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Bill Fulkerson

It's not all Pepes and trollfaces - memes can be a force for good - The Verge - 0 views

www.theverge.com/...d-behavioral-science-nazi-pepe

memes

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 30 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 30 Aug 18
     
    "How the 'emotional contagion' of memes makes them the internet's moral conscience By Allie Volpe Aug 27, 2018, 11:30am EDT Illustration by Alex Castro & Keegan Larwin SHARE Newly single, Jason Donahoe was perusing Tinder for the first time since it started integrating users' Instagram feeds. Suddenly, he had an idea: follow the Instagram accounts of some of the women he'd been interested in but didn't match with on the dating service. A few days later, he considered taking it a step further and direct messaging one of the women on Instagram. After all, the new interface of the dating app seemed to encourage users to explore other areas of potential matches' online lives, so why not take the initiative to reach out? Before he had a chance, however, he came across the profile of another woman whose Tinder photo spread featured a meme with Parks and Recreation character Jean-Ralphio Saperstein (Ben Schwartz) leaning into the face of Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) with the caption: hey I saw you on Tinder but we didn't match so I found your Instagram you're so beautiful you don't need to wear all that makeup ahah I bet you get a lot of creepy dm's but I'm not like all those other guys message me back beautiful btw what's your snap "I was like, 'Oh shit, wow,'" Donahoe says. Seeing his potential jerk move laid out so plainly as a neatly generalized joke, he saw it in a new light. "I knew a) to be aware of that, and b) to cut that shit out … It prompted self-reflection on my part." THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MEMES STRIKE A CULTURAL CHORD AND CAN GUIDE AND EVEN INFLUENCE BEHAVIOR Donahoe says memes have resonated with him particularly when they depict a "worse, extreme version" of himself. For Donahoe, the most successful memes are more than just jokes. They "strike a societal, cultural chord" and can be a potent cocktail for self-reflection as tools that can guide and even influence behavior. In the months leading up to the 2016 US
Steve Bosserman

The idea of intellectual property is nonsensical and pernicious - Samir Chopra | Aeon E... - 0 views

aeon.co/...-is-nonsensical-and-pernicious

intellectual property

shared by Steve Bosserman on 12 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • A general term is useful only if it subsumes related concepts in such a way that semantic value is added. If our comprehension is not increased by our chosen generalised term, then we shouldn’t use it. A common claim such as ‘they stole my intellectual property’ is singularly uninformative, since the general term ‘intellectual property’ obscures more than it illuminates. If copyright infringement is alleged, we try to identify the copyrightable concrete expression, the nature of the infringement and so on. If patent infringement is alleged, we check another set of conditions (does the ‘new’ invention replicate the design of the older one?), and so on for trademarks (does the offending symbol substantially and misleadingly resemble the protected trademark?) and trade secrets (did the enterprise attempt to keep supposedly protected information secret?) The use of the general term ‘intellectual property’ tells us precisely nothing.
  • Property is a legally constructed, historically contingent, social fact. It is founded on economic and social imperatives to distribute and manage material resources – and, thus, wealth and power. As the preface to a legal textbook puts it, legal systems of property ‘confer benefits and impose burdens’ on owners and nonowners respectively. Law defines property. It circumscribes the conditions under which legal subjects may acquire, and properly use and dispose of their property and that of others. It makes concrete the ‘natural right’ of holding property. Different sets of rules create systems with varying allocations of power for owners and others. Some grants of property rights lock in, preserve and reinforce existing relations of race, class or gender, stratifying society and creating new, entrenched, propertied classes. Law makes property part of our socially constructed reality, reconfigurable if social needs change.
  • ‘Property’ is a legal term with overwhelming emotive, expressive and rhetorical impact. It is regarded as the foundation of a culture and as the foundation of an economic system. It pervades our moral sense, our normative order. It has ideological weight and propaganda value. To use the term ‘intellectual property’ is to partake of property’s expressive impact in an economic and political order constructed by property’s legal rights. It is to suggest that if property is at play, then it can be stolen, and therefore must be protected with the same zeal that the homeowner guards her home against invaders and thieves.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • What about the common objection that without ‘intellectual property’ the proverbial starving artist would be at the mercy of giant corporations, who have existing market share and first-mover advantage? It is important to disaggregate the necessity and desirability of the protections of the various legal regimes of copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets from that of the language of ‘intellectual property’. Current copyright, patent, trade-secret and trademark law do not need to be completely rejected. Their aims are rather more modest: the reconfiguration of legal rules and protections in an economy and culture in which the nature of creative goods and how they are made, used, shared, modified and distributed has changed. Such advocacy is not against, for instance, copyright protections. Indeed, in the domain of free and open-source software, it is copyright law – through the use of artfully configured software licences that do not restrain users in the way that traditional proprietary software licences do – that protects developers and users. And neither do copyright reformers argue that plagiarists be somehow rewarded; they do not advocate that anyone should be able to take a copyrighted work, put their name on it, and sell it.
  • This public domain is ours to draw upon for future use. The granting of temporary leases to various landlords to extract monopoly rent should be recognised for what it is: a limited privilege for our benefit. The use of ‘intellectual property’ is a rhetorical move by one partner in this conversation, the one owning the supposed ‘property right’. There is no need for us to play along, to confuse one kind of property with another or, for that matter, to even consider the latter kind of object any kind of property at all. Doing so will not dismantle the elaborate structures of rules we have built in order to incentivise artistic and scientific work. Rather, it will make it possible for that work to continue.
Bill Fulkerson

How To Think About Corporate Bailouts Correctly - People's Policy Project - 0 views

www.peoplespolicyproject.org/...t-corporate-bailouts-correctly

bailouts

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 26 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 26 Mar 20
     
    Due to an aversion to socialist rhetoric about "capitalists" or even "the wealthy," American populist lingo tends to focus on "corporations" as the great evil. We talk about "corporate power" and "corporate concentration" and "corporate influence" and "corporate money" and "big corporations" instead of talking about "the capitalist class" or "the ownership class." This kind of metonymy is, I suppose, fine in most cases. But sometimes taking it too literally can lead people astray when thinking about appropriate policy measures.
Bill Fulkerson

Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding | naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...ernist-thinking-exploding.html

capitalism power society

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17
     
    " Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o
Steve Bosserman

The Next System Project, Reconsidered | Grassroots Economic Organizing - 0 views

www.geo.coop/...xt-system-project-reconsidered

grassroots organizing transformation insurgency

shared by Steve Bosserman on 11 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • That is, our situation is much like that of colonized peoples: we can vote for our rulers, but cannot control them; our voices, at times, can be expressed, but can almost always be dismissed or over-ruled; our tax revenues mainly fund military interventions and corporate interests, leaving us to battle with each other over tiny trickle-downs. We are, in effect, walking in the dreams and demands of our captors, doomed to sit like docile passengers, who can only watch as the USA train goes wherever the MIC takes it. Despite the incessant rhetoric of “freedom”, we as a people are unwilling and indeed, unknowing, captives.
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