Problem is that states usually have constitutional safeguards that keep a safe balance of power between citizen and state.
Not so with these companies. Step out of line and they can unperson you like that, and you can't vote on their leadership. And increasingly entire livelihoods and social existences are tied into them.
This is why you're seeing states start to get so aggressive with them. The EU fining billions out of them on an ongoing basis. Dragging them before Congress. Etc.
They're not only starting to rival them in power, they're starting to flex power over them -- playing a kingmaker role as they form the platforms on which elections are being won and lost.
If the tech giants win, we lose. They've already shown willingness to coordinate with each other. The non-poaching agreements and the Alex Jones case.
Our defences from power have always been the existence of multiple states (e.g. refugees) and democracy. They would be beholden to neither. Able to destroy social lives and livelihoods at the click of a button, with no defence and no safeguards.
The difference between a sovereign nation-state and a corporation is that a nation-state has a legal monopoly on sanctioned violence within their jurisdiction. Those constitutional safeguards are necessary because otherwise they could search, seize, detain, arrest, imprison, torture and kill with impunity.
A tech company can deplatform you with impunity, but they’re not inflicting any real violence in the process. Corporations are still agents of real people, and those people are still subject to the laws of nations.
Taking away somebody's right to make a living with their chosen profession or otherwise participate in commerce is economic violence.
Say you have built up a following of people over many years and you are making thousands of dollars a month from YouTube, and they they decide to shut you down overnight, I bet it's going to feel like violence when it comes time to pay bills and you no longer have any of that income you have become accustomed to.
Shift your perspective. YouTube is a video distribution service provider and one of many ways to publish a video. You can choose to publish on YouTube, but you don’t have the right to compel YouTube to do business with you anymore than a coffee shop has a right to compel their current coffee roaster to do business with them.
If YouTube cancels their contract with you, they’ve taken away your ability to make a living on YouTube. What they haven’t taken away is your ability to make a living. You can even make a living in video production, if you can find the means to do so.
YouTube certainly enabled many more people to viably live as video producers, but that doesn’t entitle people to make a living in that profession anymore than it entitles them to make a living roasting coffee or serving in a public office or performing heart surgery.
Maybe we should make you persona non grata at the three largest supermarket chains in your area, plus Walmart and Amazon. You can get your meals at Burger King and 7-11.
I see your angle, but that would still leave me with countless other places to purchase groceries, any one of which could choose not to do business with me.
Indeed, the market for food is more fragmented than that for a large video audience. That's why it's a screwjob by Google. And it's a good reason to break Google into pieces.
What consequences are appropriate for someone acting badly enough to get specifically, independently targeted by that many major local businesses and two massive transnational corporations?
>Taking away somebody's right to make a living with their chosen profession or otherwise participate in commerce is economic violence.
The thing is, no company is taking away a creator's right to their living. They may take away the opportunity to make a living on that company's platform, but there's a distinct difference.
YouTube (or Twitch, etc) are providing a service to content creators, that service being hosting and broadcasting their content. Service agreements come with clauses about termination of service. A content creator should never put all their eggs into a single basket lest that service cease to support them for whatever reason.
> YouTube (or Twitch, etc) are providing a service to content creators, that service being hosting and broadcasting their content. Service agreements come with clauses about termination of service. A content creator should never put all their eggs into a single basket lest that service cease to support them for whatever reason.
This is normally true, but in the "winner takes all" world, not having access to Youtube (or Twitch, etc) is effectively like being cut off from all customers. I experienced this in the past when running an ad supported website. Adsense paid by far the best (> 10x everyone else), so being shut off by them was like being shut off altogether.
And the problem is that for marketplaces it typically is "winner takes all".
Should this, should that. I have heard this so many times. If you are a app developer and became successful on the Google playstore, but not on iTunes store then who are you to say that you should never put all your eggs into a single basket. This would never be a deliberate choice. Fact is, that many business lost everything due dragonic decisions made by big tech companies. Unacceptable. That's why those companies need to be split up. Regions like Europe need to restrict massive US invasion and come up with their own alternatives.
Even if YouTube (or the Play Store) was its own entity, they can still prevent you from publishing on their platforms on a whim. You solve nothing by breaking them up.
Don’t hold your breath on Europe coming up with dominant consumer tech anytime soon.
