I agree corporations don’t claim certain rights that governments do at present - the right to kill citizens (sometimes without trial), the right to tax their income (though they do impose transaction taxes). So they are limited at present but not so much as you imply.
Information is powerful and exerts huge control over our lives.
Indeed how did nation states get their legitimacy? They took it by force and impose it by force on those who disagree.
There is nothing natural or immutable about our current power structures or nation states.
But at the end of the day, even if FAANG help the government do a bad thing, it’s still the government doing a bad thing. Making FAANG the primary focus of our ire enables the government to continue to do those same bad things. And the bad things FAANG can do pale in comparison to what the government can and does do.
Again, it’s not a binary choice. But it’s why some people worry more about the government than large corporations.
To be clear, i agree it's not a binary choice and considerable amounts of bad things come out of governments too. Or if you like memes, you may enjoy: https://i.imgur.com/CkOr542.jpg
Corporations control the government.
The bad things that corporations do are much more immediate and common.
When a government does something bad, in practice it is often just failing to protect people from corporations. For example, the parent mentioned providing clean air and water; however, the most likely scenario where that doesn't happen is a corporation polluting the environment.
When the government does bad things (or more commonly fails to prevent bad things from happening), the consequences tend to correlate with inequality.
On the other hand, others see this power and want to use it. Thus recently we see a lot of "they are a private company, they can do whatever they want" when somebody likes how they handle some situation and "they have become too powerful, they need to be regulated" when somebody doesn't like that. This is a kind of a game where whoever makes facebook do their bidding wins, and facebook itself is reduced to maneuvering between various demands and interests without much agency of their own. That's quite scary as well.
My guess is this will end up with some kind of quasi-censorship regime, "voluntarily" installed by facebook (because, you know, first amendment), so that they can continue to collect their ad dollars unmolested. The beginnings are already there - various fact-checkers etc.
It's basically the same argument that the people making tools available have no responsibility for what users do with them (which is BS). The tools of misinformation are out there and being widely used and Facebook made them available. It's important that they take responsibility for that.
Now if Facebook promotes division and misinformation... just because you don't log onto Facebook, doesn't mean it has no impact on your life.
Also, technically Adobe killed Flash, not Apple. Adobe could have liberated the technology at any point to address Apple's issue, or continued without iOS support. Adobe decided to pull the plug because they're a greedy evil corporation like any other and don't care that people depend on things or create cool stuff with those tools.
Maybe I misread the ending of the article and that the author meant that we should worry about the centralization of any org, and more so about the centralization of government orgs.
fwiw, that’s what I got out of it.
Maybe what hit me harder was the last line and the presumption that 1) it is a historic increase in the scale and depth of government management of society and 2) that we are also not seeing a large amount of corporate centralization. Maybe I perceive more corporate centralization than government centralization, as platforms have hundreds of millions or billions of users across 100+ countries, and I recall my 2005 political science class talking about the rising influence of multinational companies over nation-state governments.
Previously, governments had an area of influence of roughly a few days travel from their centers of power: their area of influence was as large as their army's capacity to crush dissent. It's a "new" development in the history of humanity that you cannot be safe anywhere on earth: even in a remote forest/mountain, the government can come and massacre your community very quickly.
(In most countries, they'll most likely just tear down your houses [0] and imprison you, because that's less likely to cause popular uproar)
[0] Even a pretend democracy like France has strong regulations mandating to break people's homes. And french police/préfets are very involved in persecuting ethnic minorities (eg. Rroma people) and other "light housing" folks.
A while ago there was a thread here on HN about how WhatsApp had got quite big in Brazil. The particular thing I remember was that apparently, in some school districts, you'd have to be on WhatsApp to get information about your kids' school. If not mistaken, this was at the time when the new privacy policy was being rolled out, with threats of being cut off from the service if you didn't accept it.
The school can only communicate via so many platforms, and they're likely to choose the biggest ones in their area. So when you're banned, or for some other reason can't or won't go on them, then it's a problem.
Of course, the bigger point is that maybe this kind of services shouldn't transit only through social media but should be available in an open way, but I won't hold my breath, at least for the time being.
You suggest that life without _any_ social networking platform would be bad. All of human history before Y2K would suggest otherwise.
There are lots of ways (even on the Internet) to socially network without using Facebook (or whoever you currently think of as a Facebook compeditor).
Or, dare I suggest it, socialising without the Internet?
I haven’t used my Facebook (that I made in like 2007) in a few years, and I finally got around to deactivating it a week ago.
Doing so was painless—it’s all voluntary, of course, and I have plenty of (healthier) avenues to maintain relationships with my friends and family.
But the same doesn’t apply to my country! I can’t painlessly “deactivate” my citizenship and be rid of the government whenever it does something bad.
De-Googling your life is annoying, but not impossible. De-United-States-ifying your life is… way different :)
Prior to centralized social networks, there were _many_ tools that have been abandoned since. For instance, you would have smaller internet boards dedicated to a specific hobby or a geographic area (many of these died out). Before that, you had fanzines, local community congregation points like bars and such. But those either disappeared, or their use changed (e.g. bars as a point to meet existing friends rather than to make new acquaintances).
It is a common pattern for new technologies to displace existing tools, which means that people refusing the new technology usually end up in a worse situation than before the technology appeared.
