| > This is typically called a “Government”. In the US we used to have this at the town, state and federal level. And these “governments” wouldn’t just work with one company, but a many companies. Sounds like a good idea! > The way they worked is people would vote for representatives that help make decisions that were in the interests of people, and this would reign in the power of extremely large and powerful companies. Ah yes, people were so sophisticated before the internet. I find it hard to remember how things even worked. The representation was a fantastic solution for the communication over distance problem. Today it would be rather silly to propose representation. I don't need anyone to represent me. Strength in numbers is enough. While big [worker] unions are powerful they do tend to get distracted by large issues. Smaller tailored unions spend all of their time on their much smaller scope. It is also very helpful for Google to see which issues users would like to see addressed. They probably have them documented internally already but cant find a way to prioritize them. There could be constructive dialog rather than a moaning contest that addresses only the company most moaned about. As with employee unions, being a member makes the employer act entirely different. |
That said, we throw away a lot for this "efficiency" and end up with corrupt political parties and lobbies that act completely against our interests. Maybe we can't have a true democracy unless everyone is putting a lot of time into participating in decision-making, rather than just hitting the ballot box once every couple years. I actually think this idea of doing things the "hard way" usually getting better results applies in almost everything, personally.
There are lots of alternative models out there to the one that is glorified in the US, invented by the Founding Father deities some centuries ago. There has been more than a little innovation since. Worker co-ops -- which have existed for almost as long as the US, or longer in some sense -- have experimented with many structures where workers or consumers, or both, share power in how the company is run. Alternative government structures with more direct representation and delegation have also been attempted, e.g. the democratic confederalism approach in Rojava, which also includes worker and land co-operatives for organising their industries.
I think this discussion is also leading towards the suggestion that Google's services should become more like utilities and therefore be publicly owned and managed. Basically nationalised. This makes a lot of sense when you consider how powerful the search engine is and how much of every person's data and flow of information is controlled by Google. However, it wouldn't make sense, or at least it wouldn't be fair, for the US to be the government that nationalises Google, since it's not only the US population which uses this "utility". It seems we need to invent a new kind of concept that considers the global population as a "public" that owns and controls these vital global resources.