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Things are awful because someone wrote an opinion piece in the newspaper?

I heartily disagree that anyone should "detect a consensus" from leftists preaching expropriation. That's just an ordinary activity for them. Nick Srnicek may be shouting a bit louder than most from his pulpit in The Guardian, but that has as little to do with truth as his article has to do with reason.

Google, Facebook, and Amazon are just fashionable targets for his emotional appeals for a more powerful state. He doesn't write about Monsanto in this article, even though they have an ever tightening control over the food we eat, because they aren't as well understood by the masses.

Bread and circuses. This is the circus part.

> I heartily disagree that anyone should "detect a consensus" from leftists preaching expropriation. That's just an ordinary activity for them.

Have you missed the conservatives who both argue against net neutrality while claiming that Google (and others) are censoring content because they're too big to be just considered one actor (of many)?

Nationalizing a company would definitely be a left-wing endeavor, but to claim that "leftists" are the ones preaching about Googles unchallenged dominance is just misleading.

That's not what bread and circuses means.

That expression is a cynical look at the relationship of the individual to the State: so long as my belly is full and I am entertained I'm all right Jack.

“… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses”

So, no, this is not the circus part.

The article is an argument over who ought to own and run the circus. The article is also a distraction, on its own, and thus part of a circus.

Granted, I'd completely accept a quote from The Dude as a legitimate response: "Yeah, well you know... that's just, like, your opinion, man."

It is.

> That expression is a cynical look at the relationship of the individual to the State: so long as my belly is full and I am entertained I'm all right Jack.

Wow. You just describe Sweden O.o I'm mighty impressed how this saying fits perfectly into the context of the modern Swedish culture!

Would you please clarify what you mean?

He did briefly touch on how Monsanto was using similar practices in the agriculture business. I think most readers can make the implied connection there.

>>Bread and circuses. This is the circus part.

I think perhaps you should look up what "bread and circus" actually means, because it's not what you think it is.

or does he...

Perhaps like in the matrix where Neo was in his own little mind trap where he was the "One" while the machines still had control.

or inception where your in a dream inside of a dream...

...maybe arguing about this BS is the circus deju to keep people from really getting involved and actually effecting change in the world.

> I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not in my free society" comments are missing the point.

They really aren't. Far larger, more entrenched monopolies have existed before; when they needed to be resolved, they were simply broken up.

Suggesting to nationalize them is not only entirely unnecessary, it contradicts decades of experience in dealing with monopolies.

IMHO, nationalizations are either bail-outs or power-grabs.

> They really aren't

They really are? The back and forth is tedious.

The questions I have are,

1. What is the issue? (if multiple issues, start over one at a time please) 2. Once you decide the role of Government (which is still in flux), can it even apply to this issue? 3. Does it serve the public interest to nationalize this company to address that issue?

So the answer is no. We don't have a working definition of the role of government in the US, so there's no point continuing. It's rather simple to me, but I'm conservative (you don't disrupt livelihoods aimlessly in hopes it all works out).

The idea that you would break up a company to address an information aggregation problem is idiotic. I can see how this pans out....now we have N companies with the information. Some of the issues can't be addressed with brute solutions from the past...or it wouldn't be something to talk about at all.

The new problem here is that the centralization is pretty much the core value of these companies. Breaking them up would destroy that value. A way around is to first standardize and open all the protocols on which they internally operate, and then split them. But you could say that the standardization is in a way an indirect nationalization. If email was run by a company, it would easily be amongst the richest companies in the world.

centralization isn't the problem, bundling is.

advertising with communication.

privacy with contact management

web index with advertising.

content creation and distribution with advertising marketplace.

product distribution with product marketplace with eCommerce store.

Data storage with advertising

...the list goes one.

I think they need to be forced to integrate with open standards and open contracts.

1. identity management

2. data storage & privacy individual, group, and public level.

3. Data graphs

4. open standards for apis with an api broker

5.

Here's a nice writeup on Stratechery advocating reasonably for #2 and #3 in the context of Facebook. I thought it was a good read:

https://stratechery.com/2017/manifestos-and-monopolies/

> Secondly, all social networks should be required to enable social graph portability — the ability to export your lists of friends from one network to another. Again Instagram is the perfect example: the one-time photo-filtering app launched its network off the back of Twitter by enabling the wholesale import of your Twitter social graph. And, after it was acquired by Facebook, Instagram has only accelerated its growth by continually importing your Facebook network. Today all social networks have long since made this impossible, making it that much more difficult for competitors to arise.

Amazon sells products at a loss in order to put competitors out of business.

Google disables accounts, with no notification / justification, if someone's opinion offends them. Again with no justification / warning, they alter search traffic to/away form companies, with the ability to choose winners and looser in the 'free' market. I dont know how true it is, but I heard they were suppressing positive search results and bringing results with soldiers pointing guns to peoples heads during the arab spring to destabilize governments.

