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Comment by beckman466 | Hacker News Reader

Google introduces $50 4G smartphone to enable billions of people to get spied on and to use black box Silicon Valley tech that will continue to plunder the commons and continue to commoditize science and technology*

There, fixed the title.

This has little to nothing to do with helping people in the Global South, it is a calculated investment by Google/Alphabet.

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Google introduces $50 4G smartphone to enable billions of people to *get more ad revenue.

Yes, yet it doesn't identify the root cause of the rot of this current system though, which is the complete commoditization and monopolization of science and technology.

If you are working class and you live in the global south today, your life is often already a living hell because of this [1]. This flavor of hell will slowly 'trickle up' to the north as more and more spaces of the commons are plundered through imperialism, increasing inequality while more and more members of the working class become alienated.

[1] https://anthempress.com/kicking-away-the-ladder-pb

Can we agree that MSGOOGLEAPPLE are defacto arms of governments? If the USGOV wasn't getting what they want from them, they would have been broken up a long time ago (antitrust). China would kick manufacturing out.

...and then also things like Y Combinator being one of the recruitment arms for this US empire (alongside all the US universities like Stanford, MIT, etc.) - luring technologists and scientists from other countries in, in order to capture and monopolize new advances and adding these innovations to the US portfolio as part of the supposedly neutral US-led 'intellectual property' regime (WIPO, TRIPS, etc.) [1].

Of course this is nothing new. This is one of my favorite scenes in Good Will Hunting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJHvSp9AKYg

I am against any system that aims to make knowledge artificially scarce and monopolizes parts of our collective human inheritance (all of humanity's scientific and technological discoveries). I am for new systems which respect both our world's 1) actual material scarcity (natural resources, human labor, etc.) and 2) it's immaterial abundance (any knowledge/resources that can be replicated by (digital) technology).

[1] Against Rentier Capitalism: David Graeber, Michael Hudson & Guy Standing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rlIXAUGans&t=944s

Oh noes! Better to stay without connection then.

Or buy Chinese phones, they offer more bang for the buck.

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