Wealth Transfer

The Biggest Wealth Transfer in History Is Happening Right Now You can choose to be on the right side of it. Tim Denning in The Ascent5 min read

Surveillance Capitalism

The undercurrents of the future

How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

Big Tech’s use of surveillance for profit is an existential risk to our species — but we're thinking about this problem all wrong. In a new book, published on Medium, Cory Doctorow explains how to beat this system, first by correctly identifying what's going on.

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Read more from OneZero: California Is on Fire and Choking Out Its Most Vulnerable

Digital Economy

The Digital Economy Is Capitalism at Its Worst Corporations are more able than ever to extract what little value people have left Douglas Rushkoff in Team Human4 min read

The future of capitalism

The future of capitalism, commerce and cash

49:17 minutes · TED2020

Capitalism needs an upgrade, says PayPal CEO Dan Schulman, and it starts with paying people enough to actually invest in their futures. He discusses why companies need to cultivate trust to recover and rebuild after the COVID-19 pandemic -- and how we can use this defining moment to create a more inclusive, ethical economy. (This virtual conversation, hosted by TED business curator Corey Hajim and current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers, was recorded on May 19, 2020.)

Watch now »

The VOC

The Richest Company In History The company that was worth more than 20 of the current highest valued companies. Calin Aneculaesei in History of Yesterday4 min read

Money and Modern Life

Money and Modern Life

Daniel Lopez, Aeon

Sociologist Georg Simmel diagnosed the character of modern city life: finance, fashion and becoming strangers to one another.

Georg Simmel was born in the heart of Berlin in 1858. That city epitomised the tensions of Germany’s special path to modernity. Rapid urbanisation and financial speculation propelled Berlin to the world stage. An avant-garde cultural elite flourished uneasily alongside central Europe’s aristocracy while a young proletariat fought the state and the bourgeoisie for rights, political and economic. A proliferation of modern technologies generated power and wealth while eroding the landed Prussian Junker nobility, the foundation of Bismarck’s united German Reich. The Hohenzollern dynasty – one of the oldest in Europe – reigned over a volatile empire, intoxicated by the most modern ideas./.../

Daniel Lopez is a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine and an honorary research associate at La Trobe University, with the Thesis Eleven Forum for Social and Political Theory. He is the author of Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute (2019). He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

4,200 words

Edited by Sam Dresser

Microchip SC implant

Notícia completa em: https://www.businessinsider.es/suecos-implantan-microchips-piel-reemplazar-dni-433831?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_campaign=BI&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1562841218

Unos 3.000 suecos se implantan chips en la piel para sustituir a la tarjeta de crédito y al DNI

La técnica de implantarse chips y otros sensores en el cuerpo es una tendencia en muchos países.

En los últimos 3 años unas 3.000 personas de Suecia han decidido insertar en su piel microchips que sustituyen a las tarjetas de crédito, carnés de identidad e, incluso, a las tarjetas del metro. Según comenta AFP, estos chips son del tamaño de un grano de arroz y llevan implantándose desde el 2015.

Estos pequeños aparatos pueden hacer las veces de tarjeta de acceso al gimnasio o a la oficina. Esto supone que en un solo chip un ciudadano puede usar numerosos documentos que en su versión física ocuparían más de 5 tarjetas de plástico magnetizadas.

Como señalan en Business Insider, el pasado año la línea de ferrocarril estatal SJ comenzó a escanear las manos de los pasajeros con chips para que pagasen el billete justo en el momento en el que el detector pasaba por encima de sus manos. Algo más propio del siglo XXII, pero que ya es una realidad en pleno 2019.

Indoloro

El proceso para implantarse uno de estos chips es bastante sencillo. Con un suave pinchazo el ciudadano ya tendría integrado ese chip en el cuerpo, que posteriormente debe configurar para añadir la información de las tarjetas que desee. Aunque, como alerta la AFP, en algunas ocasiones el propio cuerpo rechaza estos mini dispositivos y pasan a ser retirados.

Aunque pueda parecer una locura, el biohaking, que consiste en implantarse chips y otros sensores en el cuerpo, es una tendencia en muchos países. Por ejemplo, en Estados Unidos, 50 trabajadores accedieron a ponerse este tipo de aparatos en sus manos para hacer fotocopias o sacar snacks sin insertar dinero. En realidad, es hacer que nuestra mano se convierta en la tarjeta contactless que llevamos en la cartera.

Ciborgs

Uno de los casos más conocidos es el Neil Harbisson que tiene una antena conectada al cerebro que le permite escuchar los colores. Este compositor criado en España y de ascendencia inglesa desarrolló acromatopsia, una anomalía en la visión que impide ver la diversidad de los colores. Para los ojos de este artista el mundo es negro y blanco (con sus tonalidades de grises). Para poder disfrutar de los colores decidió implantarse esta antena que le informa de qué color son las cosas a través del sonido. De hecho, Harbisson ha sido reconocido como el primer ciborg del mundo.

http://medicamentos.alames.org/debates-eticos/unos-3-000-suecos-se-implantan-chips-en-la-piel-para-sustituir-a-la-tarjeta-de-credito-y-al-dni/

Dreams of El Dorado

Today's selection -- from Dreams of El Dorado by H.W. Brands. The uneasy, often adversarial relationship between farmers and bankers: 

"For Western farmers, the depression that followed the panic of 1893 -- the worst depression in the nation's history until then -- ­merely added to the stresses they had been feeling for decades. Since the 1870s farm prices had been falling relentlessly, pushing prosperous farmers into the ranks of the marginal, and marginal farmers into ruin. Ironically, a principal cause of the price decline was the farmers' very success; they produced more corn, wheat, cotton, pork and so on than the markets for those commodities could absorb. Some of the overproduction was the result of the increase in farm acreage, notably under the Homestead Act. Some was the consequence of the mechanization of the farm process.

"But farmers didn't like hearing this explanation. It demeaned their labor and accomplishment. They were suffering because they had succeeded too well? It made no sense. And it implied that some of them -- maybe very many of them -- would have to go out of business.

Billionaires...

Billionaires Beware

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Anis Chowdhury

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 07 (IPS)  - The latest November 2019 UBS/PwC Billionaires Report counted 2,101 billionaires globally, or 589 more than five years before. Earlier, Farhad Manjoo had seriously recommended, ‘Abolish Billionaires', presenting a moral case against the super-rich as they have and get far, far more than what they might reasonably claim to deserve.

Manjoo also argues that unless billionaires' economic and political power is cut, and their legitimacy cast in doubt, they will continue to abuse power to further augment their fortunes and influence, in ways detrimental to the economic, social and public good. 

World Economy

World Economic Forum

@wef

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14h

The $86 trillion world #economy – in one chart https://wef.ch/2lIqWJk

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