The president of the United States proudly admitted to alerting Facebook to "problematic" accounts just last week. Maybe that's justified, or isn't in service of a "surveillance dystopia", but the best light is "collaboration" between the largest corporations and the government. It's certainly going on, and that's not a conspiracy theory.
Also, corporations are government - they quite literally are often the same people, having their hands in government agencies and institutions before cashing out in the private sector. Practically everyone at one point or another is thinking about their next job, so it's hard to argue the folks in the highest positions in society aren't.
> Kidding, not kidding. We should really look at what these companies are pushing.
Now you're confusing me a bit - but if this is your actual position, I agree.
For crying out loud, I oppose a surveillance dystopia as much as anyone and far more than most. But it's not a surveillance dystopia for the things you publicly say and have your name attached to as you publish it to be brought to the attention of the publisher.
If you wanna talk about censorship, we can talk. But that's a different concept often related.
Yes but by whom, and are they being held to the same standards of accountability?
If corporations collude in favor of the state against its political opponents in order to secure their place in a new regime's cabinet and no one is around to hear the president order it, is it still fascism?
According to WRI calculator, in 2018 world GHC emissions totaled 47.6 Gt. Paris accord 1.5C target is 25 Gt. Population in 2050 projected at 10 billion people. Back of the envelope calculation gives per capita target of 2.5 CO2e t. As of 2020, even countries with green electrical energy production (nuclear & renewables) like Sweden, Switzerland or France are still at 4.5, 4.7 and respectively 6.3 CO2e t/capita emissions.
As of 2021, there is no country with a western lifestyle and 2.5 CO2e t/capita emissions, closest being Sweden with 4.5 and Switzerland with 4.7. Perhaps a ray of hope, both these countries started at 8 CO2e t/capita 30 years ago in 1990.
(#) 'western' roughly includes Western Europe, North America, East Asia, Australia and Arabian Peninsula.
https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas...
https://unepdtu.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/un-egr19-es-4...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-fo...
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
Cuba (2.68), Tunisia (2.60), Ecuador (2.43), Egypt (2.32), Brazil (2.25), Vietnam (2.20)?
what does that even mean?
There is a name for government-corporate collaboration. Even if you think it's going well "for now", it probably isn't.
What we want to look out for is not corporate cooperation with government, which is natural and proper. Rather we need to be on guard for corporate control of government, and I think America with it's energy, media and banking firms comes close to crossing the line. That line between corporates cooperating in a natural and necessary regulatory order on the one side, and corporates controlling the government's regulatory and legal order.
You may even be able to argue that the line was crossed a while ago. There's a reason we have everything from private prisons, to corporates that are "too big to fail", to wars for oil, to regulatory bodies so corrupted that our word can no longer be safely relied upon to certify an airliner.
My own opinion is we're holding the line in some places, and in others, clearly the dam has already broken.
Until you find yourselves on the other side, by definition..
It hasn't been a good long-term strategy historically speaking. But you can definitely get your way for quite a while.
It’s as if the X-Files never ended and is still relevant. So many people, when grappling with why things are the way they are, simply reach in the toolbox for the easy Cynicism and Conspiracy tools. It’s always “shadowy elite” in media, in tech companies, in government, conspiring to make us all buy SUVs because… uh…, well they are conspiring to make everyone wear masks so they can… uhh… do something. No, actually the elites are conspiring to bring on climate change and space travel so they can build their own Elysium space station and then… um… profit in some way we can’t figure out yet.
That’s the great thing about conspiracy theories: you can just spout the first few steps and fail to explain the end game because there’s always another conspiracy theorist building on it and imagining what the next steps might be.
They're pushing their bottom line, same as ever, but now with a legitimating rhetoric appropriated from humanities academia, the nonprofit and advocacy/NGO sector, and various protest movements.
I'm certain China thinks suppressing the Uyghurs is the right side of history too.
Your comment is literally the most dangerous thing you can ever say. Literally that someone else is a better arbiter of truth than yourself.
Kidding. This isn't the 90's. The only people who worry about an axis of collaboration between corporations and government to create a surveillance distopia are conspiracy theorists pushing misinformation now. Plus, big tech is finally being responsible and working on the right side of history, so we can all get aligned on fighting climate change, and finally force the assholes to pay everyone back for their empty status symbols like all the air they polluted with their SUVs, unpaid emotional labor, meat, and tax breaks they took from us, and finally give it to people who deserve it. We can even replace small thinking regional governments with better international collaboration and cooperation so that everyone will be equal no matter where they live, and we can end the privileged western lifestyle once and for all.
Kidding, not kidding. We should really look at what these companies are pushing.