We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't. It's the literal definition of fascism.
And you see it being championed by people as defending against "the greatest threat to our democracy".
“Literally fascism” is a little overused. I’m not saying governments and corporations teaming up is a good thing, but let’s not use fascism here, that will only make it harder to recognise actual fascism.
If corporations and a heavily authoritarian government team up to crack down on anyone who they believe is the slightest treat to the success of some imagined single-minded Volk, then yes we can talk about fascism.
Until that time I think you can at best put down an argument for why you believe this censorship situation will be a slippery slope that ends in fascism.
Good point about the Volk. To be noted, contemporary Anglo culture has constructed the photo negative of Volk. Everybody of the Volk is intrinsically broken, worthy of contempt and deameaning. Everybody not of the Volk is intrinsically virtuous, worthy of praise and elevation.
History will tell what the consequences of corporatism + negative Volk will be.
I'm not so sure, I think if GP had expanded on it a little it's an interesting take.
Multiple corporations (with their 'fiefdoms') is decentralised from government, in a similar manner to peers being decentralised from government (or the crown).
You could either argue 'not as much so', or that 'corporate lobbying, unions, and party donations have a similar influence on policy'; regardless I think it's an interesting idea.
First of all this, but even in the very definition of feudalism it's feudalism:
> Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs [...]. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. [0]
Don't really get all the downvotes. I could extend more on it, and explain my reasoning, but I feel like HN is too caught in this "tech moguls are saviors" and even if they weren't and they wouldn't be where they are, somebody else would be a bad actor.
Not in the literal sense of land, but in the economical/capitalistic sense. In capitalism theory, the basic idea behind the growth of capitalism is defined as "land grab", i.e. the system ingests what is foreign and makes it its own. So land in that sense can mean anything that binds people to you. Nowadays this means money in order to pay rent, food, bills etc.
> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.
Now why do I call this feudalism? To be honest I could call it various other things, the most "getting to the root" would be "class warfare". I chose to call it feudalism in this case, because feudalism was basically the last period/time we chose to call it honestly what it is: Getting ruled from above. They want to implement censorship, because even though we always say "one day it might work against you", but for them it does not. Ever.
So when we introduced parliaments we split law-making power from nobility to politicians, elected by the people. But if you are an "accumulator of wealth", you can basically act as a modern fief. Especially if you work together with politicians.
Walled gardens (read fiefdoms) run by megacorporations is decentralised, I don't have to accept Alphabet's TOS if I don't want to. They just have so many people who do want to that they can dictate pretty crazy terms.
Governments asking favours of these corporate lords looks centralised and makes us pay attention, but it requires their consent to get anywhere.
> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.
And then he said it's facism. To which I say, no, it's feudalism:
> Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs [...]. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. [0]
I don't get why people downvote me so much. It's basically a direct answer
You can wait to wake up to a totalitarian government biting you on the nose, but some of us remember that Mussolini was a journalist and rose to power in the media and don't want to let it get that far.
Considering that the term itself comes from his movement, the "Fasces of Revolutionary Action", and that he coined the word fascism personally in 1919 (after the word "fascio"), I think at the very least he gets to be attributed the lions' share of it.
Newton can be credited as being substantially the inventor of Newtonian Physics. That doesn't make alchemy a sub-field of Newtonian Physics, despite the fact that Newton wrote numerous treatises on alchemy.
He literally coined the term when talking about his movement. If anyone has claim to what the definition was, it's him.
But history is written by the winners and I'm sure modern day fascists would like to distance themselves from that history as much as possible...and thus the term gets narrowed and redefined.
So then why not take Mussolini's own words on what fascism is and isn't? His definition required it to be totalitarian: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".
> Considering that the term itself comes from his movement, the "Fasces of Revolutionary Action", and that he coined the word fascism personally in 1919 (after the word "fascio"), I think at the very least he gets to be attributed the lions' share of it.
Sure, but that doesn't mean any one aspect of what he did, in isolation from the rest, is "the definition of fascism". (And the understanding of the genericized term is at least as much shaped by Naziism as Italian fascism, anyhow; this might annoy Mussolini if he was around to be annoyed -- frankly, that Nazis are taken as an example of "fascism" would probably annoy Hitler, too -- but, you know, that's just the way language evolves; if we're talking about Mussolini's movement in Italy specifically, we generally say "Italian fascism", not just "fascism" unless there is context to indicate that we are specifically talking about Italy.)
> a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader
is the definition of fascism. This is a tool often deployed by fascists.
And saying that something is "the (very) definition of" something is a colloquialism drawing comparison that dates back at least to James Madison and the Federalist Papers.
> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't. It's the literal definition of fascism.
