Tim Pendry > Status Update

Bad news! I started buying books from The Book Depository a while ago as an alternative to Amazon, then found out that Amazon had bought them out some time ago. Is there any stopping this monopolising behemoth??

I hope, if you do decide to stop posting your informative an enlightening reviews on this site, that you post them somewhere else instead.

Thanks for that. I'll stick with the reviews but I had a bad experience with Facebook once and, although material was recovered, I stopped using their Notes function and downloaded everything to hold in store.

Since then, I have been transferring my best non-review pieces to a basic Google Blog - http://positionreserved.blogspot.co.uk - as a reserve holding place and then cross-posting these to social platforms where the debate takes place.

I may ensure the best reviews here are transferred to the blog as well in case GoodReads or Amazon play 'silly buggers' but I see no urgency in this. One advantage is that a copy of what you write appears in your PC and so can be preseved that way.

There is a somewhat hidden export function on GoodReads so reviews can be downloaded for holding securely elsewhere, although in the somewhat unfriendly Excel format - but at least the IP is not lost.

I also did a full review of my bookmarks the other day and found a surprising number of platforms that were 'live' two or three years ago but had folded since.

On the one hand, the weight of Amazon preserves GoodReads but, on the other, it makes its survival the potential whim of some number-crunching zombie in the bowels of the empire.

The answer is never to invest too much emotion or value in any platform, consider them all to be potentially terminated at any time and back-up, back-up, back-up.

Calvin wrote: "The whole goal of the globalists when they started Amazon (It wasn't Bozo in his garage, that's a BS story. He's just a CEO puppet like many others doing what they're told) was to first and foremos..."

I am not sure I buy the more conspiratorial angle on what is happening ... it is mostly just bright people with access to sufficient funds following their noses, taking on risk and creating something out of changing circumstances. We get the same in every era - the robber barons with railroads, Rockefeller getting in on oil and so on.

We may not like it but we have to stop fantasising and start seeing things for what they are - the unfolding of the market in democracies where money does most of the fixing as the process continues.. Still, the money to make more money (ultimately through political fixing) has to come from somewhere and it comes from these bright people accepting risks that risk-averse bright people cannot face and not-so-bright people cannot exploit or come crashing down in failure if they try to take risks.

The 'ressentiment' so many people feel about this process is misdirection. It just results in us all letting off steam about something which we can do very little about it because money has its fingers in every pie. You vote progressive and you just get a dodgier type of all this because the progressives try to make you believe that they are not in on the racket. They are.

And it has to be said that this manipulative and exploitative system does produce benefits just as cattle ranching and railroads and meat packing plants brought cheap meat to the teeming masses in the East Coast cities.

Globalism simply takes what was happening within nations and empires and tries to generalise it at the highest level. Each stage of 'capitalism' produces its own insane ideology and intellectual absurdities, inchoate oppositions and manipulations. Ours is no different. The thing though is not to fight old battles but look to the next stage and prepare for that. Exactly what is coming next? Probably something both similar (in the power of capital) and new (in the way it manages itself and so us).

At least Varoufakis (for one) is attempting to think about this with his analysis of techno-feudalism where we live as moderately comfortable serfs (so long as we obey rules set by a progressive political class seeking accommodation with capital), living on sufferance through licensing what we think we own but do not and scrabbling for revenue during our lifetimes and hoping our 'investments' will sustain in us in old age.

There probably are solutions to all this. The most cogent should be 'socialism' (which is not the same as the handouts proposed by the liberal-progressive Harris) but a) the brand is soiled by past mistakes and b) the system will play very dirty to make sure that neither it nor nation-state firebreaks will ever get very far. Our vulnerabilities make 'revolution' far too risky in a world where security is becoming more important than freedom and the narratives being poured down our throat are either self-serving (mainstream media) or confused (social media) andd persuasive to too many. Surveillance and psychological operations maintain the system through their chilling effect on dissent and setting off one group against another.

Politics has become impotent ranting across the internet or posturing presences at physical rallies where the only thing being done is to endorse the corrupt and dodgy system by approving it with a vote every four years or so. As soon as someone protests in an inchoate fashion (Capitol Hill or what is going on in the UK), the system takes off its velvet glove and its smile and undertakes the most brutal judicial lawfare that it can muster. Genuine villains give excuse to imprison people for a few unwise words, simply standing in the wrong place or for having wrong beliefs - the chiling effect on the rest of us is considerable.

Anger and resentment grows but has nowhere to go except in posturing, ranting and health-damaging frustration. We know what is going on in whole (a few) or in part (the many) but we are impotent, with nothing we can do except offer that rare meaningless vote or not buy something or stand in the rain to be ignored unless we go over a line to get jailed. We KNOW what is wrong. What we do not know (and the system relies on this) is what exactly to do about it beyond performative ranting and normative posturing.

The sheer scale of organisation and funds required to change things is beyond us or else we have to sell our soul to some unreliable marginal figurehead like RFK or to support someone (like Trump or Farage or Orban) who would at least cause a split in the ruling order and 'break things' a bit. Reading (or writing) books about this will certainly change nothing. And anything that might conceivably change something would probably land the perpetrator with a life sentence in the liberal Gulag. Is it game over or can something be done? I remain open to suggestions.