Tag: corpocracy

The Decline of the Newspaper

It is not to be mourned, but rather, celebrated, given the complete irresponsibility and outright wickedness of the media institutions:

The country’s largest newspaper company, Gannett, is once again forecasting it will sell off more of its daily newspapers. Since its merge with newspaper company GateHouse Media in 2019, Gannett has closed or sold hundreds of papers and slashed staff by more than half, and that is projected to continue. Joshua Benton has been writing about this for the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, and he joins me now. Welcome.

JOSHUA BENTON: Good to be with you.

FLORIDO: Joshua, Gannett had 25,000 employees at the end of 2019, and less than four years later, it has just over 11,000. It slashed staff by more than half. I mean, newspaper revenue has been steadily declining over that time but not by that much, not at that rate. So what’s going on here?

BENTON: The Gannett that we have now is the result of the merger of two very large companies. The idea was an individual newspaper might struggle on its own, but if you buy enough of them, you can extract as much of the cost of producing the newspaper from the local community as possible. You cut down on print days. You have the page layout and editing done elsewhere. The thought was you could achieve these economies of scale and make a profitable business. The problem is, as part of the merger, Gannett took on a lot of debt, and they have to pay off that debt. So they need revenue. And the way that they have been doing that is by cutting costs to the bone. That means cutting staff and cutting the quality of their newspapers.

FLORIDO: I guess it goes without saying that print circulation of newspapers has plummeted in recent years. It’s been on the decline for decades, actually. And today, most people get their news online. Is it just the case that these Gannett newspapers aren’t managing to get people who used to subscribe to their print paper to subscribe to their digital product instead?

BENTON: Yeah. Newspapers have generally given up on the idea of creating new print readers. They’re not really making new print readers anymore. So the idea has been to shift to digital, and Gannett claims some degree of success in doing that. But even when that does happen, newspapers generally make significantly less money off of a digital subscriber than they do from a print subscriber. The other problem is that there are lots of other free alternatives for a lot of local news and information, and people will be happy to consume those without bothering to subscribe to the local daily.

Better uninformed than misinformed and propagandized by the corpocracy. The only real loss is historical, but that was inevitable once paper moved to digital. It will be good when government-funded media institutions like NPR and the BBC eventually fail as well. No one’s lives are enhanced or improved by learning very important information about a deadly hurricane in Bali or a fatal shooting in Chicago, or by being told lies about war, geopolitics, and the economy.

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Devil Mouse in Danger

The Dark Herald explains how Disney CEO Bob Iger has placed the wicked corporation in a perilous legal position concerning the nature of the relationship between the Walt Disney Company and the Reedy Creek Improvement District.

This was clearly and obviously a legal fiction.

HOWEVER, it was a legal fiction that Disney absolutely and under all circumstances had to observe. The Chinese wall separating the Walt Disney Company from the Reedy Creek Improvement District had to be as big as the Great Wall of China.

And yesterday Bob Iger bulldozed through it.

During the question-and-answer portion of the Disney Annual Investor Meeting, an already flustered Bob Iger answered a question that at first seemed like it was from a friendly or at least neutral quarter.

An Ameriprise Financial Advisor asked, ‘What are you doing to protect stockholder value because of the Reedy Creek problems with the State of Florida?’

Iger went into a long and rambling answer that demolished fifty years of carefully cultivated legal fiction. He briefly and biased covered the history of the Florida Anti-Grooming law and Disney’s hysterical reaction to it. And then said, ‘The governor of Florida got angry and decided to retaliate’, (here is the kill quote) “including the naming of a new board to oversee the property and the business.”

Disney’s Chinese Wall was completely blown up.

Done.

It is ended. It is over.

Bob Iger acting in his capacity Chief Executive Officer at an official stockholder function effectively admitted that the Reedy Creek Improvement District was directly connected to the Walt Disney Company. There was no effort at conflation at all. “…oversee the property and business.” He has now stated that the two were inseperable. It was unbelievable.

The real question now is if Gov. DeSantis and the Florida legislature are simply posturing for conservative voters or if they are serious about dismantling one of the primary engines of evil in the country. Because Bob Iger has foolishly handed them the very tool they need to do it if they have the will.

Read the whole thing, which is a rather fascinating lesson in how corporations have managed to literally place themselves above the law in some states.

