Cory: Why creative workers get screwed in labor negotiations (until very recently):
Creative workers are part of a class of workers who suffer from “vocational awe,” the sense that because your job is satisfying and/or worthy, you don’t deserve to get paid for it.
Also:
The attempt to divide-and-rule “knowledge workers” from “industrial workers” is a transparent bid to shatter solidarity and make it easier to abuse and exploit all workers.
The goal now is to attract users by the hundreds of millions, so Facebook is making Threads great for users. And it’s working—Threads is, indeed, a great place.
For now. But soon, Facebook will pivot to wanting revenue from Threads, and so Threads will become great for advertisers and steadily worse for users.
Then once all the advertisers and the users are locked in, Threads will become shitty for everybody but Facebook itself.
Running from the arms of one billionaire to another is a bad idea.
Musk is the second worst thing that happened to social media, but Facebook is much worse, because they’re so much more competent, but lack any vision other than sucking up as much of the world into their silo as possible and never doing anything that could possibly benefit anyone else.
Podcaster PJ Vogt writes about his 20-year use of prescription stimulants, as well as coming to terms with the suicide of a friend.
Vogt struggled to understand what his friend’s depression was like from the inside and was surprised to learn his own thinking was a product of depression.
I had been like Ahab hunting for Moby Dick, not realizing the boat he’s on is actually a large whale in a boat costume.
Cory Doctorow: A taxonomy of corporate bullshit: “… six lies that corporations have told since time immemorial…. it’s refreshing to see how the right hasn’t had an original idea in 150 years and simply relies on repeating the same nonsense with minor updates.”
I think maybe video has taken off and text is declining simply because TikTok and YouTube make it easy to share revenue with creators, whereas opportunities for independent writers are harder to find and harder to use. (There’s Substack and … well, Substack. And also Substack.)
If Facebook instituted revenue sharing, I could make a significant revenue stream off this—my random thoughts, memes I find elsewhere, photos I take while walking the dog. It wouldn’t replace other work, but it would be a nice supplement.
Does that sound nuts to you? Ask Mark Zuckerberg. He’s a billionaire now because of the time and effort that I, and hundreds of millions of other people, have put into Facebook.
Reading about our new Speaker of the House and seeing absolutely nothing good. He’s an insurrectionist who wants to impose Sharia law on the United States.
I had to cold-call a relative stranger for social reasons just now. I knew it was coming and I was nervous about it for days. I have become a millennial.