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Comment by subw00f | Hacker News Reader

Big tech serves exactly three purposes (real, not stated):

- The precarization of work by wage compression and anti-worker rights lobbying (Uber)

- The overexploitation of attention for financial (ads) and political gains (tolerance and reach for the ultraliberal, protofascist, neonazi groups and narratives) through American state-sponsored algorithmic manipulation (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter)

- Assimilationism, erasure of local culture, traditions, identities, to achieve cultural hegemony (Netflix)

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Big tech serves exactly one purpose. Making money by giving people what they want. In the case of Uber that's great because I will never even think about doing business with the cab cartel again. I don't owe them a damn thing. Nor do I owe my own local culture any loyalty over what I can watch on Netflix. You could argue that the algorithmic feed on social media is a negative, but the idea that there is some underlying agenda is ridiculous. At worst it's like a drug dealer saying "I have what you want... heroin!"

> Big tech serves exactly one purpose. Making money by giving people what they want

Oh, this is not true for a long time. Much better money can be made by making people want.

"Look what you made me do." It's no one's fault that you want things that are bad for you. Don't blame the pastry chef for making you want dessert.

It's remarkable to me that even after all the scandals and whistleblowing going on in the last decades about intelligence agencies, the US government, and big tech collaborating to surveil and control their own citizens or other nations, the recent, full public alignment between the big tech billionaires and the executive branch, not to mention the whole history of US imperialism, which you can boil down to violent expansion of private markets and capital to the detriment of other peoples, there are still smart people like yourself that don't question it in the slightest. In fact, embrace it. Hopefully you're benefiting directly from it, otherwise, you're just a frog getting slowly boiled in a pot of crumbling social environment. Also, did you ever ask yourself where your "preferences" or "wants" come from or how they form?

And none of that is profitable. It's quite the opposite. They do it because the government forces them to do it. Big tech companies don't want to do this, and didn't do this before the spooks came knocking. This is why government regulation will only make matters worse. These things are done because of, not in spite of, the government.

The government is them! Can you not see it? They are intertwined so hard, it's difficult to distinguish who wants what, because they MERGED. The state is ruled by the economic elite, and that's done via the government.

If the government were controlled by billionaires, we would be a lot more competently governed than we are. Democracy works, and I know it because the government's competence resembles its average citizen.

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