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A new book shows how the power of companies is destabilizing governance

333 points by alexzeitler 2y ago

farts_mckensy 2y ago
Look, pretty soon you are going to have to choose either left or right accelerationism. There is no in between. Acceleration is occurring whether you want it to or not.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
jeffbee 2y ago
We imported a Member of European Parliament, from a place with a sclerotic and insignificant tech industry, to tell us how to sabotage our robust and awesome tech industry. No thanks!
- FredPret 2y ago
  Right!? We should send someone to write serious and thoughtful pieces about “How the unchecked power of governments is destabilizing companies”
- linguae 2y ago
  Will our tech industry in Silicon Valley remain awesome, however? I've been working in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade, and it seems to me that power in our industry within the past decade has consolidated to a small handful of companies. I'm hearing less these days about startups disrupting incumbents, and I'm hearing more about incumbents entrenching their gains. Even when it comes to career choices, it seems these days that more young people are opting for the Leetcode grind in hopes to join a FAANG or another high-paying Silicon Valley firm instead of starting a company. After all, it's hard to start a company in a garage when renting a home with a garage is prohibitively expensive for many people. My concern is that Silicon Valley could end up becoming a place where it's all about entrenched incumbents, where it would be too difficult for startups and small businesses to compete, and where those who'd otherwise be willing and ready to compete against the incumbents are stymied by extremely high housing prices that discourage risk-taking, not to mention regulatory capture from the incumbents. Silicon Valley could morph into a place that stifles innovation instead of encourages it. While I'm on this topic, it also seems to me that Silicon Valley collectively is losing the social goodwill it once had. I remember a decade ago people outside of the tech industry being very excited when they heard of one of their friends getting a job at a company like Google or Facebook. Google was still seen as one of the "good guys," and Facebook was still seen as a tool people loved that allowed them to connect with their friends and family. Yes, there was discontent in some parts of the Bay Area about gentrification fueled by an influx of tech residents combined with long-standing restrictions on housing development, but the broader society still thought highly of the tech industry and Silicon Valley in particular. Today that goodwill has been eroded. There are many people who don't think highly of the current generation of tech leaders; Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman seem to bring out different emotions than Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did during their heydays (and I know Jobs and Gates had their detractors). The difference, though, between Silicon Valley today and Silicon Valley in the past, however, is that Silicon Valley is a deeper part of our everyday lives today than it was in the past. The tech industry is bigger than personal computers and e-commerce; the tech industry today plays a major part of our lives. Tech has become vital infrastructure, much like how energy and telecommunication companies are. Maybe in the early days of electrification and telecommunications companies like PG&E and AT&T were better regarded, but eventually as these companies played an increasingly integral part of peoples' lives, these companies exploited this fact, and thus they lost their social goodwill. I can also think about how cars in American society undergone a transformation from being seen as a liberating force to being seen by some as an oppressive force (e.g., facilitating urban sprawl, car-dependent commuting, soul-crushing traffic congestion, etc.). Perhaps the tech industry has entered this life cycle, but I could definitely be wrong.
dgfitz 2y ago
The headline alone sounds like a feature, not a bug!
- ebb_earl_co 2y ago
  Would you elaborate? This wasn’t my reaction so I am curious what I’m not considering.
  - Clubber 2y ago
    >How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governance It's an old joke. The joke is it's working as designed for the companies.
gilbetron 2y ago
Era of Cyberpunk is arriving! Interesting times indeed.
yedava 2y ago
The problem is deeper than that. Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.
- CatWChainsaw 2y ago
  Yanis Varoufakis.
- Clubber 2y ago
  >Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it. We were way more worried about that before GNU/Linux became a thing.
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Serfs has very little choice over their situation. What piece of software do you need for your life, but you're forced to lease?
    - aspenmayer 2y ago
      Code running on medical devices.
  - userbinator 2y ago
    Now there are tons of devices running Linux, for which you may be able to see the source code, but are unable to modify it, for ostensibly "security" reasons.
- ronsor 2y ago
  > Software has completely eroded property rights. This is a great topic to discuss right after you accept the End-User License Agreement and Terms of Service.
- majormajor 2y ago
  > Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it. I think that's reversed - that's property rights being stronger than ever. "Own things forever and just rent them out" is NOT a weak formulation of property rights from the point of view of the producers of those things.
rjurney 2y ago
It's just an unfortunate title by her editor, the article is interesting. Silicon Valley is about building new companies, not large incumbents manipulating the world.
haberman 2y ago
> And of course, the other real issue, especially in the U.S., is the capability of the power grids. In the Netherlands, which is an advanced economy, as in the U.S. and the U.K., we’ve already seen reports that the grids are functioning at near-emergency levels: code red. The grids are stretched to their limits. They break down and outages are more frequent. And yet there are many data centers in the pipeline that were agreed to years ago. When they come online in two or three years, we may face a wave of disaster. I keep a document called "Timed Predictions," so I can check back on bold predictions such as these. I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.
- xxr 2y ago
  I would love to hear more of these from your doc
  - haberman 2y ago
    I've added claims from a wide gamut of people (some just random Internet users), but here are a few: 2021-10-02 (did not come true): "I would not be surprised if Apple completely closes off the Mac ARM64 platform for “security” in the next few years. The option to boot third-party OSes seems like a short-term gimme to keep the pitchforks and torches at bay." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406 2022-01-12 (did not come true as a "crisis"): "Long COVID / PASC [...] will easily be our next great public health crisis sooner than anyone can imagine." -- https://twitter.com/JamesPhipps/status/1481442131751456770 https://twitter.com/JamesPhipps/status/1481442131751456770 2022-04-04 (we will soon see): "Unless we see big structural changes in the Democratic party's coalition, then the modal outcome for 2024 is Donald Trump winning a filibuster-proof trifecta with a minority of the vote." -- https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912 https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912 2022-11-18 (did not come true): "I do not think Twitter will die, but it will go down in the next few days due to the World Cup and its overwhelming traffic. When it does, Musk will dedicate himself to bringing it back up, and boldly claim that his mission is to “keep Twitter standing.” In the background, he will realise that nobody wants to work for him, and that there is no path that involves him running (or even keeping) this website that resembles any kind of success." -- https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/ 2024-01-29 (by the end of 2024): Brigida v. @SecretaryPete will be settled by the start of year 2025 -- https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752118772960514234 https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752118772960514234
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
CatWChainsaw 2y ago
[flagged]
roenxi 2y ago
Is the HCAIP funded by newspaper or TV companies, by any chance? There are certainly good reasons to be concerned about tech companies, who are pretty much uniformly becoming politically active (the Facebook-Google-Amazon-Apple axis being an especial concern, they seem to be relatively politically homogenous). But the new is still strictly better than the old; the combination of radio/newspaper/TV produces an unreasonable amount of misinformation (and government officials, for that matter). The energy issue is a joke. We have had a massive shift from the 90s to today where the political system was set to prioritise environmental concerns above energy security. Even if it materialises a lack of energy has nothing at all to do with tech companies. And political fracturing looks like it is mostly due to demographic pressure. Better communication is more likely helping than harming - if nothing else now we hear about the genocides instead of them being quietly swept under the rug. Facebook doesn't cause genocide, racialists cause genocides.
caust1c 2y ago
Orthogonally related to the article, I think it gets to the deeper issue at hand with regulating technology: The internet connects everyone and allows for free-flow of information, free-flow information is eroding people's trust. We want free speech, but people use words to deceive and coerce. You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them. Ken Thompson wrote "Reflections on Trusting Trust" in 1984 (fitting as it may be). The conclusion being that we can't rely on computers to build trust. But we need trust to live in a society. It's human instinct trust one another. But falsehoods spread fast online, and after being fooled so many times, people are losing their natural trust in others. What's the way forward? I'm curious what this crowd thinks.
- smaug7 2y ago
  I don't have a specific answer to this as I'm not a trained historian. However, didn't we see this with the invention of the printing press back 500+ years ago? That also dramatically increased knowledge distribution and probably lies and mistruths. How did society handle that?
  - jfengel 2y ago
    A key difference was the lack of democracy. There was plenty of misinformation, but it didn't channel quite so directly to the levers of power. That wasn't necessarily better. We put democracy in place for a reason. But there has been a shift in the societal basis that underlies democracy, and we'll be forced to come up with another set of solutions.
    - mistermann 2y ago
      It's weird how people can recognize early versions of manmade things are usually primitive and need numerous iterations to get working at acceptable levels of optimality but when it comes to democracy there's some sort of a magical force hiding it from sight in this regard.
  - Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
    Exacerbated witch hunting, for one[1]. Enabled the Protestant reformation which led to the 30 years war, among others[2]. [1] https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept09/2009/10/31/unintended-consequences/ https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept09/2009/10/31/unintended-con... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
_yb2s 2y ago
