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At least with government we have the powers of oversight and political organizing. It seems like a better bet then a corporation who's accountable to a bottom l
by leafmeal 5y ago
At least with government we have the powers of oversight and political organizing. It seems like a better bet then a corporation who's accountable to a bottom line, or owners.
- wyager 5y agoI trust "political organizing" (codeword for astroturfing and cathedral control) less than I trust Google's profit interests.
- crocal 5y agoI guess you are ready for dictatorship then?
- wyager 5y agoCould you explain this take further? I’m tempted to write this off entirely, but I’m curious if you actually have some reason to associate corporatism with monarchy.
- adamcstephens 5y agoCorporatism in practice is an oligarchy. The people at the top decide the fate of everyone lower than them. In some companies it is effectively a monarchy, as a sole person is driving the decisions.
- whimsicalism 5y agoI would rather be governed by a public actor with constraints than the arbitrary interference of a private actor. This is the core republican (as in the political philosophy: Discourses on Livy, Philip Pettit, etc.) insight. If you want a stable society, you cannot leave space for arbitrary private individuals to become domineering forces on the rest of society. It's literally textbook how civilizations will fall, yet as a species we seem incapable of avoiding our own mistakes.
- wyager 5y agoGoogle is more effectively constrained than, say, the US federal government.
- whimsicalism 5y agoGoogle is effectively unconstrained, so hard to see how that could possibly be the case. Sure, the government has more power, but it is also more constrained. There is no public control of Google, it is not a publicly sanctioned power.
- wyager 5y ago> Google is effectively unconstrained Google is many orders of magnitude less likely to kill someone (legally or extralegally) or seize their assets than US government.
- leafmeal 5y agoI'm confused, do you not believe there is "political organizing" outside of the guise of astroturfing? And even when political organizing is just astroturfing, isn't the motivator just the same as Google's profit interest? Whether you believe it or not, you have a lot more power to influence government (locally at least) than you do to affect what Google does. That was my only point.