Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Stop rolling your eyes, this isn't a patriotic post! You know me better than that.
This is about spilling the tea... about the British East India Company's spilled tea, and what that had to do with Bengal, textile workers, and famine.
See, BEIC was using its private armies to open markets around the world to their trading policies, and to install local rulers who would keep the goods and money flowing. They did this in Bengal, one of the world's biggest producers of textiles in the mid-1700s.
Then, in 1768, drought hit Bengal and crops failed. People began to go hungry, but the BEIC's puppet rulers and agents just continued to collect taxes--and, in some cases, to profiteer off the sale of food. Over the next two years, these practices exacerbated the food shortages, leading to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, in which 7 - 10 million people are estimated to have starved to death. That's at least 25% of the entire Bengali population of the time.
This put a big dent in the profits of the BEIC (oopsie, who knew famine profiteering could have negative economic impacts?), leading to a financial crisis in England. This is also why BEIC was unloading tea for cheap in the American colonies, to get some of those revenues back.
So yeah, "no taxation without representation" was the rallying cry, but isn't it interesting that we (USians, I mean) were never taught that the REASON colonists were worried about this is because they felt they had something in common with starving Bengalis: namely, the vulnerability to a multinational corporation which clearly demonstrated its depraved indifference to human suffering in pursuit of profit.
Couple of little nuggets I left out because I'm trying to be concise (ha), but they're so interesting:
The BEIC was able to unload tea in the American colonies because the English parliament, rather than let the company fail, bailed it out. Part of the bailout conditions were that they got a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. Same as it ever was, eh?
BEIC agents who wrote letters and contacted the media (such as it was) to spread the word, and the outrage, about the completely unnecessary famine, were possibly the world's first whistleblowers.
Is this the future of social media? It certainly is better than Silicon Valley/commercial-surveillance disinformation platforms by orders of magnitude, yes...
...but personally, I have a different view.
I recommend reading the "Public Service Internet" manifesto. It was a privilege to read it. This is one of my greater research interests as well.
Tl;dr: an internet infrastructure of the people, by the people, and for the people — including democratic governance, user representation (suffrage), and citizen co-ownership of resources. NOT government-owned.
Of course there are some bits I disagree with too.
One could argue Mastodon/Fediverse is like that... but not truly (I like the place though). Here's why →
Above all, they should not be imitations of commercial media platforms.
The reason why things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, TikTok, and others succeeded (initially) was because they were unique at the time (well, Vine and TikTok are the same, FB and MySpace, MSN and Skype, etc., but you get me).
Pixelfed, PeerTube, Mastodon — these are all just their commercial media peers, except decentralised, distributed, and surveillance free (varies instance to instance).
I’ve been here for a while now. Don’t lose heart, though, if you’ve found your place in the Fediverse:
There are two ways you can take this.
That means this whole thing was a waste of time and amounted to nothing!
All our time spent here + time we will spend here can lay technological/social foundations for what can become a “public service internet” — initiatives like ActivityPub and the Fediverse are things we can build on.
I prefer the latter.
My time here is temporary — but I won’t move “back” to SV media like threads, new commercial media, or stuff like Bluesky.
I’ll wait until public service internet is a thing. Remember, this is a social element that requires social efforts/ideas rather than technological ones. We can’t tech our way out of social problems.
Interoperability. The ability of such a platform to talk to other platforms as well as an opt-out function. To eliminate switching costs so that users will never be trapped on a platform or by code again.
@pluralistic explains this in better words than I do in his book, The Internet Con (also a recommended read).
Check out the DH project on the economic, social and political history of the banana industry in Latin America from my colleague Kevin Coleman. @histodons
Next time someone trys to blame #capitalism on the cost of cars or a home now compared to in the 50's or at the the turn of the century just remind them we dont have a capitalism problem, we have a population problem. For most people in their 40's the population of the planet has virtually doubled since were kids, there isnt as much to go around as there used to be (and since the turn of the century the population has increased 5x).
@Amikke 200 years ago humans walked as they couldn't afford anything else. Only their rich could afford a horse. Farmers might have an ox, but they didn't ride in the cart, they lead the oxen.
From the author of The Shifts and the Shocks , and one of the most influential writers on economics, a reckoning with how and why the relationship between democracy and capitalism is coming undone.
I mean, if you are rich enough that you can just pay politicians to do the stuff you want them to do, then what most people want them to do won't get done.
In fact, it will usually be the opposite of what most people want done
"Meanwhile, Philadelphia has started a program where teenagers are teaching high school. Yep, high schoolers are teaching now. The local news station says it's how they're dealing with their teacher shortage.
They're hoping it goes nationwide.
That's life now. Teenagers are working in meat packing plants and construction sites. They're waiting tables and serving beer. They're working the fast food jobs nobody else wants."
🗣 We have an open call for communications for the workshop "The gains of their sorrow: Slavery, the slave trade, and the rise of capitalism in the other South", which seeks to open a debate on bridges connecting research focused on the Middle Passage and the one focused on mines, plantations, urban jobs, etc.
Our capitalist rulers, and the politicians they own, are playing the long game. Since the 1950s they have been working steadily to shift the Overton window, to reduce the influence of labor unions, to boost consumerism, and to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few.
A large part of that strategy involves privatizing services that used to be (and should be) public.
They're playing the long game, and they are winning — much to the detriment of you and me and the environment we live in.
The untold story of mega-mansion maintenance crews. It turns out your typical US$20 million Los Angeles mega mansion costs around US$42,000 each month in upkeep costs: https://youtu.be/k-ImID3kpAg?si=fYZEEr8lLKaSInKi
@ReverendEntity@wfpb Certainly, the sort of evil that makes a person not care about others, willing for them to die if the person can increase his or her own wealth. Cigarette manufacturers are still eager to get more people to smoke cigarettes, for example.
What a great illustration of the perversion of #capitalism: someone who owns two restaurants in downtown Minneapolis is asking Target to force thousands of employees to spend literal pieces of their lifespan every day (and polluting and adding to traffic and wearing down/depreciating their cars in the process) to #commute#returnToOffice#RTO so that their restaurant business model continues to be profitable.
The #remoteWork#flexibleWork revolution is likely unstoppable: thanks to three years of lockdowns, workers now know that rote commuting is a waste of time. Flexible and remote work allows more work-life balance and costs everyone less to produce the same output.
The forces against remote work are almost entirely #reactionary: a desire to return to the Old Ways, to Manage By Walking Around, to go back to the Old Business Models, to save Commercial Real Estate; in other words, to save old capital.
(Article title is clickbait, so I wont’t repeat it)