When I was at Google, a few people there posted on internal forums to celebrate how successfully the deplatforming was in causing financial troubles for the targets.
>A tech company can deplatform you with impunity, but they’re not inflicting any real violence in the process. Corporations are still agents of real people, and those people are still subject to the laws of nations.
The influence of Twitter on say, the Arab Spring, says differently. Or the many other cases of social media platforms and algorithms being used to incite mobs, riots, and revolutions.
Hatred is a prime input/output for algorithms optimized for engagement. We all know what impulsive mass hatred can lead to.
What we are discussing here is not whether a platform which enables people to communicate can be used to incite and coordinate violence, of course it can!
We’re discussing whether deplatforming a person from a private social media platform or video distribution platform is a form of violence.
Just want to point out that this is true today in the USA and most developed nations, but there was definitely a time when corporations had armies and navies (e.g. Dutch East India Company times). Corporations, not government, were also the main driver of the Atlantic slave trade.
Of course this was true at the time because of a power vacuum, physical security is a requirement to doing business–at the end of the day someone has to hold the gun.
Mostly agree! But! An important part of a monopoly is the ability to grant licenses on that monopoly, or letters of marque and reprisal, or charters or pass laws governing acceptable uses of violence by private citizens, and so on. Theoretically if Congress allowed it, private corporations could raise standing armies and navies, I just don’t think we or anyone in Congress would stand and suffer that blight on society.
In a way though, that’s what private security contractors are though, although their authority to engage in violence is legally limited.
Also it is important to note that such corporations as the Dutch East India Company operates their militaries outside and beyond the core jurisdiction, were and of their nations of origin. There was no contradiction of terms in subjugating and governing Indians and Javanese so long as they weren’t subjugating free Dutchmen.
> they’re not inflicting any real violence in the process
Are you suggesting violence can be only physical in nature? Even if you aren't, your choice of the word violence is intentional because you want to avoid words like "harm" which more fully capture the socioeconomic implications of being fired without due cause from a position which your livelihood depends on.
In an ideal world, nation states would provide UBI for their citizens. A company is not going to provide UBI for someone who does not add to their bottom line. And that's why the American government, for example, could be considered a business instead of a real government. A government by nature serves its people, a company by nature is served by its people.
Violence is inherently physical. It is the forceful physical violation of one’s person or property. Trying to expand the definition of “violence” beyond this scope dilutes its meaning beyond recognition and usefulness.
However, I will agree it is harmful when a supplier terminates its services, particularly so if you were dependent on that supplier. People make their own choices about who to do business with and how to go about their business, but let’s not pretend that YouTube is anything it isn’t. The lesson to take away here isn’t that YouTube should be regulated like some kind of utility and to take away their ability to terminate relations with producers, but that you shouldn’t be so thoroughly dependent on one supplier for your business that it is financially ruinous to lose their services.
I’m not saying there’s no case to be made for YouTube to improve their policies and processes to provide more due process than they do now, but that’s a debate that should be happening between YouTube and the people that use YouTube to distribute their work. They’re not employees, they’re clients, effectively small businesses and a number of the smarter ones already know the danger of depending on YouTube as their sole source of income and have worked to diversify.
You're honing in on a specific definition of violence, ignoring its historic colloquial usages.
People make their own choices about who to do business with and how to go about their business
More attempts to pin the narrative as a business transaction while ignoring the larger implications of phenomena such as deplatformization in public forums operated by unscrupulous corporations who control access to their audiences of millions.
The lesson to take away here isn’t that YouTube should be regulated like some kind of utility and to take away their ability to terminate relations with producers, but that you shouldn’t be so thoroughly dependent on one supplier for your business that it is financially ruinous to lose their services.
Try applying that same logic to someone who is stuck in an abusive relationship, deprived of the resources needed to secure their financial and emotional independence. We shouldn't regulate domestic abuse, because people should not be so thoroughly dependent on one person for their welfare. It's their choice.
Information is the currency of modern society. In a two-decade span we've allowed extreme centralization and gatekeeping of digital information, placing control of its flow into the hands of a dozen or two corporations.
Twenty years ago, decentralization was alive and well and if a community of 50-100 people had a hardass for an admin, that was fine, because there were often plenty of other communities of similar caliber elsewhere for popular topics.
