Yes and I’m not arguing against the theory, I’m arguing against the reality of how governments actually work in practice. (Hint: they aren’t perfect)
The worlds worst atrocities; genocides, mass murder on the scale of millions, Mao’s Great Leap Forward (the largest mass starvation event of all time), constant wars, authoritarian brutality that exists globally today, etc…
None of these things are due to the actions of supposedly “evil” capitalist companies.
There’s far more capacity for harm in your own government than there is in any private company.
So I'll restate my original point which nobody seems interested in addressing head-on: granting government the ability to meddle in things is inherently dangerous, and should not be cheered on especially when we’re talking about regulating the entirety of modern media. One poorly placed sentence in a piece of legislation and suddenly you've opened the door to killing all freedom of the press when the cultural wind changes.
As a Finnish person (guessing by the name Pekka -- I also live in Finland), you will find this difficult to understand because Finland is tiny, hyper-nationalist, ethnically homogenous, and Europe is currently peaceful. But just imagine what Finland would look like today if the civil war went the other way. I think you might be on the other side of this argument.
Yes and commercial entities aren’t some absolute evil constantly repressing us either.
Both government and private entities have checks on their power in the form of voting (government) or in the case of commercial entities, the market itself (voting with your dollar). Both entities can and do abuse their power.
However, only one group is always granted a monopoly and legally allowed to force you to comply and buy their products at gunpoint (government).
When you grant the government more control over the world to supposedly “protect” you, unfortunately those powers aren’t always wielded by people you would have voted for.
But this is often fine if there’s real harm there. Eliminating the harm often outweighs the risk of centralized abuse of power.
But when the harms you’re supposedly protecting against aren’t actually real (the social media hysteria is a classic moral panic), you’re simply creating legal levers for control over all media that is just waiting to be abused by bureaucrats and government employees, most of whom are non-elected. Even the elected Commission has already proven they will happily force through unpopular legislation in bad faith.
People’s naive inability to understand the mechanics of this is astounding to me. You do not grant powers to government that aren’t absolutely necessary because they all power is abused and government power is implicitly enforced via a gun to your head.
This is the same EU commission pushing chat control and VPN bans and passports to access the internet. Which people on HN hate.
Yet, when they couch authoritarian action under the premise of a popular moral panic, suddenly the reaction here is “tie us up and tell us what we’re allowed to see daddy.”
I really don’t get it. Do you not see how cheering on this social media moral panic and inflating the idea of a big tech “boogieman” leads to emboldening them to do the much worse authoritarian surveillance state thing? I guess this is the inherent contradiction of left-leaning internet spaces.
We want privacy and freedom personally but as self-styled members of the urban elite we unironically believe everyone else is dumber than us. So we don’t want other people to have freedom over what they do and read.
> are addicted to social media and have to take psychiatric medication for it.
I’m sorry but this is just not real.
There’s not a single non-quack doctor who will recommend psychiatric medication for “social media addiction,” which is not a real thing and pretty much all of the recent academic literature proves as much.
If your doctor is suggesting medication for social media use, you either have much deeper underlying mental health issues, or you need to find a new doctor ASAP and report them for malpractice.
> power cannot be destroyed, only transferred...someone is going to have power over all sorts of aspects of your life
I fully agree with this, but that someone doesn't need to be a 3rd party centralized entity (like a government or company), the power can be decentralized onto you.
That's the story of basically all progress in the modern world.
The evolution from Monarchy/Dictatorship -> Representative Democracy was a step down this path (albeit a mild one).
The evolution of knowledge from Church -> Printing Press -> Internet did this, hence why I have to the power to publicly broadcast these words to you.
The evolution of media from Broadcast TV -> Cable -> Youtube -> Tiktok did this.
The evolution of commerce from Department Stores -> Malls -> Shopify/Etsy/etc did this.
And AI is currently enabling the next step of this in many new areas.
> a clear cut distinction between "business" and "government" which would be hard to find in a lot of real world situations
I think you're intentionally muddying the waters here.
In fact it's extremely easy to make the distinction between "business" and "government," given the monopoly on violence granted to government. Proctor & Gamble has never held a gun to my head and imprisoned me for not buying their products.
This is actually a fantastic example of the blindspot I'm talking about.
You fundamentally are unable to judge risk correctly due to your political bias.
You're even admitting the risk of companies harvesting data is that it may fall in the hands of governments.
Yet you still think a private company lobbying to reduce taxes is a greater threat than your government wielding enough firepower to kill millions of people and destroy the entire world.
