A nation state is backed by armies, monetary obligations, and the need to co-operate with other nation states in each others' best interests (optimally).
In order to protect its citizens and monetary interests and obligations most modern, well-functioning markets are regulated by these nation states.
Facebook doesn't care about users, laws, and lacks any sense of moral or ethical standards.
While I enjoy the benefits of being able to freely start a business I believe that a well-functioning market requires guidance and planning from broader, more conservative social structures in order to benefit everyone.
its difficult to say with a straight face that a government that runs trillions of deficits, spies constantly on its population, and engages in so called defensive wars abroad, cares about its citizens. The lack of responsibility is rampant among government figures.
At least there's ability to enforce governmental responsibility through elections and free press.
Facebook can be leveraged in no other way then through government regulation, even if you opt out from facebook it still watches you, and good luck even understanding of what's going on if you're not a technical person.
Yes, for example, voters in the U.S. elect presidential candidates who promise to scale back our military presence overseas, and then it happens! Voters also get what they want when they elect candidates promising to reform Wall Street, make government more transparent, or end the culture of graft & corruption in Washington.
Or take the issue of NSA surveillance, mentioned above. Since there were zero candidates on offer from either major party who promised even a sliver of reform, and no major media outlet even raised the issue, we can conclude that the voters have "opted in" to this program, and we should all learn to just live with it.
The other issue is -- as I come to grips with it myself, is yes NSA has sweeping and unjust powers, which invade privacy of many, but so far this power has been largely benign, whereas facebook was either complicit or actively participated with the subversion of several western democracies.
Incidentally this is also true of people patronizing large companies and exchanging their personal data for those companies' services. And I don't know why a constituency which accepts NSA surveillance from its government would be expected to pressure that same government to sanely regulate edge providers like Facebook. In reality, this pressure is all coming from elites who are upset by the prospect that they've lost some of their exclusive control over social media to the Bad Side. When it was the Obama campaign applying largely the same tactics in 2012, they were feted in the press as tech geniuses.
> yes NSA has sweeping and unjust powers, which invade privacy of many, but so far this power has been largely benign
"So far" being the operative term here, and I'm amazed that the same people who think Trump is a huge threat to civil liberties are somehow still not up-in-arms about this. It's probably also not true that its use has been benign, there are strong hints that NSA surveillance has already been deployed in an unconstitutional manner against U.S. citizens who find themselves in the government's crosshairs, e.g. in the hunt for Ross Ulbricht.
> facebook was either complicit or actively participated with the subversion of several western democracies.
Again, the only reason people are talking about "subversion of Western democracies" is because Trump/Brexit/Orban/AfD are winning, and that's not "supposed" to happen according to their own preconceptions. It's far easier to chalk these election results up to nefarious foreign meddling than it is to confront the genuine, pressing systemic problems causing voters to want to upend the system in this way. Had the Russians run a similar number of hilariously bad ads in favor of Clinton, occupying an equally infinitesimal sliver of Facebook ad traffic, it correctly would be dismissed as largely inconsequential to the electoral result.
I don't like Facebook, and even as a fairly hardcore libertarian, I'm open to the idea that FB and its ilk need to be reined back from some forms of data sharing and overly broad applications of their terms of service. But it's hilarious that what finally got people up in arms about this issue was Russia putting up a handful of vaguely pro-Trump Jesus arm wrestling memes on Facebook.
That's just false equivalency.
> "So far" being the operative term here, and I'm amazed that the same people who think Trump is a huge threat to civil liberties are somehow still not up-in-arms about this. It's probably also not true that its use has been benign, there are strong hints that NSA surveillance has already been deployed in an unconstitutional manner against U.S. citizens who find themselves in the government's crosshairs, e.g. in the hunt for Ross Ulbricht.
So far we can only operate with the evidence we have. Ross Ulbricht was caught because he was trying to order a 'hit' on one of his accomplices who turned to authorities. It's strange that you used this example because he was arrested and charged by using good old police work, everything that he did to run his organization, besides tech skills, was really amateurish.
> Again, the only reason people are talking about "subversion of Western democracies" is because Trump/Brexit/Orban/AfD are winning, and that's not "supposed" to happen according to their own preconceptions. It's far easier to chalk these election results up to nefarious foreign meddling than it is to confront the genuine, pressing systemic problems causing voters to want to upend the system in this way.
