Technology firms as a threat to basic liberties

The direction we're moving towards seems to be one in which Amazon controls what you can buy by blocking out competing products. Google controlling what you can learn by censoring results based on politics. Facebook controls which news you read by allowing for purchased content. It may be related to the size of the company, but I think it's more related to the general conscientiousness of society as a whole and the awareness of how dangerous these companies are.

1. Size is important: A mischievous kid can be cute, but a mischievous general can be terrifying.

2. Incentives: A small start-up has space to grow, in many cases, it's in its interest to be nice. A giant could be out of ways of to grow and, in many cases, hungry, it will bite the hand that fed them. In the case of Google, Facebook and company, could be their users.

Maybe it's the circumstances of the beast what have changed, instead of its nature but that's enough to deserve some criticism.

I haven't been there physically but observed it from the distance. Google or not, wasn't the Silicon Valley of the 1990s more about creating new technologies and less about kissing VC asses, repackaging crap, pumping valuations, and screaming "innovation"?

I think the current backlash comes mostly from the fact that Google got a lot of good PR out of slogans like "don't be evil" until it turned out that they are just another greedy big corporation.

> Rather than idealistic newcomers, they increasingly reflect the worst of American capitalism — squashing competitors, using indentured servants, attempting to fix wages, depressing incomes, creating ever more social anomie and alienation.

Everything is about attacking a big company?

The motivation behind attacking tech giants (at least in my case when I bash Google or whatever), is mostly to show others how ethic I am and consequently to feel good about my worldview. This is, virtue signaling in purest form.

Meanwhile, I'll stop my signalling hamster for a moment to say that Google has maybe been the single biggest net positive to the society among all corporations ever, mainly because of the ease of access to information that Search provides, that propelled Internet to became ubiquitous and grease many wheels of information storage and transfer that were mostly manual and hard to scale (this is, to broadcast to many people at once).

This new paradigm has his problems, disruption of previous model of society being one, but is the best way forward I know.

An ant becomes pretty scary when it grows to 100 feet tall.

I'd say that power corrupts even the most well intentioned and that history has many examples of this. I don't see how tech is differently immune.

One perspective is that monopolies are not inherently evil, because 1) It's a matter of perspective - what is Google a Monopoly in - advertising? Or web search? They may be completely dominant in web search, but they are a tiny player in web advertising in the grand scheme of things, which is interesting because that is their main business. 2) Monopolies are regularly supplanted by new monopolies, and provide stable financial ground upon which other "hard innovation," can happen, as with AT&T in the 50s and IBM in the 70s.

Of course, if you are someone like Theodore Rosevelt, then you would say, "trusts, a form of monopoly, are horrible, and more competition increases the amount of innovation, so therefore Google must be broken up." However if you are a Peter Thiel type ideological person, then you might say, "Yeah well, times change and monopolies will provide a huge amount of value for the time that they exist, and then they will inevitably die out, like Sears."

So, the conversation people are having around the world today, regardless of what is being talked about in Silicon Valley...is - has Silicon Valley (as a construct, rather than a physical place) created a feudalistic system, and should we create legislation to take that power and money away from them? Silicon Valley, similar to Wall Street (also a construct, not a physical place), will either innovate a way to maintain that power and convince the rest of the world that they are "not evil," or change the conversation in some way, or politics will keep moving in the direction where they eventually break up all the huge tech companies.

You can scream and say, "hey, we're not evil!" all you want - I'm not sure whether that communication strategy will work or not. Post 2008 folks on Wall Street seemed to have embraced the fact that they were perceived as evil and that they monopolize banking, and it seems that their power has been curtailed very little. I could see Mark Zuckerberg and all the tech execs coming out with a unified message saying, "yeah, online data isn't about us, it's about supporting millions of other small businesses, so an attack on cookies and pixels is an attack on freedom," - a similar tack that Wallstreet takes, and I could see people going forward in believing in that. Regardless of whether spying on people is actually evil, they could create some argument that it's a necessary evil, and therefore is not evil, and get anyone who might oppose them politically on their side, and hence we will continue forward in the United States having a completely separate legislative philosophy around data than Europe.

Maybe not, but its capacity to do evil has changed dramatically. Size matters. Absolute power - in citizen data and web advertising - corrupts absolutely.

1. AMP is eating the open web https://80x24.net/post/the-problem-with-amp/ 2. The youtube algorithm leads users "down hateful rabbit holes." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtu... 3. Google is using monopolistic practices to favor its own products. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against...