capitalism

Europe’s GDPR has just dealt its biggest hammer blow yet. Almost exactly five years since the continent’s strict data rules came into force, Meta has been hit with a colossal €1.2 billion fine ($1.3 billion) for sending data about hundreds of millions of Europeans to the United States, where weaker privacy rules open it up to US snooping.Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), the lead regulator for Meta in Europe, issued the fine after years of dispute about how data is transferred across the Atlantic. The decision …

Every day, upon leaving her Catholic high school, Agustina Bazterrica and her friends were followed by the same predatory man who would aim “the most terrible words” in their direction. A different man once masturbated in front of her on a packed train. “No one did anything,” she recalls. Coupled with the epidemic of violence against women in her native Argentina – where 212 femicides were reported in 2022 – these early experiences nurtured the feeling that “because you are a woman, anything can happen to you at any…

Too Long; Didn't ReadThis essay retells Olive’s story, a New York City young artist who went looking for something *else* during the pandemic. Olive finds themself in niche and more niche internet spaces, begins to practice alternative ways of using social platforms. Olive offers us their sincere and complicated anxieties about an experience of the internet that evades surveillance capitalism. Too Long; Didn't ReadThis essay retells Olive’s story, a New York City young artist who went looking for something *else*…

Remember Liz Truss’s plan last summer to carpet-bomb Britain with investment zones? These were not just freeports – these would be zones modelled on the most anarchic capitalist zones in the world. There would be no tiresome planning laws, no irksome regulations, minimal labour laws, little taxation and only the lightest veneer of democracy. For Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, these would be the ultra-libertarian battering rams to ignite the capitalism flame – covering almost every city and town in the…

This is the second movie in Krzystztof Kieslowski’s great Colours trilogy, now on rerelease; here white is the colour of death, the colour of winter, the colour of orgasm (a climactic, screen-filling flash of pleasure) and also the colour of a clean slate and a fresh start about to be muddied and spoiled. Theoretically, it addresses not just the middle colour of the French flag, but the second tenet of the revolution as well – equality – which it does by dramatising some outrageous inequality. It also satirises the…

Bertolt Brecht famously advised his allies on the left not to “start from the good old things, but the bad new ones”. It is a maxim that has guided various activist-writers over the years, wherever they have sought to identify and expose the latest mutations and dreamworlds of capitalist development. In recent decades, figures such as Naomi Klein and the late Mike Davis have kept this tradition alive, unearthing the “bad new” innovations, ideas and technologies that are restructuring the world around us on behalf of…

Dear Reader, PREMIUM Ashish Chauhan, CEO, NSE. A few months ago, I attended a talk by Edward Chancellor. You can’t really understand the world we are in, until you understand what interest does, the bestselling financial historian said, to a packed pavilion at the Jaipur Literary Festival. His words came back to me this week, as Silicon Valley Bank Bank collapsed and Credit Suisse almost did. Across sectors, thousands of people lost more jobs in more layoffs. Browsing through the Waterstones Bookstore at…

Some banks are huge. Some are tiny. Some serve all possible kinds of customers, while others, like the recently kaput Silicon Valley Bank, carve out a niche, catering to venture capitalists and tech-related startups. But there’s another important category in the taxonomy of banks, according to a new right-wing narrative: the “woke bank.” As SVB shuttered last week and federal lawmakers began picking through the wreckage of the first major bank failure in more than a decade, some have decided the problem was…

Joe Biden is poised to enact the first veto of his presidency. Photo: Evan Vucci (AP)President Joe Biden is expected to issue the first veto of his term to defend the right for retirement plan managers to direct client investments based on environmental and social considerations. The anticipated action follows the advancement of a Republican-backed resolution through the House and Senate this week aimed at targeting so-called “woke capitalism,” or environmental social governance (often abbreviated as ESG).ESG is nothing…

Anglo American = blue, Glencore = turquoise, Rio Tinto = orange. Credit: Trading View Ron DeSantis, Florida's Republican governor and likely future presidential contender, has opened up a new front in his party's war on "woke capitalism." He is proposing to change the rules around how public bodies within Florida borrow from the markets by issuing bonds. …