If I can’t share a Curly Wurly then it’s not a revolution.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2023

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  • The difference between my experiences in the UK and Australia were… interesting. Being upfront, my time in the UK was extremely radicalisng.

    In the UK there was a general distain from the media and most people I met for the labour movement. While at the time there was some real bright spots like seeing crowds singing The Internationale, it was mostly an extremely depressing environment. I think the number of people who are a part of their union is similar to Australia but there seems to be a more aggressive negative sentiment from non-members. But my experience was that there was some really strong displays of solidarity despite the outside attacks. But the level of wealth inequality was sickening and probably not helped by a cultural obsession with the monarchy.

    Back in Australia you’d think there would be strong culture of working class solidarity, with the Australian Labor Party (ALP) being the first Labor party to have ever formed government in the world in 1904, but its [solidarity has] been in steep decline here since the 80s with union membership down from nearly half of all workers to close to 10%. Despite that decline, the unions here still hold a lot of influence, being a key driver behind the general strike in 2005 where 1/2 million people marched against exploitative employment laws. The unions also control the majority of ‘superannuation’ funds which all employers make compulsory payments into on behalf of their workers, and the unions own some successful energy cooperatives, insurers and credit unions. However the movement is going through a particularly rough patch this last month with corruption allegations, and parliamentary interventions, some sketchy leadership issues and some sharp divisions appearing along gender lines, all while the ALP adopts increasingly neo-liberal policies.










  • Yeah it’s a good book. It’s a cycle that this issue surfaces every couple of years where someone does a study, finds that the numbers they’re given don’t match their own analysis and the ad tech platform does some PR to paper over the story.

    Most people selling ads are just like the real estate agents in The Big Short. The media people make their money via rebate from the platforms by guaranteeing a certain volume of spend so they have no incentive to be putting hard questions to the platforms and the client is reliant on seeing the data which is provided by the platform with no third parties able to provide any level of transparency.

    Money goes into Google, Amazon and Meta’s black boxes which spit out numbers. The agency people copy and paste the figures into a presentation and everyone congratulates each other for a job well done.


  • The cost of digital advertising cannot be justified by its effectiveness (or rather lack there of). We’ve collectively spent hundreds of billions of dollars creating the infrastructure for invasive hyper targeted ads that do not get better results than simple billboards and terrestrial TV ads even now. We’ve created a global economy of marketing, media, advertising and sales solely reliant on technofeudalist overlords who’ve provided very little actual improvement of anything.