Eve here. The “Crush” ad created a long-awaited “I hate Apple” moment. Steve Jobs was a great designer, and modern Apple has deviated significantly from his vision, but Jobs was also very controlling, doing everything possible to restrict users to a closed environment. This kind of capture and tight integration with other products and services in the ecosystem is a key factor in forcing consumers to embrace renting rather than owning what used to be a product, especially an edition of software. I stopped getting Adobe Acrobat because I have to keep renting it. I had to argue with my tech guy about whether to buy Microsoft Office instead of renting it. So what if I have to buy it again? I don’t need new features, and my last copy survived a decade of OS updates. Plus, I don’t like the possibility of espionage with Microsoft constantly sending me new versions.
Rental issues are not limited to third-party products. Almost all companies, regardless of size, store their data in the cloud. Let me tell you, this is their data. Except it’s not. I’ve had readers go through long explanations about how they’ve become hostage to their cloud provider and can’t easily get their data back (I wish I could have incorporated that comment into the post at the time) .
It has become common to point to the so-called Davos Man model: “You can be happy without owning anything.” But this is simply an old peasant model wearing new clothes. Matt Stoller wrote in his 2010 post: debt collection association:
Many people forget that it’s really hard to have debt that you can’t pay back. Debt is not just a means of credit, but also a means of political and economic control.
It’s actually built into our culture. The expression “man” in “fight the man” originally referred to the creditor. In the 19th century, “the man” meant “furniture store” and referred to a merchant who sold the year’s supplies, usually on credit, to 19th-century sharecroppers and southern farmers. Farmers were often illiterate and certainly did not understand the arrangements they were entering into, with liens placed on their crops and interest rates ranging from 80 to 100 percent per year. As one farmer approaches a furniture vendor who finances seeds, equipment, and even food itself, he looks down, meek and nervous, as he sees his debt written down in a notebook. Because of deflation and usury, farmers usually had more debt at the end of the year than they had at the beginning of the year. Their land was often confiscated and eventually most of them became sharecroppers.
They became obsessed with the man and eventually became his slaves. This structure of sharecropping and usury, coupled with political violence, continued in some parts of the South into the 1960s. In the 1960s, Kennedy witnessed the poverty in rural Arkansas and called it “shocking.” These were the fruits of usury and a society built on unsustainable debt.
We are now in the midst of creating a second peasant society.
Just 14 years ago, Stoller had no idea that an intellectual property claim could jeopardize his intellectual property lease or his ownership of critical machinery such as tractors. But this is another manifestation of his debt collection model.
Just to be clear, there is nothing wrong with leasing itself, as long as both parties have decent bargaining power and the relevant laws protect the tenant’s property rights. In New York City, one of the strongest protections afforded to rent-stabilized and controlled apartment tenants is that the landlord must offer to renew the lease if the tenant is paying current rent. was. Being able to stay in a rental property for a long time will greatly change the relationship between the tenant and the property. I lived in a building with a good address that had lots of rent-stabilized housing units. Many tenants spent large amounts of money on repairs because they expected to stay for long periods of time.
But notice Stoller’s point that the sharecropper blindly accepts the contract with “that person.” Software and credit card customers are in exactly the same position.
Written by Thomas Neuberger. It was first published in god’s spy
Rent-seeking economy, queuing up to pay
I would like to consider two works that touch on the same theme. That is, how neoliberalism as an economic system prescribes the exploitation of rents over industrial production (manufactured or physical). And without a future beyond climate, how will this trend fail the West?
Now that points are consolidated, we will make them available to all subscribers. musiclastly.
Selling manufacturing to enrich the wealthy
Consider the following parts as a set.
• Industrial policy and war economy cannot be run under neoliberalism. (Ian Welsh)
Wales begins by comparing the creation of EV charging stations in the United States and China. The US government spent $7.5 billion on subsidies. The Chinese government spent roughly $10 billion. Total number of stations produced by the $7.5 billion program: Seven stations.
- Total number of EV charging stations in the US: 186,200.
- Total for China: 7 million people, of which 2.2 million are public.
He then makes the larger point that the U.S. neoliberal system is designed to: do not have To produce.
You cannot run an industrial policy or a war economy under neoliberalism. That’s impossible. …
Washington state is spending $7.5 billion on seven charging stations. This is not just incompetence, this is corruption. Yes, there is corruption in China and Russia. We have a lot. This is nothing compared to corruption in America or Europe, nor is it on the same scale. Especially in China, most corruption is “honest corruption”. You can take some of it, but you have to actually get the results. If you want to produce X number of houses or charging stations, you need to produce them.