Now we have things like reddit. "Decentralized", but communities are constantly plagued by misguided, ill-informed decisions handed down from the guy upstairs. Entire communities of thousands of people are destroyed overnight. But where else will they go? No one registers for forums anymore, reddit is in the top 20 most popular websites in the world with 300 million users. That's an entire country.
YouTube shares a similar tale. Whether you would like to admit it or not, what these large companies in positions of power are doing today is the equivalent of mass censorship, restriction of speech, and ideological persecution. And these platforms often support user-created censorship as well.
I’m sorry you had that experience on Facebook. I wish I could tell you that kind of thing is surprising or unexpected, but unfortunately it isn’t either of those things these days. I hope you’re doing alright and that you’re able to put it behind you.
As for violence, I standby what is the more useful and regular definition. There may be useful non-physical extensions in colloquial usage, but the word itself has connotations of a physical forcefulness that nothing else really has.
* More attempts to pin the narrative as a business transaction while ignoring the larger implications of phenomena such as deplatformization in public forums operated by unscrupulous corporations who control access to their audiences of millions.*
I don’t have to pin the narrative as such, that is exactly what this is: a transactional relationship between unscrupulous corporations and small businesses. Both have equal right to make decisions as to who they do business with.
* Information is the currency of modern society. In a two-decade span we've allowed extreme centralization and gatekeeping of digital information, placing control of its flow into the hands of a dozen or two corporations.*
Information has always been an asset in any society. What’s changed is that we can aggregate it at a larger scale than ever before, extract more value than ever before and have many more applications for it than ever before. Let’s say there are a dozen or two companies that have largely centralized it. That in itself is a bit of an oxymoron if there’s as many as a dozen, or two dozen participating in the trade. However, there are far far more companies trading in the information market than that!
To bring this back to social media: no one has yet to make a compelling case to me that this market is in fact centralized. You may be able to make this case in a country by country basis. You may be able to make the case that of the various subtypes of social media companies, there’s maybe one that matters in each category. Social media as a global market has never been centralized, and is decreasingly so every passing year. Facebook having a few billion users hardly matters when many of them are also active users of Reddit, Twitter, WeChat, LINE, Slack, LinkedIn, and so on and so forth. You can setup a community today and host it yourself using basic web tools or something like Mastodon.
Is deplatforming a form of mass censorship? Absolutely it is! Can you make a moral case against it? Absolutely! Can you also make a moral case for it? Again, absolutely! Does it hurt the people it targets socially and/or economically? In many cases, yes.
It’s not the government making those decisions though, which is an important distinction to make. Government censorship comes with the long arm of the law attached, which ends with the guy in the navy blue uniform with the gun. Corporate censorship is inconvenient, but it’s not prison.
I think social media is going to continue to exist, continue to have a business case, and continue to increase the total number of communities. In a couple decades, choosing a platform might be like choosing a pub: you evaluate who the maintainer is, what the community is oriented around and what are their values. Can you post pictures? What kind? Can you also post little clips timed to music? Will the messages expire?
We already see this to some degree today with group chats on different platforms. The platforms have their own rules as to what can be posted, as well as their own technical limitations, but they’re a semi-private space to cordon off a subset of the larger platform and give the members a place to exchange messages and data.
>As for violence, I standby what is the more useful and regular definition.
Often, certain commonplace words become terms of art within the disciplines which study them[1][2]. For example, "kind" or "type" or "resistance" take on special meanings within mathematics and computer science. While these terms are clearly derived from their commonplace definitions, they either work alongside the original meaning (such as in "resistance") or they replace it ("kind").
Scholarship dating to about 1980 describes two forms of violence, objective and subjective. Subjective violence is very easy to spot, it involves physical contact. Objective violence, also related to systemic violence, is not: it's the backdrop against which we measure subjective violence[0]. This is not restricted to the description of society as violent. Go onto Google Scholar and search "systemic violence" - the term is used to describe security searches of children at schools, abusive familial relationships, drug markets, and a plethora of other things.
[0] "As Žižek would argue, we consistently overlook the objective or "symbolic" violenc eembodied in language and its forms, i.e. democratic state's monopoly on legitimate violence. He asserts that "subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of the non-violent zero-level, asa perturbation of the “normal” peaceful state of things; however, objective violence is precisely theviolence sustaining this “normal” state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains thevery zero-level standard against which we perceive something as [visible] violence – in order to perceive it, one has to perform a kind of parallax shift"."
