7 ms·

I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not in my free society" comments are missing the point. I too believe nationalisatio

by bem94 9y ago

I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not in my free society" comments are missing the point. I too believe nationalisation is a bad idea in this case, but given the enormous reaction it would bring, can you imagine how awful the situation appears to be from the authors (any many other non-tech-bubble) peoples perspective to even contemplate such a thing? Let alone write an opinion piece in a national news paper. You can argue it is a bad idea all you like, but ultimately, Facebook Google and Amazon are building something that scares people. Scared people do stupid things. If the tech bubble does not look at articles like this as symptoms of a growing scepticism, or a check on the implicit (and often abused) trust of their users, then the backlash is only going to grow. The tech bubble inhabitants will have only themselves to blame. You can argue all you like about whether people are logically correct to fear the big three. What matters is that they are fearful, and how the bubble reacts to that.

jpttsn 9y ago
Are you sure the authors are writing this story out of a genuine heartfelt fear? Do you think the editor who published them shares this genuine fear?
- gaius 9y ago
  The Graun is ideologically committed to nationalising all the things. It would be noteworthy if they ever called for anything to remain private, let alone be privatised. Having said that there's a decent case for Google being broken up.
  - smcl 9y ago
    That just isn't true at all
    - gaius 9y ago
      I guess you have some links to pro-privatisation articles in the Graun then?
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
SolarNet 9y ago
I agree to an extent, however I think this is just a part of it. The other part is that these companies are these mega corporations that have more money and power than many countries and they aren't accountable to the people but to their owners. And these are the companies that are going to end up inventing stuff like generalized AI. I don't agree with nationalizing them, but I also don't agree with letting them run around unchecked.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  I saw a comment years ago and I dearly wish I'd saved it. Paraphrased it was "large corporation shit on the floor. Of course it did, that's basically their job, the job of government is to supply the rolled up newspaper and occasionally the mop". It made me laugh in its succinctness. Corporations don't exist in isolation, they are part of society and should be answerable to that society, the all regulation is bad thing is as annoying as all regulation is good. In a democracy fundamentally the corporation should answer to the people. This isn't new, Standard oil is a good example from a century ago.
watwut 9y ago
Or maybe author wants strong reaction, clickbait or dont care. There will be backslash against tech arrogance, sure, but there is no need for it to involve nationalisation.
peoplewindow 9y ago
You seem to be saying there's a high threshold for extreme opinions to be published in the Guardian, so the fact that someone wrote such an article suggests that there is a genuine problem that needs to be taken seriously. Guardian writers do not live inside a "bubble" and therefore, there is inherent merit to what they write. I wonder how often you actually read the Guardian, which is famous for having wildly extreme opinion pieces, especially lately. It's basically the Breitbart of the left, a more or less constant stream of clickbait designed to make people angry and upset. Just a few random headlines I got from clicking around just now: "Who paid for the leave vote? Brexit should be halted until we know" "The car has a chokehold on Britain. It’s time to free ourselves: Our insanely inefficient transport system is in thrall to the metal god. Electric vehicles are not the answer" "Ask Hadley: Why do older people hate millennials so much?" "Men on the left are sexist. Labour needs to do more to fix it." "Feminists don't hate men. But it wouldn't matter if we did." ... and in case you think asking the government to take control of internet companies is new idea from Guardian writers: "The Guardian view on censoring the internet: necessary, but not easy" "Internet regulation: is it time to rein in the tech giants?" "The EU is right to take on Facebook, but mere fines don’t protect us from tech giants" I wouldn't exactly claim the Guardian floats above bubbles and groupthinks.
- jasiek 9y ago
  The Guardian uses clickbait just like any other site. Those ads aren't going to display themselves.
- bem94 9y ago
  I read the guardian frequently and long since learned to ignore the clickbait headlines you point out. Remember that columnists don't write their own headlines. The content of an article is usually more nuanced and thought out that the headline might suggest. Emphasis on the usually. I don't think comparing the Guardian to britebart is fair at all, but that's another debate. I'm not saying newspaper columnists don't live in a bubble. Just a different one from the silicon valley / HN bubble. If they get an impression of the tech world that causes them to think nationalisation is the way forward, the tech world needs to respond to that. Undermining the publication or author (as opposed to considering their argument, and separating it into causes - surveillance capitalism - and proposed effects - nationalisation) does not change the fact people are rightly suspicious of Facebook/Google/Amazon etc and they will react accordingly.
slowmovintarget 9y ago
Things are awful because someone wrote an opinion piece in the newspaper? I heartily disagree that anyone should "detect a consensus" from leftists preaching expropriation. That's just an ordinary activity for them. Nick Srnicek may be shouting a bit louder than most from his pulpit in The Guardian, but that has as little to do with truth as his article has to do with reason. Google, Facebook, and Amazon are just fashionable targets for his emotional appeals for a more powerful state. He doesn't write about Monsanto in this article, even though they have an ever tightening control over the food we eat, because they aren't as well understood by the masses. Bread and circuses. This is the circus part.