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Amazon Kills Book Depository

The outcome was inevitable, of course, as soon as Amazon acquired its much-smaller competitor twelve years ago:

The online shop Book Depository is due to close at the end of April, vendors and publishing partners have been told. This comes after the bookseller’s parent company Amazon announced it had decided to “eliminate” a number of positions across its Devices and Books businesses.

The Gloucester-based bookseller was founded in 2004 by Stuart Felton and Andrew Crawford, a former Amazon employee, with the mantra of “selling ‘less of more’ rather than ‘more of less’”. It aimed to sell 6m titles covering a wide variety of genres and topics, as opposed to focusing solely on bestsellers. While originally a rival to Amazon, it was acquired by the retail giant in 2011, causing some in the publishing industry to worry about the tightening of the American company’s “stranglehold” on the UK book trade.

According to the trade magazine the Bookseller, an email sent out to vendors and publishing partners explained that Book Depository will be closing, and that the last date customers will be able to place orders is 26 April.

Fortunately, you can buy one of our thirteen – count them, 13 – titles that are available directly from Castalia. And not only is the shipping free, but you’ll also receive a free ebook edition.

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Substack Submerging

As I mentioned on a previous Darkstream, the end of the cult of free and the decline of the equity markets is not looking good for companies dependent upon startup financing to leverage their growth.

Substack is desperate, huh? That’s what I understand from their fundraising email, anyway. They’re now hitting up retail investors for millions of dollars after they failed to raise last year.

After certain recent historical events, I have become skeptical of the term “financial inclusion,” a set of buzzwords for making financial services more available to people who are not stratospherically rich. Maybe my cynicism is because Facebook tried to launch a stablecoin for the “unbanked” that you nonetheless needed (at least, according to the now-scrapped plan) a credit card to use. Maybe it is because Robinhood made a big fuss about how many brand-new retail investors it brought onto its gambling platform. Or maybe it’s the proliferation of buy now, pay later services from the likes of Klarna, Afterpay, and Affirm (and now Apple.)

As we all know from reading our 10-Ks, past performance is not indicative of future results

Anyway, Facebook’s stablecoin play failed and was sold for parts. Robinhood’s share price has fallen by a third in the last year. Oh, and Gen Z’s credit card debt is growing fast and furious. So yeah, when someone talks about financial inclusion, I assume the game is afoot…

You see, the last time Substack raised, the Fed hadn’t started its rate hikes yet. Startups — like Substack — are particularly vulnerable to being squeezed when the interest rates go up. It gets harder to raise money because conservative investors can simply invest in safer assets.

Where’s the money, Lebowski?

And during that 10-year period I cited with those outsize returns, interest rates were low and valuations of private companies ballooned. Now, with interest rates coming back up, those balloons are popping. Some VCs are slicing valuations by as much as 95 percent. There may be even more write-downs coming. And following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, there’s a considerable amount of uncertainty in the VC world.

Substack certainly knows this. It tried to raise last year, seeking $75 million to $100 million from investors. But it had revenue of only $9 million in 2021, and a sky-high valuation on relatively little revenue was not the vibe in 2022. The company gave up. On its Wefunder page, the company says that the pre-money valuation on Substack is now $585 million, a 10 percent decrease from 2021.

Any time you see a new platform explode out of nowhere, you can be assured of two things. First, there is hundreds of millions of VC dollars behind it. Second, they are paying the creators a LOT of money to join the platform. Third, the money being made by the creators on a monthly basis is NOT all coming from the subscribers and supporters.

Remember, Clown World is ALWAYS fake and gay. It always attempts to substitute the inorganic for the organic. You just have to know where to look in order to see through the illusions.

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The Wages of Clown World

Is disease, bankruptcy, deindustrialization, and death. A German institution dating back to 1380 survived many challenges over the centuries, but it didn’t survive Clown World.

The deindustrialization of Germany is in full swing. Eisenwerk Verlag GmbH has filed a claim to declare itself bankrupt The reason for bankruptcy is standard for our time – energy resources risen in price. This Saxon metallurgical enterprise traces its history back to 1380. For 600 years it has survived the Hanseatic League, two orders of knighthood – the Teutonic and Livonian, the Reformation, the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War and the Global Economic Crisis, but didn’t survive Olaf Scholz.

Clown World kills. It kills people, it kills business enterprises, and it kills nations.