So your position is that, because Coca Cola once funded paramilitary action in South America...companies are a worse threat to us than governments?
You don't seem able to hold two ideas in your head.
Yes, companies can abuse their power. Yes, governments can abuse their power.
However, the power wielded by governments is on a whole different scale, so the capacity for abuse and atrocity is exponentially larger (governments have killed millions and can literally destroy the entire world with firepower 100X over).
Oh the horror, they might try to lower your salary forcing you to find another competing employer!
Meanwhile governments wield enough power to destroy the entire world 100X over, and are currently shoveling young boys into the meat grinder of war to be slaughtered by the thousands every day.
As a left-leaning forum, HN has a giant blind spot re: government power vs. corporate power. I'm trying to point this out.
Yes, companies can abuse their power. But their power pales in comparison to government power.
> Your comment seems to frame this as a "two sides issue" as if it was a see-saw and you can only move back and forth between one side and the other with no room for nuance or alternate directions.
No. My point is you should fear centralized power in general, and in exact proportion to the scope of the power being centralized. All power gets abused.
Governments are centralized power on a scale that makes the most powerful corporation on earth look like an ant. Historically AND currently, the worst atrocities come from governments, not companies.
Yet, internet discourse (and new legislation) over the past 10 years has pretended like the biggest threat to us re: data collection is private companies. They are indeed a threat. But they are NOWHERE near the scale of the threat that data collection by governments represents.
This blind spot is part of the reason mass surveillance legislation is being rolled out (largely successfully) everywhere right now.
For example, we've created such a boogieman out of facebook/social media (which, ironically, doesn't even exist anymore as people remember it) that it has manufactured consent among the public for governments building the infrastructure for 1984. A far greater threat to us than micro-targeted face cream ads ever were.
The root issue is still government having absurdly asymmetric power over you.
If the government weren't legally able to use the toilet bowl cleaner companies data against you, it wouldn't matter.
The problem is us giving governments the right to use this data against us (passports to access the internet, messages being under constant surveillance, etc.)
In Europe we're happily handing over our rights every day so that governments have more power over us (supposedly to "protect" us from the big bad evil American tech companies).
Except, Google just wants to make $100/yr off me instead of $50/yr by me voluntarily choosing to use them.
Meanwhile, EU governments want to literally control what I think and feel and do, and take out $100,000 in debt on the backs of each of my children (we're at 115% debt-to-GDP in France) to fund this nightmare surveillance state.
I keep trying to explain to people that private companies harvesting your data, while not good, is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
Meanwhile, Governments can take away your freedom, block your right to speech, ruin your entire life, seize your private assets/wealth, take away your children, deport you, etc...all depending on how the cultural wind is blowing on a particular day. And they are legally entitled to hold a gun to your head or kill you if you don't comply.
These are not the same level of risk. Yet more hysterical attention is paid to the former instead of the latter. This is dumb.
Be more worried about governments. Read more history.
So your family would prefer to be illiterate subsistence farmers dying in war at age 40 in 1960s Algeria? Or maybe they'd prefer to be illiterate subsistence farmers in two-tier French colonial Algeria, working as landless servant day laborers in the 1920s? Or maybe illiterate subsistence farmers in pre-colonial Algeria? Maybe a career in pre-modern Saharan animal husbandry sounds appealing? You can do all of that today no problem if that life was so much better.
The refugees you're hosting would much rather be refugees today (with actual legal rights in most developed countries) than refugees during any point in history, where they'd be more likely to end up slaves. There was never a time when being a refugee was a fun luxury experience.
Re: police harassing you, please tell me a time when humans weren't racist and were less racist than they are on average today?
Again, as I already said, yes everything isn't exactly perfect for everyone everywhere. My point is things are the best they've ever been for the vast majority of us. And most of humanity is working on improving things every day through the incentive system of modern global markets, and doing so successfully.
Theres this new form of technology that is allowing decentralized actors to publish information without government oversight.
It’s called the Printing press. And yes, there was a giant moral panic about it at the time that basically split Europe in half.
Yet, today, we would find it absurd to ban children from reading printed words. Book bans are often the most opposed policies by all sides when polled.
The fact we’re looking to block children from the modern equivalent is the most classic example of a moral panic I’ve seen.
The “social media” millennials remember from their youth where they saw all the parties they didn’t get invited to…doesn’t even exist anymore. The social graph is dead, it’s all just short form TV now.
The stupidity of this panic narrative is tremendous. Instead of attacking/regulating the algorithms (the problem) we’re banning children from all information and creating a global surveillance dragnet for all adults.
