[sackfield]

I'm not interested in defending the trend as much as I am in understanding it, which the article promises but doesn't deliver.

To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece. The article lays out clearly the negative desires of the villains, and the positive desires of the heroes, but do the heroes have any negative aspects? Does the EU simply want to protect consumers or is there an argument that they are the law to unfairly targeting American companies? What about the villains, do they have any positive aspects? Does Musk want humanity to keep existing to the point where he is willing to put capital on the line to give our species a backup planet?

The point of this comment isn't to defend the villains or vilify the heroes, its to recognise that these issues are not simple as defined by the article, and in presenting them as simple you don't end up with an understanding of the core question: "How the Tech World Turned Evil".

[danaris]

> To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece.

I disagree.

To properly understand this, you need to focus not on the specific people who happen to have ended up on top of it, but the systems that enabled them to get there.

And to (probably over-)simplify it for the sake of a short post, I believe the root cause is in Ronald Reagan's deregulation and gutting of antitrust. With a robust antitrust regime through the '80s and '90s, we would not have had the kind of tech behemoths we did then, leading to the unstoppable tech juggernauts of today.

[bigyabai]

> To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece.

The possibility of EU betrayal or Musk's saviourdom is speculative, and also entirely subjective as to whether you think it's fair or righteous. I don't think either of those topics could be meaningfully explored to explain resentment towards American tech.

Consumers do not evaluate businesses with a reciprocal mentality, they don't need an absolute good to identify evil. This is a pretty poorly-written article that would not be improved with both-sidesing.

[mindslight]

> Does the EU simply want to protect consumers or is there an argument that they are the law to unfairly targeting American companies?

Straight out of the corpos' DARVO. The motive isn't really relevant. The fact is that the GDPR creates an individual-empowering legal concept of having some control over the dossiers being kept on us, which is something sorely lacking in the US.

> I'm not interested in defending the trend as much as I am in understanding it

If you're actually interested in understanding, there is a very short answer that is as old as time: power corrupts.

We, by which I mean the collective tech/hacker community (especially those directly working for the surveillance industry), promulgated technical architectures that agglomerated too much centralized power. From that, the vectoralist class / capital taking hold of those reigns of power and using them for oppression of individuals was inevitable (motive: economic extraction).

Of those early individualist ideals, some earnestly believing founders fought and/or retired. Some changed as they became more powerful. And I'm sure some were simply masking from the start. I don't think picking through individuals to suss out the distinction really matters.