Well, its arguably corporatism, which exists in lots of non-fascist systems as well as being a part of fascism, and propagandizing the population, which also is done by lots of non-fascists systems, but unless its coupled with totalitarianism and militant, xenophobic nationalism I don't think going "fascism" is literally accurate of the current state, though its definitely a risk (since the propagandization + corporatism easily enables at least totalitarianism, and is also quite leverageable for the rest.)
The president of the United States has been using these platforms to lie to the entire world unashamedly. For the most part not even the skillful half truths, statistics and selective quoting that politicians are known for, just complete fabrications and nutjob conspiracies.
The corporations had the choice to continue to be complicit, silence him completely or provide some balance from other sources. It seems to me that they choice a cautious and sensible approach.
Are companies that provide one-to-one communications services, like cell phone companies, complicit in drug dealing, insider trading, and all the other nefarious acts that are no doubt organized using their networks? I think most people would say they're not. Meanwhile, one-to-many communications services, like broadcast TV, by their nature require editorial decisions. If you're only broadcasting one stream someone has to decide what the content is, and thereby becomes responsible for that content.
Social media is many-to-many. Quite a few people seem to have decided this imposes the same sort of centralized responsibility that exists with one-to-many communications, but this is not at all obvious to me. On social networks there is no single stream of information, thus there is no necessity for editorial decisions, thus the mechanism by which one-to-many broadcasters become responsible for the content they carry is not present.
Recommendation systems complicate this somewhat, admittedly. If platform owners are putting their fingers on the scale (algorithmically or otherwise) to determine what gets exposure, some of the responsibility comes back. However, in the simple case of e.g. Twitter showing you content from people you've explicitly chosen to follow, I don't see how they've got any more responsibility than exists in the one-to-one scenario.
> Are companies that provide one-to-one communications services, like cell phone companies, complicit in drug dealing, insider trading, and all the others nefarious acts that are no doubt organized using their networks? I think most people would say they're not.
Unfortunately this same logic isn’t used when discussing the PLCAA or gun manufacturers in general.
Cells phones are not comparable to an online service.
Property rights are a thing and those who own the servers can determine what they will store and present to other users.
Conservative groups that don't spread misinformation and hatred are thriving on FB and Twitter. Change the law to make them store and publish anything not already illegal will turn them into cesspools like the various *chan sites inside of a month and advertisers will leave as will people with a conscience.
I don't know if you've been under a rock for more than a decade, but, no, Bush the Younger is not President of the United States. (Sure, some of the bad acts under his administration prefigured bad acts under this one.)
"The president of the United States has been using [...]" is present perfect continuous tense (expressing an action continuing in the present that began in the past), not past tense.
>> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.
I think there may be some legitimate truth to this statement that you are not seeing.
Donald Trump is far from the only bad actor we've had in our history, and things weren't running smooth as silk before he arrived on the scene, but you sure wouldn't know it from the way people talk.
I do agree with that to some degree. In fact I do find some of the pan rattling about how social networks "must combat disinformation" about the potential Covid vaccines troubling.
However, maybe I'm just unlucky, but I have a number of family members who are predisposed to believing anything they see on the internet. I can see the need for social distancing when it comes to viral content too.
> However, maybe I'm just unlucky, but I have a number of family members who are predisposed to believing anything they see on the internet. I can see the need for social distancing when it comes to viral content too.
So censor what they see to ensure they only receive the information you approve of correct?
I don't think platforms (or governments) should ban content they disagree with, but I think platforms should be structured to emphasize compact social groups over viral content. It's irresponsible to have a UI like Twitter, with a "What’s happening" tab deliberately looking for the most controversial topics it thinks you'll like.
No, but the 30 thousandth time a meme resurfaces proporting to show guns being delivered to terrorist refugees it would be nice if Facebook automatically tagged it with the information that actually it's a scene from some movie or where ever it really came from.
> The corporations had the choice to continue to be complicit, silence him completely or provide some balance from other sources
I am not so sure. Did they really have a choice?
I think the financial incentives are lined up so that inevitably such a click-baity behavior and culture is nearly impossible to ignore for the news media as a whole. How can everyone choose not to report together, when it makes such a good-selling piece of content?
I am starting to think that algorithm-driven news sources and targeted advertising is something we should consider banning. Breaking up our collective culture into small bubbles of isolated realities is something that is driving many countries, not just the US, apart.
Even in Finland I see people who are not only entertaining, but 100% believing all the Trump conspiracies based on stories, Twitter posts etc. picked up from social media, although we pretty much don't have any mainstream news here. Even if the educated and responsible journalists have been drowned by the flood of fake news, do-it-yourself journalism and information warfare. They cannot keep up and don't have the time to fact check everything. And when they do, the people who believe in this... shit, have already moved on to the next piece of content that supports their view.
If thats your litteral definition of fascism I suggest you get yourself a dictionary. Please dont make blanket statements to describe complex phenomenons.