There's consistent, irrefutable evidence that it is in fact the nefarious foreign power manipulating people to achieve destabilization of what it perceives to be the enemy states.
> I don't like Facebook, and even as a fairly hardcore libertarian,
Try throwing Atlas Shrugged at Zuck and see if that does anything.
It takes far more credulity to believe that Russian social media activity is swinging these elections than it does to be duped by the ads themselves.
Business on the other side, tend to be punished by the markets when misbehaving and then course-correct.
That only happens when there are regulations to run afoul of and/or a company is not a monopoly. Without government companies would be free to pollute the environment, cheat customers, and abuse workers to breaking point. The market wouldn't punish those companies if all the companies in the market were doing the same kinds of things, which is what would happen if said bad behavior was profitable.
"Oh you don't disagree with Exxon poisoning community water supplies and using a private army to seize land from indigenous people? Tough luck, Shell and BP are doing the same thing."
Yeah most governments leave a lot to desire in efficiency, fairness, effectiveness, etc. But a world where corporations are the only ones who set the rules would be far worse.
It has nothing to do with regulations.
What other corporation are you going to buy from, when you’re not the customer in the first place, but have been commoditised to be their product?
How do you protect the product, if the corporation and it’s customers have no incentive to do so themselves?
But governments, they are monopolistic by definition. And the answer to no one. Army? Seizing land? Pollution??? Well the people of Africa could tell you some stories about their governments...
Or maybe you remember the USA govt detonating countless nuclear weapons over the USA soil...
In a free market a monopolistic company is just an invitation for the competition to a rich easily accessible lunch. The (naturally occurring) monopoly is short-lived.
Unless there is regulation. Regulation raises the barrier of entry, discourages start-ups and thus protects the monopolistic company from the competition.
It's quite logical, really.
It was ruled in 2001 that Microsoft, indeed, had a monopoly on the PC operating system market which they used to overtake the browser market. They did this through private contracts with OEMs and distributors such that all PCs sold to customers were to include Windows and only Windows.
> Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his findings of fact on November 5, 1999, which stated that Microsoft's dominance of the x86-based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Software, RealNetworks, Linux, and others. [1]
> So they the competition quickly routed around them and made them irrelevant.
That's certainly true for some of their products, such as Internet Explorer, but certainly not for Windows on the desktop.
The PC operating system market is not the server or mobile OS market.
> Where's Microsoft "monopoly" today?
They own the PC operating system market.
> Unless there is regulation. Regulation raises the barrier of entry, discourages start-ups and thus protects the monopolistic company from the competition.
Microsoft created barriers of entry into both the PC operating system and browser markets through anti-competitive tactics. If by government regulation, you mean "court enforced contracts", I'd agree with your premise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
But my point is that didn't last as the market punished them for it and made them irrelevant. The market moved to mobiles and web and today they are a good player in the industry.
Even on desktop where they still enjoy a healthy margin, it's not monopoly: Windows is ~80% while Mac OS and others take the other 20%.
This was your point and it's also what I addressed:
> The only monopolies are government-granted, otherwise startups quickly eat their lunch.
You claimed that monopolies are only possible through government regulation, because government regulation creates a barrier to entry that's easily surpassed by larger companies.
I provided proof illustrating that monopolies have been built through private agreements absent of government regulation.
Reality contradicts your "dystopia".
Reality has a number of regulations and restrictions. The dystopia GP describes is a world without these regulations and restrictions, not the reality we inhabit today.
Perfect competition exists almost no where, and you should read up on the conditions when it is allowed to take place. Regulations are part of the equation, but not nearly all of it.
Large companies are relatively easy to disrupt, since they usually respond slowly to market changes and they are much less efficient than a lean startup. The "advantages of scale" you are so fixated on are just a small part of the whole picture and what large corps gain at scale, they lose at management costs and through lack of innovation
It is a natural process, with countless examples all around us. A healthy process too, since it promotes competition and innovation.
But this process is interrupted by regulation. Regulation protects the incumbents, that is why large companies love it. They'd rather regulate than innovate. Indeed, when startups aren’t allowed to compete (by governments) large companies dominate and the market stagnates.
And when governments misbehave, they kill: wars, corruption, suppression, etc.
Forgive me if I’ll prefer businesses over governments every day.
You're comparing a giant to a nest of angry ants. The giant sometimes tramples houses; the ants don't. One might conclude the ants are therefore gentler, and wonder much better life would be under giant ants instead of the giant, neglecting that if the ants had the giant's power, they would be far more deadly than it.
