According to DN, Firefly Entertainment is doing a roaring trade in what some would call “fake artists” on Spotify.
These are the now-well-known pseudonymous artists on the streaming platform – artists with no discernible online footprint – whose music fills up many of Spotify’s own key mood and chillout playlists.
For a long time, music industry figures have wondered aloud whether Spotify has deals in place that see it pay less in royalties for streams of music from “fake artists” – whose cumulative streams now sit in the billions – than streams of artists signed to major record companies.
In its report (available here) DN obtained a list of 830 ‘fake artist’ names linked to Firefly, and discovered that at least 495 of these artists have music on first-party Spotify playlists.
This figure probably under-estimates the scope of Firefly’s artists on Spotify-run playlists, suggests DN, as the newspaper only examined 100 playlists out of the “several thousand [playlists] that Spotify is responsible for”.
Consistent with Marx, the modern mental health system evolved alongside capitalism as it emerged in Europe and the United States, and it is useful to consider how it arose, and also what predated it.
In England from the 16th century, a series of laws called the Poor Laws enabled local officials to manage various social problems linked to poverty, including the problems posed by people who would nowadays be labelled as having a mental disorder. Looking at material from the Poor Law records suggests the Poor Law fulfilled two main functions in this respect: it enabled the provision of care for those people who could not look after themselves (and for their families if it was the bread winner who was incapacitated) and it allowed for the control of behaviour that put the peace, harmony and safety of the community at risk, but was not amenable to the usual forms of community punishment or formal legal sanctions. The Poor Laws catered only for families who were not wealthy enough to make their own arrangements and they took over some of the functions of the monasteries that were destroyed under Henry VIII, particularly provision of care for the sick and disabled. They also formalised pre-existing local, informal arrangements of social control.
The rise of capitalism and industrialisation in England in the 18th and 19th centuries threw more and more people into poverty, and these local arrangements started to become increasingly burdensome, bringing the idea of institutional solutions into vogue. Following the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, those who were unable to provide for themselves were forced to enter the forbidding Victorian Workhouse to obtain public assistance. The regime in these institutions was deliberately designed to be harsh and punitive so that people would endure low paid work in terrible conditions to avoid having to resort to them. When people did turn to the Workhouse, in desperation, they would be motivated to leave as soon as possible.
The public mental asylums arose in this context and were designed to provide a pleasanter, more therapeutic space for those residents or potential residents of the Workhouse who were mentally disturbed. Right back in the Elizabethan Poor Law a distinction was made between the deserving and undeserving poor, with the idea that the undeserving poor were the lazy and unmotivated who could be forced back to work, while the deserving poor were the sick and incapable who could not. The asylum arose to cater for a section of the deserving poor and it was believed that the gentle, but structured regime (as it was intended) would help restore the mad to sanity and thereby render them fit to work.
In other words, the capitalist system made it necessary to separate the deserving and undeserving poor, so as not to undermine efforts to make the majority fit for exploitation in the exacting environment of early capitalism. Asylums provided a place for the care of the unproductive and for the containment of disruptive behaviour that might threaten social harmony and make other people less willing or able to be exploited.
In recent decades, the functions of the public asylum have been privatised and re-distributed among a network of private providers of secure facilities, residential homes, home care teams and, of course, families. This was designed to reduce costs to the public sector through the provision of less intensive care by a lower paid, less skilled workforce, and to increase opportunities for the generation of profit.
Because the corona crisis has allowed us to experience a very different time, it will be interesting to see whether parts of this new normality, such as home offices and reduced mobility, will remain. But even if it is just an involuntary pause from capitalist times, we should reconsider neoliberalism’s temporal regimes of growth, decline and acceleration that have shaped life on Earth. Our experiences of corona time has given us a training in temporal thought and flexibility. Humanity will weather this crisis, but there are others ahead. Perhaps then, it will be comforting to know that we can, and must, trick time and plan for the future – even when we feel stuck in the present.
With Robinhood, “you’re able to put it on your homescreen and flip between Instagram and Snapchat; it doesn’t feel as serious as it used to,” he said. “It’s just an app you open up on your phone, there’s graphs, and numbers, and it’s easy to understand and learn really quickly.”
Many young users on the WallStreetBets forums have complained that no matter what they do, the deck is always stacked against them. Many say they seek to expose the entire financial system for the game that it is. Meme stocks are part of that. Some will hype up a novelty stock or trade it as a stunt.