[1] "One of the great controversies in defining violence pertains to its scope. Vorobej opts from the outset for a wider concept of violence and not for restricting it to cases of direct physical harm. With these cases and the more commonsensical notion of interpersonal violence the analysis begins. The first definition is borrowed from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), to which he adds apparently more sophisticated variations, for example from James Childress, Robert Holmes, or the WHO, before finally returning to the OED as the most useful paradigmatic definition for this type of approach to violence: "Violence is the exercise of physical force as to inflict injury on or damage to persons or properties" (6). After having worked through a series of ambiguities of the definition and questions that arise from it, Vorobej finally rightly problematizes this approach for its one-sidedness. Interpersonal violence "emphasizes what individuals do to others, at the cost of ignoring what happens to people" (52)."
I’ll bite and acknowledge there might be a dimension to violence that I am overlooking, however, every example of objective violence you gave except “drug markets” appears to align perfectly at face value with the definition of violence I gave earlier: a forceful violation of one’s person or property. Probably “drug markets” would too, I’m just not altogether sure what element of a drug market you mean since there wasn’t a verb attached.
I’ll look for the full paper from your link, it looks interesting, but that will have to wait until the morning. Same with your Google Scholar search, you’ve hooked me.
In the mean time, let me ask you if the difference between subjective and objective violence looks like this: Subjective violence would be the act of a pimp slapping a prostitute within his service, and objective violence would be the entire social apparatus around pimping which enables him to find women who are willing (in this example I’m assuming willing to prevent this from branching into a discussion on slavery and the various gradations of prostitution) to work under him as prostitutes in what is I assume would be considered ultimately a form of violence that works against them and women in general?
Or alternatively, a prison might be a violent place to be in, and thus is subjectively violent, but the existence and operation of the prison is objectively violent?
> It is the forceful physical violation of one’s person or property.
But not all property is physical. And increasingly, our property is just data located in somebody's servers: your Dropbox contents, your Steam games, the money in your online bank account.
I would argue it is physical insofar as it has to exist on something tangible, whether that’s an aggregated bank ledger or a server somewhere or as backups on disks that you own, but your point is taken so I’ll address the concerns you raised.
Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your perspective, but unfortunately from my perspective, in the case of Steam games and software, that is largely covered: you paid for licenses to play games rather than licenses, but some of it is DRM-free so you can take backups.
That money in the bank account is yours, unless seized through a legal process, which can happen and you can challenge it if it does.
Everything else, Dropbox, Google Photos, iCloud, emails, whatever, you should have your own backups. You should have them not just for legal reasons or because your service providers might terminate their services to you, but because they might actually lose your data.
You have some rights to that data, but none of the businesses involved in hosting it are compelled to do business with you specifically, and aren’t required to keep it anymore than the law compels them to.
> That money in the bank account is yours, unless seized through a legal process.
And this is because through the centuries we have enacted enough laws to deter private banking companies from messing with our money. If left to their own devices, we would have DRM-ed money, random service terminations, unexplained money loses, etc. We just need to extend these rights and safeties to other spheres of our digital property through the use of law and its enforcement.
Yes, but a bank can still terminate its business with you. It just has to return your money to you.
Now if you’re suggesting we have a law that companies which hold our data have to return our data when they terminate their business relationship with us, I wouldn’t necessarily disagree.
The legal obligations of a bank towards its clients generally extend way beyond your example, depending on the country, but yes, returning the client belongings upon termination of the relationship should be a basic right mandated by law. I think it is profoundly absurd that we are renouncing hard-fought consumer rights just because business is now being conducted electronically. If the letter of the law no longer matches the spirit, we should update the letter, not lose the spirit.
Say there are sanctions imposed on a country by the U.S. that make it near impossible to import the necessary mediacations for cancer patients, as a result of which, some of them die.
I'd say calling that 'economic violence' is pretty accurate.
A trade sanction is intended as a form of physical violence backed up by physical force. You could call it economic violence, I would just call it violence.
> Numbers are inherently binary. You could call 93 "a decimal number", but I would just call it "a number". There's no point in having the term "decimal" since the tech stack is all just "(binary) numbers" beneath layers of indirection.