I'd still rather live with angry (but benign) ants than a giant.
The ants cannot get the giants power, no matter how hard they try, so I'm comfortable with the ants.
(The thought experiment - what happens if Facebook tries to arrest someone? I'd be _so_ curious to watch the proceedings.)
Which is why we need to get rid of that power in the first place.
The problem is not the entity, it is the power, no matter who holds it.
Corporations are vast entities of unaccountable power when they are unregulated by a government.
Chomsky's criticism of corporations holds good, and is becoming prophetic in all accounts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYxGkFxb7f4
While the evil corporations give us, what, surveillance?!
We've never lived under corporations, but we’d always fear them. I for one, fear more the evil I know and I see ruining our world: politicians and their instruments of power, governments.
They've given us genocide, environmental destruction, the company town, the risk of being killed for striking, financial collapse, the funding of drug lords and terrorism[1].
[1] https://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1616991,0...
I look around me and every single object I use and makes my life better was made by a corporation. From my PC to my phone to my house and my card.
While every single thing that makes me fear tomorrow and sucks in my life is controlled by governments: health care, roads, bureaucrats, borders, international conflicts, corruption, etc.
I don't fear Facebook knowing everything about me and selling that info to third parties, but I do fear my government buying that info from FB and using it restrict my freedoms in the name of my own good or simply to steal more money from me.
Markets work well for most commodities.
On the other hand, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid ensure that people don't die so they can hopefully go on to enjoy a better life.
> I don't fear Facebook knowing everything about me and selling that info to third parties
A KGB, but for advertising, still collects and centralizes private info that can be abused by any party, governmental or private. A recent example of that exact dataset being abused by a private entity: the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Also, insurers and repo-men love accurate location tracking etc. Your insurers most likely aren't using that information to give you better rates.
Fruit companies and other monopolies of USA have routinely looted and exploited people and wealth of Latin American.
I can go on, recent history is rife with corporations exploiting nations for natural resource and wealth.
It's hard to take this 'protection' seriously in many cases. It's for more often the case where nation-state protection is extended to one company against other companies within the state than it is for one country's industry to be collectively protected against other countries'.
Protecting your own company against both the state and other companies is the CEO's mandate.
No, this is a mob boss's mandate.
Which usually mean to not care about users, laws, and any sense of moral or ethical standards.
True, but I can point to many countries (my own USA in many cases) that doesn't care about citizens, laws, and moral ethical standards. I can also point to corporations with high ethical standards, who care deeply about their users and the laws.
Corporations and governments are just groups of people. Groups of people have shown great capacity for good, but also extreme evil.
You want to make the NSA an election issue? You can go campaign on it. Setup a party, gather people to your cause. Vote.
You can't do anything even remotely similar to influence google or facebook.
This is sort of a bizarro-world comment to me. I'd bet good money that I have more influence on Google and Facebook than I do on the NSA, even ignoring any "I know an employee" personal channels.
I'm confused on several levels.
1. Anything I can apply to the NSA, I can apply to Facebook, probably with greater impact - and the reverse isn't true. For both Facebook and the NSA, I can lobby for regulation or sue them. I can campaign on Facebook just fine; it's not like the government has never acted against specific companies to satisfy the public. But for Facebook, I can also call for a user boycott, or promote lawsuits in other countries.
Meanwhile, I expect that campaigning and voting are better at influencing Facebook than the NSA. The US government will usually act on corporations that provoke enough public outrage, and the US (if perhaps no other government) can powerfully influence American tech companies. Three-letter agencies don't ever seem to stay constrained (the NSA nakedly lied to the Church Committee), and I usually can't even oppose their behavior because I don't know what it is.
I certainly don't see how I have more options for dealing with the NSA.
2. I basically disagree that I can go campaign on the NSA. There hasn't been a credibly anti-surveillance Presidential candidate since... Dukakis? Maybe? And the handful of primary candidates who seriously opposed it have lost badly, often via forces largely independent of actual popular opinion.
I can work for legislative reform, donate to Wyden and Udall, do all the rest. And I do, but it doesn't really go anywhere. Partly from lack of support, but partly because there are regulatory and legislative hurdles at every turn to insulate state surveillance from public influence. And even for that lack of support - the idea that democracy means you have a role in things is on an important level false. Democracy involves many people (>50%, essentially) in government, it doesn't represent everyone. It's better than dictatorship, obviously, but "accept this outcome as representing you" doesn't inherently follow from "you got to vote".