It’s a bot that creates, owns and sells the digital art it creates without relying on humans. We are only there to help it succeed. This bot’s soul will come to live in a smart contract on Ethereum. With us guiding it, it will create a new unique artwork every week, put it up for auction and sell it: creating a unique digital, transferable edition of the art. If we do our job right, it will make better and better art over time. The humans that help it will be rewarded in turn for doing so.
The Forest Charter was about restoring and preserving the right to common, the rights of commoners and their right to the commons. Of course, it was incomplete in all respects, and is hard to read, with words and concepts that have drifted into history, such as agistment (right to use the commons for livestock) and pawnage (right to pasture your pigs). Even the great verb ‘to common’ is scarcely recognised today, though users of it have a twinkle in their eyes in perceiving a revival. What the Charter did was nothing less than provide a legal foundation for living, by asserting the commoners’ usufruct rights, the right to subsistence, on common land and water. It also asserted the right to reparation, if the high and mighty encroached on the commons, through commercialisation of its products, enclosure or encroachment.
Our software is bullshit, our literary essays are too long, the good editors all quit or got fired, hardly anyone is experimenting with form in a way that wakes me up, the IDEs haven’t caught up with the 1970s, the R&D budgets are weak, the little zines are badly edited, the tweets are poor, the short stories make no sense, people still care too much about magazines, the Facebook posts are nightmares, LinkedIn has ruined capitalism, and the big tech companies that have arisen are exhausting, lumbering gold-thirsty kraken that swim around with sour looks on their face wondering why we won’t just give them all our gold and save the time. With every flap of their terrible fins they squash another good idea in the interest of consolidating pablum into a single database, the better to jam it down our mental baby duck feeding tubes in order to make even more of the cognitive paté that Silicon Valley is at pains to proclaim a delicacy. Social media is veal calves being served tasty veal. In the spirit of this thing I won’t be editing this paragraph.
If you’ve lost your job, and can’t find another one, or were never able to find steady full time employment in the first place between automation, outsourcing, and strings of financial meltdowns, Tim O’Reilly wants you to know you shouldn’t be mad. If you’ve been driven into the exploitative arms of the gig economy because the jobs you have been able to find don’t pay a living wage, Tim O’Reilly wants you to know this is a great opportunity. If ever you find yourself being evicted from an apartment you can’t afford because Airbnb has fatally distorted the rental economy in your city, wondering how you’ll pay for the health care you need and the food you need and the student loans you carry with your miscellaneous collection of gigs and jobs and plasma donations, feeling like you’re part of a generational sacrifice zone, Tim O’Reilly wants you to know that it will be worth it, someday, for someone, a long time from now, somewhere in the future.
This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, websites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich.
Not surprisingly, this optimistic vision of the future has been enthusiastically embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, innovative capitalists, social activists, trendy academics, futurist bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians across the USA. As usual, Europeans have not been slow in copying the latest fad from America. While a recent EU Commission report recommends following the Californian free market model for building the information superhighway, cutting-edge artists and academics eagerly imitate the post human philosophers of the West Coast’s Extropian cult.[3] With no obvious rivals, the triumph of the Californian Ideology appears to be complete.
“At some level, civilization itself is at a transitional premium mediocre state somewhere between industrial modernity in a shitty end-of-life phase, and digital post-scarcity in a shitty early-beta phase.”
Bob’s thesis was that he — and all of us really — existed in conditions of mentally mutilating, systematic oppression. We didn’t know that, because we didn’t dare name our oppressor, any more than Eastern European dissidents living at that time could boldly name the Communist Party and the KGB as the authors of their daily distress. But our oppressor was “work.”
“No one should ever work.” Bob was an essayist of rather broad interests, but this was the flagpole of the Black ideology. No Work. His analysis studied the actual deprivations of our freedom. Not the power-structures within various states, or the rights allegedly guaranteed by constitutions, or the effects of racial or gender prejudice, but really, just, life: the lived hours of your precious days. Where did your lifetime actually go? In the “free world,” most people spent their lifetime working. They were “free” to work.
That’s what this book is about. It is all about how “work” is much better conceived as a malignant, destructive condition called “forced labor.” It’s not that people want to “work,” by their nature. No, they’re cajoled into work by moral suasion, then kept confined within their work by large, cumbersome, irrational, spirit-crushing, economic, legal and police frameworks.
Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space. Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it. Elements of the firm’s structure and conduct pose anticompetitive concerns—yet it has escaped antitrust scrutiny. This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive. These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible. Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors.
Last January, a 28-year-old law student named Lina Khan published a 24,000-word article in the Yale Law Journal unpicking a half-century’s shifts in anti-trust law in America, using Amazon as a poster child for how something had gone very, very wrong – and, unexpectedly, this law student’s longread on one of the most technical and abstract areas of law has become the centerpiece of a raging debate in law and economics circles.
