Mediaboss Marketing

by Rob Harding

Lets leave the sordid world of Earth behind for a bit, and explore the potential of a concept thats kind of easy to dismiss out of hand.

In his venerable Culture series, Iain M Banks describes a future society based around Minds, unimaginably super-intelligent AIs that control vast ships and space-going habitats, on which a massive collection of alternately hedonistic and depressed lesser-biological beings (assumed to be human, although its never made explicit) live pampered and comfortable lives. The Culture is semi-utopian, although, if it resembles any society, it resembles the US in its relations with other civilisations, The books frequently focus on both the skulduggery necessary to keep the civilisation running and the injustice of being born outside it. Nonetheless, it is a portrait of a society in which humans (probably) are protected, cared for and treated equally through advanced technology.

Because utopias arent easy or fun to write, few societies like the Culture have appeared in fiction before or since. There is one notable version, however, in the form of an oddly idealistic leftie meme: Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.

FALGSC (Sometimes just called FALC, because space is admittedly unlikely and gays apparently arent allowed to be involved in these things) is often an expression of frustration, tempered (especially recently) with a fatalistic sense of humour and understanding that well never get there. In a world that sees Trumps and Assads, Dutertes and Al-Baghdadis, in a world where petty fascist shitheads are coming out of the walls on every continent and fundamentalists grow louder with every day, something as optimistic is impossible. More knowledgeable people scoff that Communism is a flawed system vulnerable to human nature, they delicately refuse to engage with the Gay part and make accusatory comments about entitlement because of the Luxury bit.

However you parse it, FALC and FALGSC are envisaged as post-capitalist utopias.

However you parse it, FALC and FALGSC are envisaged as post-capitalist utopias. As is pointed out in this video, capitalism as a civilisational operating system is starting to run into serious and systemic problems. As such, its time to start planning what society could evolve into, because there are some nasty failure stakes. Traditional extinction is on the table, of course. But, worse, we could end up with a capitalist kleptocracy, like that envisioned in William Gibsons The Peripheral, where only the rich survive the near-apocalypse, or else either a hideous famine-stricken fascist dystopia ruling the starving masses, or a segregated post-oil nightmare.

FALGSC provides an alternative to all this. Its not going to be easy to get to vested interests, human nature and conservatism all stand in the way

Bots are getting smarter and more numerous every day, and, in recent years, even self-taught neural networks have started development a huge step on the road to a self-sustaining AI. Capitalist systems almost always automate to improve efficiency from the stone-age woodcutter assembling an axe to cut more wood, to the self-service checkout in Tescos, theres always a machine to help fewer people do more work. Under a capitalist system, this process is focused on profit. This is a problem our unemployment crises worldwide are bad enough, and in many countries birth rates are still increasing. People are living and working longer, making it harder for the generations after them to get jobs, even without the economic inequality thats developed alongside that. Unemployed people can create big problems even if youre the kind of heartless Tory bastard who doesnt care about humans being starving to death the Arab Spring is partly attributable to massive unemployment rates and stunted labour markets in many Middle Eastern countries.

If you think robots cant do your job, youre being naive. Yes, even repair other robots. Even create art. All of it. Image credit: Wikipedia Commons.

Traditional capitalist automation only makes this much worse robots and bots are much cheaper to run than humans, so even businesses that want to reject them and hire only humans are dooming themselves to obsolescence and rapid undercutting. Automation hasnt started to bite properly yet, and already its predicted that one in three jobs are at risk within the next twenty years. Within my lifetime, we could be looking at a society where its no longer economical to hire human workers for 90% of the jobs out there.

Universal Basic Income is a potential patch to this problem, but its a limited one and its unaffordable for many of the economies where mass automation will bite hardest the manufacturing-heavy developing countries and the industrialising third world. What happens when a third of a billion Chinese workers are out of a job thanks to automation? What happens to Indias already high unemployment rate when the robots come for everyones jobs?

Tarir Square, February 2011. Economic problems are believed to have played a key role in the Arab Spring. Image credit: Wikipedia Commons.

Worse still, under a capitalist system, those that own the machines (free of the constraints of having to support a workforce) will be able to become extremely wealthy. With the natural tendency of the wealthy to want to pay as little tax as possible, and with nearly everyone else relying on universal basic income to survive (assuming a fully functional semi-universal UBI system can be implemented at all, against heavy ideological opposition from hidebound conservatives the world over), taxation becomes almost useless. We then end up in a situation where governments cant pay for themselves, or the potentially billions of unemployed, because no-ones hiring any more and the hyper-efficient automated industrial base cant sell its products because no-one can afford them. (Or maybe the new auto-industrialists will consent to paying 95% taxes and somehow keep the whole system afloat by themselves which would raise a dozen ethical questions if it wasnt blatantly unrealistic.)