I'm not happy with Facebook, and I do think there are axes on which it's noticeably worse than government action. (Mostly, that any random jackass can start a social media surveillance empire, and that corporations can jurisdiction-hop to avoid regulation.)
But the idea that living in a democracy gives me more power over the NSA than Facebook? I'm struggling to think of a single way that's true.
That you don't want to put the effort in is one thing.
It is completely impossible for you to get 51% voting power in Google or FB. You will never have a say in a single thing they do.
If you want to disrupt their business through campaigns, etc., you can only do that with protection from the government, democracy in action. Otherwise you'd simply be murdered, billions at stake.
Because of its centrality in the modern economy, tech workers are in a similar position today. They have the power to withdraw their labor from companies and restore a more equitable balance to ceaseless assault on labor by Capital that has pushed this country into decline since the 1970s.
I'm pretty sure that is not accurate. We can't opt out of Facebook without significant effort which most people aren't even aware is possible and which can prevent some websites from working (NoScript, router rules, etc).
They use the 'share' buttons built into most websites to collect information about and profit off of people who never signed up for the service, never agreed to their EULA, and never consented to interact with the company.
Appear in the background of enough photos and Facebook can use other data to eventually figure out who you are, even if don't have a computer or smartphone.
Facebook faces a class action lawsuit for "improperly us[ing] facial recognition technology on their uploaded photographs" under an Illinois law "that says a private entity such as Facebook can't collect and store a person's biometric facial information without their written consent" [1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/16/603056662...
If the social network dies, so will the surveillance system.
Americans do not broadly support reforming the NSA [1][2].
The reason for that is the same behind someone always posting, when HN discusses Facebook's shenanigans, "why is this news?" The public needs to see bodies to mobilise. The last few decades were filled with cable TV hosts and technologists screaming about existential threats to democracy. Most didn't pan out. The price we pay for our boys who cried wolf is a public demand for tangibility.
We don't have a case where the NSA's activities caused big, tangible, specific and easily-understood harm. We do with Facebook. Moreover, the NSA's leadership responded competently to criticism. Facebook's CEO and even rank-and-file reacted petulantly, which fuelled the fire.
> Don't interpret this as saying Facebook acted appropriately.
I'm glad you say this. Policy isn't zero sum. I, too, want to reform the NSA. But that isn't happening today. We do, however, in state houses, through our Attorneys General and in the EU, have a chance at dealing some heavy blows to Facebook.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/06/11/190638738... (2013)
[2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/19/americans-fe...
Addiction and psychological hacks start to blur the boundary of what is "voluntary." Regardless of that discussion, there is a problem of "reverse herd immunity" where some large fraction of the population is constantly manipulated by a systematically controlled echo chamber run by a corporation that is coopted by, frankly, bad actors. You can opt out all you want, but democracy can be compromised by mass mind control that is now not only technically possible, but clearly in beta.
Care to explain how non-users who have been having their data harvested via back channels such as their friends/family, data brokers like Acxiom, and trackers on non-FB sites, can "opt out of Facebook"? Sure, technically skilled people can "opt out" of portions of this in a sense, but that leaves billions of people still powerless in this regard.
I'd also love to know how to opt out of the wider societal damage Facebook has encouraged and enabled.. and no, "Move to a shack in the woods if you don't like it" is not a valid answer here.
Despite their shortcomings I back countries...
Cognitive dissonance would be my guess. Admitting to ourselves how helpless we are against the actual powers of this world is too uncomfortable. Much easier is to demand "democratic oversight" over the management of some nonsense-sharing app that you could have simply never used in the first place. Because hey, you might even get it.
Perhaps it would have been more palatable if phrased as "People over countries," which is a maxim I may myself use to make a saccharin vision statement. The point is voluntary exchange over the involuntary constraints one endures as part of a country.
From there, evolving to "Market over countries" is also satisfying to me although probably a bit disarming to others. And then another hop takes you to the "Companies over countries" of Zuckerberg. That's not a vision statement I would use, because I have no particular love for companies outside of what they can do for me. But taken simply on absolute measures, I still favor the freedom I enjoy when interacting with companies versus even the most free of countries. In all but the most extreme cases (usually those involving government-provided monopolies) I can disassociate myself with a company with little effort.
watching Mark Zuckerberg raise his fist with a slight smile and say, “Domination!” as a way of closing out our weekly Friday all-hands meeting
suggests a dystopian future.
