Reminder to express the right opinions, avoid WrongThink and deeply concerning points of view.
1. Understanding what underpins the fairly radical changes occurring in the US can assist folks trying to add/create value in the tech space in navigating those changes;
2. On a broader plane, frank discussions of what sort of world we aspire to live in can strongly impact important business and technical decisions made. Given the aggregate impact that (some? many?) users of this site have on the tech industry landscape, it seems a good idea to look up at the horizon every so often to see where we're heading, what that means for us as individuals and as a species and what, if any, "course corrections" might be indicated.
In submitting this, I didn't expect to change anyone's mind or encourage folks to metaphorically pound on one another. Rather, I submitted this to spark curious and intelligent discussion of current events that strongly impact the tech community.
Perhaps you'll join in doing so, perhaps even without a throwaway account. I hope so.
I saw this when there were not comments yet, and by the time I had something that could be somewhat constructive, there are a few other references to deep historical roots now. Everybody's got their own interpretation and I guess I'm no different.
What can you expect when the article opens with the same legendary graphic that everybody sees every day on the back of their $2 bills? The Signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Maybe it is never too late to revisit; independence from what, and for whom?
You could say that as a colony, "America" was founded by multinational corporations for the benefit of multinational corporations.
Almost no one else could afford to send ship after ship of "settlers" and return with relatively low-value cargoes long enough to remain solvent. These were mainly "indentured servants" who agreed to farm for the nobility who had been granted the land, until the servants' freedom could eventually be earned, even if such earning had not been completed during each servant's lifetime. This is the foundation of the earliest corporate behavior in North America. Basically under the same paradigm that would lead to auctioning off "passengers" (services) upon arrival, those who had not the wherewithal to pay for passage. In the long run it was probably more lucrative to obtain African passengers with no consideration for any ability to pay for passage, then auction them all off as chattel cargo upon arrival at the conclusion of their itinerary. It was already working about like that to an extent beforehand. Ships cost money and somebody's got to pay for it, multinational corporations are still not all that without quite a few ships being involved.
Regardless, it cost a fortune for corporations of investors to build an economic system from a blank canvas, which by design could give them an inherent advantage compared to what they already had established for centuries overseas.
Those were foreign corporations mainly of the elite, not just anybody could buy in when voyages were known to be the most lucrative.
I guess all that changed when the colonies revolted, states united, and got their own domestic stock exchange.
OTOH I have guessed wrong quite a bit, maybe for the majority of regular citizens, whether of African origin or not, nothing else changed other than which continent the stock exchange is located on.
>I guess all that changed when the colonies revolted, states united, and got their own domestic stock exchange.
>OTOH I have guessed wrong quite a bit, maybe for the majority of regular citizens, whether of African origin or not, nothing else changed other than which continent the stock exchange is located on.
I think it's a bit (okay, a lot) more complex than that.
Even the plantation system of what's now the southeast and Chesapeake Bay was, at least by the mid 18th century much more than a bunch of tenant farmers sending all their goods to faceless corporations. Those colonies had already created their own elites, their own governing (albeit not very 'small d' democratic) bodies, their own ideas about how their lives and economies were run.
Much the same can be said of the colonies of the Northeast as well, although they were always much less dependent (in fact, by the end of the Revolutionary War, Massachusetts had abolished slavery[0]) on slavery which, by the mid 19th century pretty much ensure that the Union would prevail during the US Civil War due to the focus on automation and manufacturing in the northern states.
Also, the northern colonies were less beholden to the large multi-national corporations and more to the Crown and Royal Governors.
In fact, it was wealthy merchants and plantation owners whose profits were being skimmed by both the big corporations back in England as well as the Crown, who bankrolled (by lending money to the colonies/newly proclaimed states, as well as foreign governments -- notably France) the revolution.
There was also great deal of discussion around why the colonies should be independent from the crown, which convinced a significant proportion (a majority, by the end of the war?) of the population to support the independence movement.
For the slaves (well, except the ones that moved over to British lines when promised their freedom and managed to get out of Dodge before the end of the war), not much changed until after Appomattox[1].
The Reconstruction Amendments[2] (13th, 14th and 15th) and the Union occupation of the states of the failed rebellion[, ushered in a still not equaled level of African-American elected officials in the US until widespread White Supremacist violence and terrorism[3] and the disputed election of 1876[4], ended the Reconstruction era and doomed millions of Americans to second-class (if that) status for a hundred years.
I'd note that I'm glossing over a great deal as well as the history of the foundings[5] (note the plural) of the US is enormously more complex, especially WRT the industrial revolution, the expansion of the US across North America, etc., etc., etc. And later, the 19th[6] and 26th[7] Amendments,as well as the Civil Rights act of 1964[8] and the Voting Rights Act of 1965[9] further extended the political franchise.
Further movement (opposed by the same folks who opposed the above laws) legalized contraceptives and abortion as well.
In any case, there had been a slow movement toward more freedom, more liberty more widely distributed. Sadly, the inheritors of the folks who terrorized and murdered newly freed slaves in the late 19th century continued to do so for another hundred years until they were forced to stop. Since then, a concerted effort over the past 75 years or so has attempted to roll back many of these expansions of liberty, with significant progress being made over the past thirty years or so.
There's so much more, of course the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment[10], rolling back the Voting Rights Act, rampant gerrymandering and a host of other anti-democratic (small 'd') actions, big and small, with folks not being content with the will of the people, but pushing their own views on others whether they like them or not. It's pretty disgusting, in my view.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_Massachu...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Appomattox_Court_Hou...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Amendments
[3] https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/46/1/53/102853/White-Sup...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidentia...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Founding
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-sixth_Amendment_to_the_...
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
Looks like it was typeset using the same fonts that B.Franklin was using at the time.
If anybody can read the Declaration of Independence, they can read 178 short pages of this:
https://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/AA/00/06/19/95/00001/978194...