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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

I also used to think that the dystopia of the future was corporations use money, power, convenience, and AI brainwashing to control people in a democracy.

Now I am afraid, it will be something far older and far worse: just straight up state autocracy enforced by people with guns/weapons.

Look at Texas. Who cares about using differential targeting of voters when you can just disenfranchise groups that are likely to vote against you. And as January 6, came so close to showing, who care who people actually vote if you can cry “fraud” and physically intimidate the people in charge of certifying the votes.

The Chinese government isn’t intimidated by the market reach of Alibaba when they can physically threaten Jack Ma and makes sure he only does what he is supposed to.

Analogous to the xkcd cartoon and the $5 wrench, many times the tool of coercion is not some multimillion dollar GPU cluster running advanced AI, it is a 50 cent bullet.

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I'd say that's the reasoning for states and countries to begin with; the group with the bigger stick.

What you're witnessing is people desiring to be outside of what is acceptable to those inside. The basis of that whole Jan6 debacle was that they felt the state (is: vote counting) did them wrong, and so they don't want to be in that group.

One group, state, country, splits into many others, where each now feel protected better by their in-group. It's a common thread throughout history.

To add, I'm not American, but if I saw the same graph spikes in my election I'd probably do the same, regardless of candidates.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-afs:Content:9647421...

why? the explanation is entirely reasonable and was expected beforehand

That the behavior that FiveThirtyEight themselves said to expect actually happened? The Republican state legislatures engineered it to happen this way and then acted with mock surprise when their system functioned as expected.

The Republican base was taken for a ride and they didn't even realize it.

> But Wisconsin law requires that the results of those absentee votes be reported all at once, Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe explained Wednesday.

If that graph didn't have a big spike for Milwaukee's absentee ballots, it would be a sign of something nefarious.

You can look at the charts and there are spikes for Trump as well depending on area.

Urban cores vote overwhelmingly democrat and it takes longer to tally those votes than podunk villages. Somehow, in 2020, people thought this was a controversy.

Most of the comments here read like the worst of Facebook and /pol/ "experts" came together. Jesus.

Regarding Jan 6, I think you have it exactly backwards.

If the 50 cent bullet was the tool of coercion for the future the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War. The Soviets lost not because they could not produce enough bullets, but because they could not keep up with the rapid advance of information technology, computer chips, processors, and supercomputers.

China leverages its vast market power to coerce American high tech companies to provide it with the latest technology if they want to conduct business in the People's Republic. China's power is market power, it is the power to request that Google censor news that is harmful to the Communist Party. It is the power to ask Hollywood studios not put the small flag of Taiwan on Tom Cruise's bomber jacket in the new Top Gun movie. The Chinese now have more supercomputers than the United States (188 to 122), and for a few years, they had the fastest supercomputer in the world. These computers allow nations to simulate everything from the weather to nuclear detonations.

At the end of the day, China understands better than anyone that control in the future is control over information, not tanks, aircraft carriers, or nuclear tipped ICBMs.

For the first three decades of China’s “opening up”, what they had was not coercive market power but incredibly cheap labor on a huge scale and a stable, pro-business government. And what that government did was to play the long game of requiring all foreign businesses wishing to take advantage of the huge, cheap labor force to do so through joint ventures with domestic companies. For the Chinese people, this was exactly the right move, because foreign businesses would never have voluntarily enriched the Chinese labor force and thus driven up their own costs. China is where it is today because, while the Western companies were planning on the scale of quarters, they were looking decades down the road. However, the rest of the world is finally waking up, and China still has tremendous internal structural challenges to sustaining its growth. So whether China will become a dominant force globally still remains to be seen.

Citing Chomsky, the media in a democratic state has the same function as the police baton in an autocratic state.

Agreed, except that companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon are orders of magnitude more powerful than traditional media companies. Keep in mind that Google and Facebook are the gateway to the internet for the vast majority of users. If Facebook erases news, a vast majority of people may never know it happened.

If Google orders search results that highlight whatever it likes on the first page, and buries what it does not on the 10th page, people's understanding of the issues will be severely skewed. We are talking about companies that have the power to manipulate ideas and information orders of magnitude greater than anything in human history.

The top 4 biggest tv media networks are worth just 100 billion combined. That is just a small fraction of Facebook

Curious how you define “top 4 biggest media networks.” If you mean the traditional big 4 US networks (NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox) they’re mostly part of pretty large media conglomerates (i.e Disney, Comcast, Viacom) that are each smaller than FB by market cap, but by less than 1 order of magnitude.

I don’t agree with that. The media isn’t a violent arm of government. They, and the greater intelligentsia, are more like a priesthood. They indoctrinate us regular folk with state-approved myths to give context and framing for our world view and in so doing a veneer of legitimacy to rulers. Similarly, they are almost completely dependent on wealthy patrons. Egyptian priests, the Roman Imperial cults, the Medieval church, Communist Dialecticians and their modern progressive successors all do about the same thing. I think the police are just the police and whether or not they’re illegitimate depends on what you think about the Mandate of Heaven, Divine Right of Kings, or Trusting the Science.

I find Chomsky’s critique of his fellows amusing, given that he is a member of that population he considers illegitimate.

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