The article is called Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, and you should read it, because Khan is a sprightly and gifted writer with a talent for squeezing some exciting and relevant juice out of dry and abstract subjects.
At its heart is a critique of the neoliberal “Chicago School” and its new orthodoxy about when monopolies are a problem – an orthodoxy that is at odds with much of the world and hundreds of years’ worth of US lawmaking and enforcement.
The Chicago School is notorious for its emphasis on profits ahead of all else, its complicity in tens of thousands of death-squad executions in Chile, its influence on Thatcher, Reagan and their contemporaries in their belief that “there is no such thing as society” and “greed is good” – the belief that behaving as selfishly as possible will make everyone richer and happier.
It’s this school and its adherents that John Kenneth Galbraith was speaking of when he called economics “the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” As you might imagine, if you owe your fortune to selfishness, ruthlessness and greed, you might want to fund and elevate this kind of exercise. Nothing confers empirical respectability to manifestly immoral behavior like a lot of inscrutable mathematics that purportedly shows the self-perfecting nature of a system of greedy, “rational” actors.
The Chicago School holds that monopolies are only bad when they result in higher prices (“price theory”) and that everything else – the “structuralist” worry about rich people amassing political power, or making inferior goods, or screwing their workforce, or holding back innovation – is just a distraction.
This model rose to prominence in the 1980s with Reaganomics, and it coincided with catastrophic collapse in small business in America(especially minority-owned businesses); since Reagan, Republicans and Democrats alike have been enthusiastic proponents of the idea that the only thing a competition watchdog should keep an eye on is the prices charged to consumers, not “integration,” be it vertical (one firm owning the factory, the trucks and the stores) or horizontal (companies buying out their direct competitors).
Using Amazon as her poster-child, Khan argues that whatever problems this approach had in bricks-and-mortarland (she highlights several), the combination of networks, digital goods, data-oriented retail, and huge pools of investment capital willing to float businesses like Amazon using their profits from one area to sell goods below cost in others to the detriment of their competitors, make mincemeat out of price-theory. The digital world – where each customer might pay a different price, where retailers can use algorithms to price their competition out of existence – is one where costs of one category of goods can’t possibly capture the wider harms of monopolistic practice.
Related to this is On the Formation of Capital and Wealth, by Stanford’s Mordecai Kurz, who proposes a means by which digital commerce can drive a winner-take-all phenomenon that makes the rich much richer, at the expense of the general welfare.
The question, then, is what to do about it. Khan suggests some modest reforms in anti-trust enforcement, which, despite their modesty and the extremely unlikeliness of seeing them enacted under Trump or any future establishment Democratic administration, have provoked howls of outrage from Chicago School economists.
More radical approaches have been proposed, of course. Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism points to Amazon’s very monopolism as the reason to believe that capitalism has outserved its usefulness. If a monopolist like Amazon can use customer surveillance and algorithms to decide what to make, where to put it, and how to deliver it, why do we need imperfect markets? Just nationalize Amazon and its datasets (for the record, I think Mason was unduly optimistic about the problems of anonymizing large data-sets).
But if the internet supercharges inequality and monopolism while delivering many undeniable benefits in coordination, culture, and material production, can we simply divorce technology from the economic and social context that created it? Can we have the internet without douchey Silicon Valley jerktech and its lucrepaths, vulgarati, uberization, mom-as-a-service, and *-bait?
It’s not without precedent: the Protestant reformation gave us religion without the unified Church; the Enlightenment gave us alchemy without superstition; and Wikipedia and GNU/Linux gave us encyclopedias and operating systems without a single corporate overlord. As Leigh Phillips wrote in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts, the belief that Chicago-style sociopathic capitalism is the sole proprietor of technological change and improvement is one of the Chicago School’s most successful projects, one that convinced large swaths of the left that you either have to be pro-technology or pro-human, that being anti-corporatism meant that you had to oppose the technical feats of corporations.
Science fiction’s best move is cleaving a technology from its social and economic context, as steampunk does, when it imagines industrial-style production without the great Satanic mills where people become part of the machines, moving through scripted and constrained tasks in unison to the ticking of a huge time-clock. In steampunk, individual inventors and small groups produce things with the polish and awe-inspiring innovations of the industrial revolution, without the surrender of individual autonomy that industrialization demands of its workers. In steampunk – to quote Magpie Killjoy – we “love the machine and hate the factory.”
The problem with Amazon isn’t that it’s now really easy to get a wide variety of goods without having to shlep all over the place trying to find the right widget (or book). The problem is the effect that this has on workers, publishers, writers, drivers, warehouse workers, and competition.