FALGSC provides an alternative to all this. Its not going to be easy to get to vested interests, human nature and conservatism all stand in the way (and what the hells their plan for this? I suspect it runs along the lines of fuck you, got mine, like it usually is.). Join me next week to explore some of the winding, difficult roads that might lead to the promised land of Fully Automated Luxury Gay (Space) Communism. Its more practical than youd think.

Featured image credit: James Vaughan, Flickr.Text reads Soviet anthem is our triumph in space!

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THE ROAD TO FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY GAY SPACE COMMUNISM: PART 1 - Norwich Radical (blog)

Chinese boyband TFBoys' song "Go!AMIGO" is a big hit in China this summer. VCG/VCG via Getty Images hide caption

Chinese boyband TFBoys' song "Go!AMIGO" is a big hit in China this summer.

The first words of the hit song "Go!AMIGO" are sung in three languages: English, Spanish and Chinese. Its music video shows the three teenage members of TFBoys China's hottest boy band gathering friends for a game of baseball.

It all seems pretty innocent. But there are calculated reasons behind the song's linguistic flair, the video's focus on baseball and even the band itself: "This video is proof that Communist Party propaganda is evolving," says cultural critic Zhu Dake, who teaches at Shanghai's Tongji University.

He says the TFBoys are the latest example of a pop group engineered by a company whose aim is to champion the values of China's Communist Party. The "TF" in the band's name shares an acronym with Time Fengjun, a Beijing entertainment company that selected the boys for the group, writes its songs and produces its videos.

"This video is interesting," says Zhu as he watches the video for "Go!AMIGO." "It features baseball, a sport we don't play. It's American, so it's aspirational. But the song's message is about teamwork and serving the collective communist values. Usually, China's state propaganda is filled with dreary platitudes concocted by government workers with low IQs. But this is very clever."

"We rely on each other," the TFBoys sing in "Go!AMIGO." "It's so magical to have you along the way. We'll soon reach our glittering dreams."

TFBoys fan Ren Jiaying, a 16-year-old high school junior, says the song speaks to her. Attending Chinese high school is full of pressure, she says, and the band's music reminds her that she's not alone.

"They're the same age as me, and I feel like they're with me no matter what I do," she says of the members of TFBoys. "I'm not good at chemistry, but then one day I saw a video of them reciting periodic tables between photo shoots. I feel like we're making progress together."

Ren is among tens of millions of young fans who follow the TFBoys' social media feed religiously. It's an enormously popular feed: When bandleader Wang Junkai posted a note to fans on his 15th birthday to Weibo, China's Twitter-like social media platform, it was shared more than 355 million times the most of any Weibo post ever.

Zhu says most of these fans live in the hundreds of cities that make up rural China. "Kids in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai dream of leaving China for America or Europe they don't care about this kind of band," says Zhu. "But rural kids won't ever get that chance, so this song provides them with dreams of playing a foreign sport in a modern, fashionable China. But who's going to play baseball with them?"

Zhu points out that other TFBoys songs including a modern revamp of the 1960s communist classic "We Are The Heirs Of Communism" show how the band is being used to promote the government's agenda.

Gao Ling, the 31-year-old manager of the TFBoys' Shanghai fan club, admits the band is promoting communist values to young people in a new, fashionable way. "But Chinese society is like this," Gao says. "We need to support our government, and these boys have been taught to be patriotic in school, so they naturally promote communist ideals. There's nothing wrong with going with the flow that's perfectly normal. They're showing a positive and bright path. They would never criticize society or government."

That's because, Gao points out matter-of-factly, "China doesn't yet have freedom of speech."

Original post:
TFBoys' 'Go!AMIGO' Is A Summery Slice Of Pop Propaganda - NPR

True socialism has never been tried. That would kill a country instantly instead of slowly weakening it.

Could someone very slowly and carefully explain to me what a buttered roll is?

Coconuts grow on deserted islands because thats the only place anyone would be tempted to eat one. So what kind of fruit does this tree have? Its a brown hairy ball full of wax. Can can trees have mental problems?

So before today, did anyone else know you could put butter on a roll and eat it? I just used rolls as something to chuck at squirrels.

Most action movies are cheering on bad guys getting shot. I guess the more grounded in reality, the more problematic that becomes. Taken was kind of in that mold, and it was very popular. At the cinema, we tend to like the simple, unapologetic solution to evil.

Is a poem written on a statue binding law? Before you answer, know that the statue is very very big.

Hes a father who after an unspeakable tragedy no longer cares if SJWs come after him en masse. Its Bruce Willis in Problematic Wish. You cant just gleefully gun down thugs without being contemplative about the underlying socioeconomic concerns! Try and stop me.

