A comedian with a dustbin on their head (Count Binface) would probably have a much more consumer focussed view that their contemporaries. Binface's policies do include such things as reducing the price of a 99 Flake ice cream to 99p and capping the cost of croissants - joke policies, but better than politicians just kow-towing to corporate interests.
That reads to me like a hand wavy an excuse for not asking what we can do to make our system more representative of the voters’ will when it should be.
Power in numbers is with the people. Power in votes is with whoever has the votes. Power in money is with the billionaires. Power comes in many forms and isn't fungible.
No, Money, Votes, etc has value because the general public gives it value. All billionaires could be instantly broke if the general public decided they were broke. Votes are ultimately a method of control not an inherent power unto themselves.
Societies have gotten really good at convincing people they don’t have power so it’s rarely exercised but it’s always worth remembering the difference between abstraction and the underlying reality.
If I stop believing that money has value, men with guns will come to my house and force me out of it and change the locks.
If they stop believing money has value (so they wouldn't want to come to my house), men with guns will come to their house, force them out of it and change the locks.
This isn't a voluntary system, it's a forcibly imposed one.
> If they stop believing money has value (so they wouldn't want to come to my house), men with guns will come to their house
You’re assuming there’s going to be large groups of people that believe money still has value. However, there’s nothing inherently different about the first group of people with guns and the second group of people with guns.
If hypothetically there’s a large moon heading to earth so everyone is going to die, everyone is responding to the same situation.
Less extreme situations result in societal collapse, and that’s just one of many options.
I believe the parent was referring to the power to do something with the money. (Not in what one owes). In a decent society there are things no amount of money can buy, and things that take inordinate amounts that would only corrupt a sick fraction of the populace. That is part of what is gross about Epstein's scale, it made many of us realize that there is a price on those specific things and it wasn't just a sociopathic microslice of society, but seemingly "all" (lots, most, too many -- choose your term) of the people in power.
Additionally Lobbying shows us the amount of money for corruption is surprisingly low.
Any of the above, the world could just decide arbitrarily everyone with 1+B is suddenly broke. That’s not likely but it doesn’t break the laws of physics or anything.
If you haven’t been paying attention lately, laws are only as good as they are enforced and it has become obvious that the ruling class is not going to enforce laws against themselves.
The solution here is not something most people are willing to inconvenience themselves over
Rewind a bit over 100 years and the robber barons had an iron grip over the US economy, US politics, and people who understood the mechanisms despaired at ever prying it away from them.
Then the wind shifted and, suddenly, we could and we did. It took them decades to undo that progress and decades more to reassert their grip.
Don't self-sabotage by imagining that it is impossible to achieve change through democracy. We've done it before and we can do it again.
Can we though? There is marked difference in how the government reacts to populist demands. Notably, they learned from Vietnam how to manipulate the population to divide public opinion. I am not sure people today can overcome such organized machinations.
Using foreign wars to prosecute domestic agenda is a strategy that predates written history, let alone Vietnam. Rulers have always understood which levers were available to them, this is not a modern discovery. Classical history in particular is full of this sort of thing and worse in a democratic context, which is comforting in the sense of where we stand and concerning in the sense of where things could go.
Machinations were always organized. I'm reading about Louis Brandeis and I'm struck by how familiar the robber baron talking points are; they are exactly the talking points I heard from neoliberals growing up. Time is a flat circle when it comes to antitrust. Also: they tried to coup FDR! They got themselves a strongman figurehead and everything, it just didn't work.
I'd actually give us the advantage today: the information environment is messier and more difficult to control and machine politics is barely starting to form rather than firmly established everywhere at every level.
I would say the information environment makes it easier to control the population, because the goal isn’t necessarily to get everyone to agree on a desired agenda but rather to prevent us from reaching consensus on pursuing any opposing agenda. The goal is to divide and prevent unity.
Laws are meaningless de jure. Especially where megacorps are concerned, the de facto law (ie the only one that matters) is the text, multiplied by the enforcement mechanism, multiplied by the political will to enforce, multiplied by the 10-15 year process of the megacorps draining their legal warchests into challenges and appeals. Then, after all that, maybe… you get a change to corporate behavior.
