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Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations

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Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations

#81

Post by awb »

ncmncm wrote: post #25

It is essentially the same at all corporations, always has been. Lenin was a great admirer of Ford Motor Company. His Soviet committees were copied directly from Ford. You could think of the SSRs as divisions, and satellite countries as wholly-owned subsidiaries.

I've overheard forms of this many times from C/VP-level execs facing internal debate: "We're not running a democracy here".

It is interesting that we only see it in government. Most companies are dictatorships. Some might have a board of directors that is responsible for voting in it's own members, kind of like a tribal elders system.

It's interesting to see these different forms of decision making producing different advantages and disadvantages.

Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations

#82

Post by matt123456789 »

epicgiga wrote: post #53

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 ou…

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.

Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations

#83

Post by SllX »

topologistics wrote: post #73
SllX wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Co…

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 yo…

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.

Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations

#84

Post by ocdtrekkie »

christiansakai wrote: post #58
epicgiga wrote: post #53

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 ou…

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

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.

Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations

#85

Post by jahewson »

indigochill wrote: post #74
topologistics wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

>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 hostin…

> economic violence

This construction is linguistic violence!

Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations

#86

Post by thisguysnuts »

SllX wrote: post #83
topologistics wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

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…

Classic masochist

Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations

#87

Post by epicgiga »

osb10 wrote: post #75
epicgiga wrote: post #53

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 ou…

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 t…

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.

Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations

#88

Post by wskinner »

awb wrote: post #81
ncmncm wrote: post #25

It is essentially the same at all corporations, always has been. Lenin was a great admirer of Ford Motor Company. His Soviet committees were copied directly from Ford. You could think of the SSRs as divisions, and satellite countries as wholly-owned subsidiaries.

I've overheard forms of this many times from C/VP-level execs facing internal debate: "We're not running a democracy here". It is interesting that we only see it in government. Most companies are dictatorships. Some might have a board of directors that is responsible for voting in it's own members, kind of like a tribal elders system. It's interesting to see these different forms of decision making producing differen…

The difference is that the natural state of the corporation is to go extinct. Governments have so much inertia that it often takes a literal revolution to replace them.

Bad externalities are the downside to dictatorships. The externalities of a corporation are much more limited, and there is more pressure to reduce them (from governments, other corporations, and their customers).

Continuing the dictatorship metaphor, this pushes corporations to be more “benevolent”.

Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations

#89

Post by bagacrap »

tomrod wrote: post #80

So do several religions. As well as mafioso or cartels. I think of these groups as "states-in-waiting." Should their regional government grow too corrupt or too weak, they fill the void. [1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-net-worth-of-the-Catholic-... [2] https://fox13now.com/2018/05/30/mormonleaks-lds-church-contr... [3] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2660520/joaquin-el-chapo-guzma...

To transition into something resembling a government would not be very on brand for Apple. If anything they seem likely to blast off into space and colonize Mars with all the cash they've mined and stockpiled here.

Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations

#90

Post by epicgiga »

SllX wrote: post #72
epicgiga wrote: post #53

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 ou…

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. Co…

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".

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