A bad actor with access to peoples private data from Facebook, Google, or Apple could probably blackmail a large fraction of politicians, globally. Someone with unchecked access to peoples private communications would have nearly unimaginable levels of power. It would also be fairly easy for these companies themselves to cover their tracks enough that it would be impossible to prove it wasn't a rogue employee or outside hacker acting alone. We already had "the Fappening" when iCloud was compromised, but I feel if someone did something similar and kept the data private for blackmail purposes, we'd probably never hear about it. Am I missing something here about how this wouldn't actually be possible? Frankly, I'd be surprised if it isn't already happening.
betaby 2y ago
The articles authored by Katharine Miller are not worth reading - they are not even wrong.
- azemetre 2y ago
  Can you expand upon what you mean? They’re right but poorly written?
  - walleeee 2y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong I take no stance on the article or parent comment, just for your reading.
    - azemetre 2y ago
      Interesting, I always heard it as being referred to as unfalsifiable (which your link mentions). I also don't think this is a good phrase to use in reference to society, politics, or the economy.
tehjoker 2y ago
This is basically spelled out in the writings of Marx and Lenin. Same stuff over and over again. Corporate monopolies accrue incredible undemocratic power. They must be owned by the people and their workers.
- cscurmudgeon 2y ago
  [Someone from a former socialist country. My parents stood in literal bread lines] Marxist governments have caused exponentially more harm (e.g., genocides) than monopolistic companies. Both are bad but the first one results in harm always.
  - tehjoker 2y ago
    capitalist countries literally starved other countries outside the imperial core. gaza is in famine today to satisfy the lust for control of world markets. churchill starved india. the list goes on. the only genocide i can think of by a nominally socialist govt was the cambodian genocide, backed by the US and China, and the ppl in charge were really weird and not marxist. they were rigid idealists afaik. that genocide was halted by vietnamese marxists.
miki123211 2y ago
I think this "problem" stems directly from the fact that the geographic model of governments is extremely unsuited for governing on the internet. In times past, Governments could e.g. regulate the quality of coke, control election misinformation or forbid burglaries on their own soil, because they had law enforcement who could imprison people doing these things against the law. What happened outside of their borders was mostly of no concern to them. If Coca Cola wanted to sell their products in Germany, they needed people in Germany willing to sell it, and those people were directly vulnerable to imprisonment by German law enforcement, so they had to care about and follow German law. Even if the original corporation wasn't involved directly, there were always vendors, importers, store owners and such, and all of them could be targeted to some extend. Tech companies are different, you can make a product on the internet that interacts with the data of the majority of German citizens, without ever stepping foot in Germany or even realizing that a country called Germany exists and has laws. If Germany doesn't like the fact that this product exists, there isn't much they can do. For now, most countries still have some semblance of control, usually backed by the power of international treaties, DNS blocking and control over payment infrastructure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of fast and affordable satellite internet on one hand and easier access to crypto on the other will make the situation even worse.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Huh? Germany is notorious for banning, restricting, or altering, a huge number of tech products from smartphones to video games, with practically perfect compliance after a valid court order is issued. Do you have some examples of non-compliance?
  - ggm 2y ago
    Crypto in modems, and mp3s
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Are there any recent examples, in the past decade?
SamPatt 2y ago
>It’s basically about catching up through international law, regulations, and enforcement, to make sure that the ideas that we have about what a democratic mandate looks like, what accountability looks like, and what oversight looks like are actually meaningful whenever activities happen in the digital sphere. Who is "we" here, and which "democratic mandate" is being discussed? The author was involved with the EU parliament? Excuse me for not taking their tech sector recommendations seriously.
- azemetre 2y ago
  Why not? The EU has some of the best consumer protection laws on the planet and they seem to be the only coalition that are actively legislating against big tech. Why be so dismissive on the idea that the “tech utopia” that Google or Meta wants to sell us is just digital serfdom? Seems appropriate seeing how damaging to society these companies truly are.
smackeyacky 2y ago
The insidious take over of security by the smart phone is what worries me the most. I can't pay my taxes, access healthcare or even sign-on to my job without using my phone any more. If somebody said 25 years ago that access to government services would be completely privatised there would have been uproar. Not only did we consent to this, we did it willingly in exchange for convenience. Now we are screwed. Americans used to be all gung-ho about "those who give up freedom for security will not be free or secure" but it's much worse than that. We gave up security for convenience and handed everything about ourselves to an unscrupulous bunch of billionaires who are intent on replacing government wholesale, and we will be paying them while they do it.
- bloomingeek 2y ago
  Not to mention the tracking on our vehicles and TVs. And how the police can demand the video off our Ring door bells. What's next, my dash cams?
  - gruez 2y ago
    >And how the police can demand the video off our Ring door bells. What's next, my dash cams? They always could. It's called a search warrant. The idea that your security camera footage was inaccessible to governments was incorrect to begin with.
- majormajor 2y ago
  Plenty of people when I lived in Texas 25 years ago who would be pretty easy to get onboard with privatizing access to government services. Complaints about the DMV, for instance, are eternal. School vouchers were and continue to be hot in many influential circles, with people wanting to get rid of the government services entirely in favor of privatized ones. Pro-privatization, small-government ideas have been WILDLY popular since at least Reagan. Giving up liberty for security, (or just convenience or religion) in the US goes back even further. Cold War policies and inquisitions, any number of vice laws, restrictive zoning, to name a few from the 20th century.
- tomrod 2y ago
nisten 2y ago
[flagged]
themgt 2y ago
This is hopelessly confused: they are just as illustrative of some of the challenges that I’m pointing to, [such] as Elon Musk deciding who in Ukraine should and should not have access to Starlink internet connections. ... Let’s compare how the U.S. responded to the Ukraine war in the physical world versus in the cyber domain. As part of NATO, the U.S. is clear: It doesn’t want to see boots on the ground. But in the cyber domain, the U.S.’s offensive activities are ongoing. That political discrepancy can continue because of the legal gray zone in the digital realm. Wikipedia has a good overview[0] but the basic debate was originally over funding of systems donated to replace a civilian communication network, and later over the use of the Starlink civilian communication system in attack drones, e.g. "Starlink legal documents claim it is not for use in weaponry as a military use of Starlink brings it under US export control laws like the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) or the Export Administration Regulations (EAR)" and "Shotwell explained that her company agreed with Ukraine's military using Starlink for communications but never intended to have them use it as a weapon. She added 'But then they started putting them on f---ing drones trying to blow up Russian ships. I’m happy to donate services for ambulances and hospitals and mothers [...] But it’s wrong to pay for military drone strikes.'" This author says "we need to bring the same level of legal clarity, accountability mechanisms, and transparency measures to the digital realm that we expect around other innovations such as medicines, chemicals, foods, cars, or even processes such as the decision to engage in foreign conflict" but uses as her case-in-point example the demand by a foreign military that a civilian communication system be enabled for use on novel drone weapons in a war where the United States is explicitly not a combatant. Certainly legal clarity could be helpful for a situation like this, but I would hope the clarity is that a private company intentionally building a product for purely civilian use cannot be forced to modify that system to enable its use as an offensive weapon in a foreign war. Her argument seems akin to saying "Tim Cook arbitrarily decided Apple won't sell iPhones secretly loaded with remotely detonated plastic explosives for use by a foreign military - we need accountability here, this is destabilizing governance!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainia...
animal_spirits 2y ago
I watched Julian Assange’s recent talk at the Council of Europe and his testimony on the insanity that the U.S. Government put him through [1]. This makes me come to a different conclusion than the article. > In the digital realm, companies’ control of information, unfettered agency, and power to act have almost overtaken that of governments. Why is it assumed that governments will act better if the power to control information is in their hands? We see this time and time again that the control over information is the most manipulating force a tyrant can wield. Why should we trust government over companies? At least with a publicly traded company we can sell stock faster than we can elect new leaders. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idphGmY3QRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idphGmY3QRM
- philosopher1234 2y ago
  Because companies make decisions based on who has the most money. 90% of Americans have basically no control of those decisions. And companies interfere with democratic control of the government. Getting things out of the way of democracy seems good to me.
  - phyzix5761 2y ago
    Again, how would that be different if government had the power to control information? Its human nature to do things that benefit yourself. At least if its not centralized then you have competition which gives people a choice of where they want their information coming from.
  - tightbookkeeper 2y ago
    Who does the government listen to when making decisions? Influence and power follows a power distribution. This is an age old problem.
  - refurb 2y ago
    We already know that organizations (whether public or private) eventually devolve into a bureaucracy where the goal is the growth of the organization itself. We see this with the government - how often does the government ever remove laws? Or reduce size? Very rarely. It seems to me that if the goal is to ensure one is not coerced, whether by business or government is not to try and create mechanisms to ensure coercion is only benevolent, but rather to ensure they never have the power to coerce people in the first place.
anonymousiam 2y ago
What can be done about the unchecked power of governance?
- AdieuToLogic 2y ago
  > What can be done about the unchecked power of governance? If you are fortunate enough to live in a country which has free and fair elections, then vote.
