Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations

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?

Given the amount of money, employees and resources these companies have, you can see that they are becoming and behaving like independent pseudo-nation states.

Each of these companies (FAAMNG) apparently are more worth or near worth the GDP of Luxembourg and other developed countries and their businesses are built like an entire economy.

There are also do’s and don’ts with some of them i.e rules that one citizen should follow. Don’t touch/hack google3 or you will be arrested. Thinking about virtualising macOS/iOS? You will be swiftly dealt with the Supreme Court of Apple Inc, You disagree with Mr. Zuckerberg on his platform? You will be expeditiously banned and charged with high treason with your real name, address, phone no. set to public for the whole world to shame you and list goes on.

Facebook has a population of 3B people and still calls it a community. If it were a country, that’s like the population of China and India put together. They have a town square, news, emergency services and more. The problem is it’s founding member Emperor Zuckerberg still doesn’t understand privacy and trust with its users despite the scandals of the 2010s. If it were a nation state, then it would be like an authoritarian one.

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the People’s Republic of Silicon Valley.

>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)."

[2] https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/violence/v-1

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?

I understand the GAFAM, but is Netflix even in the same ballpark? (It's also extremely dependent on Hollywood, isn't it?) And Microsoft isn't in the Silicon Valley...