ponett:

the situation with tumblr just kinda reinforces the notion that most big social networks are grifts that are just constantly hemorrhaging money and the founders are just trying to trick venture capital investors into thinking they can make money off of ads just long enough for them to sell the site for a fat check and retire while the site slowly dies

this is, tragically, why vine died. you can’t put ads in front of a six second video. tumblr’s lasted much longer, and i don’t expect it to implode overnight, but it’s clearly very difficult to monetize tumblr. remember how staff said they were going to implement an ad program we could make money off of in, oh… 2016? that sure went nowhere

2018 is the year we realize that monetizing social media is doomed to failure unless you’re facebook, which is the example that proves that success in this case is worse than failure.

The Automation Charade

Of course capitalists want working people to be precarious, pitted
against one another, and frightened about what the future may hold. Of
course they want us to think that if we dare to push back and demand
more than scraps the robots will replace us—that we can be automated
away at the push of a button. They may wish that were the case, and are
no doubt investing their fortunes toward making it seem so. But it, and
indeed anything like it, has not come close to being true. If the
automated day of judgment were actually nigh, they wouldn’t need to
invent all these apps to fake it.

Why is it that fascists have identified themselves as socialists so much in the past?

left-reminders:

Because fascism arises most prominently in times of capitalist crisis; crisis screws over the working class, filling them with a deep political anger at the status quo. Socialism was a prominent movement throughout the western world in the early 1900s, and it represented a real outlet of change for many people. Fascists latched onto this rhetoric in order to absorb the disenfranchised into an ideology that appeared, on the surface, to support the working class. This is why fascism is often difficult for laypeople to pin down politically – fascists alter their rhetoric depending on who they’re trying to absorb, and it all conceals a deep desire to reinforce the capitalist class structure when the economy is in crisis and there’s widespread social unrest. In practice, fascism is a capitalist ideology – disempowering unions, crushing strikes, cultivating racism and sexism and nationalism to divide the working class, elevating a “natural set of elites”, abandoning even the pretense of democracy, etc. – the ruling class adapting to different conditions and using more overt rhetoric to defend the system of capital accumulation.
-Daividh

luciferandphilosophy:

spacedijks:

spacedijks:

kirbylesbian:

klimvoroshilov:

postirony:

Step 1: Look at the Price.

Step 2: Look in the Trash

because there can be a store like this full of food and people on the same block starving because they don’t have enough pieces of paper to trade for it.

because the people who planted, maintained, harvested, and inspected all that produce are compensated barely enough to sustain themselves

because in order to drive down the prices of bananas, the us government and american fruit corporations destroyed the democratically elected leftist governments of numerous central american countries, placing murderous despots at the head of these “banana republics”.

because the scars of these crimes against humanity still haunt millions to this day.

I work in a grocery store. We are considered one of the better chains for produce quality, and out of the stores of this kind in the local area, we actually have good produce sparing procedures. Despite all of that, we waste 40% (FOURTY) of all the produce we receive. I throw out my own body weight daily in produce. I am not exaggerating or joking. This is capitalism.