Almost all of the online payment providers you interact with is backed by one of a handful of giant payment processors (eg PayPal and Stripe, or in China, AliPay and WeChatPay). That are essentially an API between you and the credit card company your card belongs to. That are, in turn. basically APIs between you and the company that hosts your bank accounts.
In other words, companies are squeezing on chokepoints between you and your bank.
(2/?)
https://www.advicenow.org.uk/training
https://www.advicenow.org.uk/get-help/benefits/personal-independence-payment-pip
I used one on my second attempt to get PIP (successful)!
ICR whether it was https://www.advicenow.org.uk/get-help/benefits/personal-independence-payment-pip/pip-mandatory-reconsideration-letter-tool or any of
https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2018/january/pip-and-dla-mandatory-reconsideration-letter-tools
https://templatestoolkit.com/mandatory-reconsideration-pip-letter-template/
https://cpag.org.uk/welfare-rights/tools-templates/personal-independence-payment-tools-and-templates
https://forum.scope.org.uk/discussion/59301/pip-mr-letter-tool
The role of commercial policy in politics is to keep private companies under control not to do them favors. That's to ensure, that #capitalism is not unleashed. That's the duty of the state towards its citizens. Because capitalism, at its core, is an Ouroboros that would devour itself if given the chance.
Money is finite. The world is a closed system. In order do make huge amounts of money, you have to take it from somewhere. You do not generate this money out of nowhere.
Let's say, there's a rich person who owns a company. Said person has the role "capitalist" and the goal "make profits". So, making profits here is neither good nor evil in itself (I don't like it and I dislike the person for being profit-driven, but that's not the point here), it is just what a person in that role does.
2/
@heiseonline Entschuldigung, aber ist es eine gute Idee, mehr Menschen in den Amazon-walled-Garden zu schicken, wo sie direkt in die Abhängigkeit kommen? Mag ja sein, dass es da ein hübsches Tool gibt, aber das alleoine ist kein Grund, sich von einem US-Unternehmen abhängig zu machen. Sagt den Menschen doch wenigstens, wie sie plattformübergreifend frei publizieren. #publishingwide #Selfpublishing #Amazon #ChokepointCapitalism #Enshittification
@kristiedegaris Thank you so much for sharing your story on the unpaid labour of book authors.
I first learned about this through the 2022 book "Chokepoint Capitalism" by @pluralistic which describes in detail how publishers (and other intermediaries) systematically exploit creative workers:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chokepoint_Capitalism
The system is in an advanced stage of #enshittification, and things must change.
I am sure. I would love to disable it, but you deliberately didn't include a "disable" button and then sent all the devs into their Christmas and New Year vacation
MBAs with a focus in SPOF.
@arclight a.k.a. #ChokepointCapitalism
Why specifically #TikTok is a problem?
– Because it's a Chinese app (#racism) and people like to suppress the fact how problematic big American tech companies are (#corpocracy)
– Because right-wing propaganda works and middle and left-wing politicians don't want to admit that they just didn't try to be equally present there
Finished Memories of Ice, the third book in the #Malazan Book of the Fallen, and it was pretty amazing. Going to take a beat and read @pluralistic 's #ChokepointCapitalism next, then I'll get back to Malazan.
How long until this next #enshittification "feature":
Premium users can see your cam in the meeting software, non-premium users can't—BUT: You can't either and you can't deactivate your cam.
Bsky raises $15m from Blockchain Capital, the VC's press release hints at what they're interested in:
Bluesky [is] designed to foster a new ecosystem of applications. [...] It is interoperable with existing internet protocols and blockchain-based systems, opening the door for a more connected, less siloed social experience. Since its launch in April 2023, over 100 clients have been built on the AT Protocol, and users have created more than 50,000 custom feeds. And the best part of it all? By building on top of the AT protocol, these developers have access to Bluesky’s 13M users worldwide.
The VC firm sees bsky and their ownership of the relay as being a potentially very lucrative chokepoint, where the users of bluesky are the asset to rent to platform developers who want "access" to them. I've written before how atproto's decentralization is effectively meaningless with the relay system, where it's decentralized in the same sense as google alerts is decentralized - sure you can host your own PDS, but it's only useful because the main relay crawls it, and then either bsky or someone else who (inevitably) pays for access can send it back to you.
edit: here's why i think the relay is a chokepoint and why there will never be a second: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/113365406995624763
"Amazon's character never changed. The company always had a predatory side. But now that monopoly and IP law have insulated it from consequences for its actions, there's no longer any reason to keep the predator in check..." - @pluralistic #Amazon #streaming #enshittification #business #ChokepointCapitalism
@jwz @timbray @codinghorror I was really hoping cryptocurrency would have freed us from having %age based middlemen siphoning off my earnings that I want to direct at creators. Instead, even the "best" cryptocurrency just completely fails at being a good way to transfer my resources to someone else digitally. :(
#ChokepointCapitalism (from Apple and Google, but ALSO Valve and Patreon) is driving everyone towards #enshittification and #TechnoFudalism and I hate it. :(
Wealth of Jeff Bezos: $185 billion (2021). It's a literally unimaginable amount of money.
Wer vermutet, dass #Microsoft zu wenig Geld verdient und deswegen #Werbung innerhalb ihres Betriebssystems schalten "muss", irrt gewaltig. Microsoft betreibt mit #Xandr einen riesigen Datenmarktplatz und nutzt seine anderen Produkte als Anzeigenfläche. #Advertising #SurveillanceCapitalism #PeakCapitalism #AdvertisingIndustry #ChokepointCapitalism
Basically, the threat of AI isn't that it will outpace humans in quality & cost effectivity - it's that everything will be replaced with it, even though it does way worse on both those parameters, because the #ChokepointCapitalism gatekeepers stand to make more money that way.
- and yet they're still wildly understating the problem.
Google isn't going for a competitive advantage - their goal is to put us in an inescapable stranglehold. There's a reason @pluralistic & others refer to the way things currently work, especially (but not exclusively) in the digital realm, as #ChokepointCapitalism
"Not using Google will be a hassle" isn't an acceptable argument. We can deal with this & foot the bill it now - or pay a far steeper price later.
CET 