Considering the record, if you still support Communism over Capitalism, you absolutely, positively do not care about famine or the poor. With the record of Capitalism versus Communism on famine, thats like comparing a prime rib dinner to a shotgun to the groin.

Difference between Nazi and Communist is when you say how horrible Nazis have been, they dont say, Well, real Nazism has never been tried

Really, though, who cares about the NYT? When was the last time they influenced anyone who wasnt already a mindless left-wing partisan?

The difference between a prophet and a scientist is that there are more specific qualifications to being called a prophet. Wed all be much smarter if journalists were required to replace scientists say with some guys say. Then youd ask, Who are these guys and why should I believe them? Questions some people think the term scientist answers when it doesnt.

Guys, come on. Keep quiet on spoilers for the next 40 years while Im waiting for George R.R. Martin to finish the books.

NYC having best pizza sounds like a dumb urban legend. You can just copy whatever recipes they have and make it the same in any other city. Same for bagels.

Isnt limiting the acceptable areas of discussion more anti-science than anything else?

So is Google even going to attempt to refute what the guy said or are they just going to fire him?

Whoever thought promoting diversity and tolerance would so often involve screaming, Burn the witch!?

Looking like 2020 will again be an easy choice between a cartoonish, moron buffoon and people who will constantly lie and try to destroy you.

Theres a hotline to call to report any nuclear wars you see.

The North is definitely my least favorite of the Koreas.

Im all for tolerance as long as its for things I approve of.

What struck me about the Google memo was how earnest it was. He honestly thought he was going to foster a discussion. He thought response would be Heres where youre wrong and where your biases are blinding you. Instead it was You hate diversity! Fired! He comes off as this poor, naive guy who foolishly believed people who disagreed with you had other settings than Crush! Kill! Destroy! Lesson learned for other Google employees: Stick to quietly seething.

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Random Thoughts: Socialism, Communism, and Google - IMAO (satire)

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Neglecting the evils of communism? Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Has anyone else observed a striking pattern in The New York Times recently? The newspaper has hosted a series of fond, nostalgic recollections about the good old days of 20-century communism the optimism, the idealism, the moral authority. and more »

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Neglecting the evils of communism? - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

During the Cold War, few American institutions were more resolutely anti-communist than the labor movement. On the surface, this might seem counterintuitive. The Soviet Union, after all, claimed to be a workers paradise, a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Reality, of course, was different. Just because communist leaders professed to represent the interests of workers didnt mean they actually did. In communist societies, workers lacked the basic freedoms that their brothers and sisters in democratic societies enjoyed: namely, the right to assemble peaceably, free speech, and strike. Communist leaders insisted their economic system obviated the need for unions, though they gestured in the direction of the Western civil society model by creating labor fronts, regime-sanctioned bodies that served as tools of the one-party state. Any attempt at forming unions independent of the regime were ruthlessly suppressed.

For this reason, most leaders of the American labor movement understood communism to be a uniquely dangerous enemy of free trade unionism, writes Arch Puddington in his sterling biography of Lane Kirkland, the legendary president of the AFL-CIO and one of the Cold Wars unsung heroes. Workers are exploited under any form of dictatorship. But under communism, they are in a way doubly exploited, in that the exploitation is cynically implemented in the name of the working class. There is no such thing as a Communist trade union official, Kirkland said. They are all just rulers of labor.

To be sure, American labor was not uniformly anti-communist. At the outset of the Cold War, disputes between anti-communist and communist-leaning unions caused major ruptures within the movement. But the main labor confederationthe AFL-CIOnever backed down from its position that communism was an enemy of working people worldwide. In the late 1940s, the AFL published a map of gulags across the Soviet Union. When the exiled Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to the United States in the mid-1970s, his first public speech was delivered at an AFL-CIO dinner. And the AFLs most heroic international achievement was its early and unwavering support for the Solidarity movement in Poland, to which it secretly smuggled printing presses.

A fierce critic of dtente with the Soviet Union, Kirkland assailed American captains of industrythose supposed lovers of the free marketfor their willingness to cut deals with communist regimes. In a 1981 speech protesting the imposition of martial law in Poland, Kirkland even assailed the Reagan administration for being soft on communism, criticizing it for allowing a steady flow of credits to those who keep Lech Walesa in prison, Andrei Sakharov in exile, thousands in psychiatric clinics, countless more in labor camps, and whole peoples enslaved. The Polish communist regime of General Jaruzelski, he said, was a fascist junta.

Today, it is hard not to conclude that Kirkland would be anything other than ashamed at how his successors in the American labor movement have abandoned his legacy. Earlier this summer, labor leaders across the country, including those at the AFL, feted a Cuban government union representative visiting the United States. In late June, Vctor Lemagne Snchez, secretary-general of Cubas Hotel and Tourism Union and executive committee member of the Cuban Workers Federation (CTC), began a two-week tour of 11 American citiesthe first time in 17 years that a Cuban union leader acquired a visa to visit the U.S.

