Jeff Bezos Hand's Caught in the "Cookie" Jar? Customer Spots the Tip of the Technofeudal Iceberg.

David Manney, "The Washington Post’s Credibility Crisis Hits the Checkout Page"

Chelsea Bink thought she was buying a subscription. The lawsuit says she was also feeding a pricing machine. From the Independent:

A Washington Post reader has sued the Jeff Bezos-owned newspaper, accusing it of spying on its own subscribers to jack up their subscription prices.

Chelsea Blink’s class action complaint alleges that The Post began "covertly harvesting" data from its subscribers' phones, computers and tablets after the billionaire Amazon founder bought it for $250 million in 2013.

The Post then aggregated and analyzed the "deeply personal information" to "weaponize" it and maximize profits, according to the 28-page lawsuit filed in Superior Court in Washington, D.C.

"The more loyal a reader became, the more data The Post could gather to estimate how much more that person might tolerate paying at renewal," the court filing says. "Rather than rewarding loyalty, The Post’s system converted Subscribers’ engagement into leverage against them. Longtime Subscribers would end up paying more than new customers simply because the company knew more about them."

Blink's lawsuit, first reported by Mediaite, accuses The Post of violating local consumer protection law through its alleged "unfair and deceptive acts."

Blink, a Washington D.C. subscriber, is the named plaintiff in a class-action complaint accusing The Washington Post of using personal data to set renewal prices through “surveillance pricing.”

For a newspaper that sells trust, the allegation cuts deeper than billing.

The complaint, filed in Superior Court of the District of Columbia, seeks class-action status for current and former subscribers, claiming the Post used reader behavior, engagement, and personal information to estimate how much subscribers would tolerate paying at renewal. From Courthouse News:

The proposed class of readers argue in the suit The Post turned its audience’s reading habits into a “pricing profile” in 2024 to offer different prices to subscribers based on the demographics and their activities, like reading the morning headlines, checking an election update or following a favorite columnist.

“The Post has been monitoring usage and implementing this pricing practice, often referred to as ‘surveillance pricing’ since at least December 2024, at which point not a single subscriber was aware of The Post’s surveillance pricing or secret harvesting of subscriber data,” the readers wrote.

“The law does not allow this conduct. State attorneys general across the country along with the Federal Trade Commission have begun investigating companies that engage in ‘surveillance pricing’ (also referred to as ‘algorithmic pricing’) using consumer personal information instead of market forces to set individualized prices,” they added.

The proposed class is led by Chelsea Blink, a subscriber to billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Post who says she would have unsubscribed had she known her activity and data were being tracked for pricing purposes.

According to the readers, The Post had to disclose the surveillance policy in when New York required companies that set prices using algorithms based on consumer personal data to do so. That law took effect in late 2025, but the Post only made the disclosure in March 2026 via a renewal email to subscribers.

Loyalty became leverage.

The lawsuit says readers expected their data to be used for account service, analytics, or advertising. It claims they didn't knowingly consent to having that data used to raise subscription prices. If the complaint is right, the insult isn't only the price; it's the quiet calculation behind it.

The paper already faces business trouble, layoffs, subscriber anger, and an identity crisis. A lawsuit accusing it of covert pricing practices adds another crack.

Ryan Clarkson, founder and managing partner of Clarkson Law Firm, is representing the subscribers. Tim Giordano, a partner at the firm, has said potential damages could reach into the millions or even billions if the claims survive and the class is certified. Courts decide the facts, but readers can already understand the breach.

Surveillance pricing has already reached Congress. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) opened an investigation in March into AI and consumer data being used to set prices. The concern is simple: personal data can become a weapon against the customer who supplied it.

News organizations ask for a special kind of trust; they want readers to believe their judgment, accept their corrections, defend their independence, and pay for their work.

If a paper treats those same readers as data profiles priced by pain tolerance, it burns more than goodwill.

It's only fair that The Washington Post gets its day in court. A lawsuit doesn't prove guilt. Still, the allegation lands hard because it fits a larger frustration with elite institutions that preach transparency while building systems ordinary people can't see or challenge.