I appreciate you articulating your views wholly. I also live in a high trust society (Finland).
I would categorize your position as the textbook left-leaning bias (Government good, corporation bad), and fundamentally incorrect. But NOT because I'm on the opposite side.
I believe the only rational position to take is the center (ie. "things are complicated" and "incentives rule all").
There are huge holes in your logic:
1) The default state of humanity is not utopian prosperity. The default state is starving naked in the dirt. So where does the tax money the collective uses to "take care of each other" come from? Why are only the rich countries providing good benefits...and how did they get rich in the first place?
2) If one is being honest in their analysis, enterprises competing to create surplus value is the only reason your government is able to get the tax revenue to provide you with anything. Otherwise you're just redistributing dirt among naked people.
3) You've ignored the existence of incentives. Your view rests on the fallacy humans in government are a different species than the humans in private companies and will act more selflessly. This is provably false. 99.99% of government workers have zero exposure to the accountability of elections, have no competitive pressures, no fear of losing their job, and thus do not make things better or innovate. People in private companies on the other hand have all those incentives.
4) Historically, whenever we give a society over wholly to government, it has resulted in disaster and human tragedy on a mass scale every single time. If government is fundamentally good, why aren't wholly government-driven societies better? How come when China privatized and reduced its percentage of government driven economy from 90% to 30% (where they sit today), it made everyone more prosperous by a factor of 100x?
5) Current trendlines all indicate the "High trust European socialism" model is in slow collapse across Europe. Like the USSR (you could call it USSR-light given EU average has now reached 55% government driven economy), they stopped innovating and are losing the private industry surplus to tax and redistribute. Germany, UK, France, Finland (my country) etc. are all in deep shit right now.
6) Cooperatives are legal in basically all developed countries. If the collectivist model drove more value for people, how come cooperatives don't dominate all sectors of the economy?
EU has the talent but not the ability due to structural issues and fragmentation.
And even if they solved that (it will take them 40 years of bickering), it’s not something you can top-down create, unless you want the AI equivalent of the Yugo.
China has the drive and the ability. It’s communist in name only, and has truly turned into a hyper-capitalist super producer (less government spending as % of GDP than even the US).
It will beat out both the EU and US and sweep both the digital economy (the US’s golden goose) and industrial economy (the EU’s golden goose) over the next 20 years.
Nobody is saying "everything is exactly perfect for every person on earth."
There's never been a time in history when that was true and there never will be a time when that will be true.
The point is you live in the most comfortable/easy/least violent/most democratic/longest lifespan/best healthcare/best technology/best educated/etc. time to be alive in all of human history.
On top of that, if you're on this website, according to similarweb you're one of the highest income and most educated people on the planet (you're the 1%).
So you're likely in the 0.005% luckiest humans to ever live, and yet you're pessimistic because some media channel preyed upon your empathy or fears of change to capture your attention so they can monetize it selling ads for toilet bowl cleaner.
The truth is some people just have a negative emotional disposition. Others have genuine issues in their lives they need to change. In all cases there are actions, medications and therapies for you. Seek help.
Pretending you're so virtuous as to care about all the worlds problems and yet also powerless to do anything about them is simply a giant excuse to never actually do anything but complain and contribute nothing to humanity.
This is very true. However, institutions being granted this power in the first place (unlimited taxation via threat of violence, unlimited deficit spending power, unlimited money printer access on the global currency) is what enables the abuse by the politicians and voters all acting in their short term self interest.
If the US didn't have the world's reserve currency like Germany/France/UK/etc, the bill would come due via the bond markets. The demand for Euro-denominated debt is not near-infinite in the same way the demand for USD-denominated debt has been (at least up until now).
The worlds worst atrocities; genocides, mass murder on the scale of millions, Mao’s Great Leap Forward (the largest mass starvation event of all time), constant wars, authoritarian brutality that exists globally today, etc…
None of these things are due to the actions of supposedly “evil” capitalist companies.
There’s far more capacity for harm in your own government than there is in any private company.
So I'll restate my original point which nobody seems interested in addressing head-on: granting government the ability to meddle in things is inherently dangerous, and should not be cheered on especially when we’re talking about regulating the entirety of modern media. One poorly placed sentence in a piece of legislation and suddenly you've opened the door to killing all freedom of the press when the cultural wind changes.
As a Finnish person (guessing by the name Pekka -- I also live in Finland), you will find this difficult to understand because Finland is tiny, hyper-nationalist, ethnically homogenous, and Europe is currently peaceful. But just imagine what Finland would look like today if the civil war went the other way. I think you might be on the other side of this argument.