Like Soviet-era labor fronts, the CTC is the only organization permitted to represent workers before the Cuban government and is thus an appendage of a regime that routinely harasses and imprisons independent trade unionists (PDF). In addition to being a leader of a fake union, Snchez also sits in a fake parliament, the Cuban National Assembly of Peoples Power, in which all 612 deputies are members of the Communist Party. In Sacramento, according to the communist Workers World newspaper, he was warmly welcomed as the first Cuban elected official received onto the floors of the California Senate and Assemblya mockery of those democratic chambers.

Snchez was hosted by the Communications Workers of America in Berkeley, and paid visits to the San Francisco Labor Council, the San Jose/South Bay Central Labor Council, and the University of California/Berkeley Labor Center. On July 10 in Washington, Snchez met with AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre, Cathy Feingold, (director of the confederations International Department), and representatives from the AFL-CIOs LGBTQ unit PRIDE at Work, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. The AFL-CIO did not respond to requests for comment.

The Cuban Workers Federation is not a genuine union but an instrument for controlling workers. At his speech in Berkeley, Snchez claimed that membership in his union is voluntary and conscious. This is a lie. Membership in the CTC is compulsory for anyone wishing to work in government-run factories, stores, and resorts, which, in a country where the regime either controls or has a stake in nearly every aspect of the economy, comprises a huge percentage of the labor force. The Cuban hotel workers whom Snchez ostensibly represents are not paid by the foreign conglomerates that partly own these establishments; rather, the businesses pay the Cuban regime in hard currency, and the regime, acting as middleman, pays its subjects in worthless Cuban pesos.

Ultimately, 95 percent of the wages earned in joint enterprises are garnished by the state. Any American trade unionist should understand how these practices violate both the letter and spirit of democratic, pluralistic labor relations, and the Cuban regime has been repeatedly criticized by the International Labor Organization and human rights organizations for its abuse of basic worker rights (PDF). Labor relations in Cuba can hardly be said to resemble the collective bargaining processes employed by unions in democratic societies. Its more like indentured servitude.

One of the greatest insights offered by the international labor movement has been the notion of solidarity: the idea that a steelworker in Gary, Indiana, has common interests with a dockworker in Gdask, who in turn has a stake in the fate of a hotel maid in Guantnamo. Reminding American labor leaders of this legacy are independent Cuban trade unionists, two of whom wrote an open letter to the AFL-CIO protesting the organizations welcoming a Cuban regime apparatchik (PDF). Such a visit, until this moment irrelevant and confined to communism-leaning, pro-Cuban regime groups, and with no relevance in the trade union and political life of the United States, was institutionalized and enhanced by the meeting held at the AFL-CIO in Washington, stated Joel Brito and Ivn Hernndez Carrillo, director and general secretary, respectively, of the International Group for Social Corporate Responsibility in Cuba, an organization advocating for the protection of labor rights and socially conscious behavior by international companies operating in Cuba. The CTC, they explain, is an instrument of an oppressive State that systematically violates the most basic and fundamental human and labor rights of the Cuban people.

These criticisms could have been lifted from a 2009 AFL resolution condemning multinational enterprises that profit from the exploitation of Cuban workers and from the Cuban governments chronic violations of international worker rights, the Cuban governments continued imprisonment, arrest, torture and other acts of unconscionable harassment against independent trade unionists, human rights advocates and democracy activists, and call for authentic and democratic Cuban trade unionism.

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Not long ago, the AFL would have lobbied strongly against a visit from a figure like Snchez. During the Cold War, it repeatedly pressured the State Department to deny visas to communist officials posing as authentic trade unionists. In the 1980s, the New York State AFL president described a delegation of Nicaraguan Sandinista trade union leaders as an enemy within floating around the United States under the guise of representing workers. That description fits Snchez, who is, in the words of Brito and Hernndez Carrillo, not a union leader but an oppressor co-protagonist of the worst indisputable violations of the fundamental rights of Cuban wage earners.

What caused the change in labors Cuba policy? Part of the shift surely owes to the Obama administrations Havana opening, which, by offering unconditional concessions to the Castro regime, emboldened the dictatorship. But larger forces are at play, namely, the gradual triumph of progressive anti-anti-communism over an earlier generations Cold War liberalism. Emblematic of this tendency is an article in The Nation by left-wing journalist Tim Shorrock appraising the AFLs Cold War record as one stained by a belligerent anti-communism that today looks like a dangerous anachronism. But whats truly anachronistic in the 21stcentury is a one-party state devoted to the worker-crushing principles of Marxist-Leninism, not the opposition to it.

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What Is American Labor Thinking in Honoring a 'Union' Figure From Cuba? - Daily Beast