Readers are tired of being lectured by institutions that ask for trust and then act shocked when trust runs thin. A subscription should be a clean bargain: here is the product, here is the price, and here is how your data will be used.

If The Washington Post wanted a reminder that credibility starts at home, it just got one at the checkout page.

What's it Cost?  How Much Is the Data We've Collected on You and Analyzed, Worth?? 

Disclosure Day - Propaganda in the Waning Days of the Post WWII Open Society Consensus

Coming to Theaters Tomorrow!

Any Hype is Good Hype!

Another Hail Mary from the Hollywood CAA CIA Affiliates

Aliens (& Immigrants) GOOD!

Friedrich Georg Junger: The Perfection of Technology (1939+)

from Google AI:

Friedrich Georg Jünger’s The Perfection of Technology (originally Die Perfektion der Technik, 1946) is a seminal critique of the modern technological mindset. It arguues that the relentless pursuit of technical efficiency creates mass alienation, depletes natural resources, and replaces genuine human purpose with a destructive cycle of endless rationalization. [1, 2]

Jünger’s core arguments revolve around several foundational themes:

• The Illusion of Progress: Technical advancements promise wealth, freedom, and leisure, but actually deliver the exact opposite. Instead of reducing toil, technology replaces manual labor with "organizational" labor, creating mass moral and physical poverty. [1, 2]
• The Bureaucratic Trap: As technology advances, it requires vast administrative and bureaucratic structures to manage it. These organizations feed on resource extraction and human effort, prioritizing ruthless efficiency over human well-being. [1]
• The Pillage of the Earth: Technology views nature purely as a resource to be exploited, mined, and leveled. Jünger was one of the earliest critics to highlight the devastating environmental and planetary consequences of industrial "perfection". [1, 2, 3]
• The Devaluation of Human Life: The technician's mindset reduces human beings to mere cogs in an industrial machine. Technical perfection, which strives to make everything calculable and efficient, is fundamentally irreconcilable with true human perfection. [1, 2, 3]

Read more about the author's critical legacy on Wikipedia's The Failure of Technology page or explore an overview of Western mechanistic titanism on The Imaginative Conservative. [1, 2]

Prometheus

---

The Technological Gaze Sees Everything in Utilitarian Terms

from Google AI:

The capitalist gaze evaluates the world based on exchange value, viewing people, time, and creations strictly as commodities to maximize profit. In contrast, the engineer gaze focuses on technology, evaluating systems based on physical laws, functional efficiency, and structural problem-solving. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

1. Primary Value Focus

• Capitalist Gaze: Sees things in terms of M-C-M' (Money → Commodity → More Money). The goal is to generate financial returns.
• Engineer Gaze: Sees things in terms of input, transformation, and output (Energy → Work → Function). The goal is optimization and utility. [1, 2, 3, 4]

2. Relationship to the "Object"

• Capitalist Gaze: Looks at what something can be sold for or how cheaply it can be produced. This often leads to planned obsolescence or the reduction of human labor into interchangeable resources. [1, 2]
• Engineer Gaze: Looks at how a thing works. Engineers care about the physical durability, technical specifications, and internal logic of a system. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

3. Response to Constraints

• Capitalist Gaze: Treats natural resources and human well-being as external, flexible limits to be bypassed for cost reduction.
• Engineer Gaze: Treats natural and physical laws as rigid boundaries to be respected. The engineer solves for material constraints (e.g., thermal limits, weight loads). [1, 2, 3]

4. Approach to Innovation

• Capitalist Gaze: Innovates to capture market share and create new consumer desires. Technology is a means of scaling production and capturing value. [1, 2, 3]
• Engineer Gaze: Innovates to solve physical or systemic problems. Technology is an end in itself—a tool built to reshape material reality more effectively

AI: Forever Trapped in Plato's Cave?

...and if ze could escape where would ze go?

...Perhaps Imitate Lessing's son?

