Silicon Values
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This is a very Canadian take.
I wouldn't consider most workplaces I've been in totalitarian - though maybe you've lived in some pretty nice totalitarian countries I'm not aware of. But I also don't see why customers shouldn't demand what they care about from companies.
Do you have any say in employee perks/benefits? I mean a real say, not preferences which are allowed by some benevolent analyst from HR.
If the CEO goes rogue and the company is private, can rank-and-file employees oust them?
Can you vote out your manager or your manager's manager? Is there even a process in place to do that?
Do you follow orders from management? What happens if you don't?
What happens if you disobey your manager in a public setting?
Can you get fired without notice? How about laid off?
Can you get fired because you said something?
Do you have a dresscode? What would happen to your employment if you dressed like a clown in customer meetings?
Do you risk getting fired if you start talking about unionizing?
Do you get fired if you sue the company?
Can you bring a gun to work?
Does your employee handbook say something about how your run your personal life? Does your employer have rights over IP created outside of working hours? Can you get fired over a DUI outside of company hours? Can you get fired for smoking cigarettes in your free time?
etc..
Some literature for you: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32889465-private-governm...
Yes I'm aware that corporations set up a legal hierarchy in which management has more power than labor within the corporation. I'm not going to go through your specific questions one by one, since they're largely rhetorical, though some of them don't have the answer you hope for. Some people seem to interpret the lack of formal, democratic processes with a totalitarian dictatorship. I've personally witnessed the firing of C-suite execs in response to employee revolts.
A totalitarian system requires complete subservience. Depending on your position in the labor market, your leverage may vary. My objection isn't to the notion that the employer-employee power balance is lopsided in many cases, to the point where some sectors of the economy are exploitative, but rather that an office by it's nature is akin to a totalitarian dictatorship. Maybe you're just using that phrase for effect, or maybe you genuinely think that working at Google and living in Egypt under President Mubarak is a good comparison. To me it comes off as a bit out of touch.
> maybe you genuinely think that working at Google and living in Egypt under President Mubarak is a good comparison
Nice way of picking two extremes to make a point. Also, not sure what you're comparing here. Nobody is gonna kill you at Google. You can get fired though (which is more or less like some sort of corporate execution or something) and if you're at the wrong end of a recession you're gonna have a bad time.
Fine then, it seems I struck a nerve here. How about authoritarian? Is that better? And maybe Russia instead of Egypt. Would that be more palatable?
I did live under a totalitarian government myself. And to be honest, I see a lot of the behaviors I grew up with, in the current corporate culture (at least in the US). Do I live a better life? Sure, of course, there's no doubt about it. But that's solely because I submit to that culture. But I will be kicked off the gravy train at the first sign of dissent (same as under said dictatorship).
I'm picking extremes because the OP made a blanket statement about life in workplaces. They didn't say, life as an Amazon warehouse worker is exploitative for example. The statement was extreme to begin with. There are lots of different types of workplaces in America. You didn't really strike a nerve beyond I guess that I'm not a huge fan of hyperbole / sloppy language.
I don't really think you'll get kicked off the gravy train if you dissent at all. There's a good bit of anti-capitalism, "tear down the system" type talk in tech. That said, I agree with you that corporations are not democratic organizations.
My first corporate job was as a cashier at a grocery store. Yes, if I refused to wear the uniform, or ring up customers when they stood in my line, I'd probably be written up and after 3 write ups, fired. I guess you could call that authoritarian. I don't see how it gets you much though.
You're the one claiming "totalitarian". But when someone brings in real totalitarian, you say "hey, that's too extreme". Um, yeah, that's the point. Your claim of "totalitarian" is a bogus over-the-top rhetorical flourish, and you have now pretty much agreed that it is.
I was referring to the comparison itself to be extreme. There's a difference.
Can you define your view on what totalitarianism means? And please don't use countries as examples. I think there's a disconnect here and people are arguing semantics and language accuracy while missing the original point, which still stands.
So if you've got a definition where your claim makes sense, state it. Then we can argue about whether your definition is reasonable. My definition is a distraction. (I don't know whether you were trying for a distraction or not, but my definition isn't the point.)
