Bill Allowing Big Tech to Form “Techno-Governments” to Be Announced Today
thedebrief.org
thedebrief.org
> Las Vegas Review-Journal reports Blockchains, LLC gave $50,000 to a political action committee, Home Means Nevada, which managed Sisolak’s transition into office in January 2019. Campaign finance records also show the company donated $10,000 to Sisolak and his Republican opponent Adam Laxalt’s campaign in 2018.
> Records also show the company’s owner, Jeffrey Berns, personally gave $50,000 to the Nevada Democratic Party in 2019 and various donations ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 to various state lawmakers from both parties.
Looks like Nevada is $150.71/day or about $55k/year.
We really need to pay these people more so they don't need to supplement their pay through lobbying.
I am pretty pro-business and for small government but I think this is a bad idea all around. Why do we need this in the fist place? What is wrong with the old model of people getting together and agreeing to form their own government, why do companies need to be involved in the first place?
On a flip note, are governments not known to also have a history of psychopathic behavior?
Psychopathic behavior just comes with power, it seems.
* Local conditions may vary, contact your local election official for details on gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, and voter suppression. Offer may not be available in all areas.
It's the opposite, psychopath are attracted by power.
and I'm even planning to turn over all of my assets into a non profit in 3 years. But I can still feel the greed.
Maybe your are both (a psychopath and corrupt) but for one of those points you aren't responsible (the sickness NOT the possible actions).
I have never met anybody else who was wealthy or powerful deny that temptation is there - historic literature is rife with the same sentiment.
BTW you are borderline:
I wrote:
It's the opposite, psychopath are attracted by power.
Your Answer:
>I recognize in myself that power corrupts me. For example, now that I’m rich - I don’t see the poor as being equal to me.
I'm rich others are poor, right out of consent just to tell others your are rich (show your power) but actually not a bad person (manipulate).
then:
>Please keep your diagnosis to yourself - it will benefit you and those who love you.
"Please keep your diagnosis to yourself - it will benefit you and" again a threat or show your power "those who love you" but i am actually not a bad person, that ticktok from threat to manipulation is the exact pattern of a psychopath.
>I have never met anybody else who was wealthy or powerful deny that temptation is there - historic literature is rife with the same sentiment.
No one said anything against that. And again "never met anybody else who was wealthy or powerful deny that temptation is there" i know lots of powerful people. "historic literature is rife with the same sentiment" i am so powerful i should compare myself to historic literature.
Communism or capitalism, you see human faults in both.
Corporations are nearly by definition going to exhibit psychopathic behaviour, simply because acting in the interests of their workers or other people can legally only happen if it's compatible with the interest of shareholders.
A government is at least capable of acting in the interests of its citizens, even if it doesn't always do that.
If you look up company towns, their level of corruption make the mafia look like saints.
People formed gov is no where perfect, but it's a fuckton better than company formed govs.
Corporations aren't (generally) permitted to directly engage in violence. The defining characteristic of a government that distinguishes it from all other groups of people is that it claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
If corporations were sovereign, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they participated in comparable levels of violence.
I think the corporation versus government phrasing is obscuring the underlying problem of power without accountability to the people. That’s going to end poorly no matter the exact relationship between the private and public sectors.
Though I'm sure the complexities of conflict make for a mixed bag of such overlapping actors and rationales...!
I'm prepared to walk this thought back btw.
The CCP is a government, as was the USSR, as is the USA.
I'll take Google antispam algorithms going haywire and suspending my electric power or fiber account and providing zero recourse to human support over a Great Leap Forward or a continent-wide Genocide any day of the fuckin' week.
Government is literally an institution grounded in collective welfare (albeit imperfect instantiations of this goal). Google has NO SUCH directive, and the only reasons we don't see companies doing worse (at least not since East India Company times) is because the very container you criticize has enough power to keep it anchored to ostensibly human values.
We can just agree to disagree here, if you are truly deep in the anti-government camp (because I am pretty entrenched in the unfolding repair narratives of government, not disposal narratives)
EDIT: Reworded to use less provocative language. Sorry if you read v1
Corporations will absolutely use violence if not constrained by the state. I trust a democratically elected government much then a random board of directors.
People form governments all the damn time, most often municipal corporations.
I’m not a fan of this new wave of interest in company towns, but the worst aspect of them was company scrip and that was outlawed by Congress. Still, cities are an emergent phenomenon, cities that you can call cities and not just cities on paper. You can’t plant a few skyscrapers in the ground and call it a day.
I try to explore the anarchist leaning ideas with an open mind since I see the problems with government, but in a way, maybe I'm just a square but my reasoning always comes back to government.
First I start with ok, I like my water drinkable and my food not poisoned, I do like my roads to go around, ok but smaller entities could regulate it, cool, but now we have thousands if not millions of entities regulating this in their own manner, wouldn't it be cool to have a standard? not too mention that some of this smaller entities would have a real hard time if they don't have enough resources that a central entity would distribute more fairly?
It always seems to start from the basis of every actor will collaborate, what if the river I need for water is right outside the border from my smaller entity? is they only option war?
Speaking of war, if we have all small entities that are peaceful amongst them but a couple of them decide they want more group and invade this smaller entities for their resources, maybe we could start an organization that unites the smaller entities together so we can defend against them, sounds familiar? looks like the history of mankind, and again it always seems to go back to government.
