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That is not how capitalism works but love an optimist.
Like Elon Musk, the richest man ever who is best friends with the president?
Insane take.
Yanis Varoufakis views Big tech as digital landlords in his book 'Technofeudalism" . He argues that they extract rents from owning the digital space as landlords did in the Middle ages while monetising our attention. They are not capitalists in the sense that they don’t sell goods and services for profit but rather control the environment where others buy and sell.
It’s an interesting take on where we are and how dystopian big tech has turned out to be.
That reads as an excuse, “they are not really capitalists” type of argument. Yes, they are. They sell products, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta… They all sell products, they are all capitalists to the very core. It’s just that, one of their products is us.
I would love for this headline to be correct, but it seems far more likely that it is wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. /Drcox
So the autocrats will disband the technocracy? This is watching rich people have a slap fight with billions of dollars and think to yourself, “Ah yes this is good policy.”
I was a little confused by the tone of this one. I scrolled back up and realised it was written by Signal’s Meredith Whittaker, and it made a bit more sense.
Who knows one day we’ll see Youtube finally crumble
wow that’s optimistic. how about big tech gets with government to make laws that prevent the use of such egalitarian protocol based tech. instead, big tech is mandatory and further continually monitors you from your phone which you are mandated to carry. AI minders alert the morality police or etc to come issue beatdowns to dissenters.
This is a bit optimistic. It’s amazing that the tools exits to create a better, more open internet. However, the biggest barrier is convincing people to use them.
Personally, I’ve found that convincing the average user of just how much they are being taken advantage of by big tech is much harder than it should be. People are addicted to the convenience that lured them into these proprietary platforms in the first place. Humans tend to choose easier options over healthier options.
We should continue to carry the flag of open source, decentralization, and privacy-respecting platforms. However, we should be prepared that people will look at it an go… “Nah, that sounds hard. I’ll let them sell my data to save a few clicks.”
Looking more like Wired has fallen from grace. Why would investors care about negative societal consequences of Big Tech as long as they make money? And it wasn’t Microsoft who cut corners, it was CrowdStrike. That’s a big enough error to be the target of a Microsoft lawsuit. I stopped reading there cause this just seems like hot garbage.
A child wrote this.
Fortunately, there’ve been successful Monopoly destroying actions in the past. When money power/ capitalists get too much influence political power strikes back.
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Because it happened in the past as well. And the big tech companies were split, cut down, and destroyed. Big tech was not IT in the past but other “advanced technologies” at their time.
The past is a good reference to learn from, but it can’t be a blueprint for the present. There are different circumstances between then and now which complicate things, like the aforementioned big money in politics.
Just a few in the US - and they were all different at that time. They were all intertwined with politics at their time. Quick google search though, not sure how good the sources are:
Railroad: https://digfir-published.macmillanusa.com/roark7e/roark7e_ch18_4.html
Steel, oil, and tobacco: https://19thcentury.us/19th-century-monopolies/
Or just recently: take a look at China. How Chinese Big Tech influence on society was crushed and control was taken back by the Communist Party in the past 5 years.
We had something open and trustworthy before big tech, but idiots decided to attempt to create a ‘global village’ by inviting in all the world’s backward cultures.
What does she mean by ‘VC’?
Venture capital
There are two genres of capitalist optimism.
one is the “it’s going to be different this time baby I swear” and the other is “prayer to an angry god”. This piece obviously is of the former category.
