Capitalism would provide security and competition, but just as with unions these big corporations only exist as a result of violence backed government favor. The socialists sense a real problem - corruption, but their solution is more corruption and government power.
Giant companies are the security holes of capitalism. The more centralized industries get, the more they attract socialist political activists. The Bolshevik Revolution was a violent version of this vs. railroad stations, newspapers, etc. Now activism is focused on tech giants.
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What is the barrier to entry to compete with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube... Can we really blame the state here? Isnt the network effect more significant?
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It very well could be. The blame game is not nearly as important as the reality of the vast and dangerous political power now in the hands of the tech giants, and the fact that this power is attracting censorious activists and regulators whether that violates principle or not.
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Oh I totally agree. In a way, I hope this gets worse so that it weakens their own dominance. We need open platforms and a reason to switch. Also saw this as an opportunity to contest JW's point of view that monopolies can only exist with state backing.
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Publicly traded companies can buy smaller companies and instantly have the revenue of the smaller company 10x more valuable. Why? Because public companies benefit from many government favors. For more on why monopoly requires government violence see:https://mises.org/library/human-action-0 …
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Would Facebook have been orders of magnitude easier to compete with, if these favours were not offered? I am not convinced. I would argue that the network effect is the biggest factor here.
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Perhaps the network effect only secures dominance for short time spans. When one platform becomes too dominant, it self-destructs, or just becomes repugnant to the new crop of young people who do not want to share a platform with their parents :D
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Network effects & regulatory capture are both common ways to secure dominance. The most important such networks are not user networks but ad networks, since advertisers r social medias' customers (users are product). Advrtisrs r behind much of much of this censorship/"curation".
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Do you see a role for antitrust for this problem?
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Yes. Antitrust is not just an economic issue, it is also a national security issue.
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Because large corporations are multinational?
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That's part of the problem, but the main problem is that they are security holes and means of severely attacking political opponents when they exercise centralized control over important infrastructure such as social networks and financial systems.
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centralization is the problem of capitalism, "socialism", "communism" and NOT "socialist political activists".
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The activists target the centralized institutions, because that is where the political power is.
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I.E. the institution of education. A very big security hole. How many know about the Bolshevik Revolution. Weaponized history.
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I personally think it's insane that the worlds most valuable tech companies produce very little in terms of "meaningful" tech. Legacy monetary systems deserve legacy tech and the legacy greed that has come with it. I'm counting on people like you and
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They are an odd hybrid of high-level tech (mostly software, and of that mostly UI) and media company: bot-censored pipes taking advantage of network effects and the use of government regulations to suppress competition.
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Technology is it's own currency. bitcoin is the currency of technology. I don't know how to make any of it. but I know how to use it. You guys just keep doing the right thing and I don't have to worry about being John Connor. People want the future. It's not with Legacy Tech/Fiat
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Nice write-up from
@mtaibbi on this - https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/facebook-censor-alex-jones-705766/ … : "politicians are more interested in using than curtailing the power of these companies ... The endgame here couldn’t be clearer. This is how authoritarian marriages begin, and people should be very worried." -
Elite ad-funded mag. They want free speech for themselves and censorship for everybody else.
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I disagree a lot with
@mtaibbi but I like his writing, wherever it appears!
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