3 ms·

Maybe I'm in the minority but I definitely see the rise of mega corps as directly affecting me. They funnel obscene amount of wealth and resources(and thus poli

Maybe I'm in the minority but I definitely see the rise of mega corps as directly affecting me. They funnel obscene amount of wealth and resources(and thus political power) to a few individuals, lessening my democratic impact; they aren't beholden to any particular community and thus often are worse for workers and demonstrate worse negative externalities (such as environmentally); and so on... The thing is I just feel helpless to do much about it. I can shop locally, but that feels pretty insignificant. Lately it's not even useful to vote any particular way (in the US), since it seems bigcorps have essentially captured both major parties.

hnbad 5y ago
Oh, it's absolutely affecting everyone. It just does it in a way that feels too trivial and non-dramatic to be a genuine threat to "the main character". Quoth Thanos, "I don't even know who you are" -- except unlike Thanos it's a faceless megacorp and every single person you ever interact with is an underpaid contractor working for a sub-subcontractor you likely never even heard of. We understand individual problems ("I have cancer", "I lost my job", "My car broke down") intuitively. Systemic problems (pandemics, climate change, capitalism) not so much. Plus we've spent over a century increasingly framing every systemic problem as an individual problem and training us to think only of individual solutions ("boycott Amazon", "buy organic", "take shorter showers" -- note how many of these are explicitly about individual consumption rather than active collaboration).