It has never in the history of western civilization been easier for people to inject random claims into the public discourse. Neither Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes nor Otis Chandler at the LA Times would have given an inch of space for QAnon or antivax, but the "giant corporations" you allude to today do so happily, and at a scale no newspaper publisher would have imagined 50 years ago.
It's worse than that, the algorithms these companies use sometimes purposefully promote these random claims because they lead to more user engagement.
For example teenage girls searching for weight loss on YouTube were more engaged when shown videos on eating disorders like anorexia. YouTube addressed that by tweaking the algorithm, but there's an endless number of edge cases like that and fixing it by tweaking the algorithm is like playing an never ending game of whack-a-mole. It's fundamentally unwinnable - the problem is optimizing for engagement itself.
As many people here may have noticed at some point, the same thing happened with flat Earthers and other conspiracy theories. In fact for a while it was common knowledge that you could start on any YouTube video and keep watching from the recommendations, and with an hour or so that would eventually lead to crazytown - videos just showing bigfoot and aliens and flat earth stuff.
I had my first Internet Account in the 1980's via PLATO.
When the internet first became a more widely-used thing I thought that it would be a great equalizer, giving every person in the world a voice, and it would democratize information flow and empowerment.
I thought that open debate would absolutely crush all misinformation - and I wrongly thought that nobody would see any profit in spreading it, because their reputation would be destroyed, once proven to be a liar.
Conversely, it has never been easier to inject true claims that are inconvenient for gatekeepers. What tilts the balance of equities in favor of censorship for you?
I object to the claim that I've tossed out any "core enlightenment principles" by observing that we have drastically fewer gatekeepers now than we did in 1980.
It is my understanding that toleration, free association, and free expression are core enlightenment principles that enable a civilization to be governed by reason. These are threatened by the censorious attitude of boomers and aging gen-xers with home equity to protect.
It is not unusual for older, wealthier elements of society to question the value of free expression for the masses. [1]
Because it takes far longer to confirm if a claim is true or not than it does to make a claim.
The folks who makes lots of claims which are false know this, and do so anyway because it is effective at swaying public opinion.
"never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."
Seems like it should be TRIVIAL; (if backed up by legal authority of governments - and that's the REAL trick) - to cause all claims to be properly categorized.
Either something is OPINION, or it's FACT. And anything that is Factual, could have the privilege to be labeled as such. Things that are proven not-true or misinformation, or unsupported - they could be permanently labelled "bullshit" and why the hell can't we do this?
Because people will skirt the system. Unless we have a government that supports rule of law.
That's not how it worked. The moment Gutenberg invented the printing press, printers popped up everywhere and printed anything and everything. That means newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets, flyers, advertisements, bills, leaflets, everything.
It was cheap to print, not remotely restricted to the rich, and you certainly did not need to buy a newspaper. Schools print newspapers, businesses do, too.
A lot of it was political, too. For a famous example, see "Common Sense".
Isn't that basically what the Allegory of the cave is advocating for?
If you are uneducated (and almost certainly poor), you do not see reality for how it is, but instead you see shadows against the wall. Only through the process of a dialectical education can you begin to see reality for how it is. As a result, only the educated enlightened individuals should become kings or the guardians of a state.
Any system which agrees with this allegory (and most of Western Philosophy implicity agrees with it) also results in the notion that poor people should not be enfranchised at the same level as wealthier people because they cannot be trusted to govern.
If you reject this allegory, than the fundamental justification for hierarchy (some are more fit to rule than others) and correspondingly the state is shattered
I think it would be more sensible to fix the education system than to appoint uneducated people to government positions just to increase the representation of poorer people.
It's more about education and a skeptical but not paranoid and nihilistic mind, than about "rich and powerful". You should be "this tall to ride". In this case, "this tall to broadcast your thoughts to millions of people".
You can watch the Eldon Edwards video right now, with a single Google search, to see how untrue it is that the KKK had in 1957 anything resembling the access to the discourse they have today.
If you think the KKK is stronger today than in the 1950s, then you are so ludicrously out of touch that I can't continue this conversation.
They might be able to access more people in raw numbers but we also have a lot more people in raw numbers on the planet. Percentage wise they're insignificant, with virtually all of the country not willing to listen to their bullshit.
As someone from the security industry, you should be a lot more resistant to bogeymen.
QAnon is irrelevant aside from the attention they are getting from their supposed political enemies. You seem to need an image of an enemy. Same with flat earthers. They existed 20 years ago and they were completely irrelevant. Antivax had a lot of people joining because they had partly reasonable objections or trust issues towards official sources and some hobby Don Quijotes with a slight inferiority complex needed to prove themselves by demonizing these groups as if they were the devil. As expected, these groups didn't shrink.
> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.
That seems like a claim that needs some examples. By itself it's hard to take seriously. Which governments and which corporations are driving which narrative, exactly?
We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't. It's the literal definition of fascism.
And you see it being championed by people as defending against "the greatest threat to our democracy".