> We can all opt out of Facebook.
Can we? What is the practical effect of doing so? Will they stop tracking us on the web? Will they stop gathering data about us via people with whom we are associated?
Facebook is a crowd-sourced global surveillance program from which there is no real opt-out and over which there are no checks and balances because most of the people running it don't even think they're running a surveillance program.
That doesn't make democracy bad, but it's absolutely bizarre seeing people in these threads equate "you get to vote" with "you're voluntarily accepting your government". As you say, you don't get to pick where you're born, and the chance to vote doesn't necessarily change anything for you personally.
Unless of course they vote for third party candidates every election, in which case failure is guaranteed and voting is an entirely symbolic act.
I probably should, honestly - at least if most/all of those people are voting the same way in an election. Since it's not prescience, I suspect I just don't have a good sense of the dropout rate; I learned this because 2016 was an upset, so several Clinton voters mentioned that even a seemingly-safe election had maintained their losing streak.
> I imagine the rate is considerably lower for real people, who by definition are more likely to vote for the winner.
This I'm not sure about, and it's a pretty interesting question. You're obviously right that a randomly-chosen person has a >50% chance of having voted for the winner, but I think this is a non-standard population issue.
People have a lot of different voting strategies, and presumably the people I know are some sort of 'perverse voters' - whatever forces lead >50% of people to vote for a given candidate tend to push them in the opposite direction. I'm not sure how common this is, but I expect it's probably bigger than the random rate. If somebody's "vote for the underdog" instinct hits 60%, that would ~triple the odds of getting this outcome.
> they vote for third party candidates
I didn't count anyone who consistently votes third party, since that's effectively "didn't vote" for odds of winning. But I think several of these people did vote Nader in 2000, which dodged a particularly hard-to-call election.
I'm honestly confused by the idea that democracy means the outcomes we get are inherently more acceptable. Democracy only opens the possibility of influencing what one government does to us. Which beats the hell out of autocracy, but doesn't actually mean people are consenting to what the state does to them. Even assuming you get to vote your preference, 49% of people are still having things done to them against their will.
you need both, and both need tending by citizens. nothing about a company makes it implicitly better than a government (being able to start a company is good for you, but how do i know you're not a jerk?), and both need vigilance to keep in line.
Even if you think natural monopolies are a true facet of free markets, Facebook is not a natural monopoly. MySpace is a simple counterexample to that idea.
of course competition for governments lay in ideas, thoughts, policies, and actions, not markets. in various forms of democracy, politicians vie for our votes, and that forms a web of constraints against greedy self-interest. besides, there are many goverments, and many levels of governments, all jostling with each other for the title of "best".
there's no need to revere free markets and abhor goverments (we should be vigilant of both). economic and political arenas are but two facets of our complex societies.
It's an heresy only if it is my country.
As an example, a lot of people is mad because Intel didn't tell (officially) to the US government about Spectre&Meltdown before the disclosure date. Should they also had toll it to Russia, China, UK and France?
Some countries are at least subject to the "whim" of democracy.
Others have noted powers that a country has, that a company doesn't.
The converse holds too.
It's interesting to re-read James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State" with social networks in mind. Facebook can “read” its users (and many non-users) in ways that states only wish they could.
“Filipinos were instructed by the decree of November 21, 1849, to take on permanent Hispanic surnames.[…] Filipinos generally lacked individual surnames, which might ‘distinguish them by families,’ and that their practice of adopting baptismal names drawn from a small group of saints’ names resulted in great ‘confusion.’ The remedy was the catalogo, a compendium not only of personal names but also of nouns and adjectives drawn from flora, fauna, minerals, geography, and the arts and intended to be used by the authorities in assigning permanent, inherited surnames. Each local official was to be given a supply of surnames sufficient for his jurisdiction, ‘taking care that the distribution be made by letters [of the alphabet].’ In practice, each town was given a number of pages from the alphabetized catalogo, producing whole towns with surnames beginning with the same letter. […] the traces of this administrative exercise are still perfectly visible across the landscape: ‘For example, in the Bikol region, the entire alphabet is laid out like a garland over the provinces of Albay, Sorsogon, and Catanduanes which in 1849 belonged to the single jurisdiction of Albay. Beginning with A at the provincial capital, the letters B and C mark the towns along the coast beyond Tabaco to Tiwi. We return and trace along the coast of Sorsogon the letters E to L; then starting down the Iraya Valley at Daraga with M, we stop with S to Polangui and Libon, and finish the alphabet with a quick tour around the island of Catanduanes.‘”[2]
The modern corporation doesn't require the cooperation, or even permission, of local officials in order to index the populace.