Surely you see the usefulness in assigning each layer of indirection a unique qualifier?
Am glad to hear that, I'd actually agree with you, but many wouldn't because of that thin layer of 'we didn't technically use the military to accomplish this', but rather the global financial system, even if the outcome is basically the same
They might not, but for a sanction to be applied properly, you need to apply violence somewhere within the enforcement process.
Take the sanctions against Iran for example. Huawei violated these sanctions and this directly led to Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in Canada and her bring charged in the United States. It would appear the extradition hearings are still going on with the trial set to start this month and it might go as long as October.
This is an overly simplistic view of power. The man in the blue uniform with the gun is at the end of a very long chain of people.
What happens, historically, when one group wields superior technology to another group? Who has the power?
Do you think we have the power, with our 1 in 300 millionth votes every 4 years for 1 of 2 people?
Sure, let's pretend there'll never be any "senator, I'm afraid if you take that stance on that bill, our algorithm won't be able to help you..." behaviour.
Absolute power corrup... I mean "muh private company -- nothing to see here".
There’s elections in every State every 1-2 years for a variety of positions from city assemblies to county board of supervisors to the lower and upper house of each State that has both, executive offices, different special district bodies, Judges in some cases for better or worse, and again, depending on the State, various city, county and/or State ballot propositions before we even get to the 1 Representative, 2 Senators and 1 President you can cast votes for as well.
That’s just the ballots you cast. There are countless ways to politically involve yourself in any issue you care to make the time for. We’re not powerless citizens, but our power is diluted, intentionally so, because that’s what democracy does. You wield as much power as you are willing and able to accumulate up until the point where the power you wield competes with people with interests counter to yours.
Yes, it was a simplistic outline of the power of the state vs. the power of a corporation, but it is an accurate one. Corporations are agents of the people they serve, a means of aggregating means and power to more effectively wield it in the interests of the people they are serving. The power they can wield is immense, but it is still ultimately subordinate to the power of a state.
Problem is that states usually have constitutional safeguards that keep a safe balance of power between citizen and state.
Not so with these companies. Step out of line and they can unperson you like that, and you can't vote on their leadership. And increasingly entire livelihoods and social existences are tied into them.
The notional constitutional safeguards of states become eroded over time (n.b., interstate commerce, mass data collection) and the overreach of states is more potentially damaging to its citizens than getting locked out of a platform on which you built a business.
Political power can be spent over and over. Dollars can only be spent once.
The notional constitutional safeguards of states become eroded over time (n.b., interstate commerce, mass data collection) and the overreach of states is more potentially damaging to its citizens than getting locked out of a platform on which you built a business.
States are not meant to be corrupt in this way, and have several avenues for reform by will of the people. Companies benefit from a dictatorial stance, and therefore the only effective recourse against unjust treatment is partial or total destruction.
>Political power can be spent over and over. Dollars can only be spent once.
Credit is a thing.
Corporations give private citizens power they should not have over their neighbors in a democracy.
HR can filter at mass, keeping people from work they enjoy. Advertising has social agency warping effects. And at scale we spend our time prioritizing paid speech. Policing valid speech at scale is how authoritarian states work.
“This is how you view the problem, how you design the solution, and how you speak to people. Or you don’t get to have shelter & eat.”
Sir, yes sir.
“Profits (or some other ideological target) must go up this quarter!”
Sir, yes sir.
Not allowed to truly question what happens if AI that can schedule hair appointments isn’t developed. Computing/engineering effort we know is destined for the bin as hardware changes. Seems economical.
That’s hardly a behavioral model for a free society.
Nah sorry. We have friendly oligarchs, and looking at Google’s shifting culture and the Amazon warehouse situation that’s been going on for years... very superficially friendly.
Political power is emotional. It fades generationally as people retire, or we could term limit officials.
A big enough pile of dollars means you can generate more faster than you can spend what you need to in order to stay on top.
Ownership is the root of political theory in America. And a smaller and smaller group really own anything.
And the powers that be know that: they’ve read it in academia’s papers and philosophers notes. If the public took ownership of the manner of production (IMO themselves not factories) and stayed home for a week, politics would be shifting real fast.
We keep looking at history to learn about us. Is it any shock we keep developing top down authoritarian structures when we’re casually fetishizing their previous existence? What was becomes hard to look beyond when continually referencing the material. Wonder what humanity could look like if future people read about past people living differently.
