy is a movement: it is a movement for deregulation,” Slee concludes. “It’s not about building an alternative to a corporate-driven market economy, it’s about extending the deregulated free market into new areas of our lives.”
To read more, visit Truthdig.