  - wejrwiejre 2y ago
    Those countries exist? Last I checked there are few true democracies. Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests. If all your options are just corporate shills and power hungry spooks and goons is it even "free and fair" at that point?
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Last I checked there are few true democracies. Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests If you're anywhere in the West, this doesn't describe your democracy but a cartoon of it. Like yes, if you only show up for--in the U.S.--the Presidential general election, your vote isn't that powerful because it's not supposed to be in a country of a quarter of a billion.
      - farts_mckensy 2y ago
        "Bought out by corporate interests" is a completely accurate assessment of the American electoral system. It's honestly quite alienating reading all of these completely delusional comments. Your vote is at the very least supposed to be proportionally significant to the general population. We don't even have that. We are bombarded with corporate propaganda every fucking day. A senator from Wyoming has just as much of a vote as California. This notion that we live in a democracy or anything close to that is asinine. The system is not tethered to the will of the people in any sense of the word. It's an oligarchy.
muaytimbo 2y ago
The author is an authoritarian lawmaker. This is a false flag to consolidate additional power over the last vestige of the free Internet.
- e40 2y ago
  This person? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marietje_Schaake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marietje_Schaake … doesn’t seem so (authoritarian). Your comment is provocative, can you back that up with evidence?
  - userbinator 2y ago
    World Economic Forum (WEF), co-chair of the Global Future Council on Agile Governance
    - alistairSH 2y ago
      And? By its own description, that council doesn’t appear authoritarian. For reference, here’s how it describes itself… “To seize the benefits of rapid technological progress, while managing its risks, it is essential to foster responsible technology governance and regulation, advance the digital transformation of sectors and industries, and promote tech-enabled solutions to serve people and the planet. How can policies, regulations and institutions be transformed to scale technologies responsibly?” https://www.weforum.org/communities/gfc-on-technology-policy/ https://www.weforum.org/communities/gfc-on-technology-policy...
      - userbinator 2y ago
        The WEF is ultimately authoritarian.
      - realce 2y ago
        > By its own description, that council doesn’t appear authoritarian. The defendant certainly didn't kill his wife, he said so himself!
- 2y ago
TZubiri 2y ago
This is an interesting discussion, no doubt. But no one questions this is the case. Yes corporations grow in power and reach and are taking on responsibilities previously held by states. I'm looking forward to the next step in the discussion. Should this not be the case? Where do these notions that imply that the state doing something is better than a company? I'm not a libertarian or an extremist, but I've had to reject some pretty simplistic views that businesses are evil. The word coporation comes from the word Corpus, in a sense the people congregate, each with their own function as an organ to serve as a body. So it seems as noble a concept as the state. I can point to corrupt states or corruption in golden standard states as easily as I can do the same for companies. Is there a disparity between the goals and the results of these organizations (Companies for selfless reasons, the state for the common good)? If so, is it sufficient to judge the organizations based on their results, or should we demand organizations not only to benefit the common good, but to expressly pursue it? Finally, not for profits enter the fray as a potential intermediate option. OpenAI's success is pretty unprecedented, although the reputation of the NFP is irreparably damaged. Even if courts decide that whatever fuckery they are doing is all good by the law, in the trial of public opinion we can all agree that OpenAI walks like a dog and barks like a dog.
- ekimekim 2y ago
  There are two important differences between corporations (even non-for-profit ones) and the government. The first is that citizens have a say in who governs them. If the government does something they don't like, they can (at least in theory) vote for someone who will change it. The second is that in most legal systems, there are differences in what governments are allowed to do and what corporations are allowed to do. For example, a government may be required to provide services to all citizens, whereas a corporation has the right to not serve certain people (such as "people who don't own a smartphone"). These differences aren't insurmountable, but it's something to keep in mind.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    Regarding point 1, I would argue that citizens have more of a say in how the corporations operate, (and what corporations for that matter) as their say occurs every time they pay or not pay or engage into a commercial contract, which is much more often than once every 4 years.
Barrin92 2y ago
"Let’s compare how the U.S. responded to the Ukraine war in the physical world versus in the cyber domain. As part of NATO, the U.S. is clear: It doesn’t want to see boots on the ground. But in the cyber domain, the U.S.’s offensive activities are ongoing?" A few weeks ago I saw Zero Days, which is a good documentary on Stuxnet and it's pretty wild just to what extent tools in that domain are out of the purview of the public. Offensive capabilities that amount to acts of war seemingly have no democratic oversight, and even an ex-director of the NSA thought the amount of classification of materials went too far. Very few people were willing to speak at all to the filmmakers even years after it had already blown over. Whether its some sort of dystopian privatized policing by Palantir or tools used by three letter agencies, what the article warns of has arguably already arrived a decade ago.
econcon 2y ago
Money and Violence dictates who controls resources hence power. So, companies controlling government is no surprise.
fallingknife 2y ago
I have a hard time listening to this complaint about unchecked power coming from an entity that controls $20 billion of land, owns a $40 billion endowment, and receives most of its revenue from the federal government who is legally required to pay whatever price they ask, all while paying $0 in taxes on all of it.
rapatel0 2y ago
As any company reaches scale, they will begin to have negative externalizes due to that scale. It is rational to address these externalities. The author, however, fails to put forward any real criticism of government authorities who: - Have much greater scale - Are more opaque - Engage more aggressively to control and manage narratives - Are routinely shown to be subject to corporate capture---negating the fundamental point of the argument. Tech companies (in spite of all of their warts) are at least promoting the free flow of information. This (free thought and expression) is the bedrock of every successful culture in history. Moreover, loss of these has been the downfall of almost every one of these cultures. Examples: - Late Ming Dynasty China (16th-17th centuries) - Late Ottoman Empire (18th-19th centuries) - Fall of the roman empire - Tokugawa era in Japan - Ancient Greece after the execution of Socrates. - Golden Age of Islam (9th to 10th centuries) Pretty much all of these examples were cases where the political class enacted controls that prevented challenges to government orthodoxy and/or becoming more isolationist, and other avenues to preventing/controlling free speech in the name of "better social cohesion" and preventing bad influences (...cough...misinformation...). So I cannot more vehemently disagree with the authors precept (especially since she is likely in a position to benefit from it)
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  > The author, however, fails to put forward any real criticism of government authorities who: - Have much greater scale - Are more opaque - Engage more aggressively to control and manage narratives - Are routinely shown to be subject to corporate captur The author has chosen to write about, and I quote "How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governance" This does not include, and is not obligated to include, any other factors that might destabilize governance. As for the claims of virtue re: tech companies, I think they are overbroad and overpositive. There are several examples of tech companies violating any of the virtues you mention, and going head to head with government regulation to the determent of us all. This is not to say tech companies lack virtue, just that they may not all be the paramount morality that you seem to describe.
  - fallingknife 2y ago
    Yes, the author is not obligated to include that, but nor is the reader obligated to ignore obvious evidence of her hypocrisy and self interest. And when a creature surfaces from the morass of governemnt bureaucracy to complain about the threat of something much less ominous and powerful than itself, that hypocrisy is certainly something I will point out.
talkingtab 2y ago
For those who do not know this, in the USA, our choice is not just between government controls and corporate controls. There is a third element, one that is supposed to be primary. We are supposed to live in a place where we people enact laws. This is not the case. The simplest test is simply to ask "Cui Bono". Who benefits from the laws enacted? For example, do the laws enacted favor drug companies and help them charge $1000 per month, or do the laws help keep drug cost under control? Do the laws enacted ensure that workers earn a living wage, or do they ensure that corporations can charge whatever price they want and pay as little as possible? What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people This is not rocket science. And it is stupid. At some point fewer and fewer Americans will be able to afford the things corporations sell. If you are a predator and you kill off your prey, you will die. We, the people, need to start enacting laws that benefit the people. First and foremost is one that reverses Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. This decision by the Supreme Court represents the height of incompetence or stupid. Why is this not happening? Are the opinions and situation of common Americans ongoing and visible? Or does the NYT cater to wealthy corporate advertisers? Does it feature articles like "What house can you buy Portland, Maine with $1.5 million" while the number of homeless in Portland, Maine is staggering. Is the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos (aka Amazon) really going to talk about corporate excesses? Since our media is now utterly dependent on corporate advertisers, which of those media are going to oppose corporate excesses? We need to fix this.
- wsintra2022 2y ago
  Very well articulated. Standing right next to you, fist raised, ready to share the word.
- donatj 2y ago
  What percent of those drugs exist explicitly because they can charge high prices for them? Are companies going to continue to invest countless millions developing drugs they have no chance to recoop? I'd argue everyone benefits from a world where cures exist but are expensive, when the alternative is everything that exists is affordable, but progress halts.
fdschoeneman 2y ago
Yes because companies are totally unchecked and there's no regulation at all and because of this we have governance that brings us Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and bullshit wars and tampons in boys bathrooms and under lock and key at Walgreens. Good grief. This is not the kind of thing technical people or hackers want to read.