- igravious 9y ago
  That's not what bread and circuses means. That expression is a cynical look at the relationship of the individual to the State: so long as my belly is full and I am entertained I'm all right Jack. “… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses” So, no, this is not the circus part.
  - demonshalo 9y ago
    > That expression is a cynical look at the relationship of the individual to the State: so long as my belly is full and I am entertained I'm all right Jack. Wow. You just describe Sweden O.o I'm mighty impressed how this saying fits perfectly into the context of the modern Swedish culture!
    - uoaei 9y ago
      Would you please clarify what you mean?
  - slowmovintarget 9y ago
    The article is an argument over who ought to own and run the circus. The article is also a distraction, on its own, and thus part of a circus. Granted, I'd completely accept a quote from The Dude as a legitimate response: "Yeah, well you know... that's just, like, your opinion, man." It is.
ckastner 9y ago
> I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not in my free society" comments are missing the point. They really aren't. Far larger, more entrenched monopolies have existed before; when they needed to be resolved, they were simply broken up. Suggesting to nationalize them is not only entirely unnecessary, it contradicts decades of experience in dealing with monopolies. IMHO, nationalizations are either bail-outs or power-grabs.
- jack9 9y ago
  > They really aren't They really are? The back and forth is tedious. The questions I have are, 1. What is the issue? (if multiple issues, start over one at a time please) 2. Once you decide the role of Government (which is still in flux), can it even apply to this issue? 3. Does it serve the public interest to nationalize this company to address that issue? So the answer is no. We don't have a working definition of the role of government in the US, so there's no point continuing. It's rather simple to me, but I'm conservative (you don't disrupt livelihoods aimlessly in hopes it all works out). The idea that you would break up a company to address an information aggregation problem is idiotic. I can see how this pans out....now we have N companies with the information. Some of the issues can't be addressed with brute solutions from the past...or it wouldn't be something to talk about at all.
- azag0 9y ago
  The new problem here is that the centralization is pretty much the core value of these companies. Breaking them up would destroy that value. A way around is to first standardize and open all the protocols on which they internally operate, and then split them. But you could say that the standardization is in a way an indirect nationalization. If email was run by a company, it would easily be amongst the richest companies in the world.
  - sharemywin 9y ago
    centralization isn't the problem, bundling is. advertising with communication. privacy with contact management web index with advertising. content creation and distribution with advertising marketplace. product distribution with product marketplace with eCommerce store. Data storage with advertising ...the list goes one.
autokad 9y ago
Amazon sells products at a loss in order to put competitors out of business. Google disables accounts, with no notification / justification, if someone's opinion offends them. Again with no justification / warning, they alter search traffic to/away form companies, with the ability to choose winners and looser in the 'free' market. I dont know how true it is, but I heard they were suppressing positive search results and bringing results with soldiers pointing guns to peoples heads during the arab spring to destabilize governments. Facebook - well zuckerburg's manifesto on deciding whose words are heard or suppressed scares the shit out of me. On top of all this, the big tech companies are avoiding taxes and concentrating jobs to small geographic areas. They are using their power/capital/lawyers to monopolize their respective markets and I feel we are starting to see the consequences of that more and more
- cgmg 9y ago
  > Amazon sells products at a loss in order to put competitors out of business. Lower prices are good for consumers.
- surge 9y ago
  Post on another site then, or post it on your site. But it doesn't have the audience you'd argue, well that's how new sites gain popularity, because things are seen/said there that exist no where else. And as far as audience goes, the controlled content argument is not new, we've had that for years with TV networks/channels in terms of who had a platform and what entertainment you had to select from. To take it further, something like YouTube was just cable public access television taken to an extreme. Now YouTube wants to be mainstreamish, so they're largely doing what MTV, or History Channel did in the late 90's, taking off or downplaying the unique niche content that got them noticed and people originally went there for and promoting the mainstream "reality" shows, etc. Yes, this is the case, yes, this is the natural progression of things when sites become more mainstream, corporate, and focused on revenue (especially advertiser revenue). But this also leaves an opening for someone else to provide a platform for what is lost to go to. YouTube funny enough replaced MTV as the go to to watch music videos, so in a way I guess it was good MTV had a bunch of high rating low common denominator appeal reality shows to lean on when that happened. The beauty of the Internet is that there will always be the sub-communities and places for people to go to who have other non-mainstream interests or views. FB, Google, etc are now mainstream, but largely that's because they're replacing the media people used to consume over legacy platforms like TV and Radio.
rphlx 9y ago
I agree with your broader point but The Guardian is a consistently far-left, pro-large(r)-government publication, so it actually doesn't take much for them to publish something like this; the suggestion is right up their alley.

