4 ms·

The tech companies (and large business in general) can be viewed as a threat to their power, so they take action. -edit- Just to be clear because I've seen so

• packetlost 6y ago
  That's... generally how governments should work, no? The government should not let private entities undermine it's power.
  • ericmay 6y ago
    Just to be clear I'm not really advocating for a position here, just stating what I think is going on. But with that being said, yea I agree with you here in theory. But it's exceedingly difficult for me to not be skeptical about it when I think about it as a power struggle between a Congresswoman and a tech company over who gets to fuck me over.
    • packetlost 6y ago
      Yeah, there wasn't any language that indicated you were taking a side. The thing is, at least the Congresswomen is democratically elected and (in theory) serves the interest of their constituents. Whereas a company serves the interest of it's shareholders, by law, so well-being of it's customers and even employees is secondary to it's legal mandate for profit.
    • sarah180 6y ago
      Is there a particular reason why it's women in Congress who make you skeptical? Is there some context I'm missing here?
      • ericmay 6y ago
        I just try to use the terms interchangeably in hypothetical scenarios so that there isn't a sense of normal association. Sometimes I use Congressman, sometimes Congresswoman. Sometimes I use Congressperson as well. I think if people are noticing then that's a clear sign to keep doing it, because you probably had a prior bias that the person doing something wrong would have been a man.
        • dragonwriter 6y ago
          “Congressmember” in the generic and “Representative” and “Senator” for the specific houses are widely accepted (standard and formally preferred for the house-specific ones) and gender neutral.
          • ericmay 6y ago
            Yes, thank you for that. I'm specifically not using gender-neutral terms in this instance, actually. The goal is to muddy the associations that exist and unfortunately gender-neutral terms are unable to do that. They definitely have a time and place for use, though, and I do use them when I think it makes sense to.
            • edmundsauto 6y ago
              Interesting approach, but what it reads like is that you are intentionally gendering the term for some purpose. I was trying to figure out if you meant Senator Warren specifically, because she has been behind a lot of this discussion. You might be confusing your audience more than you are accomplishing your other objective.
              • ericmay 6y ago
                Hey thanks for the feedback. Yea you're right that I was intentionally gendering the term here. My goal was to have someone notice that I used Congresswoman in a negative context. But I definitely appreciate your comment here and it's something I'll continue to evaluate. On one hand it's shouting into the void. On the other... well... it's probably still shouting into the void.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • brummm 6y ago
    It's just generally a surprise when the Republicans actually do their job.
    • ericmay 6y ago
      Ha. Depends on how you define what their job is supposed to be. :P
  • cle 6y ago
    Not as an absolute. Speaking broadly, outside of this specific context, it seems obvious to me that systems which are sufficiently dysfunctional should cede their power to a better system. In the US at least, this is laid out at the very beginning of the Declaration of Independence: > That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government Bringing the context back in to this discussion, I don't have a strong opinion. The power the tech companies wield is scary indeed, but the amount of political dysfunction is also pretty scary. I suppose, since they are equally scary to me, that I'd prefer them to have equal power to act as a check against each other?
• drtz 6y ago
  Wouldn't you want power to stay with elected officials who can be removed from office by the public rather than a private business that's primarily motivated by profit and only answers to shareholders.
  • ausbah 6y ago
    comments like above are reminders of how strong libertarianism is in tech circles, for better or worse
  • cle 6y ago
    That sounds good in theory but I think in practice, at least in the relatively broken representative system in the US, I'm not so sure. Consider that politicians often operate against the will of ~49% of their constituents. As long as they can maintain a majority, they don't care as much about the minority. I don't think a company, operating in a healthy non-monopolized marketplace, would be as willing to lose 49% of their customers.
  • leetcrew 6y ago
    in theory, yes. in practice, I'd rather be a customer than a constituent.
  • closeparen 6y ago
    Depends on which kind of accountability is more necessary. In the same way that people buy good cheap stuff that works well from Satan himself, they also vote for their ideological allies whether or not public services are within a thousand miles of functioning.
  • Nasrudith 6y ago
    When it is over what is a means of accountability for them (it is the media and not the tech which draws the aggro)? Fuck no - they already forget they are servants and not masters.