- ggm 2y ago
  Is that a generalisation about the readership or to content here, or a bitter observation of lack of concern by the readership? There are multiple interpretations possible here.
  - fdschoeneman 2y ago
    The former.
dools 2y ago
This isn't some accident, it is the stated aim, and result of systematic academic capture by Austro-libertarian economists and right wing libertarians.
- mattmcknight 2y ago
  Left wing professors outnumber right wing professors more than 12:1.
  - zdw 2y ago
    What's the ratio in the economics department?
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      I doubt you'll find many people identifying with either of those labels in an economics department.
- zahlman 2y ago
  >result of systematic academic capture by Austro-libertarian economists and right wing libertarians. For anything to "result" from this, it would have to happen. What evidence do you offer for such a phenomenon?
thunderbong 2y ago
An interesting point from the article - > Governments are increasingly outsourcing all kinds of processes to tech companies. And if a tech company operates in the name of a government, it should be as accountable as the government. I call this “the public accountability extension.” It sounds simple, but it would be a huge game changer. Right now, as governments outsource more and more critical governmental functions to tech companies, they also offload governmental accountability.
wyager 2y ago
This is not worth reading, because it was not generated as part of a deductive process, where you start with some facts and work your way to some entailments. Instead, the causal process that let to the creation of this book and ad was that the political patronage relationship between American progressives and American tech companies fell apart. This leads to demand for post-hoc justifications for subsequent changes in cash allocation, lawfare budget allocation, etc. The author started with the conclusion "... and that's why we have to disenfranchise tech companies" and worked backwards from there. Therefore, this document cannot, on expectation, communicate to you any useful entailments, except insofar as that conclusion might incidentally be correct for reasons totally unrelated to the author's thought process.
1024core 2y ago
IMHO, it's the companies AND the government against the people. The government twists the companies' arm to make it do things that the government is not allowed to do. Company refuses to play along? Threaten to break it up. There's a reason why AT&T has dedicated wiretap rooms for the NSA. DJI not selling drones to Ukraine? Threaten to ban it in one of its biggest markets.
jmyeet 2y ago
Tech companies have successfully weaponized "the algorithm" as a shield of plausible deniability. Google was probably the most successful at this and one of the earliest. So often we'd hear about something getting removed or upranked or downranked and here "well, that's the algorithm". The implication is they're not responsible. But all algorithms, particularly ranking algoirthms and news feeds, are merely a means of reflecting the wishes of the people who design and maintain them. Every ranking decision has a human decision behind it. Go back to Google's war on content farms. While this was justified, it demonstrates the principle: some teams at Google decided it was a problem, then designed some ML systems to decide if a given site was a content farm ("high quality" vs "low quality", etc) and then plugged that feature into the search ranking system and then tweaked ranking so those sites ranked lower. The point is it's never "the algorithm". It's always humans. We see this with the US government's war on Tiktok. This really has nothing to do with the risk of Chinese interference. If that was ap roblem, more serious efforts would've been made to tackle interference by Russia and other countries through existing companies like Meta. The real problem with Tiktok (from the US government's perspective) is that it doesn't play ball with US State Department policy. You get to actually see things happening in the world that IG, Googke, Youtube, FB, etc intentionally suppress, both by ranking them lower and making it ridiculously easy to abuse content safety systems to remove such content by brigading it (this is a problem on Tiktok too but at least it exists to be brigaded). What's happening in Gaza is th emost pertinent example. And then we have Elon Musk who buys Twitter to basically push his own political views.
Animats 2y ago
It's not a very good paper, even though the author has reasonable credentials in Europe. She writes: "For example, just as legislatures rely on independent legal teams to help draft legislation that will survive court challenges, they also need independent technology experts they can turn to for reliable information. Making tech expertise available to lawmakers would go a long way toward reducing lobbyists’ effectiveness and ensuring lawmakers understand how technology impacts issues like healthcare, education, justice, housing, and transportation." This shows insufficient knowledge of the US situation. The U.S. Congress used to have an Office of Technology Assessment.[1] It was abolished in 1995. "House Republican legislators characterized the OTA as wasteful and hostile to GOP interests." The generic problem is monopolies, not "tech". US banks and drug stores are down to 2-3 major players. Tough enforcement of the Sherman Act might help. Although the experience with the AT&T breakup is not encouraging. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...
- BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
  I don't see how you conclude from that quote that she doesn't know about the office of technology or lacks understanding of the US context. When I read making tech expertise available, I'm not picturing a government science department doing research, I'm picturing independent consultants translating algorithms into english. If anything, your point shows the bipartisan us vs. them is the main problem if claiming bias against a party is enough to get rid of something disliked. Is that what you mean by monopolies? And to be clear, I agree monopolies are an issue, but that doesn't negate other issues such the fact tech solutions can result in enforcing implicit rules that weren't decided through democratic process despite impacting populations at the same level a government decision would.
smsm42 2y ago
So, the question is: "What can be done to put democratic entities back in charge" - supposedly wrestling control from the hands of "companies". And as an answer, she talks about war in Ukraine, as performed by US government. It's not even tangentially related to the question asked, how does it makes any sense?! Then, in the next question: "For example, just as legislatures rely on independent legal teams to help draft legislation that will survive court challenges, they also need independent technology experts they can turn to for reliable information." What are "independent experts", where would the come from? Academia? NGOs? How really "independent" will they be? WHo will establish this independence and ensure it? It looks like quest for power - those guys do not deserve power, take power from them and give it to us, because we're the Experts, we deserve it! Then: "There are no standards or reporting obligations requiring companies to say how much energy or water they’re using or plan to use." - why should they? It's their private business, why should they disclose this data to anyone? Then Cambridge Analytica thing again. All political campaigns have been used behavioral data to get out the vote and influence results, but of course only for some campaigns it is extremely nefarious. All in all, extremely sloppily done justification for grabbing power to control speech and development of digital economy, by people that do not have any justification for it and use "democracy" as if they own it, and only when they are in control it is "democracy" but if somebody else is allowed to play the same role they do it's "dangerous" and "harmful".
derelicta 2y ago
Karl Marx already wrote about it 150 years ago.
djohnston 2y ago
The state is the primary means by which wealth is siphoned from the public to private interests. You see it with lobbyists, Covid scams, politicians amassing millions on a 200,000 salary. The state is the enemy. If tech companies (and technology generally) are stripping power from the state, so be it. In 100 years we’ll look back at the carcass of the nation state the way we do the Catholic Church.
- oefnak 2y ago
  Wow. I feel the complete opposite. The state is the only thing that can fix things like climate change. Public companies cannot have ethics, they only focus on profits.
  - djohnston 2y ago
    Not all are created equal. I do get the impression that the Nordic states maintain responsible governance and generally have a vested interest in the success of their people. But most Western states are a malignant plague of cronyism and theft with no hope of recovery. We are genuinely in the phase “steal as much as you can before the show is over”. Taxes will continue to rise, austerity will increase, and the state will oversee the continued transfer of wealth from the public to its corrupt benefactors.
  - animal_spirits 2y ago
    Profits mean providing value to individuals. People more and more are valuing sustainability and spending their money to buy sustainable products. It might not be happening where you are yet, but in Seattle there are huge markets for plastic free goods, compostable packaging, farmers markets and locally sourced foods.
- wormlord 2y ago
  No offense but this feels like a politically immature opinion. You could say "this implementation of the state". I also believe that the "less state, the better". But what about a state that is controlled by council composed of worker and citizen councils? Those types of states would explicitly NOT transfer wealth from public to private interests, since private property would not exist. Liberal Nation States + Capitalist Corporations are kind of the same evil in different clothing. They are undemocratic. You either have capital and control the corporation, or you don't. You either have political capital and control the state and its violent mechanisms of control, or you don't. > If tech companies (and technology generally) are stripping power from the state, so be it. Could you explain to me what you think the difference would be between: 1. Living in an authoritarian city where the state has total control over your day-to-day life. 2. Living in an authoritarian company town where the company has total control over your day-to-day life. (If your response is "the free market" please explain why we wouldn't just see anti-competitive behavior between the corporations in order to mutually supress workers and consolidate their control?)
mark_l_watson 2y ago
I am half way through the book and like it. The book rubs against many of my own pro tech beliefs, and that is a good thing.
oriettaxx 2y ago
I was just waiting for something about this!
mrangle 2y ago
That was one of the worst written articles in terms of form, and the worst overall pitch, that I've read in a long time. It reminded me of a whiteboard of disconnected concepts that one might come up with when brainstorming for article support while using random association. Besides lacking logic and therefore honesty in terms of why anyone should support her ask, the author is nakedly partisan and the ask is rank in its authoritarianism. Which aren't persuasive characteristics when pitching for more authority. Either the writing should get better, or if it can't because the premise is horrible and dishonest, then at least learn to lie and cajole with more concision.
l0t0b0r0s 2y ago
The book is one in a series titled 'No Shit'