Mark Koyama criticizes[3] Scott: “It is hard to avoid the impression that Scott underrates the adaptability and flexibility of markets. Yes, markets can result in homogeneity; but the market process is also a driver of creative experimentation and innovation. Too much bland standardization, and markets provide incentives for entrepreneurs to create products that appear idiosyncratic or unusual. The market as a process can certainly appear ruthless and much that is valuable can be lost as a result in the hurly burly of the market place. But everyday experience provides pretty convincing evidence that markets tend to be more capable of self-correction than are state planners and bureaucrats.”
Maybe there's a case to be made that the market is working in the case of Facebook, but it's not obvious.
[1] James C. Scott, _Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed_. Yale University Press (March 30, 1998). p. 11. Excerpt https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sc....
[2] Ibid, p. 67
[3] Mark Koyama, "Some Thoughts on “Seeing Like a State”", Medium (July 13, 2017). https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama/some-thoughts-on-seeing-like-...
[4] Bradford Delong, October 24, 2007. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/10/james-scott-and.html
[5] Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”. March 16, 2017. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like...
Not really. In countries with representative government not only does that state have a monopoly on law/force but all people are granted an equal say in the state. The market may be good at some things but would you desire a governmental system where the rich having more power than the poor was baked into the system? [0] I think most would resist that.
>We can all opt out of Facebook. Thankfully many have. But NSA surveillance is involuntary.
Well actually we can't. We've found out recently that Facebook tracks even non-users. Besides you could go so far as to say that you can opt out of NSA surveillance by rejecting email and cell phones. Even if your work requires an email and a business phone you're certainly not required to share personal information over them. So what makes surveillance of your private emails more involuntary than surveillance of your private FB messages?
>Why are we more worried about a voluntary and foreseeable risk than an involuntary rights violation?
I think if you went around and asked regular people with Facebook accounts whether they voluntarily gave fine detail location data and browsing histories to Facebook they would reject that. Certainly they would reject foreseeability.
Further I'm not sure you can even call rule by market regime more voluntary than rule by representative government. Both require loads of coercion.
[0] I'm aware that our own representative democracies have been corroded by the effects of wealth but there is at least a path towards eliminating that influence. In a market system there isn't, it's the core feature of the market.
Most countries around the world are led by the upper class who has large access to capital. Even in democracies power goes to the wealthy, and you dont get to vote for lower class representatives.
Yes and that's bad so we certainly shouldn't expand the power that people with lots of capital have.
>Even in democracies power goes to the wealthy, and you dont get to vote for lower class representatives.
That's not an intrinsic feature of democracies but it is of markets.
More. But I got a dead device..
Back.
Business operates under license, and that comes with terms, the rules, law. It serves us, as do markets, and when that doesn't happen, the license can be revoked, or new terms come into play so it all does.
Government is about the general welfare too. Very different purpose from a corporation, and a necessary one.
Under all of that lies the basic idea of citizens defining their society, for their own welfare.
When we set those basic ideas aside, we get the sort of mess we have today.
Zuck has this backward, and favors lords and fiefdoms over a just society. His ideas are old world, old money ideas more closely aligned with ideas of leadership, how a society runs more in line with kings, divine right, wealth, purity, and other obviously unjust ways to define and manage power.
This nation was formed on the idea of rejecting all of that. Thomas Paine derives most of this in "Rights of Man" and "Age of reason", where the first reference speaks to self governance and what free people means, and the second speaks to why the church is not a center of power either, both straight up rejections of both forms of old world governance.
Look at last week. The senate was on their high-horse, admonishing facebook for privacy infringements, totally unaware of the irony they are an appendage of the same entity which created the NSA and continues to eavesdrop on all of our conversations.
We can all opt out of Facebook. Thankfully many have. But NSA surveillance is involuntary.
Why are we more worried about a voluntary and foreseeable risk than an involuntary rights violation?
Don't interpret this as saying Facebook acted appropriately.