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by owl_troupe
1963 days ago
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>In the years that followed, a surveillance society flourished in those rooms, a social vision born in the distinct but reciprocal needs of public intelligence agencies and private internet companies, both spellbound by a dream of total information awareness. She sums up two decades of modern history in one sentence. Also, her take on why antitrust approaches won't work is brand-new to me and it raises a critical point. Antitrust efforts against Standard Oil did not prevent the downstream effects of the business model, i.e., ecological disaster. They may be a necessary, albeit, temporary fix to the issue of competition in the marketplace, not the real harm inherent in surveillance for profit. >Another thought experiment: Imagine that the America of 1911 understood the science of climate change. The court’s breakup decision would have addressed Standard Oil’s anticompetitive practices while ignoring the far more consequential case — that the extraction, refining, sale and use of fossil fuels would destroy the planet. |
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Even worse, it was seminal liberal makework. The owners of Standard Oil were saw their holdings double in value as it was broken up, and were now the owners of the resultant entities. It was money and effort burned for no purpose other than to support the careers of the kind of "progressives" that don't have a class-based critique or worker orientation. It was a pseudo-technocratic solution that didn't even really have a clear theory about how it would solve the problems that the size and market control of Standard Oil had raised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Tarbell
When it comes to surveillance, I'm not sure that anything short of a Butlerian Jihad can stop this train. Limiting government surveillance powers just allows them to farm out surveillance to favored companies. Breaking up those favored companies just makes trying to stop the aggregation a game of whack-a-mole that no one would have the authority or interest to play.
We need to create enforceable rights based on values that are new. But the people who profit from surveillance will be powerful enough, if they aren't already, to destroy or silence any voice that endangers their business model.