7 ms·

In the nineties (and even later) I read a lot of cyberpunk set in near-future dystopias where government power had crumbled and evil megacorps ruled the world,

• a3voices 13y ago
  Maybe it's because corporations care about their users more than the government does? After all, they make money from selling their products, not from coercion.
  • personlurking 13y ago
    I'd say it's somewhere between 'selling' and 'coercion'. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." - Edward Bernays The quote continues... http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/203430-the-conscious-and-intelligent-manipulation-of-the-organized-habits-and http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/203430-the-conscious-and-int...
  • walshemj 13y ago
    err profit I think you meant to say
• pirateking 13y ago
  Don't worry. We are just in the 1984 stage of dystopia. Snow Crash is coming soon though!
• coldtea 13y ago
  >Now the megacorps are trying to defend our personal liberty and privacy from governments that have gotten too powerful (albeit mostly because it would improve sales)! That's... unexpected. Well, they make a show of it, they could not care less about our privacy actually. Most of them had collaborated just fine with the government before the revelations... Matter of fact, if they could have all of our personal info for themselves as a competitive advantage they would be more than happy...
  • l33tbro 13y ago
    Collaborated? Not so much. Each company was issued a gag order. Not all of these companies can be like Lavabit and spit it back in big government's face. I think this is an awesome development.
    • jnbiche 13y ago
      >Not all of these companies can be like Lavabit and spit it back in big government's face. Sure they could. In fact, these companies are in a much better position than Lavabit to spit it back in big government's face...financially, legally, and politically. But I agree that this is a positive development.
      • ChrisAntaki 13y ago
        > these companies are in a much better position than Lavabit to spit it back in big government's face...financially, legally, and politically. Here's an example of Yahoo's fight against PRISM. http://mashable.com/2013/06/14/yahoo-fought-prism-lost/ http://mashable.com/2013/06/14/yahoo-fought-prism-lost/
    • vidarh 13y ago
      None of them were issues with gag orders that would have prevented them from taking the actions they are now taking in asking for reforms.
    • nate_meurer 13y ago
      Yes, collaborated. Microsoft provides the NSA with holes in its OS (and presumably other SW) long before it provides us with patches.
      • CWuestefeld 13y ago
        This is a recurring talking point, but it's not entirely accurate. Microsoft provides early information about known weaknesses, even before fixes are available, to MANY large customers, one of whom is the US government. This is done so that those customers can mitigate the risks ASAP, before the zero-day hackers can leverage the weakness. So while your statement is correct, it implies a relationship that doesn't actually exist.
• weland 13y ago
  > Now the megacorps are trying to defend our personal liberty and privacy from governments that have gotten too powerful (albeit mostly because it would improve sales)! That's... unexpected. Don't be too quick about it. Once the megacorps win the war, it's interesting to see who will defend our personal liberty and privacy from them.
  • pjc50 13y ago
    Indeed. In the UK, we're wrestling with a rightwing _news_ junta with its own surveillace abuses, intertwined with the police. The power to dig up every detail about someone's life then publish it for the adverse judgement of millions of people is capable of great destructiveness if abused.
    • Silhouette 13y ago
      In the UK, we're wrestling with a rightwing _news_ junta with its own surveillace abuses, intertwined with the police. While that may be true, it's not really the same situation. For one thing, it seems clear that the behaviour in question was illegal, and people are going to jail for it. For another, guessing that someone won't have changed the default PIN to access their voicemail is not on the same technical level as, say, building backdoors into widely used hardware by being sneaky with state-of-the-art mathematics.
  • tripzilch 13y ago
    > Once the megacorps win the war, it's interesting to see who will defend our personal liberty and privacy from them. well, the Free Market obviously ... right? cough
  • d4nt 13y ago
    Fortunately, the mega corps haven't started hiring their own police forces and locking people up who break whatever rules they decide are appropriate. If they did that, then I might reconsider what data I shared with them. The state is in a very different (privileged) position to commercial companies and we need an additional layer of protection from the state that is not necessary with companies.
• alan_cx 13y ago
  Yeah, because government excess has given corporate data slurping a bad name.....
• scrrr 13y ago
  ONLY because of sales. That's the point of companies! Revenue! But yeah it's interesting. It seems to go back and forth over the decades. Evil corporations, good government, good corporations, evil government.. if a god exists I'm sure he has a big bowl of popcorn.