The laws in this country are primarily written by and for large corporations. They’re not going to meaningfully practically restrain them just because something got passed.
Laws are great and all. But what we really need is a massive boycott. Stop buying shit manufactured or sold by Sony for a year. That alone will probably force them to backtrack every single anti consumer decision they've made recently.
Boycotts don't work nearly as well nowadays because
a) Consumers don't have enough money already, so they're both stressed out and getting fewer things for themselves. These combine to mean that they're less likely to be willing to give up what little luxuries they have left, even if you're just asking them to substitute one media property for another.
b) The companies being targeted are just too damn big. The consolidation that began in the '80s has reached truly ludicrous levels in 2026, meaning that the company can just...ignore drops in profits for months or even years while consumers get worn out.
You painted an accurate picture about how people act in this case and for boycotts in general but let’s be honest, not buying movies from Sony and its store is the last thing most people would “suffer” from. There’s such a large supply of content today that ditching one source for another has almost no real impact.
How much content really is only on Sony’s store, and how much of it would wear you down if you didn’t consume it within X years?
There are truly painful boycotts (try boycotting the only ISP in your area), and boycotts that are an inconvenience. This one is a far cry from losing a luxury or getting worn out.
You seem to have either misunderstood my point (a), or you have a misguided idea of how important small luxuries are to people, especially people who do not have the means to procure larger luxuries on a regular basis.
I mean, sure; it's much more painful to boycott the only ISP around, or the only grocery store within a 30 mile radius, but just because there are things that could be worse doesn't mean that this can't be bad.
I get the need for small luxuries but you failed to make the point that the Sony store is the place for this. I don’t mind if you clarify for me how not buying movies from Sony and buying instead from Amazon or a local store for example is such a loss for quality of life. Why is Sony so special? Do those people find special meaning in Sony’s store above all others? Or do they need to buy the “small luxury” from every store and can’t boycott any?
They probably boycott the Xbox store just fine, and that one’s also full of “small luxuries” so as best I can tell you make a personal preference based argument, which is different from what you think you’re saying.
There's nothing special about Sony's store—the point is that, just for instance, many people own a Playstation of some sort, and want to watch movies through it. For some (nontrivial!) percentage of those people, the Playstation is the only thing hooked up to their television, and thus the only way they can—or know how to—watch a movie on their biggest screen.
Furthermore, Sony is the exclusive source for movies distributed by Sony. If someone wants to watch one of their movies—I don't know which those are offhand—they will need to buy it from Sony (or, at the very best, buy it from some other store and their money still goes to Sony).
In either of these cases, yes, they could choose not to do that. But if you've just gotten home from a hectic shift at your second job, microwaved a ready-meal for yourself and your kid, gotten them to bed, and finally have an hour or two to relax before you have to go to sleep yourself...are you really going to be willing to go out of your way to find some other way to watch the movie you want to watch? And more and more people are finding themselves in these sorts of situations in recent years.
Most broadly, my point is that for any given (major) store, there are people for whom their preferred "small luxuries" come from there, and asking them to give that up in order to try to make a difference that probably won't happen (due to my point (b) above) is likely to be a very hard sell.
You are not going to get the guy at 7-11 or the cashier at Target who just bought a PS5 for her son to boycott watching movies on it. Boycotts only work if it is demonstrably going to make their life worse if they don't. Losing access to a movie that interested you 15 years ago when you were still in high school is not one of those things.
For me, it was when they removed the Linux capability from the PS3 (or technically, they removed the ability to have it be able to run Linux and also use it to play PS3 games). I wasn't personally affected by the rootkit fiasco as I was pirating music back then (I mean I still do, but I did back then as well). I should have taken that as a warning as I was fully aware of what kind of company they were, but was attracted by the shiny PS3 games. Nowadays, I mainly play games on my SteamDeck and do appreciate Valve's treatment of customers - the hardware is mine and I can do what I want with it such as easily upgrade the NVM drive (I'm glad I put a 2TB disk in it back when the prices were lower).
I wasn't affected either as I had given up using Windows already but it hit No. 2 son's machine. I decided that the intent was more important than their technical incompetence.