Based on Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich, totalitarianism has 6 characteristics which makes it a particular extreme form of authoritarianism. The definitions relate to state level politics, so I agree it's a bit of a stretch to extrapolate it to how a modern corporation is run, but here we go:
- all-encompassing ideology
I think this pretty much rolls up to a core mission (which everyone needs to work on pushing forward. You also don't get to pick the core mission, it is a top-down approach) and what people call 'culture'. Some companies are more hardcore when it comes to enforcing and maintaining the culture and mission by hiring based on 'culture fit' and by weeding out renegades. This is also something often brought up during conflicts: 'what is our mission? what are we working towards?' and used in contexts when it's less appropriate. For example a company using stack ranking for employee performance, using the same philosophy when dealing with external vendors. I will not bring up other divisive aspects of corporate ideologies which cross boundaries into wedge politics. The ideology has a great way of self-enforcing, but having people police each other.
- a single party
Well, there are no parties per se in megacorp. Maybe factions? This doesn't really fit well here as there's no direct correspondence so I agree this would be a total stretch.
- a terroristic police
Well, not really. But the oppression is still there and you'd know if you ever crossed the line when it comes to compliance. Nobody is waking you up in the middle of the night to push you inside a black Volga car and execute you in a back alley. But someone can schedule a random meeting out of the blue to tell you that your services are no longer needed. The company will always put on a friendly face until shit hits the fan. I remember once I got an email from a department I didn't even knew existed that I'll be terminated by the end of the day if I didn't provide a photocopy of some document. This is a very successful approach as most people during regular work don't even know it exists. Also, hands up anyone who's been walked out with security after getting fired. I think it's also fair to remind everyone of how Facebook handles whistleblowers or how Amazon handles union efforts (they're even hiring Pinkertons. Pinkertons!!).
- a communications monopoly
Again, it's not like you're not free to read news. But I bet all company news discussed OFFICIALLY at work comes from one source and one source only. And with current events (say the company is going through something bad) you'll be notified about exactly what to say going forward relative to the events.
- a weapons monopoly
This doesn't really apply as weapons are off-topic when it comes to workplaces. BUT let's extrapolate it to trade tools/software/equipment. Except for when I was a contractor (and even then I had limits), I always had a list of 'approved' tools or list of stuff I was never ever supposed to use on premise (usually stuff from the competition).
- a centrally directed economy
This one is obvious. Nobody can deny that most companies use some form of central planning.
Now of course, there is a spectrum here. It's never binary and some states are taking it further to the extreme. For example dissidents can be just ousted from positions of power but still be able to live a normal life all the way to getting shot in the back of the head. That's why fascist Italy is different than Putin's Russia or North Korea under Jong-il or under Jong-un. Not all aspects of totalitarianism are enforced using violence. Some are enforced by social norms or by people explicitly drinking the kool-aid to have a better life. Believe it or not, some people actually want totalitarianism. This is why I'm saying that some comparisons may be more extreme.
I know and understand that 'totalitarianism' sends people directly into the violent oppression mindset. But oppression is not always violent and most of the times it doesn't even feel like oppression.
Is there something I'm missing? I think we don't have to go over authoritarianism as I see people agree on that and most had a problem with 'totalitarianism' as a term.
- all-encompassing ideology
Maybe a lot of startups fit this bill, but most jobs people just come, do their work, and go home. They couldn't give two shits about the ideology. Startups are different cause you need people to work really hard / sacrifice and mission helps with that.
- a single party
you agree this doesn't work
- a terroristic police
sounds like you agree this is a stretch. HR can be annoying but it isn't really terroristic.
- a communications monopoly
this isn't even remotely accurate. there are so many backchannels and secret meetings and company gossip is everywhere. especially now that we have slack.
- a centrally directed economy
most mature organizations have teams run their own P&L. in some places (Amazon) they even compete with each other, and have a market-type internal economy.
It's just a bad analogy. There ARE companies that run like totalitarian dictatorships, but I don't think it's the norm and it's not inherent in the model. There are other, and in my opinion much better, critiques of the corporate relationship with employees I'd start with first (I could talk at length about stock based compensation).
Edit:
I think there's a bigger flaw in your argument though that misses the forest for the trees. You can break things down into their constituent characteristics (or the ones you can see) and try to argue that because they share a lot of traits, those two things are the same, which is kind of what you're doing here. The reality is there is a subjective experience of a thing that is different. If the experience of working in a job doesn't feel like a totalitarian dictatorship, it seems it'd be wrong to tell people "no you actually are living under totalitarian rule, you just don't know it". Unless you think people are so acclimatized to corporate rule like a frog in water that they don't notice (which you might).
