What's unbearable about this is the middlemen, the curators and access providers and distributors, being lauded while creators are attacked If the whole industry is frivolous bourgeois crap then that includes the librarians and they should stop taking donations and tax dollars
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Martian_High
If you don't care about books then fine, don't read them, ignore them, spend your hard earned paycheck on something that does matter Just fucking stop talking like the Internet Archive are the hardworking dairy farmers and authors are the cattle
1 reply 3 retweets 40 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Martian_High
I cannot fucking abide this framing like it's rich fatcat "PMC" authors in their mansions vs Oliver Twist begging to pwease give him just a little short story to read so he doesn't die of literature deficiency after a long day in the sweatshop
2 replies 2 retweets 33 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Martian_High
You know who's actually profiting tremendously from the Brave New World of digital distribution? Silicon Valley techbro millionaires, like the one who founded the fucking Internet Archive
1 reply 4 retweets 34 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Martian_High
And their industry has done more damage to blue collar workers than all the snottiest snobbiest wine-swilling Ivy League literary authors in all of history combined
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Martian_High
YOU WORK FOR AMAZON You know who makes money whenever ebooks get cheaper and easier to get? JEFF BEZOS You can pirate an ebook but you can't pirate the Kindle you read it on
1 reply 2 retweets 32 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Martian_High
You know how Jeff Bezos amassed the capital to destroy traditional brick-and-mortar retail and replace it with the giant wretched hives of Amazon warehouses? BY FUCKING OVER AUTHORS
1 reply 5 retweets 48 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Martian_High
By, as Paul Graham put it, "releasing the potential energy" of "inflated" prices for books, piggybacking on the collapse of "rent-seeking cartels" like the Net Book Agreement in the UK and turning books into an interchangeable commodity everyone went to one big website to buy
1 reply 1 retweet 18 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Martian_High
The enemy of all labor here is LITERALLY THE SAME GUY Bezos became the richest billionaire in the world by coming after EVERYONE'S job and trying to drive down their wages to an "efficient market level"
1 reply 3 retweets 33 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Martian_High
But because writing books isn't "real work" you don't see it from a worker perspective but a consumer perspective Fuck yeah, make books cheap, make them free! The less I, a real working man, have to pay out of my paycheck the more empowered I am
1 reply 1 retweet 26 likes
But they're making EVERYTHING cheap or free and they're keeping ANYONE from getting paid more than they absolutely have to That's the whole game, that's what it's always been, divide and conquer, alienated labor, commodity fetishism
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Martian_High
Drive down Alice's wages to offer Bob low, low prices on Alice's wares, then turn around and do the same thing to Bob to "help" Alice It's classical econ 101, it's the most basic evil free market bullshit, and you call yourself a "leftist" and you don't even see it
2 replies 4 retweets 36 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Martian_High
Because you're all wrapped up in cultural identity politics bullshit and owning the suburban whitebread libs and deciding who looks like a worker and who doesn't Christ fuck you
0 replies 2 retweets 33 likes
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