At any one time, there have probably only been a few dozen accelerationists in the world. The label has only been in regular use since 2010, when it was borrowed from Zelazny’s novel by Benjamin Noys, a strong critic of the movement. Yet for decades longer than more orthodox contemporary thinkers, accelerationists have been focused on many of the central questions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: the rise of China; the rise of artificial intelligence; what it means to be human in an era of addictive, intrusive electronic devices; the seemingly uncontrollable flows of global markets; the power of capitalism as a network of desires; the increasingly blurred boundary between the imaginary and the factual; the resetting of our minds and bodies by ever-faster music and films; and the complicity, revulsion and excitement so many of us feel about the speed of modern life. “We all live in an operating system set up by the accelerating triad of war, capitalism and emergent AI,” says Steve Goodman, a British accelerationist who has even smuggled its self-consciously dramatic ideas into dance music, via an acclaimed record label, Hyperdub. “Like it or not,” argues Steven Shaviro, an American observer of accelerationism, in his 2015 book on the movement, No Speed Limit, “we are all accelerationists now.”
So, will there still be enough jobs for everyone a few decades from now? Anybody who fears mass unemployment underestimates capitalism’s extraordinary ability to generate new bullshit jobs. If we want to really reap the rewards of the huge technological advances made in recent decades (and of the advancing robots), then we need to radically rethink our definition of “work.”
We believe that developing alternative business models to the startup status quo has become a central moral challenge of our time. These alternative models will balance profit and purpose, champion democracy, and put a premium on sharing power and resources. Companies that create a more just and responsible society will hear, help, and heal the customers and communities they serve.
We’ve long been fascinated by the Huaqiangbei electronics market area of Shenzhen. (Hereafter, we’ll just call it HQB.) If you need some bit of electronics or a phone accessory, you can find it in HQB. There is an entire multi-floor shopping mall that sells nothing but phone cases. There’s one that specializes in smartwatches. There’s a mall that sells cellphones wholesale. There’s one just for surveillance cameras. And then there are the component markets. Need a chip? Or 250,000 chips? Somebody there can get them for you.
While degrowth does not have a succinct analysis of how to respond to today’s shifting socio-technical regimes—accelerationism’s strong point – at the same time accelerationism under-theorizes the increased material and energetic flows resulting from this shifting of gears. Put another way, efficiency alone can limit its disastrous effects. As degrowth theorists have underlined, environmental limits must be politicized; control over technology must therefore be democratized; metabolic rates must be decelerated if Earth is to remain livable. To conclude, accelerationism comes across as a metaphor stretched far too thin. A napkin sketch after an exciting dinner-party, the finer details colored in years afterwards—but the napkin feels a bit worn out. Big questions need to be asked, questions unanswered by the simplistic exhortation to “shift the gears of capitalism.” When the gears are shifted, the problem of metabolic limits won’t be solved simply through “efficiency”—it must acknowledge that increased efficiency and automation has, and likely would still, lead to increased extractivism and the ramping up of environmental injustices globally. Or another: what does accelerationism mean in the context of a war machine that has historically thrived on speed, logistics, and the conquest of distance? Is non-violent acceleration possible, and what would class struggle look like in that scenario? To be fair, the word “degrowth” also fails to answer many big questions. There has been little discussion on whether mass deceleration is possible when, as Virilio shows, all mass changes in social relations have historically occurred through acceleration. Can hegemony decelerate? If degrowth lacks a robust theory of how to bring about regime shift, then Williams and Snricek’s brand of accelerationism doesn’t allow for a pluralist vocabulary that looks beyond its narrow idea of what constitutes system change. And yet, the proponents of each ideology will likely be found in the same room in the decades to come. Despite their opposite ‘branding’, they should probably talk. They have a lot to learn from each other.
“The great merit of the capitalist system, it has been said, is that it succeeds in using the nastiest motives of nasty people for the ultimate benefit of society.”
Recently, I’ve been thinking of ways to collect some different form of value, besides money or just another token. One of the more interesting ideas is that in age of abundance, our time and thus attention is the most valuable asset. Maciej Olpinksi has written about the attention economy in relation to blockchain tech and similarly inspired me to think about ways to monetize that.
“What’s now captured the interest of intellectuals is the elephant chart, the idea that over the past 30 years the winners were emerging market middle classes and the 1 percent in developed markets, but the developed markets’ middle classes were stagnant,” he wrote. “And I think we’ve finally found the correct framework for thinking about intersection of politics and macroeconomic trends.”
