#elite capture

[catandgirlcomic]

What's the point!?!?!

[protoslacker]

But if Swartz’s actions were criminal, it is worth asking: What standard are we now applying to AI companies? The question is not simply whether copyright law applies to AI. It is why the law appears to operate so differently depending on who is doing the extracting and for what purpose. The stakes extend beyond copyright law or past injustices. They cncern who controls the infrastructure of knowledge going forward and what that control means for democratic participation, accountability and public trust.

Bruce Schneier in Schneier on Security (first published in San Franscisco Chronicle). AI and the Corporate Capture of Knowledge

Aaron Hillel Swartz November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013

Aaron Swartz Wikipedia

Aaron Swartz Website

[probablyasocialecologist]

That I have experienced my share of traumatic experiences, have survived abuse of various kinds, have faced near death from accidental circumstance and from violence (different as the particulars of these may be from those around me) is not a card to play in gamified social interaction or a weapon to wield in battles over prestige. It is not what gives me a special right to speak, to evaluate, or to decide for a group. It is a concrete, experiential manifestation of the vulnerability that connects me to most of the people on this earth. It comes between me and other people not as a wall, but as a bridge.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture

[sarasa-cat]

Pouring one out to every elite university educated women born in the 70s or first half of the 80s who attempted to call me out 10ish years ago bc I pointed at all the neoliberalism and how that would shape voter sentiment.

[ripley-stark]

while american leftists and liberals continue blaming each other and infighting, technocrats and evangelicals are laughing themselves into trillion dollar paydays and climate denialism. what we really need on BOTH sides of the divide, leftist and liberal, is coalition building. most of yall need to reckon with the fact that when it comes to organizing and constructing a majority, you will necessarily have to work with people you do not like. it's not enough to be right or believe yourself right; we actually have to win.

the good thing is we have already bridged this ideological divide before, which is how we ended up with biden in 2020. the bad thing is we have yet to do so beyond elections. leftists need to recognize the fact that, at least domestically, trump actually is worse than the average democrat. liberals need to recognize the fact that they actually need leftists. regardless of the policies they've enacted, democrats have become so unlikable to a wide and crucial swathe of the bloc that they have lost them. and they desperately need to find a way to win them back.

anyway here are some books i've been reading in preparation for the years to come. join a union, start a book club, find your nearest mutual aid org, switch all your comms to signal.

[embodiedfutures]

IMAGE DESCRIPTION UNDER THE CUT.

A new task force! Admittedly when we first discussed this, we were a bit upset, knowing how passionate we were to start up a new media literacy workshop for the summer. But upon further thought, honest conversations like these need to happen in every organization, ones where we admit our current capabilities and limitations so as to best protect everyone's time and energy while simultaneously continuing to fulfill our mission statement.

Further, we've already noticed a weight lifted amongst our volunteers! We utilized yesterday's Sunday meeting time to discuss BFP's history thus far, what it means to be a 501(c)(3), the nonprofit industrial complex, why we utilize a horizontal organizational structure, and then the best part? Our core beliefs! We only got to the first three (the right to organize, intersectionality, and educational equity), but the conversation was SO productive! Youth were given the chance to openly ask and answer questions with fellow activists around the globe. Even with just those three topics, we were able to cover: organizing tips, COINTELPRO, the gamification of politics, elite capture, epistemic injustice, the infantilisation faced by those at the intersection of transness and disability, equity vs equality, and accommodations in school! So much!

Next Sunday we'll continue this educational dialogue, so feel free to join us on Zoom (link available through our Discord server as well as college and career mentorship, peer support, mutual aid, private channels for marginalized communities, and the space to openly ask any social justice related questions without shame)! And once we eventually cover all of our core beliefs, BFP will officially begin designing a specific mission and timeline for this new task force, ensuring that all of us fully understand what our nonprofit stands for before making concrete decisions. Genuinely so excited to see how our little family transforms as we have already learned so much from one another in just one meeting since making this decision :)

[P.S. We do have bots in our server that can translate text messages for our non-English speakers, bots for those with dissociative identity disorder so their alters/fronts appear as different accounts with different names, bots for our nightly studying and music sessions, nonverbal emotes, and more!]

[ID: All 10 slides are a very pale mint green with a white circle made of diagonal stripes inside of a white tilted square made of thick dashes as the background. In the foreground is a white rectangle with curved edges meant to mimic an iPhone's "Notes" app with the bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, numbered list, and bullet point icons pictured at the bottom of the rectangle. Which icon is being highlighted shifts with each slide depending on the formatting of the text. At the top left corner, it reads "Notes" with a small arrow pointing left. And at the top right corner, "@bfpnola."

The slides read as follows:

"Honoring our dedication to transparency, this is BFP's current state of affairs:

Developing proper onboarding

Activity & Retention Task Force

Nonprofit Industrial Complex"

BFP was originally founded in 2016 by a team of 12 year olds in New Orleans, Louisiana. As the organization grew internationally and the work became more complex, we began to lose volunteers almost immediately as they joined. Why? We didn't have a proper onboarding process, aka a clear and efficient orientation and trainings for newcomers! As kids ourselves, none of us had entered the workforce yet so we weren't even aware that "onboarding" existed. Because of this, new hires would either become overwhelmingly confused and leave or be thrown straight into the work and burn out. As young adults now, we aim to create an efficient onboarding process and share our discoveries with other youth organizations in the future!