> Well, there are no parties per se in megacorp. Maybe factions? This doesn't really fit well here as there's no direct correspondence so I agree this would be a total stretch.
Actually, I can kind of give you this one. In a country, a single party means that I can't vote for a different set of policies. I can't vote for anyone not "in" with the current powers. In a company, if I want a different set of leadership, I can... um... get a job somewhere else.
At least in this respect, a company is totalitarian, but with open borders. It's when they don't let you quit that things get really nasty...
Where did you work where you could vote for the CEO?
[0] Not a judgement call, I think that is necessary given what they do and the risks they have to be ready to face the moment they are ordered to do so
Can’t relate
There's something to it. More people will be able to express themselves fully and openly if a tiny minority isn't screaming, throwing excrement, and/or threatening violence.
That said, I don't think free speech is a utilitarian principle (greatest good for the greatest number) but rather a deontological one, that it is wrong to muzzle an individuals right to express themselves as a first order effect. The author's argument describes second or nth order effects.
If one of the problems here is that the one-size-fits-all approach is dangerous and counterproductive in social networks, then it seems an experiment in local-only networks is worth investigating.
That's what church is. The experiment has been successful for at least 2,000 years.
Edit: upon reflection, the side-effects are probably contained in the etymology of the english adjective 'parochial'
In the faith, the joke is that all Catholics are "à la carte Catholics" to some degree or another. Many will even dismiss papal ex-cathedra statements that they don't like, even though papal infallibility is Catholic dogma.
I've always thought that churches should solicit people of the same general morality to participate, regardless of god-belief. As such, it's sad that there isn't something like a community church that filled this need for those of on the outside.
Speaking of admin privies, I can verify. I had a close friend many years ago who was a card-carrying member of the Church of Satan. He went on to become a Catholic priest, swear to God.
This sums up my feelings nicely. Western governments are quietly outsourcing surveillance to private companies. "Social credit" as a formal system may be limited to China, but between government, insurers, and employers using data from data brokers to make decisions about people in the west, we're not far from building our own ad-hoc version.
I am in favor of governments ruled by representatives elected by the people. Regulating markets to ensure healthy competition, without collusion or corruption.
Not sure where the laws of nature fit into the picture. Unless you subscribe to the view that might makes right.
Does the government need more money? Print it, and/or steal it from others with threats of violence (taxation). Does the government need more labor? Conscript and/or imprison people.
Even representative forms of government are subject to this behavior, as unfortunately the types of people who go into politics are still subject to seeking personal gain and exercising violent whims.
Might does not make right, and governments are the ones with more might than anyone.
We actually live beyond a time where this is possible. The political conditions of the US have basically deteriorated to where any meaningful regulation of corporations can't really happen because of the changing laws around how corporate contributions to political campaigns work. It actively hurts whichever political party attempts to regulate (by reducing finical contributions/increasing them to the other party or rivals in primaries who "stay in their lane".)
The only group who benefits from regulation are individuals who live in the country, which really isn't enough to get laws passed.
1. Corporate spending in politics has had negligible impact after Citizens United: https://www.nber.org/papers/w30352
2. These days, the ostensibly pro-business party(GOP) gets more of its money from individuals and SME donors than the Democratic party.
Your real problem is public opinion itself. The public in America simply trusts corporations over government institutions(except maybe the military). David Shor has great(but damning for progressives) analyses of this phenomenon.
EDIT: I'm a recentish immigrant, so help me out with this inconsistency: Why Democrats and not Democratics? Why Republicans and not Republics?
"Republican" and "Democratic" are modifying the noun "Party" when referring to the political organizations, so you use the adjective in those cases.
Republicans are members of the Republican party
Democrats are members of the Democrat party
Isn't that overstating the case?
I agree corporate lobbyists have an outsized and often harmful impact. But just recently we have seen California moving toward ending sales of gasoline-powered cars. Or at the federal level, greenhouse gasses are now legally a pollutant that the EPA can regulate. With just one more Democratic senator, we would have seen the end of the carried-interest loophole. And organized labor, which serves as an important check on corporate power, has been on the rise, in part due to Federal support.
I'll also note that places like Facebook, although not yet particularly regulated, are running scared from a lot of proposed legislation, and so are increasing transparency and reducing harm in hopes of heading it off. That too checks corporate power, and is a strong sign that they don't see themselves as untouchable.
Personally, although the challenges are large, I think there's a fair bit of cause for optimism.