The fact is that slaving was at the very centre of state-making. It is impossible to exaggerate the massive effects of this human commodity on stateless societies. Wars between states became a kind of booty capitalism, where the major prize was human traffic. The slave trade then completely transformed the non-state ‘tribal zone’. Some groups specialised in slave-raiding, mounting expeditions against weaker and more isolated groups and then selling them to intermediaries or directly at slave markets. The oldest members of highland groups in Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Burma can recall their parents’ and grandparents’ memories of slave raids. The fortified, hilltop villages, with thorny, twisting and hidden approaches that early colonists found in parts of South-East Asia and Africa were largely a response to the slave trade.
The Random Darknet Shopper is an automated online shopping bot which we provide with a budget of $100 in Bitcoins per week. Once a week the bot goes on shopping spree in the deep web where it randomly choses and purchases one item and has it mailed to us. The items are shown in the exhibition «The Darknet. From Memes to Onionland» at Kunst Halle St. Gallen. Each new object ads to a landscape of traded goods from the Darknet.
In the popular imagination, artists tend to exist either at the pinnacle of fame and luxury or in the depths of penury and obscurity — rarely in the middle, where most of the rest of us toil and dream. They are subject to admiration, envy, resentment and contempt, but it is odd how seldom their efforts are understood as work. Yes, it’s taken for granted that creating is hard, but also that it’s somehow fundamentally unserious. Schoolchildren may be encouraged (at least rhetorically) to pursue their passions and cultivate their talents, but as they grow up, they are warned away from artistic careers. This attitude, always an annoyance, is becoming a danger to the health of creativity itself. It may seem strange to say so, since we live at a time of cultural abundance and flowering amateurism, when the tools of creativity seem to be available to anyone with a laptop. But the elevation of the amateur over the professional trivializes artistic accomplishment and helps to undermine the alre
The problem that crops up in all discussions of this kind, however, is the ambiguity of the term “work,” particularly in a capitalist society. It has at least three distinct meanings that are relevant. One, it can mean activity that is necessary for the continuation of human civilization, what Engels called “the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life.” Two, it can mean the activity that people undertake in exchange for money, in order to secure the means of continued existence. Three, it can mean what Gourevitch is talking about, an activity that requires some kind of discipline and deferred gratification in pursuit of an eventual goal. These three meanings tend to get conflated all the time, even though they all appear seperately in reality. This is the point I’ve tried to make going back to my earliest writing on this topic. “Work” manifests itself in all eight possible permutations of its three meanings.
The difficulties and ambiguities in discussing wages for facebook stem from the reduction of wages for facebook to a thing, a lump of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective. The difference between these two standpoints is enormous. To view wages for facebook as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself and to miss its significance in demystifying and subverting the role to which we have been confined in capitalist society.
The shift to the distorporation comes at the expense of the “C” corporation, the formal name for the familiar limited-liability joint-stock structure that emerged a century ago (see chart 1). The newer structures still protect investors from liability. But the requirement for partnerships to pass through their money blocks the accumulation of earnings. In C corporations retained earnings can be used to fund investment and growth, assuring persistence. Without them, pass-through businesses have to be far more intertwined with investors. Staying alive means routinely inhaling capital, as well as exhaling.
It appears the Federal Bureau of Investigation has finally cracked down on Silk Road, the underground marketplace where users could buy cocaine, heroin, meth, and more using the virtual currency Bitcoin. Journalist Brian Krebs has just published a purported copy of a complaint filed in the Southern District of New York against Ross Ulbricht, who is alleged to be the mastermind behind the site and the handle Dread Pirate Roberts. Ulbricht is being charged with narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy. The site, which is only accessible through the anonymizing Tor network, has been pulled and replaced with an FBI notice. The Silk Road forums are still operating, suggesting they were hosted on a different server.
If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.
Taken to its logical extreme, this dynamic brings us to the point where the economy does not require human labor at all. This does not automatically bring about the end of work or of wage labor, as has been falsely predicted over and over in response to new technological developments. But it does mean that human societies will increasingly face the possibility of freeing people from involuntary labor. Whether we take that opportunity, and how we do so, will depend on two major factors, one material and one social. The first question is resource scarcity: the ability to find cheap sources of energy, to extract or recycle raw materials, and generally to depend on the Earth’s capacity to provide a high material standard of living to all. A society that has both labor-replacing technology and abundant resources can overcome scarcity in a thoroughgoing way that a society with only the first element cannot. The second question is political: what kind of society will we be? One in which all people are treated as free and equal beings, with an equal right to share in society’s wealth? Or a hierarchical order in which an elite dominates and controls the masses and their access to social resources?