In addition, socializing is often at least somewhat "competitive". If you are less able to network then you will be at a disadvantage when seeking a job. If you are more difficult to communicate with, then you are likely to be left out of group decisions; even if by accident. If you are advocating a political position, then not having access to the most popular communication platforms is a major handycap.
They may not be able to tax or put people in jail directly, but with lawyers, lobbyists, and DMCA takedowns they can achieve similar results.
They can hire lobbyists to affect government policy like immigration, environmental protections, and war.
I'm less concerned about what happens if Facebook fails than what happens if Facebook succeeds.
Note: "Facebook" used as a placeholder for any mega-corporation.
Dating sites that start out free then once they have captured the market squeeze it dry, LinkedIn does much the same, etc. etc.
If you cancel your LinkedIn or Tinder account, nobody is going to throw you in jail. Even if you just stop paying.
They’re wildly different.
The US Government isn’t the one providing your income.
Bouygues and Vinci can, siphoning off billions of public money into the pockets of the already insanely rich billionaires of the ruling class.
> They can’t tax me or put me in jail.
Corporations won't collect your taxes themselves, because the State's armed hand is here for that. They have a price tag on everything, and if you don't agree with their unjust rules and prices for basic services (food, electricity), cops will come and seize your belongings.
Many prisons across the globe are operated privately, and it's not unheard of to have private police. Many multinationals employ militias to kick away local inhabitants (to steal their resources/land), and get whistleblowers/activists/journalists murdered.
> They’re can’t put migrant children in cages or drone strike weddings.
Who builds the cages for children? Who benefits from quasi-slave labor due to strong anti-immigration laws? Who profits from selling drones and missiles to the military? Corporations, usually owned by people very close to the government.
> They’re not responsible for making sure our water and air are clean.
Corporations are responsible for polluting our air and water. Facebook, in particular, has enormous data centers just to archive/surveil everyone. Also corporations are sometimes responsible for maintenance of public infrastructure, which to my knowledge they never do well (see Veolia scandals in France for example).
> Facebook can’t Brexit. If Facebook fails, life goes on.
No, but they've got a propaganda apparatus sufficient to convince millions of people to.
> If my government fails, life is going to suck. A lot.
It doesn't have to, and could in fact be a great source of hope! Your government is the reason why life sucks in the first place. They are the people and institutions supposed to represent the people (cough cough) that enabled vampires to bleed the whole population dry in the first place, all the while polluting everything so that future generations won't even have clean water. Abolishing corrupt governments and any form of centralized power, which have shown time and time again to be useless to protect the weak against the powerful, could be the start of something better and more beautiful, an actual democracy without a center and without psychopaths running the show because nobody would hold power over somebody else (the actual definition of a democracy).
In fact, I would generalize more than the article’s thesis: “large organizations considered harmful”.
Any large organization, be it a company or a government or even an NGO, will inevitably lose efficiency as it grows larger, and will lose focus on its original purpose in favor of the purposes of the people with decision making power in the organization.
I find it interesting that people on the left in general tend to believe the worst of corporations and have more confidence in government, and people on the right have the reverse views in general.
In my opinion, both have some potential for tyranny; it’s just a little easier (not much) to deal with recalcitrant corporations, and sometimes you have a choice of corporations to interact with.
This is because they're competing coalitions. If you want to build a garbage F-35 for a trillion dollars*, the trillion dollars will come mostly from corporations and capitalists. If you want increased media consolidation and to keep your Hollywood movie studio cartel protected from competition by upstarts, you want regulatory capture and a lot of international treaties to launder your draconian copyright laws through, i.e. less government antitrust enforcement and less government autonomy.
*This is, in actual fact, an underestimate. Somehow.
Both of those things are bad, but the people who want them both want to control the government in order to institute them. The beneficiaries of having the government not do either of those bad things would be the public at large. They're diffuse and unable to effectively organize, so there is no political party representing them.
And notice that I just provided an example of "the right" wanting wasteful central government spending and "the left" acting in the interests of multi-billion dollar corporations. Because they're not principled ideologies, they're heterogeneous opposing political coalitions.
I can dream right? Imagine this: Rather than a basic income or a salary in fiat issue some kind of shares to the employees/citizens. You need 100 to get a full vote (50 for half etc) and you get dividend for each share.
If the value of the share declines (as we keep issuing new ones) the amount issued and the amount needed for a full vote are gradually increased and the dividend decreases.
Then, rather than a single vote for someone you also get a single vote against someone so that popularity alone doesn't win elections.
Have a very simple certificate that one must obtain in order to vote that teaches the absolute bare minimum about each candidate.
Finally, lets no do single elections but allow people to change their vote whenever they like with a higher amount of votes required for getting in than for getting out.
But they do control the soapbox. They can simply silence you, without any due process. They can divorce you from your social network.
It’s not that Facebook can’t do bad things, it’s just that there are reasons why you might be more worried about the government doing bad things and therefore talk about it more (like in the article).
Yet governments are directed by citizens through a democratic process unless they are dictatorships.
Workers and customers don't vote in private companies. They function as dictatorships.
If propaganda and manipulation was a weapon, Facebook would be a social nuclear bomb.
Which is to say that Facebook effectively acts as a government agency (maybe they could call it the "Ministry of Truth"?)
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/biden-administrations-admission-the...