I did buy a Sony ultrazoom camera recently but that was a secondhand purchase. The hardware is brilliant but as usual the software ranges from barely usable and to totally broken. In theory it is supposed to be able to run a wifi hotspot that lets you transfer images wirelessly but instead of just putting a minimal web server on it they created their own opaque protocol, the only client was Windows only, and you can no longer download it. Had I bought it new in the expectation of being able to unload it wirelessly I would have sent it back for a refund
I didn't take the hint then but I also will never buy any Sony product ever again. I have two headphones from them. Both noise canceling. When the model year passes they push one final firmware to make ANC shit. Then they deny it. I thought if I got the fancier one I would be OK but it doesn't turn on anymore. Very comfortable ear warmers. (Simple shitty solder without support probably. Gotta open it up and look sometime.)
For the love of god please understand 80% of people are trying to just get on day by day. They don't give a shit about any of this. They probably don't even realize it's happening. Some subset of them might be hit by this but most just don't care.
The point of a government in society is for people who give a shit to guide this kind of thing.
No, I won't understand. These people who don't give a shit, they are the problem. They're the ones who finance these corporations and enable their abusive practices.
They are indeed part of the problem, but you cannot blame them. You have to blame those who caused their situation to be so dire, making them lack support.
These people work 2 jobs, have a young kid, a demented parent or a bedridden sister that need constant support. If they take the time to give a shit about politics, their dependent dies. You don't seem to know how incredibly stressful and exhausting the life of some people is.
Do something about their situation that gives them the time to participate in real life. Don't blame them for trying to survive with all their might, and not go to council hall twice a week.
I learned about the earlier generations of my family. The massive difference is how much more socially connected they were. They walked to grocery stores because the grocery stores were within walking distance because they had to be (perishable foods were not refrigerated). They walked to work and lived blocks away from their business (great grandfather owned a service station). Their friends were the people in the businesses between home and work. They rode streetcars to travel around. The great- generation of my family was born 1908 and 1910. My grandparents conveyed these stories of how they lived and how their parents lived.
In your dire example, the missing component is how older generations socialized organically and effortlessly. They might be caring for their dependent, but the minute they left the house, they experienced social interaction. I certainly feel like modern day is vastly different and creates the isolation you describe.
>If they take the time to give a shit about politics, their dependent dies.
Meanwhile, their healtchare provider canceled on their parent because they gaslit the family into saying "this isn't covered in out service" and the parent dies. Because they did not give a shit about politics.
This isn't asking for a part time civics duty hobby. Just to stop pretending all politicians are the same and take a few hours to vote. It'll save you a few weeks of battling with UnitedHealthcare over a very treatable issue.
>Do something about their situation that gives them the time to participate in real life.
That also requires votes and calls to the represenatives.
There's a reason why they teach the prisoner's dilemma on day 1 of business school: a group which is more fragmented has less power. From the consumer perspective, this is why monopolies are bad and this is why boycotts don't work. From the slimy businessman perspective, this is why monopolies are good and boycotts are the only way consumers should be allowed to push back. Boycotts are empirically understood to be an ineffective strategy -- which, of course, is usually exactly what the people proposing them as an alternative to legislation are usually after.
Completely different circumstances as the protest was very organised and the target far smaller than a multi national company and the reason was far more important than access to a few films
Boycotts are one thing, people simply not buying because a company's reputation is ruined is another. What I think we really need is simply to spread the word about how sony is a shitty company, let people know the stuff they buy from them gets deleted. That's enough to really smash up sony's revenue. Tech people naturally assume other people are highly informed about tech stuff, but they aren't, they're watching tiktok ai sexy cat videos and assume the reason grandma lost her copy to Alien: Resurrection was because grandma isn't very good at computers, not that sony deleted it. Indeed, I think, because sony is concurrently removing physical media the outrage probably will effect their bottom line in some ways when the next playstation comes out.
Look at how the firestone tire scandal in 2000 effected their company's bottom line. Or how the click of death effected the fortunes of the owners of Iomega. Reputation actually does matter sometimes.
In democracy, power comes from demos.
In capitalism, power comes from capital.
Demos doesn't have capital.
People never had power.
Whenever they've thought they won ... they just damaged position of someone powerful for someone even more powerful without even knowing it.