Facebook - well zuckerburg's manifesto on deciding whose words are heard or suppressed scares the shit out of me.

On top of all this, the big tech companies are avoiding taxes and concentrating jobs to small geographic areas. They are using their power/capital/lawyers to monopolize their respective markets and I feel we are starting to see the consequences of that more and more

Post on another site then, or post it on your site.

But it doesn't have the audience you'd argue, well that's how new sites gain popularity, because things are seen/said there that exist no where else. And as far as audience goes, the controlled content argument is not new, we've had that for years with TV networks/channels in terms of who had a platform and what entertainment you had to select from.

To take it further, something like YouTube was just cable public access television taken to an extreme. Now YouTube wants to be mainstreamish, so they're largely doing what MTV, or History Channel did in the late 90's, taking off or downplaying the unique niche content that got them noticed and people originally went there for and promoting the mainstream "reality" shows, etc.

Yes, this is the case, yes, this is the natural progression of things when sites become more mainstream, corporate, and focused on revenue (especially advertiser revenue). But this also leaves an opening for someone else to provide a platform for what is lost to go to. YouTube funny enough replaced MTV as the go to to watch music videos, so in a way I guess it was good MTV had a bunch of high rating low common denominator appeal reality shows to lean on when that happened.

The beauty of the Internet is that there will always be the sub-communities and places for people to go to who have other non-mainstream interests or views. FB, Google, etc are now mainstream, but largely that's because they're replacing the media people used to consume over legacy platforms like TV and Radio.

> Amazon sells products at a loss in order to put competitors out of business.

Lower prices are good for consumers.

I agree to an extent, however I think this is just a part of it. The other part is that these companies are these mega corporations that have more money and power than many countries and they aren't accountable to the people but to their owners. And these are the companies that are going to end up inventing stuff like generalized AI. I don't agree with nationalizing them, but I also don't agree with letting them run around unchecked.

I saw a comment years ago and I dearly wish I'd saved it.

Paraphrased it was "large corporation shit on the floor. Of course it did, that's basically their job, the job of government is to supply the rolled up newspaper and occasionally the mop".

It made me laugh in its succinctness.

Corporations don't exist in isolation, they are part of society and should be answerable to that society, the all regulation is bad thing is as annoying as all regulation is good.

In a democracy fundamentally the corporation should answer to the people.

This isn't new, Standard oil is a good example from a century ago.

Are you sure the authors are writing this story out of a genuine heartfelt fear? Do you think the editor who published them shares this genuine fear?

The Graun is ideologically committed to nationalising all the things. It would be noteworthy if they ever called for anything to remain private, let alone be privatised.

Having said that there's a decent case for Google being broken up.

That just isn't true at all

I guess you have some links to pro-privatisation articles in the Graun then?

Or maybe author wants strong reaction, clickbait or dont care. There will be backslash against tech arrogance, sure, but there is no need for it to involve nationalisation.

I agree with your broader point but The Guardian is a consistently far-left, pro-large(r)-government publication, so it actually doesn't take much for them to publish something like this; the suggestion is right up their alley.

You seem to be saying there's a high threshold for extreme opinions to be published in the Guardian, so the fact that someone wrote such an article suggests that there is a genuine problem that needs to be taken seriously. Guardian writers do not live inside a "bubble" and therefore, there is inherent merit to what they write.

I wonder how often you actually read the Guardian, which is famous for having wildly extreme opinion pieces, especially lately. It's basically the Breitbart of the left, a more or less constant stream of clickbait designed to make people angry and upset.

Just a few random headlines I got from clicking around just now:

"Who paid for the leave vote? Brexit should be halted until we know"

"The car has a chokehold on Britain. It’s time to free ourselves: Our insanely inefficient transport system is in thrall to the metal god. Electric vehicles are not the answer"

"Ask Hadley: Why do older people hate millennials so much?"

"Men on the left are sexist. Labour needs to do more to fix it."

"Feminists don't hate men. But it wouldn't matter if we did."

... and in case you think asking the government to take control of internet companies is new idea from Guardian writers:

"The Guardian view on censoring the internet: necessary, but not easy"

"Internet regulation: is it time to rein in the tech giants?"

"The EU is right to take on Facebook, but mere fines don’t protect us from tech giants"

I wouldn't exactly claim the Guardian floats above bubbles and groupthinks.

> "Ask Hadley: Why do older people hate millennials so much?"

Disclosure: Guardian reader here. I remember reading the Hadley Freemen [1] article cited here, finding it amusing at the time, so googled it [2] to remind myself what it said. On re-reading, I still find it quite amusing. It includes observations such as “Older people have always found youngsters irritating, self-entitled and arrogant, because young people are irritating, self-entitled and arrogant. That’s part of the joy of being young, and part of the compensation of getting older is you can snuggle on down in your smug eiderdown of condescension about The Youth Today.” The concluding para says “So, in conclusion, don’t feel attacked, young people: older people were always grumpy with the younger generation. And to all the 55- to 64-year-olds out there? Maybe give all that boob Googling a rest, OK? Take a tip from your kids on this”. To me, the article is a plea for tolerance of the young by the old, pointing out the quirks of both generations.