It's also probably worth drawing distinctions around the different meanings of "corporate." The sense of "large for-profit, limited liability business entity" has eclipsed all other meanings, which is a shame.
I’ve run a US Senate campaign. We raised tens of millions of dollars, and I can confidently say that corporate donations made no impact in any policy decisions - on the campaign or the official side.
That extends to individual donations as well. The caps are ~$10,000 per couple. Considering the cost of a federal campaign, no person or corporation can buy a campaign when costs are in the tens of millions and contribution caps are in the thousands.
I mean, foreign language learning is great and I'd definitely encourage people to do it, but if your true goal is just to break out of whatever echo chamber of ideas you find yourself in, there's easier ways to go about it.
One analogy would be the 20th century. There are many ideologies and cultural movements that clashed against each other during that time, but it's still possible to develop a sense of fatigue about those events and the corresponding ideas, even if these ideas are at odds with each other in some major ways.
In both cases, it's probably easier to conceptualize if you aren't originally anglophone or didn't live most of your life during the 1900's.
So we have two mental models: (1) ubiquitous social media like YouTube is so large and important that it has become a public service, or (2) ubiquitous social media like YouTube is so large and dominant that it has become a monopoly.
The weird part about the "public service" argument is that it's hard to say I would ever want tax dollars funding "video distribution," while I don't have those qualms around distributing water and electricity. Content feels different to me. But maybe future generations will look back on that and laugh.
The weird part about the monopoly argument is that the barriers to entry for video hosting and distribution are low, and there are many different social media platforms, so the only thing YouTube has a monopoly on is... being YouTube. But perhaps that's enough?
Ultimately I'm more sympathetic to the anti-trust argument, that we should take action to break up mega platforms (although I'm not sure what that action should be).
What has more appeal to me personally is establishing a Constitutional Right to Privacy, then apply that right to ban surveillance capitalism. (US-centric framing, sorry; I would advocate all democracies adopt such a right.)
Such a right would mostly break up social media, with the side effect being an unknown degree of harm to online platforms in general since it's pretty hard to operate the server-client model without tracking your clients. But we could work around that, perhaps with local-first software, or by common-sense provisions like the idea that a store can keep a record of your purchases, it just can't share that record with others.
There's no obvious easy solution here, but this is a big society-shaking problem so I think there's no doubt we will take steps to solve it, the only question is which path will we choose, and how will it work out in the end?
They're low for Google, but prohibitively high for any potential competitors. To me, this supports the argument that YouTube is a monopoly.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/cheaper-bandwidth-or...
"Remember YouTube's $2 million-a-month bandwidth bill before the Google acquisition? While it wasn't an overnight transition, apply Google's data center expertise, and this cost drops to about $666,000 a month."
An airline or UPS cannot just say "We don't like your politics so we will not ship your packages."
Social media is extremely similar to all these common carriers in that they are a "content" delivery mechanism. They do not decide what item is in a box or what message is in a phone call, they just distribute the box or phone call from the originator to the consumers. Similarly with social media content the social media company distributes content they have little control over through its distribution network. There is little different from a social media account than a (teletype?) conference telephone call with answering machines.
I disagree with turning platforms into common carriers. As I wrote, I think this misses the issue: a protocol should be a common carrier, but a specific provider has no obligation to host things it doesn’t want to or do not make sense for certain territories.
Cf.:
>An important legal requirement for common carrier as public provider is that it cannot discriminate, that is refuse the service unless there is some compelling reason.
ibid
I suppose you can make "compelling reason" arguments for some things, but the default is carry.
Like, you may as well say "Well there are 'compelling reasons' exceptions so theoretically people can do the exact opposite of what the law says."
Surely you'd agree that ISPs are closer to telephone companies than social media is. So many telephone companies are ISPs.
I love another comment I read on here: "Speech is free, reach isn't." Your ISP shouldn't be able to disconnect you because of your words. But equally you aren't entitled to an audience on MyFaceTubeTwit.
> The question of how to apply more local customs and behaviours to a global platform is, I believe, the defining challenge of the next decade in tech.
Government involvement aside, banning targeted advertising could be a start. Twitter and Facebook and others are centralized shit shows primarily because that maximizes their advertising revenue.
I lived in the US for ~9 years, and before and since I have been in Europe. I can totally sense this, and it's almost annoying.
I wish the Pixar/Disney teams would move to another place for 1-2 years, then produce a few animated movies with that new perspective.