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The SVB Death List

This was posted on Gab tonight:

30 companies now face extinction as a result of being tied to the SVB failure. They are as follows:

  • Coinbase
  • DoorDash
  • TikTok
  • Twilio
  • Plaid
  • Affirm
  • Etsy
  • Zoom
  • 23&Me
  • Airbnb
  • AllBirds
  • DocuSign
  • Udacity
  • Betterment
  • Checkr
  • Klarna
  • Marqeta
  • NerdWallet
  • Stripe
  • WeWork
  • ImpossibleFoods
  • Instacart
  • Patreon
  • BigCommerce
  • FarFetch
  • Lemonade

Now, not all of these companies will find the disruption, and possible partial loss of funds, to be a killer. I’d be very surprised if Stripe, Zoom, Airbnb, or Etsy found the collapse of SVB to be much more than a minor annoyance due to the particular natures of their respective businesses. TikTok probably won’t even notice. But companies like Patreon, which are very low-margin operations that don’t run a profit, are considerably more vulnerable.

So it will be interesting to see precisely how severe the eventual consequences turn out to be.

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Hence the Library II

You don’t even own your own ebooks anymore.

Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.

This is one of the strongest arguments against copyright that I can imagine. What prevents Amazon or any other entity with access to your files from completely changing what was previously a copyright-protected text?

And how can the same copyright protect two entirely different texts?

It’s also why we’re providing the ebooks to those who buy our print editions from the direct store.

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The Premier Fake Science Journal

The “science” published in this journal doesn’t even rise to the coin-flip level of professional peer-reviewed scientific publications:

Research scientists and doctors are always looking for grants. Not only so they have a job for themselves, but often can get funding for a place to live and transportation and if you string enough of them together from some very high end donors, you can live really well. The thing is those big donors all have pet causes, so you have to be able to match yourself with one of their causes and then make sure the big donor sees it. The donor wants to see that you have done the work. You also need to make sure your research fits what the donor wants to see to write the big check. Many times, the donor can be a big business who would like another business to be put out of business. If it can be done with some splashy research, that is scientifically backed and looks plausible, all the better. Then, the one big business can send out press releases talking about why some product is awful and then come in a week later with another press release about where consumers should go to spend their money.

The scientists and doctors need a publication that is willing to publish some really shaky science so the doctors can go to the donors and say look at this. We are published in this magazine that even you know. So, give us a bunch of money. The magazine has been around forever. It started as a magazine that just talked about general easy to digest science stuff for the general public and was sold on newsstands. Over the years, it has become more tailored to the scientific crowd. Most of you know the name of the magazine, especially if you were around when it came out and was sold everywhere. Now, it just takes huge amounts of money from businesses and scientists to publish poorly done research papers that most of the time are inherently flawed, but they make ten times what they ever did when it was just for sale as a regular magazine.

The magazine appears to be Scientific American, which rather like the old chestnut about the Holy Roman Empire, is neither scientific nor American these days. But it could just as easily be describing Popular Science, which is now equally devoid of genuine science. UPDATE: Or Nature, which also appears to be a candidate.

The New Atheists always failed to understand the relationship between religion and science. Not only is there no inherent conflict between religion and science, but increasingly, Christianity is proving to be an absolute requirement for science that can be successfully replicated.

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Google is a Clown World Creation

Remember, literally EVERYTHING about Clown World is either fake, gay, or quite often, both.

Google “fundamentally started as a CIA project,” according to journalist and author of Propaganda in the Information Age, Alan MacLeod, who has warned that tech giants’ ties with intelligence agencies pose big problems for freedom of information as well as freedom of speech.

MacLeod, who has extensively researched the ties between the national security state and Big Tech, explained to journalist Whitney Webb on the Unlimited Hangout podcast how a prior investigation by Dr. Nafeez Ahmed found that the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) were “bankrolling” research by Sergey Brin at Stanford University, which “produced Google.”

“Not only that … but his supervisor there was a CIA person. So the CIA actually directly midwifed Google into existence. In fact, until 2005, the CIA actually held shares in Google and eventually sold them,” MacLeod told Webb.

Ahmed explained that Brin and his Google co-founder, Larry Page, developed “the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service” “with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI),” a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, and DARPA.

In addition, the intelligence community’s Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, “essentially provided Brin seed-funding, which was supplemented by many other sources.”

Brin and Page “regularly” reported to Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser, who were “representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining,” Ahmed shared.

In his own research, MacLeod has found that the CIA’s ties with Google continue today, as “there are dozens and dozens of examples” of former CIA agents who now work at Google, “who had just been parachuted into these positions of extreme importance.”