More widely, I’ll agree that The Guardian does have regular columns written by activists such as George Monbiot [3], and its writers may disagree with or explicitly criticise some of The Guardian’s peer rivals, such as the Daily Mail, The Telegraph, etc. But, personally, I can’t accept it as the Breitbart of the Left.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_Freeman

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/aug/21/ask-hadley-o...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Monbiot

I read the guardian frequently and long since learned to ignore the clickbait headlines you point out.

Remember that columnists don't write their own headlines. The content of an article is usually more nuanced and thought out that the headline might suggest. Emphasis on the usually.

I don't think comparing the Guardian to britebart is fair at all, but that's another debate.

I'm not saying newspaper columnists don't live in a bubble. Just a different one from the silicon valley / HN bubble. If they get an impression of the tech world that causes them to think nationalisation is the way forward, the tech world needs to respond to that. Undermining the publication or author (as opposed to considering their argument, and separating it into causes - surveillance capitalism - and proposed effects - nationalisation) does not change the fact people are rightly suspicious of Facebook/Google/Amazon etc and they will react accordingly.

The Guardian uses clickbait just like any other site. Those ads aren't going to display themselves.

> It's basically the Breitbart of the left

Please. The Guardian is establishment liberal media. The opinions they publish aren't even that extreme. There are plenty of journals that are far more radical and much further to the left.

It's funny how conservative HN looks when posts like this appear.

The opinions they publish are fantastically extreme and often deeply offensive. The Guardian constantly pumps out honest to god racism, sexism and other deplorable viewpoints. The only reason you don't believe it's comparable to Breitbart is you haven't sat down and done an honest comparison.

My post simply lists out Guardian headlines for all to see. It originally had something like +15 points and now it's sitting at zero, apparently it touched a nerve with some people who can't stand the idea that the Guardian and Breitbart might be comparable.

Here are some more headlines from their opinion writers, just to disabuse anyone of the notion that the Guardian is somehow not a bastion of radical extremism. They hate white people, they hate democracy, they hate men, they hate voters, they hate tea and Thomas the Tank Engine. They make money out of peddling hatred.

"The budget should be less macho - how about it boys"

"Why do women lie more than men? Because we're nicer"

"The Whiteness Project will make you wince. Because white people can be rather awful"

"Sexists are scared of Mad Max because it's a call to dismantle patriarchies"

"Are you too white, rich, able-bodied and straight to be a feminist"

"Tea is a national disgrace: Britain's favourite beverage is a boring relic of our colonial past."

"The tyrannical world of Thomas the Tank Engine. Kids love this little dipstick of an engine ... but what a chilling isle Sodor is."

"What if men had periods? It's a question worth posing"

"Democracy is a religion that has failed the poor"

"The country is screwed, the electorate is evil, but here are nine reasons to be cheerful"

"The week in patriarchy: take a moment to step away for survival"

"Did you weep watching Wonder Woman? You weren't alone"

"Remember when men and women could be friends? Republicans don't"

"Why the mediocre male's days may be numbered"

etc etc.

Care to go through each headline and explain your issues with each? I don't see any extreme or unreasonable views in the list you've posted.

Seriously? I really shouldn't have to explain this. If you don't see any extreme or unreasonable views there, I hate to tell you this, but you're probably unreasonable and extreme yourself, without even realising it.

Just try a simple thought experiment: invert the genders or skin colours in the headlines and see how they sound.

"The Blackness Project will make you wince. Because black people can be really awful"

Does that not sound extremely racist to you?

"Why the mediocre woman's days may be numbered"

It's a statement of pure sexism. The article, in case you care, is about how much men suck. Try publishing the same article with men and women swapped around and see what your progressive Facebook friends think.

"The country is screwed, the electorate is evil, but here are nine reasons to be cheerful"

I don't think it is possible to make a more extreme statement than this. You can't go bigger than the entire country (short of going to the entire world I guess), and you can't go worse than "evil". So describing the entire voting population of an entire country as evil is pretty much the definition of extreme.

Note that thinking democracy is awful and ordinary people around you are evil has a historical correlation with murderous extremism. It's like the classical warning sign that someone may be about to do something really bad.

>It's basically the Breitbart of the left

That's ridiculous.

The Guardian has been a mainstream newspaper for over 100 years. It is not a fringe publication, no matter how much you disagree with everything in it.

I'm sure that says more about your political leanings than it does about the Guardian (as if it even had one unified ideology behind it, which it doesn't).

Yea Breitbart is on another level, doesn't even make sense to compare them.