This argument severely underestimates the alternatives available to the current corporate tech hegemony. Put yourself in the position of Internet persona non grata and let’s look at your alternatives.
Twitter doesn’t like you(or whoever “Big Tech“TM goes after next)? Yet you can still say whatever they want on their own website.
YouTube doesn’t like you? You can self-host your videos.
Facebook doesn’t like you? No access to FB products then. Nobody will look for the persona non grata there anyway.
Google doesn’t like you? You can log your own traffic and use an alternative email provider, or self-host.
Unranked in SRP? Advertise in the real world or via word of mouth.
Microsoft doesn’t like you? Run Linux.
Azure/AWS doesn’t like you? Use an alternative IaaS or buy your own hardware.
Hardware vendors don’t like you? Secondhand market.
Apple doesn’t like you? Flip phone!
Linus Torvalds himself doesn’t like you!?!? OpenBSD!
The weak point that I can see in living in a world in which the Internet itself doesn’t want you is your connection itself. While there will always be free speech-focused ISPs willing to connect anyone (within the law) the backbones might decide to drop traffic headed for their website. Not much you can do about that I guess.
The internet was around before Larry Page and Sergei Brin, and Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. These companies provide convenient tools which make it easy to do a few things but they are highly unnecessary for life itself, even online life. We have let them get too big. But we have not let them get too necessary.
> Linus Torvalds himself doesn’t like you!?!? OpenBSD!
Actually, it doesn't matter if he likes you or not; you can still run Linux just as well. Unlike the other examples he has no power to stop you from doing this.
Forgive me for my naive thinking. But as long as country have a military power, isn’t that the ultimate deciding factor? Like, sure you can bully nations all you want, but as soon as they implement policies like “obey our rules or get out of our land or receive the end of the gunpowder” companies will just obey
In theory yes, but it takes a government with "balls" to take this kind of stance. Big companies owners and leaders are from the same schools, eat at the same table, are friends with the politician ruling class. One government might take action against a foreign company because it is foreign, yet allows the same behavior from a domestic company. Ultimately the people need to cut some heads to remember them what is the commoner interest. (ps: the last sentence is mostly a joke, based on France history)
> One government might take action against a foreign company because it is foreign, yet allows the same behavior from a domestic company
Yup, I think we have seen that with Monsanto. US courts mostly got the kid gloves out when dealing with their antics. Cue Monsanto gets acquired by Bayer, next thing you know it's convictions left and right.
The likely decade of court losses was clearly inbound, it's why Monsanto was sold off. There was going to be no upside to the stock in that atmosphere, so a nicely priced sale was the optimal out. The court losses you're referring to were well set before the sale. The roundup trial for example was filed a year prior to the sale. The lawyers for Monsanto and Bayer very likely knew how bad it was, they had a better view than anybody else.
Bayer knew exactly what it was buying: they're going to trade a mere year or two of Monsanto profit (maximum), across a decade, to pay for the overall legal hit. In exchange they get to buy a fortress of intellectual property and one of the globe's dominant AG chem / AG biotech businesses (on a planet that will add ~3 billion more people to feed in the coming decades).
What's worse: big company owners and big financiers are from the same schools, etc. It's not unheard of for a nation that's threatened an overreaching company with sanctions or nationalization to find itself facing a coup, or shut out of an advantageous (read: actually workable) stake in the world monetary establishment. In fact, that's basically the modern history of the southern hemisphere.
You don't get to play unless the global oligarchs can skim off what they want, even if it breaks your economy (all the better! Who doesn't love an entire population in thrall to your whims?). The American government is currently part of that oligarchy, but see what happens if Bernie Sanders is elected.
>Forgive me for my naive thinking. But as long as country have a military power, isn’t that the ultimate deciding factor?
It's not naive, it's the way life works even though we don't like to admit it. They got the bigger guns. They're in charge. Full stop.
A Constitution and laws just tells us the conditions under which they will use their guns. Even then, they can and will use them on other occasions if they feel the situation warrants.
The idea that companies or citizens are more powerful than governments is fanciful in the extreme. When companies get militaries that can go toe to toe with the militaries of the various governments of the world, then I'll buy it.