My view is that it sounds like a nice idea to tend towards but not possible to instill unless we're on a situation where there's literally nothing to be gained by being a bad actor, and to be honest, I can't again visualize this scenario, how can there be nothing to be gained? It sounds to start terrible, nothing to aspire to?
Again, I'd like to point out that you shouldn't get me started on the abuses of government and the injustices that it brings, but I just can't get my head out of what seem to be a necessary evil unless you are starting from basis that seem just counter to what human nature is.
I'm more than open to being convinced otherwise since the idea sounds so good in so many regards.
What I'd like to see implemented is a city government formed as a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) into which city taxes went, and for which the owners are the inhabitants of the city. The security would need to be set up much better than the DAO corporation was for this to work though.
There are a lot of thorny issues to be resolved beside security too. For example, if you make owners be the taxpayers, you excluding population segments (many students, those earning less than the poverty line, etc.). If instead you have ownership be based on mandatory buy in when people move to the city, that creates other problems, including two classes of citizenship within the city (owners and not-owners).
I still think a DAC (Distributed Autonomous Community) is viable and possibly a good idea though. I just don't want to see it under a Board of Directors control, or individual control. Because.. "You know that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that's not where you want to be."
Does this achieve anything other than simply giving companies more power? Time will tell. If anything we need to go in the other direction - allow people to have the same powers as large companies, not large companies having the power of governments.
This doesn't get into the new veil of secrecy tech giants will be given. That's going to create an even bigger hurdle for whistle blowers and investigators to stop tech giants from hijacking both the economy and public discourse.
What's that I smell from clear across the country? Smells like large stacks of undeclared cash in envelopes traded hands. I wonder where that smell is coming from? We all know the history of Vegas and the state of Nevada is the epitome of law, honor and corruption busting practices.
Company towns have never worked! This is bullshit! Am I the only one that reads history books or am I taking crazy pills!?!?
I forsee Dystopia County's tax collection office will be led by Santa since he's so good at maintaining lists.
You really dont think that when an inch is given, they're not going to take a mile? It's a "company town". Look up the history of that shit. It has never worked to the benefit of the people. It's a massive source of corruption and profiteering. The current tech generation's philosophy is "break things fast". Why is everyone willing to ignore that just because these people say, "we like engineers" but in the background are just as money greedy as the old school oil tycoons?
On one hand, will be interesting to see if private entities can run government better than public ones, and if so then the road to there may just be a matter of time as lobbying, voters voting with their feet and money, and public messaging takes hold.
Any jurisdictional zones so set up would be green-field projects, entirely opt-in from the start.
The county mentioned in the article where this seems to most likely result in a project only has 4000 people in it.
I'm excited to see what, if any, experimentation results from this.
("We already tried this, they are called company towns" is not a clever or insightful take.)
Why not? That’s what it is.
Even if you just focus on the idea that a company town had a single employer for in-person work, and now we work online for anyone via the internet, this doesn't even have the basic parallels.
They aren't establishing a new country, just like everyone else in Nevada they are subject to state and US federal law.
I think we've all read about ‘The Stanford Prison Experiment’ and how that ended.
Maybe something useful will come out of it and I am definitely in support of thinking outside of the box. But there are probably some major downsides to this...
I think my biggest hang up is the draft proposal that allows the formation of the defacto county commissioners to be chosen by the companies. But like the article says, the draft could change, so the final proposal might not be the same. I think if they were elected from citizens I'd be a lot more excited.
Philadelphia is 400+ years old. If we had just put away 1% a year of our budget into a endowment, we would be making more money on it each year than our entire yearly budget. Cities are long lived, but the financial side of it is so short lived because there's no city-state, there's no expectation that the city needs to be able to bail itself out. We're always looking for state and federal funds.
It's a shame, Philadelphia could be the nicest, richest city in the world if we had something just like this.
It's about the fact that they have additional incentives that are directly related to what the people in a certain jurisdiction want that are missing for a company.
> "We already tried this, they are called company towns" is not a clever or insightful take.
That's not a clever or insightful dismissal.
Do you think we'll get some theme parks out of this?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Distri...
It is, however, an accurate one you can’t simply breezily dismiss because you don’t want to engage with it intellectually. This is no different in the power dynamic and will have similar failure modes in the absence of legal countermeasures: as the most obvious example, if you disagree with your boss you now have to worry about your kids being kicked out of school and losing your home at the same time. If they pay you in company block-scrip, they control the rates and where you can redeem it. You might naively think that having internet access helps but that’s assuming that the company-approved ISPs allow full unfettered access and don’t have terms of service banning unapproved usage.
Again, none of this is certain but history and other parts of the world show that it’s likely to happen to some extent if companies are granted power without strict democratic oversight. Just think about how companies have asserted their right to control who you sleep with, what family planning choices you should make, which political party you support, etc. Giving them more power will not make those intrusions less likely.
> uninhabited
Yes, by humans... and. There probably were natives there. Until we killed them.
AND. Otherwise... It's inhabited by billions of organisms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Distri...
I mean even assuming good intentions ( and I do not ), the road to hell is often paved with them. I just do not know how that would end well.
It's literally been done, didn't work, and we moved on. Let's try a new idea instead?
Could a "techno-government" go to war with another? And if so, what would that look like?
Could TikTok make its own corporate city?