by bem94 9y ago

jpttsn 9y ago

Are you sure the authors are writing this story out of a genuine heartfelt fear? Do you think the editor who published them shares this genuine fear?

gaius 9y ago
The Graun is ideologically committed to nationalising all the things. It would be noteworthy if they ever called for anything to remain private, let alone be privatised. Having said that there's a decent case for Google being broken up.
- smcl 9y ago
  That just isn't true at all
  - gaius 9y ago
    I guess you have some links to pro-privatisation articles in the Graun then?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]

SolarNet 9y ago

I agree to an extent, however I think this is just a part of it. The other part is that these companies are these mega corporations that have more money and power than many countries and they aren't accountable to the people but to their owners. And these are the companies that are going to end up inventing stuff like generalized AI. I don't agree with nationalizing them, but I also don't agree with letting them run around unchecked.

noir_lord 9y ago
I saw a comment years ago and I dearly wish I'd saved it. Paraphrased it was "large corporation shit on the floor. Of course it did, that's basically their job, the job of government is to supply the rolled up newspaper and occasionally the mop". It made me laugh in its succinctness. Corporations don't exist in isolation, they are part of society and should be answerable to that society, the all regulation is bad thing is as annoying as all regulation is good. In a democracy fundamentally the corporation should answer to the people. This isn't new, Standard oil is a good example from a century ago.

watwut 9y ago

Or maybe author wants strong reaction, clickbait or dont care. There will be backslash against tech arrogance, sure, but there is no need for it to involve nationalisation.

peoplewindow 9y ago

You seem to be saying there's a high threshold for extreme opinions to be published in the Guardian, so the fact that someone wrote such an article suggests that there is a genuine problem that needs to be taken seriously. Guardian writers do not live inside a "bubble" and therefore, there is inherent merit to what they write. I wonder how often you actually read the Guardian, which is famous for having wildly extreme opinion pieces, especially lately. It's basically the Breitbart of the left, a more or less constant stream of clickbait designed to make people angry and upset. Just a few random headlines I got from clicking around just now: "Who paid for the leave vote? Brexit should be halted until we know" "The car has a chokehold on Britain. It’s time to free ourselves: Our insanely inefficient transport system is in thrall to the metal god. Electric vehicles are not the answer" "Ask Hadley: Why do older people hate millennials so much?" "Men on the left are sexist. Labour needs to do more to fix it." "Feminists don't hate men. But it wouldn't matter if we did." ... and in case you think asking the government to take control of internet companies is new idea from Guardian writers: "The Guardian view on censoring the internet: necessary, but not easy" "Internet regulation: is it time to rein in the tech giants?" "The EU is right to take on Facebook, but mere fines don’t protect us from tech giants" I wouldn't exactly claim the Guardian floats above bubbles and groupthinks.

jasiek 9y ago
The Guardian uses clickbait just like any other site. Those ads aren't going to display themselves.
bem94 9y ago
I read the guardian frequently and long since learned to ignore the clickbait headlines you point out. Remember that columnists don't write their own headlines. The content of an article is usually more nuanced and thought out that the headline might suggest. Emphasis on the usually. I don't think comparing the Guardian to britebart is fair at all, but that's another debate. I'm not saying newspaper columnists don't live in a bubble. Just a different one from the silicon valley / HN bubble. If they get an impression of the tech world that causes them to think nationalisation is the way forward, the tech world needs to respond to that. Undermining the publication or author (as opposed to considering their argument, and separating it into causes - surveillance capitalism - and proposed effects - nationalisation) does not change the fact people are rightly suspicious of Facebook/Google/Amazon etc and they will react accordingly.

slowmovintarget 9y ago

Things are awful because someone wrote an opinion piece in the newspaper? I heartily disagree that anyone should "detect a consensus" from leftists preaching expropriation. That's just an ordinary activity for them. Nick Srnicek may be shouting a bit louder than most from his pulpit in The Guardian, but that has as little to do with truth as his article has to do with reason. Google, Facebook, and Amazon are just fashionable targets for his emotional appeals for a more powerful state. He doesn't write about Monsanto in this article, even though they have an ever tightening control over the food we eat, because they aren't as well understood by the masses. Bread and circuses. This is the circus part.