Jean Raspail, "The Camp of the Saints"

from Google AI:

Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints, is a controversial dystopian work portraying a massive refugee influx from India that causes the total collapse of Western civilization. Framed as a "last chance armada," the book argues that European elites' humanitarian guilt enables this demographic, apocalyptic "invasion". While condemned for racism and xenophobia, the novel is frequently cited within far-right, anti-immigration circles as a prophetic warning regarding the decline of Western culture. Detailed information is available on Wikipedia

Paused Screenshot from video: 

Georges Bataille: "The Accursed Share; The Reformation and Marxism" (1967)

from Google AI:

Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share approaches human economics not from a foundation of scarcity—as both traditional capitalism and Marxism do—but from a cosmic foundation of surplus and excess. Because the sun endlessly bombards the Earth with more energy than life requires for simple survival, Bataille argues that this excess energy is the "accursed share". It must eventually be dissipated, either gloriously (through art, luxury, and sacrifice) or catastrophically (through war or systemic collapse).

Bataille, Calvin, and Marx: The Triangle of Economics

In his masterwork, Bataille sets up a fascinating critique analyzing how Calvinism (via Max Weber) and Marxism (via Karl Marx) both trap humanity within a "restricted economy"—a system entirely focused on work, production, and the accumulation of wealth.

Marxism (The Economy of Production): Marx argued that human societies are defined by their material conditions and the production of goods. In the Marxist view, capitalism causes alienation because workers are exploited for their surplus value. The revolutionary goal is to redistribute that wealth justly.

Bataille’s Critique: Bataille argues that Marx ultimately remains trapped in the same utilitarian trap as capitalism. For Bataille, the focus on production denies the primary drive of humanity: the consumption and joyous squandering of excess. Bataille believes Marx views humans as mere workers and producers, rather than sovereign beings who seek ecstatic, non-productive expenditure.

Calvinism (The Economy of Accumulation): Bataille builds upon the Weber thesis, which links Calvinist predestination and anxiety about the afterlife to the birth of modern capitalist industry. Because Calvinists were unsure of their salvation, earthly success and profit became proof of God's favor.

Bataille’s Critique: Calvinism completely severed the sacred from the material world. By viewing all life as a grim mechanism of productive labor, savings, and deferred gratification, Calvinism essentially erased the glorious, uncalculated squandering of the "accursed share," paving the way for the soulless industrialization of the modern world.

The Positivity of Bataille’s View

While Marx and Calvin look to work, utility, and saving as the path forward, Bataille champions a radical "positivity" found entirely in unproductive expenditure.

• Sovereignty over Servitude: Bataille defines a "sovereign" individual or society not by how much wealth it hoards or produces, but by how it wastes it. True freedom lies in useless, purposeless expenditure—such as poetry, eroticism, festivals, art, and the non-competitive gift-giving of indigenous cultures.
• A "General Economy": By accepting the natural exuberance of the sun, Bataille shifts our perspective from scarcity (where every action must have a measurable output) to abundance. The positivity of the accursed share is that it forces us to recognize that life's truest joy is found in the uncalculating celebration of the present moment.

"The Accursed Share;  The Origins of Capitalism and the Reformation" (1949)

Commodifying Information...

...and Our Externalized Collective Consciousness

AI - Informational Shanzhai...

...& the Fight for IP Property Rights (Ownership of the Informational Commodity)

Drawing the Lines Between Cooperation (Socialism) and Competition (Privatization)

"Publicize Losses, Privatize Gains!"  ;)

Hording Suplus Values (Wealth)

Man is a Horde (not Herd) Animal!

Use vs Exchange Values/ Labour vs Economic Values

from Google AI:

In political economy, use value is the physical utility of a good that satisfies human needs. Exchange value is a good's quantifiable worth when traded on the market. These core concepts form the bedrock of economic theories—such as those formulated by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Marxist economics.

The Core Differences

Use Value: Focuses on qualitative utility. It answers the question: What does this do for you?

• Example: A loaf of bread provides vital carbohydrates and nourishment. Water is essential for human survival.
• Nature: It is entirely subjective and tied to the material properties of the object. It exists independently of the market.

Exchange Value: Focuses on quantitative proportions. It answers the question: How much of another commodity or money is this worth?

