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Would be truly a sight to behold. As another comment mentioned, Google scale makes things very complex; a non incidental (i.e. English) global language might b
by aordano 4y ago
Would be truly a sight to behold.
As another comment mentioned, Google scale makes things very complex; a non incidental (i.e. English) global language might be very welcome in certain groups, but it being de facto requires, as you said, of a governing body that can regulate and enforce that.
At least in Spanish, there is such a body, the RAE (Real Academia Española, The Royal Spanish Academy), which decrees "unanimously" which words and phrases are canonical Spanish and which not, including regulating regionalisms found across every Spanish speaking country. As you might expect, outside a certain... circle, the RAE is a laughingstock.
The idea that a single entity could rule the way people communicate at that level of granularity, so insidiously, from the perspective of a layman looks unprecedented and unfathomable, that is, until you present them with a taste of the modern scale at which mega corporations operate.
So, consider for a minute an organization like the RAE having Google scale and Google reach. Would something like that mean the starting point of a (very) slippery slope, a snowball rolling down, powered by the pockets of the wealthy and the might of the policymakers? A future where the principles governing the cryptocurrency world will end up driving global policy?
I mention cryptocurrencies because one of their most prominent characteristics is that "Code is Law". As i see it, it's the inexorable outcome resulting from the underlying technological platform, its limitations and its philosophies, not something intended but more of an emergent property exposing the fundamental tradeoffs required to automatically run strict policies at a scale that large.
What would it take then for public policy to go the same route? For a hypothetical evil group of policymakers in awe of the success of Google et al exerting such outsized influence, to take over the same path, and to transform actual, fiscal law into an unwieldy paradigm, a sort of "Law is Code is Law".
We already see glimpses of it when there are leaks and whistleblowers illuminate us about the dark operations of the governments using megacorps to influence the public, but how far would success with this sort of policies with "innocent" subjects like grammar would bring them closer to applying it to the whole cake?
Would be truly a sight to behold.