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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

The tech companies (and large business in general) can be viewed as a threat to their power, so they take action.

-edit-

Just to be clear because I've seen some comments after mine. I'm not advocating for a position, but just stating what I believe is happening. FWIW I'm more inclined to think that neutering tech companies is beneficial, but open to arguments and nuance.

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That's... generally how governments should work, no? The government should not let private entities undermine it's power.

Not as an absolute. Speaking broadly, outside of this specific context, it seems obvious to me that systems which are sufficiently dysfunctional should cede their power to a better system.

In the US at least, this is laid out at the very beginning of the Declaration of Independence:

> That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government

Bringing the context back in to this discussion, I don't have a strong opinion. The power the tech companies wield is scary indeed, but the amount of political dysfunction is also pretty scary.

I suppose, since they are equally scary to me, that I'd prefer them to have equal power to act as a check against each other?

Just to be clear I'm not really advocating for a position here, just stating what I think is going on.

But with that being said, yea I agree with you here in theory. But it's exceedingly difficult for me to not be skeptical about it when I think about it as a power struggle between a Congresswoman and a tech company over who gets to fuck me over.

Yeah, there wasn't any language that indicated you were taking a side.

The thing is, at least the Congresswomen is democratically elected and (in theory) serves the interest of their constituents. Whereas a company serves the interest of it's shareholders, by law, so well-being of it's customers and even employees is secondary to it's legal mandate for profit.

Is there a particular reason why it's women in Congress who make you skeptical? Is there some context I'm missing here?

I just try to use the terms interchangeably in hypothetical scenarios so that there isn't a sense of normal association. Sometimes I use Congressman, sometimes Congresswoman. Sometimes I use Congressperson as well. I think if people are noticing then that's a clear sign to keep doing it, because you probably had a prior bias that the person doing something wrong would have been a man.

“Congressmember” in the generic and “Representative” and “Senator” for the specific houses are widely accepted (standard and formally preferred for the house-specific ones) and gender neutral.

Yes, thank you for that. I'm specifically not using gender-neutral terms in this instance, actually. The goal is to muddy the associations that exist and unfortunately gender-neutral terms are unable to do that. They definitely have a time and place for use, though, and I do use them when I think it makes sense to.

Interesting approach, but what it reads like is that you are intentionally gendering the term for some purpose. I was trying to figure out if you meant Senator Warren specifically, because she has been behind a lot of this discussion.

You might be confusing your audience more than you are accomplishing your other objective.

Hey thanks for the feedback. Yea you're right that I was intentionally gendering the term here. My goal was to have someone notice that I used Congresswoman in a negative context.

But I definitely appreciate your comment here and it's something I'll continue to evaluate. On one hand it's shouting into the void. On the other... well... it's probably still shouting into the void.

On the third hand, you’re deliberately using sexist language to … secretly fight sexism? I think a continued evaluation is indeed in order.

Hmmm. Could you specify what sexist language I’m using? That’s quite the accusation.

> I was intentionally gendering the term here. My goal was to have someone notice that I used Congresswoman in a negative context.

The proper generic term is obviously "Congresscritter".

It's just generally a surprise when the Republicans actually do their job.

Ha. Depends on how you define what their job is supposed to be. :P

Wouldn't you want power to stay with elected officials who can be removed from office by the public rather than a private business that's primarily motivated by profit and only answers to shareholders.

That sounds good in theory but I think in practice, at least in the relatively broken representative system in the US, I'm not so sure.

Consider that politicians often operate against the will of ~49% of their constituents. As long as they can maintain a majority, they don't care as much about the minority. I don't think a company, operating in a healthy non-monopolized marketplace, would be as willing to lose 49% of their customers.

Depends on which kind of accountability is more necessary. In the same way that people buy good cheap stuff that works well from Satan himself, they also vote for their ideological allies whether or not public services are within a thousand miles of functioning.

When it is over what is a means of accountability for them (it is the media and not the tech which draws the aggro)? Fuck no - they already forget they are servants and not masters.

in theory, yes. in practice, I'd rather be a customer than a constituent.

comments like above are reminders of how strong libertarianism is in tech circles, for better or worse

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