"FOR YOU WERE ONCE IN DARKNESS, BUT NOW YOU ARE IN THE LIGHT OF THE LORD. LIVE AS CHILDREN OF LIGHT, FOR THE FRUIT OF THE LIGHT CONSISTS IN ALL GOODNESS, RIGHTEOUSNESS AND TRUTH, AND FIND OUT WHAT PLEASES GOD. HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THE WICKED DEEDS OF DARKNESS, BUT RATHER EXPOSE THEM. IT IS SHAMEFUL EVEN TO MENTION WHAT THE DISOBEDIENT DO IN SECRET. BUT EVERYTHING EXPOSED BY THE LIGHT BECOMES VISIBLE—AND EVERYTHING THAT IS ILLUMINATED BECOMES A LIGHT." 
EPH 5: 8-14

The Forgotten Economic Vision of Martin Luther King

From Naked Capitalism:

In the last years of his life, King was boldly forging a radical, multi-racial movement for economic justice.

First, King’s late vision connected his famous rhetoric of shimmering dreams and the filmy contents of universal human character to the immediate need for a radical restructuring of material interests and living conditions across the U.S. In May of 1967, at the Penn Center in Frogmore, South Carolina, King addressed the staff retreat of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) which had been formed in January 1957 in the wake of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The economic dimensions of his message were foundational and clearly stated: “We can’t solve our problems unless there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” In a riff he’d repeat throughout the final year of his life, he continued: “Our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality.” But, King also knew such economic visions carried along complex and volatile cultural histories and contemporary energies that were, even within the movement, often enough in conflict with each other as well as with the national, racial status quo.

The vital brilliance of King’s late vision is grounded in how he sifted together economics with cultural, spiritual, philosophical, and psychological vocabularies, ones too often separated from each other and absent from conversations about material conditions by economists and sociologists...

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/04/forgotten-economic-vision-martin-luther-king.html

"FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD THAT HE GAVE HIS ONE AND ONLY SON, THAT WHOEVER BELIEVES IN HIM SHALL NOT PERISH BUT HAVE ETERNAL LIFE. FOR GOD DID NOT SEND HIS SON INTO THE WORLD TO CONDEMN THE WORLD, BUT TO SAVE THE WORLD THROUGH HIM...THIS IS THE VERDICT: LIGHT HAS COME INTO THE WORLD, BUT PEOPLE LOVED DARKNESS INSTEAD OF LIGHT BECAUSE THEIR DEEDS WERE EVIL. EVERYONE WHO DOES EVIL HATES THE LIGHT, AND WILL NOT COME INTO THE LIGHT FOR FEAR THAT THEIR DEEDS WILL BE EXPOSED. " 
JOHN 3:16-20

Surveillance is the DNA of the Platform Economy

From Naked Capitalism:

The outcry over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica conveniently ignores the real issues: the pervasiveness of surveillance and the need to insist on stronger privacy rights.

Yves here. Not new to anyone who has been paying attention, but a useful recap with some good observations at the end, despite deploying the cringe-making trope of businesses having DNA. That legitimates the notion that corporations are people.

By Ivan Manokha, a departmental lecturer in the Oxford Department of International Development. He is currently working on power and obedience in the late-modern political economy, particularly in the context of the development of new technologies of surveillance. Originally published at openDemocracy

The current social mobilization against Facebook resembles the actions of activists who, in opposition to neoliberal globalization, smash a McDonald’s window during a demonstration.

On March 17, The Observer of London and The New York Times announced that Cambridge Analytica, the London-based political and corporate consulting group, had harvested private data from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their consent. The data was collected through a Facebook-based quiz app called thisisyourdigitallife, created by Aleksandr Kogan, a University of Cambridge psychologist who had requested and gained access to information from 270,000 Facebook members after they had agreed to use the app to undergo a personality test, for which they were paid through Kogan’s company, Global Science Research.

But as Christopher Wylie, a twenty-eight-year-old Canadian coder and data scientist and a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, stated in a video interview, the app could also collect all kinds of personal data from users, such as the content that they consulted, the information that they liked, and even the messages that they posted...

Today surveillance is the DNA of the platform economy; its model is simply based on the possibility of continuous privacy invasions using whatever means possible. In most cases users agree, by signing the terms and conditions of service providers, so that their data may be collected, analyzed and even shared with third parties (although it is hardly possible to see this as express consent given the size and complexity of these agreements – for instance, it took 8 hours and 59 minutes for an actor hired by the consumer group Choice to read Amazon Kindle’s terms and conditions). In other instances, as in the case of Kogan’s app, the extent of the data collected exceeds what was stated in the agreement.

But what is important is to understand that to prevent such scandals in the future it is not enough to force Facebook to better monitor the use of users’ data in order to prevent such leaks as in the case of Cambridge Analytica. The current social mobilization against Facebook resembles the actions of activists who, in opposition to neoliberal globalization, smash a McDonald’s window during a demonstration.

What we need is a total redefinition of the right to privacy (which was codified as a universal human right in 1948, long before the Internet), to guarantee its respect, both offline and online.

What we need is a body of international law that will provide regulations and oversight for the collection and use of data.

It is important to seize the opportunity presented by the Cambridge Analytica scandal to push for these more fundamental changes.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/03/surveillance-dna-platform-economy.html