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It matters if one person can buy Twitter on a whim and use it to pursue his ideological goals, or if one person can buy The Washington Post and dictate it's edi

It matters if one person can buy Twitter on a whim and use it to pursue his ideological goals, or if one person can buy The Washington Post and dictate it's editorial positions, or if a small handful of people can fund an effort to identify and groom a wide bench of lawyers to one day become judges who will bend the law in their favor. Not to mention plain old lobbying and campaign contributions. When wealth is power, wealth inequality is toxic to democracy.

listenallyall 2y ago
Oh my, individual ownership of newspapers? Bezos bought it from Katharine Graham, while the Sulzberger clan has owned the NYT for over a century. Scripps, Hearst, Pulitzer... how did these names get famous? Newspapers.
- andy_ppp 2y ago
  Twitter is much more effective at brainwashing stupid people into believing any old crap than newspapers ever were, there were journalistic standards in the coverage for one thing.
  - southernplaces7 2y ago
    So you've managed to blend elitist ideas of some people being less or more "qualified" to disseminate certain opinions than others who don't share your ideological preferences with supposedly egalitarian ideas of reducing concentration of power. Also, journalistic standards, historically, were little or not at all better than anything you see online today. Yellow journalism was a major part of media since long before the internet and newspapers pandering to very specific, dishonest biases was also pervasive, but with few genuinely unfiltered alternative viewpoints being available. The difference today is that a real plurality of opinions is finally possible and can be globally made visible. The media gatekeepers hate this and thus create contrived arguments about an imaginary golden standard of media integrity and mass misinformation.
southernplaces7 2y ago
>It matters if one person can buy Twitter on a whim and use it to pursue his ideological goals, or if one person can buy The Washington Post and dictate it's editorial positions, Oh no, now it's important to stop this because some people are able to do these things while having political viewpoints that you don't like. Were you previously making the same argument against say, the New York Times, due to it's being owned by one family and following that family's specific ideological viewpoints? Wealth inequality is an innate part of human society, and by itself has little bearing on democracy or even overall standards of living. There are also many countries with low wealth inequality in which democracy doesn't exist in any sense.
- TFYS 2y ago
  I’m not the person you’re responding to, but I’ll answer that yes, it has always been a problem that so much influence is concentrated in so few hands. It’s been said that a dictatorship would be the best form of governance if you could ensure the dictator would always be the best one possible. But you can’t. When you allow such concentrations of power, at some point someone who is willing to abuse that power, or someone who is simply incompetent, will come along and it’s a disaster for everybody. Wealth inequality is not innate; there have been plenty of civilizations with far less of it. It’s only an inherent part of free-market capitalism.
  - southernplaces7 2y ago
    >Wealth inequality is not innate; there have been plenty of civilizations with far less of it. It’s only an inherent part of free-market capitalism. Please by all means, name these superior civilizations with minimal wealth inequality. The fact that some people are immensely rich and many others aren't is much less important than how a given society regulates individual rights to live one's life and be protected by the law. Wealth inequality is also less important than the specific question of how these rich people became what they are and how much power they have over those less wealthy than them. Ie: You can't honestly compare a modern market economy with a feudal barony. In much of the modern "terribly" unequal market economies, a Bill Gates or Musk can be freely told to go fuck themselves by anyone less wealthy than them and their wealth has little to do with some random average person's capacity to better their own life. The same often doesn't apply to societies with low wealth inequality, which coincidentally are often poorly developed and authoritarian. I don't really care if Warren Buffet, Zuckerberg or Ellison can buy a dozen private jets any time they like if I live in the same society with most of my legal and economic rights protected, and with the ability to create a comfortable life also respected. I would however worry about a more supposedly egalitarian state in which central authority figures have given themselves the legal right to confiscate property and earned capital for reasons of ideology. Also, while many on this site live in a bubble in which the importance and influence of Musk's X (previously Twitter) is grossly fetishized, in the real world, it's just not that important. Musk can throw all the tantrums he likes on the site and ban whoever he pleases, and for 99% of the world, it doesn't matter enough to be worth a single shit. It's when he obtains literal political power that I worry, and the mechanism behind the kind of authority that could confiscate earned wealth beyond a certain ideologically or politically defined point can at any time fall victim to someone with the kind of grossly egotistical personality that someone like X's owner has. having the legal authority to prevent a rich person from owning a social media platform is much more dangerous than that rich person simply owning a social media platform (in a landscape of others that it has to increasingly compete with).
UncleMeat 2y ago
Yep. A wealth tax on billionaires brings in some tax revenue, but that's not the key thing it achieves. It achieves no more billionaires. It is bad for society when one single unaccountable person can accrue this much power.