Due to that confusion, BFP has become incapable of hosting any more large-scale workshops, as we have failed to thoroughly prepare our newer volunteers with clarity. We owe it to those directly impacted by coercive hierarchies to do better. So, what's next for us? On 03/26, we decided to create a cross-committee Activity & Retention Task Force. This team will be dedicated to expanding our audience, maintaining the family that we've curated thus far, analyzing the success and failures of our work, and most importantly... Emphasizing BFP as a safe space for marginalized youth globally. With such a diverse team, we are always learning from one another and we'd like to continue sharing that opportunity with as many people as possible. But there's something we'd like to keep in mind!

The Nonprofit Industrial Complex. We are aware as a 501(c)(3) that organizations' radical missions can often become co-opted either by their donors or distracted by their own maintenance. If BFP ever becomes too focused on its own survival rather than that of the oppressed… We will take that needed step back. Community should always be our focus. This task force is meant to broaden youth’s access to political education and peer support, not necessarily propel BFP within the nonprofit industry. The people must come first and foremost.

More concrete steps will be released soon to hold ourselves accountable. We look forward to improving this organization so that BFP can put out the work that y'all deserve and that we know we are capable of producing. Thank you for reading! Check the caption for more information."

End ID.]

[tnpx]

Elite Capture

A powerful indictment of the ways elites have co-opted radical critiques of racial capitalism to serve their own ends.

I put this release date in my calendar a while back but ooowweee that first sentence of the podcast description! “In episode thirteen of season two, co-hosts Dr. CBS and Dr. Layla Brown, start by shooting the shit with producer, Too Black, about "In-the-Room Privilege" -- when members of marginalized groups falsely believe they represent their group simply by being in the room where decisions are made.” That’s the exact humility I had to learn after my kkkarolina student government career ended and why I stay pissed off at table sitters since.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4tmgYskL8UDgwqvccvFnP5? si=uCKTQTHRT8iUS9gIoK0GBw

Upcoming Book Event with Hamarket Books May 9th 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/elite-capture-tickets-317714301027?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=escb

Elite Capture

Join Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Robin D.G. Kelley for a conversation about the politics of solidarity in the fight against racial capitalism.

From the book listing at Haymarket Books:

“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.

But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.

Táíwò’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.

Reviews

“I was waiting for this book without realizing I was waiting for this book.”

—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition

“Olúfémi O. Táíwò is a thinker on fire. He not only calls out empire for shrouding its bloodied hands in the cloth of magical thinking but calls on all of us to do the same. Elite capture, after all, is about turning oppression and its cure into a (neo)liberal commodity exchange where identities become capitalism’s latest currency rather than the grounds for revolutionary transformation. The lesson is clear: only when we think for ourselves and act with each other, together in deep, dynamic, and difficult solidarity, can we begin to remake the world.”

—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s book is worth sitting with and absorbing. While critically examining what happens when elites hijack our critiques and terminologies for their own interests, Elite Capture acutely reminds us that building power globally means we think and build outside of our internal confines. That is when we have the greatest possibility at worldmaking.”

—Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist

“Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò offers an indispensable and urgent set of analyses, interventions, and alternatives to "identity politics," "centering," and much more. The book offers a sober assessment of the state of our racial politics and a powerful path on how to build the world that we deserve.”

—Derecka Purnell, author of Becoming Abolitionists

“With global breadth, clarity and precision, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò dissects the causes and consequences of elite capture and charts an alternative constructive politics for our time. The result is an erudite yet accessible book that draws widely on the rich traditions of black and anticolonial political thought.”

—Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

“Among the churn of books on ‘wokeness’ and ‘political correctness,’ philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture clearly stands out. With calm, clarity, erudition, and authority, Táíwò walks the reader through the morass, deftly explicating the distinction between substantive and worthy critique and weaponized backlash. Understanding the culture wars is essential to US politics right now, and no one has done it better than Táíwò in this book.”

—Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works

“Olúfẹḿi O. Táíwò is one of the great social theorists of our generation. Elite Capture is a brilliant, devastating book. Táíwò deploys his characteristic blend of philosophical rigor, sociological insight, and political clarity to reset the debate on identity politics. Táíwò shows how the structure of racial capitalism, not misguided activism, is today’s prime threat to egalitarian, anti-racist politics. And Táíwò’s suggested path forward, a constructive and materialist politics at the radical edge of the possible, is exactly what we need to escape these desperate times. Anyone concerned with dismantling inequalities, and building a better world, needs to read this book.”

—Daniel Aldana Cohen, co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal

“Táíwò's book is an insightful and fascinating look at how it is that elites capture and subvert efforts to better society. Anyone who wants to understand and improve upon the activist movements shaking our world needs to read this book.”

—Liam Kofi Bright, assistant professor at the London School of Economics

“This book, building on one of the most lucid, powerful, and important essays I can recall reading in recent years, is, in a word, brilliant. Read it—and read it twice. Every sentence contains multitudes.”

—Daniel Denvir, host, The Dig

[sarasa-cat]

Have been noticing a troubling consequence of Neo-Social-Justice leftism being both associated with and absorbed into higher education (especially the elite public and private universities).

People who align with these view points often confuse their own educational attainment with actual knowledge and understanding of problems they claim to seek to address.

This means that lived experience is down graded either as data points that don’t fit (so toss them out) or as “confused and potentially wrong” interpretations from “less educated” people.

This isn’t the first time in history that this has happened.

But it is very much happening now.