333 points by alexzeitler 2y ago

Look, pretty soon you are going to have to choose either left or right accelerationism. There is no in between. Acceleration is occurring whether you want it to or not.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

jeffbee 2y ago

We imported a Member of European Parliament, from a place with a sclerotic and insignificant tech industry, to tell us how to sabotage our robust and awesome tech industry. No thanks!

FredPret 2y ago
Right!? We should send someone to write serious and thoughtful pieces about “How the unchecked power of governments is destabilizing companies”
linguae 2y ago
Will our tech industry in Silicon Valley remain awesome, however? I've been working in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade, and it seems to me that power in our industry within the past decade has consolidated to a small handful of companies. I'm hearing less these days about startups disrupting incumbents, and I'm hearing more about incumbents entrenching their gains. Even when it comes to career choices, it seems these days that more young people are opting for the Leetcode grind in hopes to join a FAANG or another high-paying Silicon Valley firm instead of starting a company. After all, it's hard to start a company in a garage when renting a home with a garage is prohibitively expensive for many people. My concern is that Silicon Valley could end up becoming a place where it's all about entrenched incumbents, where it would be too difficult for startups and small businesses to compete, and where those who'd otherwise be willing and ready to compete against the incumbents are stymied by extremely high housing prices that discourage risk-taking, not to mention regulatory capture from the incumbents. Silicon Valley could morph into a place that stifles innovation instead of encourages it. While I'm on this topic, it also seems to me that Silicon Valley collectively is losing the social goodwill it once had. I remember a decade ago people outside of the tech industry being very excited when they heard of one of their friends getting a job at a company like Google or Facebook. Google was still seen as one of the "good guys," and Facebook was still seen as a tool people loved that allowed them to connect with their friends and family. Yes, there was discontent in some parts of the Bay Area about gentrification fueled by an influx of tech residents combined with long-standing restrictions on housing development, but the broader society still thought highly of the tech industry and Silicon Valley in particular. Today that goodwill has been eroded. There are many people who don't think highly of the current generation of tech leaders; Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman seem to bring out different emotions than Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did during their heydays (and I know Jobs and Gates had their detractors). The difference, though, between Silicon Valley today and Silicon Valley in the past, however, is that Silicon Valley is a deeper part of our everyday lives today than it was in the past. The tech industry is bigger than personal computers and e-commerce; the tech industry today plays a major part of our lives. Tech has become vital infrastructure, much like how energy and telecommunication companies are. Maybe in the early days of electrification and telecommunications companies like PG&E and AT&T were better regarded, but eventually as these companies played an increasingly integral part of peoples' lives, these companies exploited this fact, and thus they lost their social goodwill. I can also think about how cars in American society undergone a transformation from being seen as a liberating force to being seen by some as an oppressive force (e.g., facilitating urban sprawl, car-dependent commuting, soul-crushing traffic congestion, etc.). Perhaps the tech industry has entered this life cycle, but I could definitely be wrong.

dgfitz 2y ago

The headline alone sounds like a feature, not a bug!

ebb_earl_co 2y ago
Would you elaborate? This wasn’t my reaction so I am curious what I’m not considering.
- Clubber 2y ago
  >How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governance It's an old joke. The joke is it's working as designed for the companies.

gilbetron 2y ago

Era of Cyberpunk is arriving! Interesting times indeed.

yedava 2y ago

The problem is deeper than that. Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.

CatWChainsaw 2y ago
Yanis Varoufakis.
Clubber 2y ago
>Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it. We were way more worried about that before GNU/Linux became a thing.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Serfs has very little choice over their situation. What piece of software do you need for your life, but you're forced to lease?
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    Code running on medical devices.
- userbinator 2y ago
  Now there are tons of devices running Linux, for which you may be able to see the source code, but are unable to modify it, for ostensibly "security" reasons.
ronsor 2y ago
> Software has completely eroded property rights. This is a great topic to discuss right after you accept the End-User License Agreement and Terms of Service.
majormajor 2y ago
> Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it. I think that's reversed - that's property rights being stronger than ever. "Own things forever and just rent them out" is NOT a weak formulation of property rights from the point of view of the producers of those things.

rjurney 2y ago

It's just an unfortunate title by her editor, the article is interesting. Silicon Valley is about building new companies, not large incumbents manipulating the world.

haberman 2y ago

> And of course, the other real issue, especially in the U.S., is the capability of the power grids. In the Netherlands, which is an advanced economy, as in the U.S. and the U.K., we’ve already seen reports that the grids are functioning at near-emergency levels: code red. The grids are stretched to their limits. They break down and outages are more frequent. And yet there are many data centers in the pipeline that were agreed to years ago. When they come online in two or three years, we may face a wave of disaster. I keep a document called "Timed Predictions," so I can check back on bold predictions such as these. I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.

xxr 2y ago
I would love to hear more of these from your doc
- haberman 2y ago
  I've added claims from a wide gamut of people (some just random Internet users), but here are a few: 2021-10-02 (did not come true): "I would not be surprised if Apple completely closes off the Mac ARM64 platform for “security” in the next few years. The option to boot third-party OSes seems like a short-term gimme to keep the pitchforks and torches at bay." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406 2022-01-12 (did not come true as a "crisis"): "Long COVID / PASC [...] will easily be our next great public health crisis sooner than anyone can imagine." -- https://twitter.com/JamesPhipps/status/1481442131751456770 https://twitter.com/JamesPhipps/status/1481442131751456770 2022-04-04 (we will soon see): "Unless we see big structural changes in the Democratic party's coalition, then the modal outcome for 2024 is Donald Trump winning a filibuster-proof trifecta with a minority of the vote." -- https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912 https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912 2022-11-18 (did not come true): "I do not think Twitter will die, but it will go down in the next few days due to the World Cup and its overwhelming traffic. When it does, Musk will dedicate himself to bringing it back up, and boldly claim that his mission is to “keep Twitter standing.” In the background, he will realise that nobody wants to work for him, and that there is no path that involves him running (or even keeping) this website that resembles any kind of success." -- https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/ 2024-01-29 (by the end of 2024): Brigida v. @SecretaryPete will be settled by the start of year 2025 -- https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752118772960514234 https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752118772960514234

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

CatWChainsaw 2y ago

[flagged]

roenxi 2y ago

Is the HCAIP funded by newspaper or TV companies, by any chance? There are certainly good reasons to be concerned about tech companies, who are pretty much uniformly becoming politically active (the Facebook-Google-Amazon-Apple axis being an especial concern, they seem to be relatively politically homogenous). But the new is still strictly better than the old; the combination of radio/newspaper/TV produces an unreasonable amount of misinformation (and government officials, for that matter). The energy issue is a joke. We have had a massive shift from the 90s to today where the political system was set to prioritise environmental concerns above energy security. Even if it materialises a lack of energy has nothing at all to do with tech companies. And political fracturing looks like it is mostly due to demographic pressure. Better communication is more likely helping than harming - if nothing else now we hear about the genocides instead of them being quietly swept under the rug. Facebook doesn't cause genocide, racialists cause genocides.

caust1c 2y ago

Orthogonally related to the article, I think it gets to the deeper issue at hand with regulating technology: The internet connects everyone and allows for free-flow of information, free-flow information is eroding people's trust. We want free speech, but people use words to deceive and coerce. You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them. Ken Thompson wrote "Reflections on Trusting Trust" in 1984 (fitting as it may be). The conclusion being that we can't rely on computers to build trust. But we need trust to live in a society. It's human instinct trust one another. But falsehoods spread fast online, and after being fooled so many times, people are losing their natural trust in others. What's the way forward? I'm curious what this crowd thinks.

smaug7 2y ago
I don't have a specific answer to this as I'm not a trained historian. However, didn't we see this with the invention of the printing press back 500+ years ago? That also dramatically increased knowledge distribution and probably lies and mistruths. How did society handle that?
- jfengel 2y ago
  A key difference was the lack of democracy. There was plenty of misinformation, but it didn't channel quite so directly to the levers of power. That wasn't necessarily better. We put democracy in place for a reason. But there has been a shift in the societal basis that underlies democracy, and we'll be forced to come up with another set of solutions.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    It's weird how people can recognize early versions of manmade things are usually primitive and need numerous iterations to get working at acceptable levels of optimality but when it comes to democracy there's some sort of a magical force hiding it from sight in this regard.
- Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
  Exacerbated witch hunting, for one[1]. Enabled the Protestant reformation which led to the 30 years war, among others[2]. [1] https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept09/2009/10/31/unintended-consequences/ https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept09/2009/10/31/unintended-con... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War

