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This is disingenuous, the "state" is still at the center of it. Consider how Google was happy to censor when it came to doing business in China. Is that just a

This is disingenuous, the "state" is still at the center of it. Consider how Google was happy to censor when it came to doing business in China. Is that just a "private" company making "private" decisions? It's similar in the US. Consider the 2020 big tech antitrust congressional hearings. Congress can go after big-tech anytime it wants. Likewise if big-tech wants to successfully lobby for favorable policies, then they'll want to stay in the governments good graces. This is the "carrot and the stick" of how our country projects power domestically. Its through soft influence of industry. We did the same during Covid times. We were never able to federally mandate the vaccine, but we got all our big companies to do so, which is just as good from a policy standpoint. Google / Youtube would probably piss off a lot of people in washington if they didn't censor these videos.

graderjs 5y ago
CIA is basically an "economic interests" vector, right? This really meshes, your statement about using the big corporates as state instruments on the sly. (I guess that's not all that different to Chinese 'state owned' enterprises. They're just more overt. West operates more covert and deceptive. A continuation of a trend, heh :)) What's your thinking about the second-order effects, larger ramifications of this?
- disambiguation 5y ago
  Hard to say. Probably further erosion of individualism in the west. Foreign interference will be used as a pretext to railroad policies like digital currency, digital ID, etc. This is of course a slippery slope to the China model of mass surveillance and social credit scores. How this mixes with the constitution and western values is uncertain. You can still have free speech and human rights in such a system, its just that much more fragile. That, or foreign interference prevails and our enemies trick us into civil war and we destroy ourselves that way.

graderjs 5y ago

CIA is basically an "economic interests" vector, right? This really meshes, your statement about using the big corporates as state instruments on the sly. (I guess that's not all that different to Chinese 'state owned' enterprises. They're just more overt. West operates more covert and deceptive. A continuation of a trend, heh :)) What's your thinking about the second-order effects, larger ramifications of this?

disambiguation 5y ago
Hard to say. Probably further erosion of individualism in the west. Foreign interference will be used as a pretext to railroad policies like digital currency, digital ID, etc. This is of course a slippery slope to the China model of mass surveillance and social credit scores. How this mixes with the constitution and western values is uncertain. You can still have free speech and human rights in such a system, its just that much more fragile. That, or foreign interference prevails and our enemies trick us into civil war and we destroy ourselves that way.