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In July, the Federal Trade Commission announced a complaint against Amazon over the ways the company has tricked customers into subscribing to its paid Prime service. The Commission argues that Amazon discovered that its customers were accidentally signing up for Prime and were unhappy about it, and that the company nevertheless decided not to fix this confusion because it was making too much money from these accidental signups. To make things worse, Amazon deliberately made it harder to cancel Prime, and celebrated that the new, more complex process resulted in fewer cancellations.
Big Tech Can’t Stop Telling on Itself
Cory Doctorow
A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism’s ostensible ‘realism’ turns out to be nothing of the sort.
Capitalist Realism
Mark Fisher
AI’s automated forms of decision making, regardless of their specific instantiation or situational impact, all contribute to a general understanding that non-datafied forms of experience are not relevant. They are ineffective: They are not part of the formula and have no hold on the world. Converting experience into data, abstracting away from any situated perspective, is what makes an experience real, consequential.
Epic Forgetting
Rob Horning
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