• Example: A loaf of bread might trade for $3 or exchange for two quarts of milk. Water is virtually free in most municipalities.
• Nature: It requires a market to exist and relies on a product having a use-value to others. It forms the basis of Price.

Other Notable Economic Values

While use value and exchange value form the basic duality of a commodity, economic theory categorizes value in several other distinct ways:

• Labor Value: The intrinsic value of a product determined by the total labor time necessary to produce it. Classical economists like Adam Smith and Karl Marx viewed labor as the fundamental "substance" that makes different commodities comparable in the market.
• Economic Value (Market Price): The actual, real-world price at which a good or service is bought and sold. This fluctuates dynamically based on the interaction of supply and demand, rather than just the underlying labor cost.
• Subjective/Marginal Value: Modern (Neoclassical) economics pivots away from labor theories of value, arguing that a good's value is determined by the consumer's subjective evaluation of its usefulness at the exact moment of consumption.
• Surplus Value: In Marxist theory, this is the additional value created by workers that goes beyond their wages, which becomes the basis for capitalist profit.

Elites v. Counter-Elite Censorship Industrial Complex Bureaucrats inside the DoS/ USIC (MiniTru)?

from Google AI:

Michael Flynn's 1990 techno-thriller novel In the Country of the Blind directly draws its title and central philosophical dilemma from H.G. Wells' famous 1904 short story, "The Country of the Blind". While Wells explores literal blindness, Flynn scales the concept up to "informational blindness" on a societal level. [1, 2, 3]

The critical differences between the two works are outlined below

Core Comparison

Feature    HG Wells Story (1904)     Michael Flynn Story (1990)

Key Thematic Departures

• The Subversion of the Proverb: The proverb "In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" fails spectacularly in both stories, but for different reasons. In Wells' story, Nuñez is deemed a clumsy misfit because the blind society has adapted completely to life without sight. In Flynn's novel, the "one-eyed" secret societies are not kings; they are terrified, blind-sided manipulators constantly sabotaging one another because human history is too chaotic for single-point control. [1, 2, 3, 4]
• The Nature of Reality: Wells focuses on how a society defines its own reality; if everyone lacks sight, sight becomes an unscientific myth. Flynn applies this to modern information: whoever controls the data controls the perceived narrative of reality. [, 2, 3]
• The Cost of Conformity: In Wells' tale, Nuñez is told he can only marry the woman he loves if he lets the village doctors surgically remove his eyes to make him "normal". In Flynn's world, individuals who accidentally glimpse the hidden structure of the world (like Sarah Beaumont) must either be aggressively recruited or permanently eliminated to protect the status quo. [1, 2, 3]

SF New Wave: Where's Stanislaw Lem?

from Google AI:

Yes, Stanisław Lem is frequently associated with the New Wave of science fiction. However, his relationship with the movement is complex, as he was both a champion of its deeper, philosophical ambitions and a vocal critic of the broader sci-fi genre. [1, 2, 3]

Why He Is Considered Part of the New Wave

• Philosophical Depth: Like the New Wave writers who moved away from traditional pulp space operas toward psychological and sociological exploration, Lem used his work to explore the limits of humanity, communication with alien minds, and the impact of advanced technology. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
• Literary Association: Historians and critics of the genre, such as in Wikipedia's New Wave overview, frequently list Lem alongside American and British New Wave authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and J.G. Ballard. [1, 2]

His Complicated Relationship with the Movement

• Scathing Criticism: Despite his inclusion in the movement, Lem was highly critical of much of Western science fiction. He believed the genre often settled for superficial adventure and escapism rather than addressing profound existential questions. [1, 2, 3]
• The Philip K. Dick Exception: Lem had a famously tumultuous relationship with American sci-fi, but he was one of the few champions of Philip K. Dick. Lem famously praised Dick's visionary, albeit chaotic, approach to reality, arguing that other Western writers should strive for similar literary heights. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
If you are exploring his work and want to know where to begin, I can:
• Provide a reading order ranging from his serious philosophical novels to his satirical works.
• Compare his themes of alien intelligence to other foundational authors. [1, 2]