listenallyall 2y ago

Oh my, individual ownership of newspapers? Bezos bought it from Katharine Graham, while the Sulzberger clan has owned the NYT for over a century. Scripps, Hearst, Pulitzer... how did these names get famous? Newspapers.

andy_ppp 2y ago
Twitter is much more effective at brainwashing stupid people into believing any old crap than newspapers ever were, there were journalistic standards in the coverage for one thing.
- southernplaces7 2y ago
  So you've managed to blend elitist ideas of some people being less or more "qualified" to disseminate certain opinions than others who don't share your ideological preferences with supposedly egalitarian ideas of reducing concentration of power. Also, journalistic standards, historically, were little or not at all better than anything you see online today. Yellow journalism was a major part of media since long before the internet and newspapers pandering to very specific, dishonest biases was also pervasive, but with few genuinely unfiltered alternative viewpoints being available. The difference today is that a real plurality of opinions is finally possible and can be globally made visible. The media gatekeepers hate this and thus create contrived arguments about an imaginary golden standard of media integrity and mass misinformation.

southernplaces7 2y ago

>It matters if one person can buy Twitter on a whim and use it to pursue his ideological goals, or if one person can buy The Washington Post and dictate it's editorial positions, Oh no, now it's important to stop this because some people are able to do these things while having political viewpoints that you don't like. Were you previously making the same argument against say, the New York Times, due to it's being owned by one family and following that family's specific ideological viewpoints? Wealth inequality is an innate part of human society, and by itself has little bearing on democracy or even overall standards of living. There are also many countries with low wealth inequality in which democracy doesn't exist in any sense.

TFYS 2y ago
I’m not the person you’re responding to, but I’ll answer that yes, it has always been a problem that so much influence is concentrated in so few hands. It’s been said that a dictatorship would be the best form of governance if you could ensure the dictator would always be the best one possible. But you can’t. When you allow such concentrations of power, at some point someone who is willing to abuse that power, or someone who is simply incompetent, will come along and it’s a disaster for everybody. Wealth inequality is not innate; there have been plenty of civilizations with far less of it. It’s only an inherent part of free-market capitalism.
- southernplaces7 2y ago
  >Wealth inequality is not innate; there have been plenty of civilizations with far less of it. It’s only an inherent part of free-market capitalism. Please by all means, name these superior civilizations with minimal wealth inequality. The fact that some people are immensely rich and many others aren't is much less important than how a given society regulates individual rights to live one's life and be protected by the law. Wealth inequality is also less important than the specific question of how these rich people became what they are and how much power they have over those less wealthy than them. Ie: You can't honestly compare a modern market economy with a feudal barony. In much of the modern "terribly" unequal market economies, a Bill Gates or Musk can be freely told to go fuck themselves by anyone less wealthy than them and their wealth has little to do with some random average person's capacity to better their own life. The same often doesn't apply to societies with low wealth inequality, which coincidentally are often poorly developed and authoritarian. I don't really care if Warren Buffet, Zuckerberg or Ellison can buy a dozen private jets any time they like if I live in the same society with most of my legal and economic rights protected, and with the ability to create a comfortable life also respected. I would however worry about a more supposedly egalitarian state in which central authority figures have given themselves the legal right to confiscate property and earned capital for reasons of ideology. Also, while many on this site live in a bubble in which the importance and influence of Musk's X (previously Twitter) is grossly fetishized, in the real world, it's just not that important. Musk can throw all the tantrums he likes on the site and ban whoever he pleases, and for 99% of the world, it doesn't matter enough to be worth a single shit. It's when he obtains literal political power that I worry, and the mechanism behind the kind of authority that could confiscate earned wealth beyond a certain ideologically or politically defined point can at any time fall victim to someone with the kind of grossly egotistical personality that someone like X's owner has. having the legal authority to prevent a rich person from owning a social media platform is much more dangerous than that rich person simply owning a social media platform (in a landscape of others that it has to increasingly compete with).

UncleMeat 2y ago

Yep. A wealth tax on billionaires brings in some tax revenue, but that's not the key thing it achieves. It achieves no more billionaires. It is bad for society when one single unaccountable person can accrue this much power.