Comment by WeylandYutani
3 years ago
I agree I'm more concerned about Silicon valley tech bros than my own government.
I can vote for Parliament I can't vote for PayPal's board of directors.
3 years ago
I agree I'm more concerned about Silicon valley tech bros than my own government.
I can vote for Parliament I can't vote for PayPal's board of directors.
Governments are far harder to remove than tech firms. You may be able to ditch Google, but there's only one government in your country. And "democracy" doesn't prevent state surveillance.
Most politicians back it, so voting differently makes little difference. Labour and the Conservatives support the Online Safety Bill, the Patriot Act was bipartisan, and voters have very little control over the EU and can’t stop Chat Control. And most of “government” isn’t directly elected: you can’t vote out the NSA, and Congress has little power over them either. The government blunts corporate abuses but doesn’t stop them: revolving doors ensure authorities target small fry while big companies like Visa keep going unimpeded. And finally, most voters don’t mind surveillance that much, since government and media manufacture consent for it. Don’t count on ordinary people to “vote it out” until it’s too late.
Lobbying against government surveillance helps marginally, but it's an eternal struggle. Governments take as much power as they can get, while abuses are exponentially harder to detect and stop than refusing to grant that power in the first place. The “slippery slope” isn’t a fallacy, it’s the record of the last twenty years. Don’t let them track speech and money with a central ID and digital currency, just because you don’t like a few tech bros or online trolls.
> Governments are far harder to remove than tech firms. You may be able to ditch Google
Ditching Google is not the same thing as removing Google from governance of your life, though. I don't use Google search, but I am sure they know who I am and sell that data to anyone who wants it, including government agencies which can't legally obtain that data on their own due (ostensibly) to citizen oversight.
Realistically, the average person has exactly 0 chance of "removing" either a government or a big multinational company.
However, the average person at least has some teeny tiny say in government via democratic processes and oversights. They have zero power against a big company unless they are a major shareholder.
The fundamental difference of "one person, one vote" and "one dollar, one vote" should not be lost in this discussion.
Big bureaucracies are terribly disempowering no matter who runs them, but in government at least you have some tiny amount of representation vs zero in the private sector.
PayPal doesn’t have a military and doesn’t extract taxes from you though.
The military? When was the last time they turned on the citizens? I don't live in Tiananmen, thankfully. Meanwhile it's private companies that oppress most of us: private hospitals, private prisons, private insurances companies, private credit bureaus, private banks, private tech companies, private surveillance companies, private small arms manufacturers and dealers. It ain't the government that's crimping my freedoms.
Taxes? So I get some roads and schools and parks and old people healthcare, and lose some to corruption. Better that than making Bezos and Zucky even richer.
Forget the military, when was the last time the government used force on its own citizens? Probably 1 second ago, and thousands of times a day. Are you really more oppressed by a private hospital today than you are by literally thousands of laws that have penalties that will put you in prison? I'm not pro private hospital, or anti-law, but let's be real about who has ultimate control of your freedom. Even if we grant the threat to your freedom by a private [fill in the blank], that entity only is allowed to exist by dint of the government. Not a coincidence that many of your examples are the most regulated industries, or directly in business with Government (hospitals, firearms manufactures, prisons, insurance companies).
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> The military? When was the last time they turned on the citizens?
1970, though I hope we aren't at risk of that happening again anytime soon. The modern military has been pretty good at staying apolitical.
I mean, for all intents and purposes, the US Postal Service subsidizes Bezos.
I prefer to use my deep pockets to lobby for tax loopholes. Easy to do, when the tax code is so convoluted 80,000 bureaucrats can't keep track
If your government's military wanted to oppress you, PayPal wouldn't protect you from the consequences. No payment system ever conceived by even the stanchest technoanarchist is immune to bullets.
It's a bit ironic... all this talk about crypto evading government hasn't really changed much. Then you have multinationals like Meta and Apple that really do have more money and power than most governments because of their centralization and scale.
The idea that the USD you earn in a wage is "yours" and the government has no right to tax it makes no sense to me. They printed the money. Your wage wouldn't exist without the government making the modern economy possible (in more ways than just printing it). Many of our jobs wouldn't even exist without the government's participation in the economy.
Holy strawman Batman.
PayPal might not but Apple/etc extract a 30% tax from everything you do through their stores.
Agreed. But I can choose not to use it. I don’t buy things in the App Store nor do I use pay pal.
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