  • Silhouette 13y ago
    In most Western countries today, it is much easier to vote with your wallet than to vote in a new government. It is easier for those who disapprove of the current situation to punish businesses than governments. Moreover, wallet-damage is a sliding scale. A guy who wins an election with 75% probably gets the same end result as a guy who wins with 51%, but a business that loses 1/3 of its profits is in trouble. Thus a government can ignore a significant minority who disapprove as long as it doesn't tip the balance come election time every few years, but that same significant minority can cause real damage to a business and they can do it today.
    • CWuestefeld 13y ago
      ... and thus, we get the demagoguery in today's politics. There's no reason for a candidate to actually be good. They just have to be one iota less evil than their major-party candidate. Then they ride in on the demagoguery, ensuring that no one dares vote for a 3rd party party for fear of the (slightly more) evil opponent winning. And so they ensure that the cycle keeps going around, without any opportunity for real change.
• fit2rule 13y ago
  I was recently reflecting on just how much Neal Stephenson got right with "Snow Crash" .. I mean, a whole class of society known as "The Feds", who have unlimited secrecy powers and have effectively formed their own state-within-a-state, accountable to nobody but their own internal power structures .. this is America today. I look forward to the day when we've got The Feed to keep us occupied, anyway.
  • XorNot 13y ago
    I think you missed what was going on in that book.
    • fit2rule 13y ago
      Really? How so? I just checked, and there is a class of society called "The Feds", they were the "remnants of the US gov't federal system" and they did maintain they were a separate legal entity. Hows' my reading of the book different from yours?
      • CWuestefeld 13y ago
        The cool thing in the book was that you could opt out of US government protection, choosing instead to live in an enclave with services provided by some private party. IIRC, Stephenson presented it as a bit dystopic, but it sounded quite exciting to me.
        • XorNot 13y ago
          It wasn't opt out. The US Federal government didn't exist. Hence the regions of the book where a guy working for the Mafia is noticing the pings of bullets bouncing off his car as he drives through a rough neighborhood, and idly wonders whether the stains on the road are people who've been smeared into nothingness. It sounds exciting because you're not living it right now. And in the modern world, it is surprisingly easy to recreate that experience - just the cost of an airfare.
• rayiner 13y ago
  People here read too goddamn science fiction. And the problem with dystopia fiction is that it treats the masses of people as mindless sheep, easily placated by whomever the evil character happens to be (Big Gov, Big Corps). These characterizations don't match the agency exhibited by real people. They don't give sufficient credit to a people who animated the civil rights movement and survived the cold war. They fail to appreciate the inherent resiliency of democracy.
  • Karunamon 13y ago
    And yet, without fail, we elect one of two sides of the same coin every 2 years locally, and every 4 years federally, despite people like me telling everyone who will listen that it's a terrible idea, and that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is moronic. A smart sheep is still a sheep. That term doesn't imply stupidity, or lack of intelligence, only ease of manipulating.
    • rayiner 13y ago
      You assume people are easily manipulated because you fail to appreciate what they actually want. You might, say, criticize a republican for wanting smaller government but voting for republicans instead of libertarians. But when arepublican says "smaller government" they mean "a little smaller." They don't want some breathtaking departure from the status quo. They want to cut back on teachers' pensions, not get rid of the Department of Education. Similarly, you might criticize a liberal for wanting less of a security state, but again fail to appreciate that what they mean by that is a "little less." In my experience, people are quite broadly happy with the status quo. The complain incessantly about it, but very few would change it in a really fundamental way. It's hard to look at the American government and see it as anything other than an expression of the composite of American voters: financially irresponsible baby boomers who carry with them some of the liberal leanings of being teenagers in the 1960's along with the paranoia of being young adults in the Cold War. This drives people who actually oppose the status quo in a fundamental way absolutely crazy.
• fulafel 13y ago
  Western governments have gotten less powerful, relatively speaking. This is more about misuse of their power.
• gorhill 13y ago
  > "Now the megacorps are trying to defend our personal liberty and privacy from governments" What is the first purpose of a megacorp (or any corp)? To increase shareholders' equity. Nothing wrong with that, but let's not fool ourselves thinking their primary purpose suddenly become something else than increasing shareholders' equity.
• contextual 13y ago
  Don't be fooled. This is damage control by cowards. Nothing more.
• frenger 13y ago
  Can you recommend any? Snow Crash was awesome :)