It’s to the benefit of Facebook, and other businesses harvesting and selling access to personal information, to call this a “war.” It’s similar to the modern he

It’s to the benefit of Facebook, and other businesses harvesting and selling access to personal information, to call this a “war.” It’s similar to the modern headline news approach to politics — everything is a horse race, everything is sports. The competition becomes the story, rather than the substance behind it. Calling this a “war” lays bare the views of many who believe this is only two tech giants duking it out over market territory, that the only substance here is the competition itself. It’s just like sports! We can root for our favorites! It shows the fundamentally nihilistic attitude of many capitalists, that every commercial entity is _of course_ solely concerned with making as much money as possible, and that any talk of ethics or principles or honest benefit to their customers is smoke and mirrors. Of course, this is simply untrue. Many businesses do operate at least partly on ethical principle. Many businesses do try to do right by their customers, and not only because of the monetary rewards associated with success. This scares the shit out of some capitalists, though, who want to believe that making money is the highest ethical good to which a commercial entity can aspire. Apple is an inconvenient example for these people. What if what Apple says is true? What if it really does matter to Apple that their customers have privacy? Then we have an example of a financially-successful business which is not operating in the most rapacious way possible, and this throws all sorts of wrenches into their late-stage capitalist fantasies. I’m not demonizing capitalism — it works for me. But the WSJ is definitely the high priest at the altar here, and it seriously fucks with their narrative to even admit that commercial competition can be about anything other than money. Thus it must be a nihilistic “war.”