DiEM TV: Another Now with Yanis Varoufakis
Putting one of the ideas in Another Now into action, last week Black Friday, one day of action against Amazon, buy nothing from Amazon, do not visit their website, Make Amazon Pay.
During the pandemic Jeff Bezos has increased his wealth by $85 billion. Wealth begets wealth. Jeff Bezos can afford to take risks, have a long range vison, fund loss making projects, within Amazon can leverage projects to benefit all aspects of the business, we see this with artificial intelligence, when Amazon recommends a book it will be possible worth reading.
Facebook abuses its position, as we saw with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook knows more about us than we know ourselves, we are commodities to be used and abused and sold, it can target and manipulate us.
On reading Another Now I thought when do we fight back, when do we start the guerrilla tech war against the tech giants, against the banks, against dirty industries?
We need financial engineers, software engineers, leading researchers in artificial intelligence, who know where to hit vulnerable fragile systems with coordinated attacks.
The fight has begun with Make Amazon Pay, one day of targeted action against Amazon, buy nothing on Black Friday do not even visit their website on that day.
One week on from Black Friday, over 400 parliamentarians from across the world including Yanis Varoufakis and Jeremy Corbyn join in the call to Make Amazon Pay.
A tweet by Mark Dodds suggests a target for the UK, pubcos, a day when we do not drink in any tied pub or corporate pub chains.
Pubcos are zombie companies mired in debt. When they tire of relieving fools of their money they sell off their pubs for redevelopment.
There is action we can all take.
Support local indy businesses, buy coffee from a speciality coffee shop where they care about coffee, you will quite literally taste the difference.
During the first lockdown, I visited little independent shops, the local butcher, baker, fishmonger, fruit and vegetable market stall, not once did I visit a supermarket. And it was safer to shop in these little shops, limited numbers, I was in and out within a couple of minutes.
We do not have to use WhatsApp or Instagram, there are alternatives, post pictures to twitter not Instagram, use Skype not WhatsApp.
Facebook must be broken up, stripped of WhatsApp and Instagram.
We should overwrite all personal information on Facebook with false information, allow a couple of days to propagate through the system then delete. Never ever quiz, game or survey on Facebook, these are scams to harvest your data, as Cambridge Analytica used very effectively. Never tag friends.
There are alternatives to using Amazon if wish to buy books on-line. But better still, pay a visit to your local bookshop.
Amazon provides a platform for third party vendors and these account for around half the sales through Amazon. A somewhat crappy website Bookshop.org does the same, except demands a larger discount from indie publishers than they give Amazon and for bookshops they make less on a book sale than if you walked through their door and bought a book and the sale is not fulfilled by the bookshop.
Writers can do their bit, stop directing to Amazon, support local bookshops, ask your publisher to offer Amazon discounts to local bookshops, at the very least as special offer when books are published..
Tech giants should be taxed on revenue where that revenue is generated. The same should also apply to tax dodging corporations for example Starbucks.
Our lives are controlled by algorithms, Big Tech owns the algorithms. The world of We, a world controlled by numbers.
Amazons suggests what I may wish to read, YouTube what I may wish to watch.
Big Tech has monopolised research on AI. To whose benefit, who has oversight?
Those who speak out are fired.
The treatment of employees by Big Tech who dare challenge their lack of ethics is not restricted to Amazon, as we see with the treatment of Timnit Gebru by Google.
Google fired the technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team Timnit Gebru for raising issues of ethics.
Please sign the statement in support of Timnit Gebru.
A day of action against Google in support of Timnit Gebru. What form should it take? For example a coordinated walk out by Google staff on the same day of no use of Google Chrome or YouTube.
Support and use open source software.
Download and install Brave, a faster alternative to Chrome that cuts out the crap.
Brave is a free open-source web browser. It blocks ads and website trackers, and provides a way for users to send cryptocurrency contributions in the form of Basic Attention Tokens to websites and content creators.