The OP mentioned companies play a kingmaker role by owning the platforms on which elections are won and lost. The implication is that they can directly and disproportionately influence the government, such that the government is their tool and not the people’s tool, as in a bonafide democracy.
The question isn’t whether the government or corporations have more power, it’s whether corporations or the people control the government and in which proportions.
> The idea that companies or citizens are more powerful than governments is fanciful in the extreme.
I’m certain King George would have agreed with you in 1775.
The people in the USA specifically are better armed and outnumber the US military many times over. This was by design.
You could make an argument about nukes or tanks or drones - but you know what has to stand on street corners to enforce curfews, stop assembly, or protect supply chains? Soldiers.
The US government as an entity is weaker than the people it sees over - for now. Many people are intent to change that.
Here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22025893 - there is an illustration of different points of view in the same - but modified - texts. Perhaps it partially explains difference in opinions on seemingly the same facts.
I think people are underestimating how much of an asymmetric advantage a tech giant like google has over opponents — so far it is in good hands, but I would argue that, if the company were taken over by a bad actor, they would have almost infinite data to blackmail any opponent that isn’t a saint with the most personal details of their life or monitor their activities.
>military power, isn’t that the ultimate deciding factor?
No, physical force is only one form of power. Knowledge/information and wealth are other forms of power that can be a far more practical (and scalable) means for achieving different ends.
The problem is big companies impose so much power over governments, which often depend on them for that military power and technological superiority that those companies can influence the countries to do what they want. Think about how many of our wars were based on oil. Think about how our government has threatened to put tariffs on France for trying to properly tax tech companies.
Countries have dropped rules on tech companies, and tech companies have retaliated to the point that those countries relented and begged the companies to come back.
No, tech companies aren't going to start driving tanks across enemy companies' lawns, but they don't have to. They're so powerful they can use countries' militaries as their pawns.
> Problem is that states usually have constitutional safeguards that keep a safe balance of power between citizen and state.
Seems to me constitutions being widespread is actually quite recent. Also, in many places 'constitutional safeguards' alone don't hold and often haven't held much value.
The only actual safeguard is power.
In companies' case
- the law (as long as it is actually enforced by the state)
- customers' choice on wether or not to buy the company's product
- employees' ability to organize, strike or quit and find another job
- shareholders votes and ability to invest / divest
For states?
- If they have fair and meaningful elections, votes. - Otherwise, well... One way or another, it usually doesn't end well.
> states usually have constitutional safeguards that keep a safe balance of power between citizen and state
I don't see much of that in China... which has too many people for that "usually" to work.
Ironically, China's biggest companies are likely the ones on the tightest leach !
Alex Jones is a bad example. I don't have any sympathy for what happened to him given the number of people whose heads he has filled with bullshit over the years. There aren't simple tools to clean up that kind of population scale mental pollution.
In these early iterations of social networks, the power to deplatform people is required. Not everyone deserves to broadcast whatever is flitting through their minds, to the largest available susceptable population.
Regulations and big tech itself will evolve as they and their kids and families aren't immune to the dangers. Most people in big tech have a much better sense of what's possible thanks to the Trump election, Brexit etc and the solution are not obvious so it's just taking time to figure out.
People like that are precisely the best example. They're not going to start by banning a kid for calling someone the f word. They're going to pick nutters like him, because they can say to the free speech advocates "oh so you support him?".
Look up Martin Niemöller's famous saying, "first they came for...". Those who forget (or don't care about) history are destined to repeat it.
If big tech are willing and able to act politically in concert, we have a serious risk of dystopia.
Not so with these companies. Step out of line and they can unperson you like that, and you can't vote on their leadership. And increasingly entire livelihoods and social existences are tied into them.
This is why you're seeing states start to get so aggressive with them. The EU fining billions out of them on an ongoing basis. Dragging them before Congress. Etc.
They're not only starting to rival them in power, they're starting to flex power over them -- playing a kingmaker role as they form the platforms on which elections are being won and lost.
If the tech giants win, we lose. They've already shown willingness to coordinate with each other. The non-poaching agreements and the Alex Jones case.
Our defences from power have always been the existence of multiple states (e.g. refugees) and democracy. They would be beholden to neither. Able to destroy social lives and livelihoods at the click of a button, with no defence and no safeguards.
"Computer says no", to your life.