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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

weird days. a lot of complainy people conflating government authoritarianism with the activity of private entities/personal citizens. this is mirrored in the right's complaints about private services "censoring" them, as if we are citizen's under their power & protection. similarly a bunch of people lambasting you online being conflated with government/state use of power against you... wild days.

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They are absolutely not complaining about private citizens lambasting them online. It's entrenched monopolies in cooperation with the state itself that work to ruin right-wing (and left-wing in the case of TERFs, Deep Greens, etc.) dissidents' lives and deny their ability to speak. For instance, banks are closing their accounts for opposing the status quo. Banking is so strictly regulated, incestuous, and intertwined with the state that innovation is notoriously difficult; and innovation from an explicitly adversarial entity with no institutional support is nearly impossible.

What's more, if one lives in a red state surrounded by people similar to them on the political spectrum, they'll still have their employers harassed to keep them from holding down a job. It's not their peers "cancelling" them; it's a minority of people with wildly different worldviews from wildly different parts of the country. It's not all that different from swatting.

The scale of these problems seems way way way out of line with how concerned people are about it, to me. I simply do not think this is a widescale problem. I think people want to be outraged.

> It's entrenched monopolies

Agreed, huge huge problem here. Anti-trust is way way way way over-due. I also think without Competitive (inter)Compatibility (comcom) rules, it is unlikely to be effective at allowing new things to get going.

> in cooperation with the state

Uhhhh I see zero evidence of this at all. Zilch. Nothing. Nada. Not a single thing.

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