_yb2s 2y ago

A bad actor with access to peoples private data from Facebook, Google, or Apple could probably blackmail a large fraction of politicians, globally. Someone with unchecked access to peoples private communications would have nearly unimaginable levels of power. It would also be fairly easy for these companies themselves to cover their tracks enough that it would be impossible to prove it wasn't a rogue employee or outside hacker acting alone. We already had "the Fappening" when iCloud was compromised, but I feel if someone did something similar and kept the data private for blackmail purposes, we'd probably never hear about it. Am I missing something here about how this wouldn't actually be possible? Frankly, I'd be surprised if it isn't already happening.

betaby 2y ago

The articles authored by Katharine Miller are not worth reading - they are not even wrong.

azemetre 2y ago
Can you expand upon what you mean? They’re right but poorly written?
- walleeee 2y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong I take no stance on the article or parent comment, just for your reading.
  - azemetre 2y ago
    Interesting, I always heard it as being referred to as unfalsifiable (which your link mentions). I also don't think this is a good phrase to use in reference to society, politics, or the economy.

tehjoker 2y ago

This is basically spelled out in the writings of Marx and Lenin. Same stuff over and over again. Corporate monopolies accrue incredible undemocratic power. They must be owned by the people and their workers.

cscurmudgeon 2y ago
[Someone from a former socialist country. My parents stood in literal bread lines] Marxist governments have caused exponentially more harm (e.g., genocides) than monopolistic companies. Both are bad but the first one results in harm always.
- tehjoker 2y ago
  capitalist countries literally starved other countries outside the imperial core. gaza is in famine today to satisfy the lust for control of world markets. churchill starved india. the list goes on. the only genocide i can think of by a nominally socialist govt was the cambodian genocide, backed by the US and China, and the ppl in charge were really weird and not marxist. they were rigid idealists afaik. that genocide was halted by vietnamese marxists.

miki123211 2y ago

I think this "problem" stems directly from the fact that the geographic model of governments is extremely unsuited for governing on the internet. In times past, Governments could e.g. regulate the quality of coke, control election misinformation or forbid burglaries on their own soil, because they had law enforcement who could imprison people doing these things against the law. What happened outside of their borders was mostly of no concern to them. If Coca Cola wanted to sell their products in Germany, they needed people in Germany willing to sell it, and those people were directly vulnerable to imprisonment by German law enforcement, so they had to care about and follow German law. Even if the original corporation wasn't involved directly, there were always vendors, importers, store owners and such, and all of them could be targeted to some extend. Tech companies are different, you can make a product on the internet that interacts with the data of the majority of German citizens, without ever stepping foot in Germany or even realizing that a country called Germany exists and has laws. If Germany doesn't like the fact that this product exists, there isn't much they can do. For now, most countries still have some semblance of control, usually backed by the power of international treaties, DNS blocking and control over payment infrastructure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of fast and affordable satellite internet on one hand and easier access to crypto on the other will make the situation even worse.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Huh? Germany is notorious for banning, restricting, or altering, a huge number of tech products from smartphones to video games, with practically perfect compliance after a valid court order is issued. Do you have some examples of non-compliance?
- ggm 2y ago
  Crypto in modems, and mp3s
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    Are there any recent examples, in the past decade?

SamPatt 2y ago

>It’s basically about catching up through international law, regulations, and enforcement, to make sure that the ideas that we have about what a democratic mandate looks like, what accountability looks like, and what oversight looks like are actually meaningful whenever activities happen in the digital sphere. Who is "we" here, and which "democratic mandate" is being discussed? The author was involved with the EU parliament? Excuse me for not taking their tech sector recommendations seriously.

azemetre 2y ago
Why not? The EU has some of the best consumer protection laws on the planet and they seem to be the only coalition that are actively legislating against big tech. Why be so dismissive on the idea that the “tech utopia” that Google or Meta wants to sell us is just digital serfdom? Seems appropriate seeing how damaging to society these companies truly are.

smackeyacky 2y ago

The insidious take over of security by the smart phone is what worries me the most. I can't pay my taxes, access healthcare or even sign-on to my job without using my phone any more. If somebody said 25 years ago that access to government services would be completely privatised there would have been uproar. Not only did we consent to this, we did it willingly in exchange for convenience. Now we are screwed. Americans used to be all gung-ho about "those who give up freedom for security will not be free or secure" but it's much worse than that. We gave up security for convenience and handed everything about ourselves to an unscrupulous bunch of billionaires who are intent on replacing government wholesale, and we will be paying them while they do it.

bloomingeek 2y ago
Not to mention the tracking on our vehicles and TVs. And how the police can demand the video off our Ring door bells. What's next, my dash cams?
- gruez 2y ago
  >And how the police can demand the video off our Ring door bells. What's next, my dash cams? They always could. It's called a search warrant. The idea that your security camera footage was inaccessible to governments was incorrect to begin with.
majormajor 2y ago
Plenty of people when I lived in Texas 25 years ago who would be pretty easy to get onboard with privatizing access to government services. Complaints about the DMV, for instance, are eternal. School vouchers were and continue to be hot in many influential circles, with people wanting to get rid of the government services entirely in favor of privatized ones. Pro-privatization, small-government ideas have been WILDLY popular since at least Reagan. Giving up liberty for security, (or just convenience or religion) in the US goes back even further. Cold War policies and inquisitions, any number of vice laws, restrictive zoning, to name a few from the 20th century.
tomrod 2y ago

nisten 2y ago

[flagged]

themgt 2y ago

This is hopelessly confused: they are just as illustrative of some of the challenges that I’m pointing to, [such] as Elon Musk deciding who in Ukraine should and should not have access to Starlink internet connections. ... Let’s compare how the U.S. responded to the Ukraine war in the physical world versus in the cyber domain. As part of NATO, the U.S. is clear: It doesn’t want to see boots on the ground. But in the cyber domain, the U.S.’s offensive activities are ongoing. That political discrepancy can continue because of the legal gray zone in the digital realm. Wikipedia has a good overview[0] but the basic debate was originally over funding of systems donated to replace a civilian communication network, and later over the use of the Starlink civilian communication system in attack drones, e.g. "Starlink legal documents claim it is not for use in weaponry as a military use of Starlink brings it under US export control laws like the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) or the Export Administration Regulations (EAR)" and "Shotwell explained that her company agreed with Ukraine's military using Starlink for communications but never intended to have them use it as a weapon. She added 'But then they started putting them on f---ing drones trying to blow up Russian ships. I’m happy to donate services for ambulances and hospitals and mothers [...] But it’s wrong to pay for military drone strikes.'" This author says "we need to bring the same level of legal clarity, accountability mechanisms, and transparency measures to the digital realm that we expect around other innovations such as medicines, chemicals, foods, cars, or even processes such as the decision to engage in foreign conflict" but uses as her case-in-point example the demand by a foreign military that a civilian communication system be enabled for use on novel drone weapons in a war where the United States is explicitly not a combatant. Certainly legal clarity could be helpful for a situation like this, but I would hope the clarity is that a private company intentionally building a product for purely civilian use cannot be forced to modify that system to enable its use as an offensive weapon in a foreign war. Her argument seems akin to saying "Tim Cook arbitrarily decided Apple won't sell iPhones secretly loaded with remotely detonated plastic explosives for use by a foreign military - we need accountability here, this is destabilizing governance!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainia...

animal_spirits 2y ago

I watched Julian Assange’s recent talk at the Council of Europe and his testimony on the insanity that the U.S. Government put him through [1]. This makes me come to a different conclusion than the article. > In the digital realm, companies’ control of information, unfettered agency, and power to act have almost overtaken that of governments. Why is it assumed that governments will act better if the power to control information is in their hands? We see this time and time again that the control over information is the most manipulating force a tyrant can wield. Why should we trust government over companies? At least with a publicly traded company we can sell stock faster than we can elect new leaders. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idphGmY3QRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idphGmY3QRM

philosopher1234 2y ago
Because companies make decisions based on who has the most money. 90% of Americans have basically no control of those decisions. And companies interfere with democratic control of the government. Getting things out of the way of democracy seems good to me.
- phyzix5761 2y ago
  Again, how would that be different if government had the power to control information? Its human nature to do things that benefit yourself. At least if its not centralized then you have competition which gives people a choice of where they want their information coming from.
- tightbookkeeper 2y ago
  Who does the government listen to when making decisions? Influence and power follows a power distribution. This is an age old problem.
- refurb 2y ago
  We already know that organizations (whether public or private) eventually devolve into a bureaucracy where the goal is the growth of the organization itself. We see this with the government - how often does the government ever remove laws? Or reduce size? Very rarely. It seems to me that if the goal is to ensure one is not coerced, whether by business or government is not to try and create mechanisms to ensure coercion is only benevolent, but rather to ensure they never have the power to coerce people in the first place.

anonymousiam 2y ago

What can be done about the unchecked power of governance?