That is, these former CIA employees often cluster in “trust and safety” roles, which are hugely influential in their management of so-called “misinformation” and “hate speech.” Examples include Jacqueline Lopour, Ryan Fugit, and Nick Rossman.

Such hiring preferences suggest, MacLeod noted, that either Big Tech is “is actively recruiting from the intelligence services or that there is some sort of backroom deal between Silicon Valley and the national security state.”

This tends to raise an obvious question: what other great corporate successes were not organic?

Given the complete inability of Jeff Bezos to do or say anything of any consequence in the last 20 years despite his fame, success, and wealth, it would not be even remotely surprising to learn that Amazon, too, has been a Clown World enterprise from the start. The hokey story about Bezos and his ex-wife boxing books on the floor of their garage has always sounded a little bit too familiar and unoriginal. And then there’s this:

The company started in the humble garage of Jeff Bezos’ house at Northeast 28th Street in Bellevue, Washington…. The start was extremely difficult as it took a full year before the company had finally sold its very first book called “Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.”

Do you know what sort of entity takes a full year to accomplish what dozens of similar operations manage to do in less than a week? A government contractor. And not to get all Miles Mathis on you, but the choice of the very first book sold strikes me as an inside joke.

It would appear that Brin and Page are frauds who are not primarily responsible for what are believed to be their own accomplishments, just like Bill Gates and many other famous “successful” entrepreneurs in the tech arena. It always puzzled me, back when I had access to various tech circles in the 80s and 90s, how vapid and observably not-particularly astute many of the most successful “businessmen” in tech were. The business history book In Search of Stupidity is a massive chronicle of the mistakes and intellectual shortcomings of the men who ran some of tech’s most impressive successes, as without the public knowledge of Clown World’s interventions, it’s hard to make much sense of many of the industry’s history.

Andy Grove of Intel was incredibly smart and insightful. Bill Gates struck me as clueless and evasive. They guy who founded Skype was entirely legitimate, while the Epic founders were less than entirely straightforward, to put it mildly. On the publishing side, the GT Interactive and Activision executives neither knew nor cared at all about games qua games. In fact, based on what we know about Google and about the post-Gamergate policing of the game space, it would be shocking to learn that the intelligence agencies haven’t been focusing on it and putting their collective thumb on the scale determining winners and losers since 2015 at the latest.

And the convergence of that space would help explain why more and more games aren’t even any fun to play any more.

Increasingly, what are believed to be the differences between “capitalism” and “communism” are proving to be nonexistent. The primary difference between the Chinese “communist” corpocracy and the US “capitalist” corpocracy appears to be that the Chinese openly utilize centralized command-and-control while the US hides its centralized command-and-control behind a false front of a darwinistic free market.

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Convergence Literally Kills

I’ve always used the phrase “convergence kills” in a metaphorical sense. And while I knew Intel’s much-ballyhooed $300 million workplace diversity program launched in 2015 was going to prove disastrous, and even addressed it specifically in Corporate Cancer, I had no idea how lethal it would prove to be.

The bright future of well-funded diversity departments and their growing cost to corporate budgets can be anticipated by looking at what some of the most converged corporations in the United States are doing. In 2015, Intel announced a $300 million commitment to diversity, pledging to spend $60 million per year by 2020 in order to establish a $300 million fund to be used by 2020 to improve the diversity of the company’s work force.

This expensive program was supplemented by Intel Capital’s Diversity Initiative, which at $125 million, is “the largest venture capital resource ever created to focus on underrepresented entrepreneurs.”

Although these costs are relatively small, the primary problem with diversity departments is that they represent a one-hundred percent pure waste of corporate resources. They simply do not deliver even the most basic results that one might expect from them.

Corporate Cancer, Vox Day

The results delivered by diversity departments don’t necessarily deliver the results promised by those who encouraged the mass entry of vibrants into the corpocracy.

On Feb. 18, an Arizona man allegedly beat his coworker to death with a baseball bat in the cafeteria of an Intel building. According to the New York Post, 50-year-old Derrick Simmons was arrested after he attacked a coworker with a bat, knife, and hatchet at the Intel Ocotillo Campus cafeteria.

Witnesses told police in the court paperwork that after the night shift employees left, Simmons approached a man at the table and allegedly hit him multiple times with a baseball bat.

Chandler police found one person dead with fatal brutal force trauma injuries and another person injured. The second victim was injured after confronting Simmons.

Strangely enough, an increase in the number of employees being beaten to death by baseball-wielding vibrants was never listed among the benefits of increased diversity by corporate diversity advocates.

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