igravious 9y ago
That's not what bread and circuses means. That expression is a cynical look at the relationship of the individual to the State: so long as my belly is full and I am entertained I'm all right Jack. “… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses” So, no, this is not the circus part.
- demonshalo 9y ago
  > That expression is a cynical look at the relationship of the individual to the State: so long as my belly is full and I am entertained I'm all right Jack. Wow. You just describe Sweden O.o I'm mighty impressed how this saying fits perfectly into the context of the modern Swedish culture!
  - uoaei 9y ago
    Would you please clarify what you mean?
- slowmovintarget 9y ago
  The article is an argument over who ought to own and run the circus. The article is also a distraction, on its own, and thus part of a circus. Granted, I'd completely accept a quote from The Dude as a legitimate response: "Yeah, well you know... that's just, like, your opinion, man." It is.

ckastner 9y ago

> I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not in my free society" comments are missing the point. They really aren't. Far larger, more entrenched monopolies have existed before; when they needed to be resolved, they were simply broken up. Suggesting to nationalize them is not only entirely unnecessary, it contradicts decades of experience in dealing with monopolies. IMHO, nationalizations are either bail-outs or power-grabs.

jack9 9y ago
> They really aren't They really are? The back and forth is tedious. The questions I have are, 1. What is the issue? (if multiple issues, start over one at a time please) 2. Once you decide the role of Government (which is still in flux), can it even apply to this issue? 3. Does it serve the public interest to nationalize this company to address that issue? So the answer is no. We don't have a working definition of the role of government in the US, so there's no point continuing. It's rather simple to me, but I'm conservative (you don't disrupt livelihoods aimlessly in hopes it all works out). The idea that you would break up a company to address an information aggregation problem is idiotic. I can see how this pans out....now we have N companies with the information. Some of the issues can't be addressed with brute solutions from the past...or it wouldn't be something to talk about at all.
azag0 9y ago
The new problem here is that the centralization is pretty much the core value of these companies. Breaking them up would destroy that value. A way around is to first standardize and open all the protocols on which they internally operate, and then split them. But you could say that the standardization is in a way an indirect nationalization. If email was run by a company, it would easily be amongst the richest companies in the world.
- sharemywin 9y ago
  centralization isn't the problem, bundling is. advertising with communication. privacy with contact management web index with advertising. content creation and distribution with advertising marketplace. product distribution with product marketplace with eCommerce store. Data storage with advertising ...the list goes one.

autokad 9y ago

Amazon sells products at a loss in order to put competitors out of business. Google disables accounts, with no notification / justification, if someone's opinion offends them. Again with no justification / warning, they alter search traffic to/away form companies, with the ability to choose winners and looser in the 'free' market. I dont know how true it is, but I heard they were suppressing positive search results and bringing results with soldiers pointing guns to peoples heads during the arab spring to destabilize governments. Facebook - well zuckerburg's manifesto on deciding whose words are heard or suppressed scares the shit out of me. On top of all this, the big tech companies are avoiding taxes and concentrating jobs to small geographic areas. They are using their power/capital/lawyers to monopolize their respective markets and I feel we are starting to see the consequences of that more and more

cgmg 9y ago
> Amazon sells products at a loss in order to put competitors out of business. Lower prices are good for consumers.
surge 9y ago
Post on another site then, or post it on your site. But it doesn't have the audience you'd argue, well that's how new sites gain popularity, because things are seen/said there that exist no where else. And as far as audience goes, the controlled content argument is not new, we've had that for years with TV networks/channels in terms of who had a platform and what entertainment you had to select from. To take it further, something like YouTube was just cable public access television taken to an extreme. Now YouTube wants to be mainstreamish, so they're largely doing what MTV, or History Channel did in the late 90's, taking off or downplaying the unique niche content that got them noticed and people originally went there for and promoting the mainstream "reality" shows, etc. Yes, this is the case, yes, this is the natural progression of things when sites become more mainstream, corporate, and focused on revenue (especially advertiser revenue). But this also leaves an opening for someone else to provide a platform for what is lost to go to. YouTube funny enough replaced MTV as the go to to watch music videos, so in a way I guess it was good MTV had a bunch of high rating low common denominator appeal reality shows to lean on when that happened. The beauty of the Internet is that there will always be the sub-communities and places for people to go to who have other non-mainstream interests or views. FB, Google, etc are now mainstream, but largely that's because they're replacing the media people used to consume over legacy platforms like TV and Radio.

rphlx 9y ago

I agree with your broader point but The Guardian is a consistently far-left, pro-large(r)-government publication, so it actually doesn't take much for them to publish something like this; the suggestion is right up their alley.