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That's what I mean. Your distrust should extend to things that have the same qualities as "government." At the more monopolistic end of the spectrum, and in man
by netcan 6y ago
That's what I mean. Your distrust should extend to things that have the same qualities as "government." At the more monopolistic end of the spectrum, and in many real life examples, they're a type of government... in the sense that they govern. This can also be true of very powerful religious institutions.
Power, coercive or otherwise, is more complex than that.
If all media is state media, that's something to seriously distrust. If all media is FB, the church of england church... same problems. Whether or not media is "coercive" is uninteresting semantics.
Whether it's big tech or ccp "soft power" is a technicality. Abusable power is abusable power, and being nannied is a symptom.
Sure, you can still kinda hide from Facebook. Takes a little effort, but whatever. You can also get around the great firewall, if you really want to. A lot of chinese people do, some of the time. Most of the time though, most people read the state approved internet. Most of the time, most people are within the influence of the FB machine... and it's still gaining power.
- scarface74 6y agoCan Facebook have me arrested? Take my property via “civil forfeiture” or “imminent domain”? Can they force me to pay taxes? Do they employ police who can shoot me in the back to make me use their services? Can they hire people to choke me for nine minutes? Do their employees have military styled weapons who can be summoned to someone’s house just by making a false report? Comparing any modern private company’s power to the government is like comparing a flea to the sun.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Comparing any modern private company’s power to the government is like comparing a flea to the sun. Well, that's trivially true for corporations, since each corporation is itself an exercise of government power, so all of their power is a subset of government power.
- netcan 6y agoThe only remedy to this is a history lesson. Do you know that the British Empire, and many of your colonies started as chartered monopolies? Not just history either. Anyway, what do those things have to do with the nanny state? Treating "government" as a monolith is like treating "capitalism" as a monolith. Comparing a police force to a media organisation is a bad comparison. You made it, not me.
- scarface74 6y agoYou mean like the government that wants to outlaw end to end encryption, run by President who threaten to “shut down Twitter” because he said something they don’t like.