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I'm getting to the point where yes, I want to force these "private" companies to uphold civil liberties and principles such as innocent until proven guilty. I c

I'm getting to the point where yes, I want to force these "private" companies to uphold civil liberties and principles such as innocent until proven guilty. I care way more about citizen freedom and expression than the concept of a "free market" which is a platonic ideal that has never existed and never will.

tw04 6y ago
Sure it exists, but you need collective bargaining for it to be a level playing field. Content creators want to fight back against Twitch? Form a union.
- morelisp 6y ago
  This is the correct, and only viable, solution. https://www.boundary2.org/2018/07/mueller/ https://www.boundary2.org/2018/07/mueller/ The labor of digital creatives and innovators, sutured as it is to a technical apparatus fashioned from dead labor and meant for producing commodities for profit, is therefore already socialized. While some of this socialization is apparent in peer production, much of it is mystified through the real abstraction of commodity fetishism, which masks socialization under wage relations and contracts. Rather than further rely on these contracts to better benefit digital artisans, a Marxist politics of digital culture would begin from the fact of socialization, and as Radhika Desai (2011) argues, take seriously Marx’s call for “a general organization of labour in society” via political organizations such as unions and labor parties. Creative workers could align with others in the production chain as a class of laborers rather than as an assortment of individual producers, and form the kinds of organizations, such as unions, that have been the vehicles of class politics, with the aim of controlling society’s means of production, not simply one’s “own” tools or products. These would be bonds of solidarity, not bonds of market transactions. Then the apparatus of digital cultural production might be controlled democratically, rather than by the despotism of markets and private profit.
anthonypasq 6y ago
companies have speech rights that you would be infringing on by doing this
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  But why is a company's right to speech more important than a real person's civil rights? A company is a mere legal fiction and it's rights should not be given equal weight to those of actual human beings, especially for a corporation as large as Amazon. Edit: I know the issue becomes murkier for things like mom and pop shops and sole proprietorships, but I am willing to make distinctions based on scale.
  - ctdonath 6y ago
    Because a company is a group of real people making decisions together. There is no “legal fiction” deciding to not associate with certain others.
    - BitwiseFool 6y ago
      I still fail to see how that coordinated group of people motivated by profit takes precedence over the civil rights of an individual.
      - Goronmon 6y ago
        I fail to see how an individual loses their civil rights just because they joined a "coordinated group of people".
        BitwiseFool 6y ago
        The individual who joined the "coordinated group of people" (the corporation) still have their individual civil rights, but the legal entity they constitute should not have it's rights valued on the same level as individual human beings. If the corporation is being seen as a single entity then you should not consider it's employees' individual rights as the same thing. Or even combine them together to give more weight to the corporation's rights.

tw04 6y ago

Sure it exists, but you need collective bargaining for it to be a level playing field. Content creators want to fight back against Twitch? Form a union.

morelisp 6y ago
This is the correct, and only viable, solution. https://www.boundary2.org/2018/07/mueller/ https://www.boundary2.org/2018/07/mueller/ The labor of digital creatives and innovators, sutured as it is to a technical apparatus fashioned from dead labor and meant for producing commodities for profit, is therefore already socialized. While some of this socialization is apparent in peer production, much of it is mystified through the real abstraction of commodity fetishism, which masks socialization under wage relations and contracts. Rather than further rely on these contracts to better benefit digital artisans, a Marxist politics of digital culture would begin from the fact of socialization, and as Radhika Desai (2011) argues, take seriously Marx’s call for “a general organization of labour in society” via political organizations such as unions and labor parties. Creative workers could align with others in the production chain as a class of laborers rather than as an assortment of individual producers, and form the kinds of organizations, such as unions, that have been the vehicles of class politics, with the aim of controlling society’s means of production, not simply one’s “own” tools or products. These would be bonds of solidarity, not bonds of market transactions. Then the apparatus of digital cultural production might be controlled democratically, rather than by the despotism of markets and private profit.

anthonypasq 6y ago

companies have speech rights that you would be infringing on by doing this

BitwiseFool 6y ago
But why is a company's right to speech more important than a real person's civil rights? A company is a mere legal fiction and it's rights should not be given equal weight to those of actual human beings, especially for a corporation as large as Amazon. Edit: I know the issue becomes murkier for things like mom and pop shops and sole proprietorships, but I am willing to make distinctions based on scale.
- ctdonath 6y ago
  Because a company is a group of real people making decisions together. There is no “legal fiction” deciding to not associate with certain others.
  - BitwiseFool 6y ago
    I still fail to see how that coordinated group of people motivated by profit takes precedence over the civil rights of an individual.
    - Goronmon 6y ago
      I fail to see how an individual loses their civil rights just because they joined a "coordinated group of people".
      - BitwiseFool 6y ago
        The individual who joined the "coordinated group of people" (the corporation) still have their individual civil rights, but the legal entity they constitute should not have it's rights valued on the same level as individual human beings. If the corporation is being seen as a single entity then you should not consider it's employees' individual rights as the same thing. Or even combine them together to give more weight to the corporation's rights.