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Cyberpunk dystopia realized. It is not so hard to imagine a near future where corporations have much more power than states. Imagine you do something like this

• bioinformatics 4y ago
  People here in this forum have enabled it, are enabling it and will continue to enable it. HN only have itself to blame when this happens.
• dannyw 4y ago
  If both Visa and Mastercard refuse to deal with you, you are basically screwed in today's world.
  • AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
    And then you have articles like this: https://sweden.se/life/society/a-cashless-society https://sweden.se/life/society/a-cashless-society Where I am really not sure how to feel about it.
    • noduerme 4y ago
      • AussieWog93 4y ago
        >Children should see pornography and taste alcohol as early as possible. Sometimes I'm glad that "idiots" are in charge of things, rather than reckless intellectuals.
      • zyx321 4y ago
        I was with you in the first half. But porn is not suitable for children, precisely because it shows a very warped and potentially harmful understanding of sexuality. Also, could you tone down the implied eugenics a little? Bit of a yikes right there.
    • wasmitnetzen 4y ago
      The Swedish Central Bank is investigating a eKrona, which would be a state-backed digital currency. I'm living in Sweden, have no problems with a cashless society in theory, but that it's all in the hands of private corporations definitely makes me unhappy.
  • eps 4y ago
    Maybe in States, but not in the majority of the world. Definetly not in Europe.
    • dalbasal 4y ago
      There are plenty of European parts where you cannot rent a car or book a hotel without visa or mastercard. Meanwhile, for a business, either of these refusing to work with you will likely kill the business on the spot. The differences between Europe and US corporatism is petty narcissism of small differences.
      • alangibson 4y ago
        > book a hotel without visa or mastercard. Maybe major chains. There are vast numbers of small-holder rentals that happily take cash. > Meanwhile, for a business, either of these refusing to work with you will likely kill the business on the spot. It's 100% possible to do business in Europe purely with bank transfer. I've been at it for years and I never interact with either Visa or Mastercard.
        • kmlx 4y ago
          small business, sure. big business, no chance.
        • dalbasal 4y ago
          You are missing the point. Yes, there are transactions that occur in cash, bank transfer & such. Fail to present a Visa/MC when you rent a car in Dublin or Brussels and you will be in for a surprise. In Dublin, standard practice is to compromise by making you pay a 5X rate... insurance or whatnot. Maybe there is a no-card option somewhere in the city, but it certainly isn't most places. Yes, you can be an electrician or consultant without accepting cards. No, it is not practically possible to run a store or most customer facing businesses. Even most electricians and consultants accept or at least use cards. There's no meaningful difference between Europe and the US. This is a powerful and hard to avoid duopoly.
  • noduerme 4y ago
    • oarabbus_ 4y ago
      I didn't downvote you, but I did find it interesting that Bovada, which was originally a bitcoin sportsbook and casino, achieved Visa/Mastercard integration for deposits several years ago.
      • noduerme 4y ago
        If YC or other investors hadn't thought it was an outright joke when I asked for $500k to get a license in Malta in 2011, for what at the time was the only full Bitcoin casino that I'd handcoded with 25 socket based multiplayer games since 2008 before Bitcoin even existed, then I too would now be accepting Visa and Mastercard. And between me and now, dozens of players have come from both traditional to cryptocurrency and vice versa. It's really all who you know, or who you bribe. My policy these days is just to write good software that makes money for me personally, and no longer share it with any of these assholes. I do appreciate the non-downvote, btw. I'm drunk and prickly tonight... these topics about society eating itself get my hackles up.
    • rootw0rm 4y ago
      Also, props to those of us wise enough to run a front company and keep separate books solely for the reason to manufacture eligibility to accept bank cards
      • noduerme 4y ago
        I had two options to do that in 2011; one by funneling money through Cyprus to an Israeli bank, and the other via a phony real estate company in Costa Rica. I didn't take either of them because the potential for having payouts or deposits suspended in transit by a card company, if they found the violation for miscoding gaming transactions, would've decimated any chance I had for fully legitimate operations; and also any banking freeze probably would've destroyed my standing and credibility with customers. Since it was important to me to not run a criminal enterprise and since transparency was one of the few things I could offer to set my company apart from other casinos, I declined, and instead spent a huge amount of time and energy blocking any attempt by people in the US to gamble on my site. So, no props are due whatsoever to the people who took that route. If you got away with it all these years, then abi gezunt. Most of the people I knew who did those things in the early Bitcoin years are now in prison.
  • fhsm 4y ago
    Given the now multi year heavily covered role of payment processors in policing the boundary between sex work and abuse I’m surprised payment is so far down the list in these comments. In the news this month: - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/02/bill-ackman-blasts-visa-saying-it-has-the-power-to-pressure-pornhub-to-remove-child-pornography.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/02/bill-ackman-blasts-visa-sayi... - https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-updates-policy-for-adult-content-sellers/ https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-upda... Getting deplatform by payment processors is existential. Also, of note, they are just the front door to a banking system that is generally necessary for commerce and yet under similar pressure to police: - https://www.marijuanamoment.net/marijuana-banking-reform-will-not-be-enacted-as-part-of-manufacturing-bill-congressional-leaders-agree/ https://www.marijuanamoment.net/marijuana-banking-reform-wil... - https://www.aba.com/advocacy/our-issues/cannabis https://www.aba.com/advocacy/our-issues/cannabis Perhaps nether is as salient as the news cycles devoted to SWIFT and the norming power that exclusion form it was sure to demonstrate. - https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60521822 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60521822 (Specific links are arbitrary pointers into the issues referenced)
• thejackgoode 4y ago
  > It is not so hard to imagine a near future where corporations have much more power than states Quite hard to imagine for me. Corporations don't have an ideological framework underneath ("we the people..."), so they are going to get overpowered any time push comes to shove.
  • AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
    Where would this push come from? Congress fed up with how corporation treats citizens? Some unions? The only thing I could imagine is the other corporation. Not much more.
  • r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
    But corporations do have ideological underpinnings, and not just the generic ones that underpin capitalism. Look at the below mission statements: To organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful - Google To enhance the lives of our people, members, customers, and the communities in which we trade - Co-op group Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together - Facebook To support national and international security policies that protect those who are defenseless and provide a free voice for all with a dedication to providing ethical, efficient, and effective turnkey solutions that positively impact the lives of those still caught in desperate times - Blackwater I would argue all of the (along with the generic maximizing shareholders value obviously.) are concrete expressions of specific underlying ideologies. Roughly speaking these are that information should be universally accessible, corporations should benefit not just their shareholders, the world would be better if we were all one big family (very dubious!), and being a mercenary is fine as long as you're an "ethical" mercenary, whatever that means. That we often don't see these as ideologically motivated statements is just because they are all, to a greater or lesser extent, in line with the dominant ideologies of our time, capitalism and liberal democracy.
  • Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
    Who is indispensable for an ideological campaign to succeed in the 21st century, or can choose to make it fail? The media, so again, corporations.
• dalbasal 4y ago
  I agree with the overall view but, corporations with more power than states is the wrong frame, IMO. What we're seeing here is symbiosis, not competition. Google empowers (overpowers) the state and the state empowers Google. It's state action that required and legitimised automated & invasive "crime detection," while requiring and legitimising underlying the underlying data collection and privacy invasion that forms a pillar of Google's ad business. Google's lobbying and advisory efforts, and their position as a big competent partner empowers the state. When citizens lobby them to "do something" to protect children, they go to Google to borrow their power. "Centralisation" is too zeitgeist and has the wrong connotation, but it's close. "Convergence" is probably a better term. Actual tensions between State(s), Google and say Apple are minor compared to symbiotic reinforcement. We're seeing one small element of Google-powered policing here. The totality is likely much broader, and law enforcement is and will be very dependant on this. Apple make more (at a 100% profit margin) selling Google their defaults than they (or anyone) could possibly make competing.
  • jeffreygoesto 4y ago
    This is as true as sad. This kind of centralization of power will end the world we know. Information asymmetry enforces itself automacically. What a bunch of sheep we are. Including the high paid henchmen of power reading this.
    • majewsky 4y ago
      > Information asymmetry enforces itself automacically. If that were a universal rule, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment could never have happened the way they did.
      • jeffreygoesto 4y ago
        True. But it is more often so than not. For example women were actively kept from being equal, to quite some extent by not educating them equally. Also the ages of feudalism were quite long until something finally changed.
    • 4y ago
• noduerme 4y ago
  Well it's a good time to buy some land and bury your gold then, isn't it. Those idiots will take themselves down sooner or later. Yeah, this is horrific, but it's what people are willingly subjecting themselves to. If you don't rely on these systems you aren't subject to them.
• bsdz 4y ago
  That's an interesting dystopia. Using the same lens, I can see similarities between Google and other pioneering companies of the past such as the East India Company (EIC) which sported its own army and ruled large parts of the British Empire. Other similarities might be market share, i.e. EIC controlled 50% of world trade at its height [1] vs Google's Search being used by 52% of the world in 2019 [2]. That all said, I'm squinting a bit to see this. Unlike Company rule in India [3] where one had little recourse as a subject if the EIC ruled against you; if Google rules against you then you can move to some other provider (of which there are many). It's still fun to think of these analogies. I was always fascinated by the mega corporation, OCP, in Robocop that sought to privatise large US cities like Detroit [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company [2] https://review42.com/resources/google-statistics-and-facts/ https://review42.com/resources/google-statistics-and-facts/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_rule_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_rule_in_India [4] https://robocop.fandom.com/wiki/Omni_Consumer_Products https://robocop.fandom.com/wiki/Omni_Consumer_Products
  • dalbasal 4y ago
    >> Unlike Company rule in India [3] where one had little recourse as a subject if the EIC ruled against you; if Google rules against you then you can move to some other provider (of which there are many). I totally disagree. Early EIC/VOC rule was lawless. Or rather, the EIC was literally sovereign. They ruled colonies in the same way that monarchies, democracies and whatnot rule. 17th century royal charters devolved power to these companies like they devolved power to colonial governorships or other bodies. The early EIC is more comparable to the Colony of Virginia, which itself started as the Virginia Company. All technically ruled under a royal charter, but were practically sovereign within their domains. Later EIC rule was more similar to modern corporate examples. Rule of Law was ostensibly introduced, and you could (in theory) take your grievances to civil authorities. In some ways, this starts to become similar to modern examples of corporatism. The EIC was still extremely big, rich and powerful. But in this later period, state power and state coffers interweaved Later, British state rule.
    • bsdz 4y ago
• tresqotheq 4y ago
  >The only way for you to stay alive is to hike to lawless desert city of "Kowloon 2.1" And this would be the best thing that ever happened to you.
• johnywalks 4y ago
  We aren't far from that future.
• WhyNotHugo 4y ago
  That's why heavily regulated banking is so important. Banks need to answer to the people. It's the price for being allowed to integrate into society in such a fundamental role.