AdieuToLogic 2y ago
> What can be done about the unchecked power of governance? If you are fortunate enough to live in a country which has free and fair elections, then vote.
- wejrwiejre 2y ago
  Those countries exist? Last I checked there are few true democracies. Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests. If all your options are just corporate shills and power hungry spooks and goons is it even "free and fair" at that point?
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Last I checked there are few true democracies. Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests If you're anywhere in the West, this doesn't describe your democracy but a cartoon of it. Like yes, if you only show up for--in the U.S.--the Presidential general election, your vote isn't that powerful because it's not supposed to be in a country of a quarter of a billion.
    - farts_mckensy 2y ago
      "Bought out by corporate interests" is a completely accurate assessment of the American electoral system. It's honestly quite alienating reading all of these completely delusional comments. Your vote is at the very least supposed to be proportionally significant to the general population. We don't even have that. We are bombarded with corporate propaganda every fucking day. A senator from Wyoming has just as much of a vote as California. This notion that we live in a democracy or anything close to that is asinine. The system is not tethered to the will of the people in any sense of the word. It's an oligarchy.

muaytimbo 2y ago

The author is an authoritarian lawmaker. This is a false flag to consolidate additional power over the last vestige of the free Internet.

e40 2y ago
This person? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marietje_Schaake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marietje_Schaake … doesn’t seem so (authoritarian). Your comment is provocative, can you back that up with evidence?
- userbinator 2y ago
  World Economic Forum (WEF), co-chair of the Global Future Council on Agile Governance
  - alistairSH 2y ago
    And? By its own description, that council doesn’t appear authoritarian. For reference, here’s how it describes itself… “To seize the benefits of rapid technological progress, while managing its risks, it is essential to foster responsible technology governance and regulation, advance the digital transformation of sectors and industries, and promote tech-enabled solutions to serve people and the planet. How can policies, regulations and institutions be transformed to scale technologies responsibly?” https://www.weforum.org/communities/gfc-on-technology-policy/ https://www.weforum.org/communities/gfc-on-technology-policy...
    - userbinator 2y ago
      The WEF is ultimately authoritarian.
    - realce 2y ago
      > By its own description, that council doesn’t appear authoritarian. The defendant certainly didn't kill his wife, he said so himself!
2y ago

TZubiri 2y ago

This is an interesting discussion, no doubt. But no one questions this is the case. Yes corporations grow in power and reach and are taking on responsibilities previously held by states. I'm looking forward to the next step in the discussion. Should this not be the case? Where do these notions that imply that the state doing something is better than a company? I'm not a libertarian or an extremist, but I've had to reject some pretty simplistic views that businesses are evil. The word coporation comes from the word Corpus, in a sense the people congregate, each with their own function as an organ to serve as a body. So it seems as noble a concept as the state. I can point to corrupt states or corruption in golden standard states as easily as I can do the same for companies. Is there a disparity between the goals and the results of these organizations (Companies for selfless reasons, the state for the common good)? If so, is it sufficient to judge the organizations based on their results, or should we demand organizations not only to benefit the common good, but to expressly pursue it? Finally, not for profits enter the fray as a potential intermediate option. OpenAI's success is pretty unprecedented, although the reputation of the NFP is irreparably damaged. Even if courts decide that whatever fuckery they are doing is all good by the law, in the trial of public opinion we can all agree that OpenAI walks like a dog and barks like a dog.

ekimekim 2y ago
There are two important differences between corporations (even non-for-profit ones) and the government. The first is that citizens have a say in who governs them. If the government does something they don't like, they can (at least in theory) vote for someone who will change it. The second is that in most legal systems, there are differences in what governments are allowed to do and what corporations are allowed to do. For example, a government may be required to provide services to all citizens, whereas a corporation has the right to not serve certain people (such as "people who don't own a smartphone"). These differences aren't insurmountable, but it's something to keep in mind.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  Regarding point 1, I would argue that citizens have more of a say in how the corporations operate, (and what corporations for that matter) as their say occurs every time they pay or not pay or engage into a commercial contract, which is much more often than once every 4 years.

Barrin92 2y ago

"Let’s compare how the U.S. responded to the Ukraine war in the physical world versus in the cyber domain. As part of NATO, the U.S. is clear: It doesn’t want to see boots on the ground. But in the cyber domain, the U.S.’s offensive activities are ongoing?" A few weeks ago I saw Zero Days, which is a good documentary on Stuxnet and it's pretty wild just to what extent tools in that domain are out of the purview of the public. Offensive capabilities that amount to acts of war seemingly have no democratic oversight, and even an ex-director of the NSA thought the amount of classification of materials went too far. Very few people were willing to speak at all to the filmmakers even years after it had already blown over. Whether its some sort of dystopian privatized policing by Palantir or tools used by three letter agencies, what the article warns of has arguably already arrived a decade ago.

econcon 2y ago

Money and Violence dictates who controls resources hence power. So, companies controlling government is no surprise.

fallingknife 2y ago

I have a hard time listening to this complaint about unchecked power coming from an entity that controls $20 billion of land, owns a $40 billion endowment, and receives most of its revenue from the federal government who is legally required to pay whatever price they ask, all while paying $0 in taxes on all of it.

rapatel0 2y ago

As any company reaches scale, they will begin to have negative externalizes due to that scale. It is rational to address these externalities. The author, however, fails to put forward any real criticism of government authorities who: - Have much greater scale - Are more opaque - Engage more aggressively to control and manage narratives - Are routinely shown to be subject to corporate capture---negating the fundamental point of the argument. Tech companies (in spite of all of their warts) are at least promoting the free flow of information. This (free thought and expression) is the bedrock of every successful culture in history. Moreover, loss of these has been the downfall of almost every one of these cultures. Examples: - Late Ming Dynasty China (16th-17th centuries) - Late Ottoman Empire (18th-19th centuries) - Fall of the roman empire - Tokugawa era in Japan - Ancient Greece after the execution of Socrates. - Golden Age of Islam (9th to 10th centuries) Pretty much all of these examples were cases where the political class enacted controls that prevented challenges to government orthodoxy and/or becoming more isolationist, and other avenues to preventing/controlling free speech in the name of "better social cohesion" and preventing bad influences (...cough...misinformation...). So I cannot more vehemently disagree with the authors precept (especially since she is likely in a position to benefit from it)

jvanderbot 2y ago
> The author, however, fails to put forward any real criticism of government authorities who: - Have much greater scale - Are more opaque - Engage more aggressively to control and manage narratives - Are routinely shown to be subject to corporate captur The author has chosen to write about, and I quote "How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governance" This does not include, and is not obligated to include, any other factors that might destabilize governance. As for the claims of virtue re: tech companies, I think they are overbroad and overpositive. There are several examples of tech companies violating any of the virtues you mention, and going head to head with government regulation to the determent of us all. This is not to say tech companies lack virtue, just that they may not all be the paramount morality that you seem to describe.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  Yes, the author is not obligated to include that, but nor is the reader obligated to ignore obvious evidence of her hypocrisy and self interest. And when a creature surfaces from the morass of governemnt bureaucracy to complain about the threat of something much less ominous and powerful than itself, that hypocrisy is certainly something I will point out.

talkingtab 2y ago

For those who do not know this, in the USA, our choice is not just between government controls and corporate controls. There is a third element, one that is supposed to be primary. We are supposed to live in a place where we people enact laws. This is not the case. The simplest test is simply to ask "Cui Bono". Who benefits from the laws enacted? For example, do the laws enacted favor drug companies and help them charge $1000 per month, or do the laws help keep drug cost under control? Do the laws enacted ensure that workers earn a living wage, or do they ensure that corporations can charge whatever price they want and pay as little as possible? What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people This is not rocket science. And it is stupid. At some point fewer and fewer Americans will be able to afford the things corporations sell. If you are a predator and you kill off your prey, you will die. We, the people, need to start enacting laws that benefit the people. First and foremost is one that reverses Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. This decision by the Supreme Court represents the height of incompetence or stupid. Why is this not happening? Are the opinions and situation of common Americans ongoing and visible? Or does the NYT cater to wealthy corporate advertisers? Does it feature articles like "What house can you buy Portland, Maine with $1.5 million" while the number of homeless in Portland, Maine is staggering. Is the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos (aka Amazon) really going to talk about corporate excesses? Since our media is now utterly dependent on corporate advertisers, which of those media are going to oppose corporate excesses? We need to fix this.

wsintra2022 2y ago
Very well articulated. Standing right next to you, fist raised, ready to share the word.
donatj 2y ago
What percent of those drugs exist explicitly because they can charge high prices for them? Are companies going to continue to invest countless millions developing drugs they have no chance to recoop? I'd argue everyone benefits from a world where cures exist but are expensive, when the alternative is everything that exists is affordable, but progress halts.

fdschoeneman 2y ago

Yes because companies are totally unchecked and there's no regulation at all and because of this we have governance that brings us Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and bullshit wars and tampons in boys bathrooms and under lock and key at Walgreens. Good grief. This is not the kind of thing technical people or hackers want to read.

