Episode 262: The Shitcaca Sküll

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I’m reminded almost daily about how the current elevation of private enterprise has made our lives crap. It's helpful to remember that this industrial fetish had an origin, and can be reversed, as I discuss in this Episode 262: The Shitcaca Sküll.

In this episode, I read from: Kim Phillips-Fein's book, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan; and from Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's book The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us To Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. Lots more to come from both of those books.

I play: a snippet of the National Association of Manufacturers' propagandistic short movie, Your Town, a Story of America. Musically, in a new intro KMFDM opens the show backing George Monbiot's observation about how far into the brainwashing stage this Chicago School focus on private wealth has taken us. I close today with Julie & Rolf & the Campfire Gang doing "Over The Rainbow".

Episode 261: Ways We Are All Getting Torq'd

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I didn’t really know how much advertisers surveil us. I started to look into it. Then I stopped looking: how much we have all lost our privacy was just too scary. I look back on 10 years of reading in this Episode 261: Ways We Are All Getting Torq'd.

In this episode, I read from: a smart TV manufacturer's owner's manual (the original of which is no longer available after ten years); two articles about smart TVs, one from the Daily Beast, another from Gigaom; a New York Times Magazine article about store purchase history data crunching; a New Scientist article about Michal Kosinski's research; the abstract of Kosinski's research; a Motherboard article about what happened after others stole Kosinski's ideas; and Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother.

I play: content from a smart TV maker bragging about how intrusive and useful to advertisers their smart TVs really were (a video which was pulled from the Intertubes so fast it left skid marks). Shoshana Zuboff opens the show backed by KMFDM; and I close today with Julie & Rolf & The Campfire Gang doing "Over The Rainbow".