This is the man people quote when they say the goal of a company is to “maximize shareholder value”. A man with the blood of thousands on his hands. A full on fascist. I guess I shouldn’t be shocked, but I am.
Milton Friedman thought Nixon was a socialist. He wanted the US to become the same kind of brutal dictatorship as he had installed all over South America.
Ok, this book is dark. But maybe something we all need to read.
Because its core claim is that there is a vulnerability that is exposed in a society when tragedy/disaster strikes, and that some groups might take advantage of such a situation to further their own aims. And it shows how this has been done time after time. Where the group waiting in the wings in the book were capitalism fundamentalists ready to support brutal dictatorships to further their grand plan.
Maybe this particular group is not the one we might see, but I’m sure we all know of groups in our respective countries that would jump at the opportunity to seize power and subjugate the population for money, religion and/or hate.
The reason why we maybe should read it is that we are on the cusp of a series of local and global disasters, even if we ignore the current wars, sitting on a runaway train straight for a climate catastrophe. And maybe if we are prepared we might recognize it when our fear is used against us.
This book is a bit intense for me because it hits a bit too close to home because of my father and the people I grew up with and around. And their stories.
Is it just me or does American racism come through in almost everything that country does? This seemingly normalized view that other countries’ populations are not fully human and can be manipulated and experimented on, and it’s fine because… they’re “not American”?
This is interesting (I’m still linking to tech, I guess I can’t turn it off), because it reminds me of one my of top 10 favorite lectures at university.
A guy came in (from industry, no recollection of name or affiliation) and talked about a project that had utterly failed. The system was some sort of public sector case management system. They had spent 10 years building it. They had (I assume) built it to spec. This was early 2000s so this was “normal” then. And when it was “finished” they had rolled it out to the users.
And they hated it. Refused to use it. And kept on using some previous system with homemade addon processes.
It was a complete shock. Absolute bewilderment.
The fascinating bit was that they ended up sending the devs out to all of the user offices to sit with the users and make what they needed and it was an unmitigated success.
Remember this was pre agile movement.
I asked him if they would’ve been allowed to do this before the previous disaster and he was convinced that it would’ve been impossible.
This was maybe 2001/2002, they were teaching us Waterfall as the epitome of system development. I think the Agile Manifesto had been published, but I hadn’t heard about it and wouldn’t for a few years still. https://agilemanifesto.org/
It’s shocking to me as a Scandinavian to read how many of these new democracies wanted to become social democracies (modeled on Scandinavian countries) and how they were deliberately sabotaged by this economic mindset backed by the US and the IMF. And often pushed into brutal regimes or never ending payments on debt accrued by their former dictatorships.