ggm 2y ago
Is that a generalisation about the readership or to content here, or a bitter observation of lack of concern by the readership? There are multiple interpretations possible here.
- fdschoeneman 2y ago
  The former.

dools 2y ago

This isn't some accident, it is the stated aim, and result of systematic academic capture by Austro-libertarian economists and right wing libertarians.

mattmcknight 2y ago
Left wing professors outnumber right wing professors more than 12:1.
- zdw 2y ago
  What's the ratio in the economics department?
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    I doubt you'll find many people identifying with either of those labels in an economics department.
zahlman 2y ago
>result of systematic academic capture by Austro-libertarian economists and right wing libertarians. For anything to "result" from this, it would have to happen. What evidence do you offer for such a phenomenon?

thunderbong 2y ago

An interesting point from the article - > Governments are increasingly outsourcing all kinds of processes to tech companies. And if a tech company operates in the name of a government, it should be as accountable as the government. I call this “the public accountability extension.” It sounds simple, but it would be a huge game changer. Right now, as governments outsource more and more critical governmental functions to tech companies, they also offload governmental accountability.

wyager 2y ago

This is not worth reading, because it was not generated as part of a deductive process, where you start with some facts and work your way to some entailments. Instead, the causal process that let to the creation of this book and ad was that the political patronage relationship between American progressives and American tech companies fell apart. This leads to demand for post-hoc justifications for subsequent changes in cash allocation, lawfare budget allocation, etc. The author started with the conclusion "... and that's why we have to disenfranchise tech companies" and worked backwards from there. Therefore, this document cannot, on expectation, communicate to you any useful entailments, except insofar as that conclusion might incidentally be correct for reasons totally unrelated to the author's thought process.

1024core 2y ago

IMHO, it's the companies AND the government against the people. The government twists the companies' arm to make it do things that the government is not allowed to do. Company refuses to play along? Threaten to break it up. There's a reason why AT&T has dedicated wiretap rooms for the NSA. DJI not selling drones to Ukraine? Threaten to ban it in one of its biggest markets.

jmyeet 2y ago

Tech companies have successfully weaponized "the algorithm" as a shield of plausible deniability. Google was probably the most successful at this and one of the earliest. So often we'd hear about something getting removed or upranked or downranked and here "well, that's the algorithm". The implication is they're not responsible. But all algorithms, particularly ranking algoirthms and news feeds, are merely a means of reflecting the wishes of the people who design and maintain them. Every ranking decision has a human decision behind it. Go back to Google's war on content farms. While this was justified, it demonstrates the principle: some teams at Google decided it was a problem, then designed some ML systems to decide if a given site was a content farm ("high quality" vs "low quality", etc) and then plugged that feature into the search ranking system and then tweaked ranking so those sites ranked lower. The point is it's never "the algorithm". It's always humans. We see this with the US government's war on Tiktok. This really has nothing to do with the risk of Chinese interference. If that was ap roblem, more serious efforts would've been made to tackle interference by Russia and other countries through existing companies like Meta. The real problem with Tiktok (from the US government's perspective) is that it doesn't play ball with US State Department policy. You get to actually see things happening in the world that IG, Googke, Youtube, FB, etc intentionally suppress, both by ranking them lower and making it ridiculously easy to abuse content safety systems to remove such content by brigading it (this is a problem on Tiktok too but at least it exists to be brigaded). What's happening in Gaza is th emost pertinent example. And then we have Elon Musk who buys Twitter to basically push his own political views.

Animats 2y ago

It's not a very good paper, even though the author has reasonable credentials in Europe. She writes: "For example, just as legislatures rely on independent legal teams to help draft legislation that will survive court challenges, they also need independent technology experts they can turn to for reliable information. Making tech expertise available to lawmakers would go a long way toward reducing lobbyists’ effectiveness and ensuring lawmakers understand how technology impacts issues like healthcare, education, justice, housing, and transportation." This shows insufficient knowledge of the US situation. The U.S. Congress used to have an Office of Technology Assessment.[1] It was abolished in 1995. "House Republican legislators characterized the OTA as wasteful and hostile to GOP interests." The generic problem is monopolies, not "tech". US banks and drug stores are down to 2-3 major players. Tough enforcement of the Sherman Act might help. Although the experience with the AT&T breakup is not encouraging. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...

BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
I don't see how you conclude from that quote that she doesn't know about the office of technology or lacks understanding of the US context. When I read making tech expertise available, I'm not picturing a government science department doing research, I'm picturing independent consultants translating algorithms into english. If anything, your point shows the bipartisan us vs. them is the main problem if claiming bias against a party is enough to get rid of something disliked. Is that what you mean by monopolies? And to be clear, I agree monopolies are an issue, but that doesn't negate other issues such the fact tech solutions can result in enforcing implicit rules that weren't decided through democratic process despite impacting populations at the same level a government decision would.

smsm42 2y ago

So, the question is: "What can be done to put democratic entities back in charge" - supposedly wrestling control from the hands of "companies". And as an answer, she talks about war in Ukraine, as performed by US government. It's not even tangentially related to the question asked, how does it makes any sense?! Then, in the next question: "For example, just as legislatures rely on independent legal teams to help draft legislation that will survive court challenges, they also need independent technology experts they can turn to for reliable information." What are "independent experts", where would the come from? Academia? NGOs? How really "independent" will they be? WHo will establish this independence and ensure it? It looks like quest for power - those guys do not deserve power, take power from them and give it to us, because we're the Experts, we deserve it! Then: "There are no standards or reporting obligations requiring companies to say how much energy or water they’re using or plan to use." - why should they? It's their private business, why should they disclose this data to anyone? Then Cambridge Analytica thing again. All political campaigns have been used behavioral data to get out the vote and influence results, but of course only for some campaigns it is extremely nefarious. All in all, extremely sloppily done justification for grabbing power to control speech and development of digital economy, by people that do not have any justification for it and use "democracy" as if they own it, and only when they are in control it is "democracy" but if somebody else is allowed to play the same role they do it's "dangerous" and "harmful".

derelicta 2y ago

Karl Marx already wrote about it 150 years ago.

djohnston 2y ago

The state is the primary means by which wealth is siphoned from the public to private interests. You see it with lobbyists, Covid scams, politicians amassing millions on a 200,000 salary. The state is the enemy. If tech companies (and technology generally) are stripping power from the state, so be it. In 100 years we’ll look back at the carcass of the nation state the way we do the Catholic Church.

oefnak 2y ago
Wow. I feel the complete opposite. The state is the only thing that can fix things like climate change. Public companies cannot have ethics, they only focus on profits.
- djohnston 2y ago
  Not all are created equal. I do get the impression that the Nordic states maintain responsible governance and generally have a vested interest in the success of their people. But most Western states are a malignant plague of cronyism and theft with no hope of recovery. We are genuinely in the phase “steal as much as you can before the show is over”. Taxes will continue to rise, austerity will increase, and the state will oversee the continued transfer of wealth from the public to its corrupt benefactors.
- animal_spirits 2y ago
  Profits mean providing value to individuals. People more and more are valuing sustainability and spending their money to buy sustainable products. It might not be happening where you are yet, but in Seattle there are huge markets for plastic free goods, compostable packaging, farmers markets and locally sourced foods.
wormlord 2y ago
No offense but this feels like a politically immature opinion. You could say "this implementation of the state". I also believe that the "less state, the better". But what about a state that is controlled by council composed of worker and citizen councils? Those types of states would explicitly NOT transfer wealth from public to private interests, since private property would not exist. Liberal Nation States + Capitalist Corporations are kind of the same evil in different clothing. They are undemocratic. You either have capital and control the corporation, or you don't. You either have political capital and control the state and its violent mechanisms of control, or you don't. > If tech companies (and technology generally) are stripping power from the state, so be it. Could you explain to me what you think the difference would be between: 1. Living in an authoritarian city where the state has total control over your day-to-day life. 2. Living in an authoritarian company town where the company has total control over your day-to-day life. (If your response is "the free market" please explain why we wouldn't just see anti-competitive behavior between the corporations in order to mutually supress workers and consolidate their control?)

mark_l_watson 2y ago

I am half way through the book and like it. The book rubs against many of my own pro tech beliefs, and that is a good thing.

oriettaxx 2y ago

I was just waiting for something about this!

mrangle 2y ago

That was one of the worst written articles in terms of form, and the worst overall pitch, that I've read in a long time. It reminded me of a whiteboard of disconnected concepts that one might come up with when brainstorming for article support while using random association. Besides lacking logic and therefore honesty in terms of why anyone should support her ask, the author is nakedly partisan and the ask is rank in its authoritarianism. Which aren't persuasive characteristics when pitching for more authority. Either the writing should get better, or if it can't because the premise is horrible and dishonest, then at least learn to lie and cajole with more concision.

l0t0b0r0s 2y ago

The book is one in a series titled 'No Shit'