[scarface74]

Well if you live in the US - not really.

If you live in a more populous state like California, you have much less voting power in the Senate and somewhat less voting power in the house and the executive office.

I can much more easily leave a company that I don’t like than the government. A company does not have the power of the state to impose its will on me.

This is the same government that less than a year ago wanted to come down on Saturday Night Live for being mean and is passing laws on the state level right now to forbid teachers from teaching history that doesn’t conform to it’s world view.

It never ceases to amaze me that people want to give the same entity more power that can and will actually take your freedom away.

[brandonmenc]

> A company does not have the power of the state to impose its will on me.

No, but it may have the economic power of a (near or total) monopoly to do that which - depending on the time and the place - may be more powerful than the state.

[scarface74]

So tell me in what realistic scenario can any of the tech companies “impose their will on me”?

[idiotsecant]

>A company does not have the power of the state to impose its will on me.

Yet.

[scarface74]

So tell me in what scenario can any of the large tech companies put me in jail, take away my money or arrest me?

[idiotsecant]

I don't think it's hard to extrapolate from current conditions. Corporations are currently quite powerful - they control the main lever of politics, which is money. They are already using those levers to bend governments to their will, and utilizing pet governments to produce favorable tax conditions in certain countries to reduce their contribution to others. Eventually, there will be small governments that are almost entirely puppet states of large corporations. Eventually those corporate states will grow and consolidate and you'll live in a world where corporations have as much or more power than some small legitimate countries, then some medium ones, then eventually some large ones, and finally more power than anyone else.

Corporations like amazon and google might not be self-perpetuating due to the entropy concentration inherent in companies that get that large but imagine if you had a organization of that size controlled by an AI officer team. It'll happen, just a matter of how long it takes.

[scarface74]

So I listed all the things a powerful government can do - control the media to enhance their worldview and threaten to take away private party, arrest and kill innocent people with immunity, take away freedom over petty crimes, etc.

And I should be more worried about corporations evading taxes?

I can tell you I’m much less worried about walking into any of the Big Tech companies and being treated unfairly than I am driving down the street and being harassed by instruments of the government.

As far as using AI to discriminate. Law enforcement and the government has been discriminating for hundreds of years. They don’t need AI to decide to harass me.

[throwawaysea]

> is passing laws on the state level right now to forbid teachers from teaching history that doesn’t conform to it’s world view

That’s one version of the story. The other version is that teachers under direction from their union (NEA) are teaching unfactual revisionist history (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...), mixed with a near-religious activist ideology (https://areomagazine.com/2019/01/25/the-theory-of-white-frag...), and corrupting education by converting schools into political indoctrination centers.

The easiest answer for all these problems is decentralization and choice. Google and other tech companies are effectively governments. They hold power and influence over billions, are insulated from competition by network effects, and also regularly act in monopolistic ways. They need to be broken up and regulated.

[scarface74]

Can any of these companies arrest me because I “fit the description” or take away my life and liberty? It’s a fact that because of the way that the US is setup between the electoral college, two senators per state and gerrymandering it’s not “majority rule”. This isn’t political. It’s the Constitution as designed.

Until tech companies can take away property via imminent domain, money via civil forfeiture, or put me in jail, they are not anything like the government.

[throwawaysea]

They are more powerful than governments because they can influence all those things by propagandizing the public to shape their opinion.

[Mary-Jane]

Poppycock!

A. Private companies cannot force you to do a single thing! Governments have entire agencies and departments dedicated to keeping people they deem dangerous in line, using a list of powers up to and including the right to take their citizens lives, if they do choose. No private company has this kind of power! Not even close!

B. People are not empty vessels, free to be molded by wiley corporate villains. People possess values and opinions, and (much to the chagrin of both corporations and politicians) it is very difficult to change people's minds.