This leads to:
Simply put, neoliberalism is about passive income, or capital gains. In PE, you buy a company with debt, accumulate debt, and then scrap it. They create monopolies and oligopolies, forcing governments to drive up asset prices and pay far more than they deserve for inferior goods (see military-industrial complex).
This is all true. China’s industrial policies are enriching the country at the expense of the wealthy. America’s industrial policy enriches the wealthy at the expense of the country.
As a result (the Welsh claim) China now produces better products, like the latest electric cars, and the United States politicians are afraid — while we create crap. And now (the Welshman adds) there is no turning back for us. The future belongs to them.
I would like to add that will do If it belongs to someone else, be theirs.Unfortunately, this is what will happen in this century. Nobody is here.
Message: Don’t count on your donor base to fix this mess. They want to do this.
• Financial capitalism and industrial capitalism: the return and takeover of rentiers. (Michael Hudson)
Thanks to the fascinating Articles about naked capitalism About Apple’s disturbingly on-the-nose “Crush” ad ( Under), I pointed to a speech given by Michael Hudson on the same theme, the capitulation of the West to financial capitalism and what it means for the world.
We must conclude that the United States no longer industrializes, but instead chooses to finance its economy with economic rents (monopoly rents from information technology, banking, and speculation), leaving industry, research, and development to other countries. Even if China and other Asian countries did not exist, the current level of indirect debt and privatized and financialized education, health care, transportation, and other basic infrastructure would allow the United States to dominate its export and even domestic markets. It is impossible to get it back.
The fundamental problem is not competition with China but neoliberal financialization. Financial capitalism is not industrial capitalism. It is a return to the neo-feudal system of debt repayment and rent. Bankers today play the role that landowners played until the 19th century, building wealth without commensurate value through capital gains on real estate, stocks, and credit bonds, and debt leverage; It increases the cost of living and doing business in the economy.
Not much different from Wales’ point. The Welsh take it even further, predicting the collapse of Western hegemony. Hudson makes no such predictions, but like Welsh, he identifies the current war between West and East as a conflict between economies rather than countries.
Today’s new Cold War is driving this landownership by globally privatizing and financializing transportation, education, health care, prisons and police, post offices and communications, and other sectors previously held in public domain. It is a battle to internationalize capitalism. In Western economies, such privatization reversed the promotion of industrial capitalism.
Whatever else they’re doing, Russia and China are still making things. So it is, at least in part, Hudson’s “new Cold War.”
Is Apple the manufacturer?
Returning to Apple for a moment, one of the products of this thinking is that Apple is no longer part of the manufacturing economy and has instead become a rent-seeker.
Naked Capitalism quotes Jaythan Sadowski:
But rather than representing a disruptive new “subscription” paradigm, what all these companies, including Apple, are doing is an old form of rent capitalism that we have long associated with landlords and feudalism. is to revive it.
Whether you call it platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, or simply the next generation of rental capitalism, this model of how capital operates uses mediation and enclosure to achieve exploitation and control of its subjects. . “Rental” refers to a relationship in which an asset owner charges another person a fee to access its asset, similar to the way a landlord charges a tenant a fee to rent a home it owns. .
…and refers to the 2019 work published in Salon.Pay Forever: Apple Wants You to Rent Your Life”:
Apple is a technology company famous for its gadgets. event On Monday, the company announced five new products, but only one of them was an actual gadget (the little box under your TV known as the Apple TV). The remaining new products areservice”, this elegant category is highly profitable, making it the industry’s second-largest revenue generator. most precious Listed companies around the world. A “Service” really refers to something you subscribe to and pay for forever, or at least until the end of your subscription. But Apple, like any other subscription business model, wants subscriptions to never end.
Life in the landowner’s world. They want to do this.
That apple ad
as if thought As if all this predation wasn’t enough, Apple’s “Crush” ad also struck a chord. It shows the destruction of what we use to make art: brushes and paints. Things that bring us joy – trumpets, pianos, guitars, even mannequins and toys – are compressed by force onto his platform of hardware, the tools of which must be rented to use.
Please play using: mute the sound In order to get the effect.
In case you missed what Apple did wrong, here’s the flipped ad.
Do you still love apples?
music
I couldn’t resist. This is a remastered performance of Pink Floyd.money”
Music theory fans, please note that this is in 7/4 time, which counts as 3 + 3 + 1. (You might compare this to his 5/4 rhythm in the music theory song “Je suis jalouse”. previous post. )
