I will 100% agree that large-corp is a threat to democracy, and specific freedoms. But indistinguishable? Come on.

A government can prevent you from speaking your mind, via legislation and the judicial branch. In terms of raw power, they have the capability to throw you in jail, they can detain you, they can prevent protest, pass laws to make your specific actions literally result in incarceration, they have armies, and police, and state spies, and on and on and on.

Corporations may sometimes avail themselves of some of that power, but it is still the state wielding it. Corporations by themselves have little direct power, compared to states themselves.

And yes, corporations will perform tasks for the state, and the state will sometimes perform tasks for corporations. But that's not my point.

My point is, having a large corporation does not immediately provide for a massive army at the direct control of a CEO. It's just not indistinguishable, at all.

So yes, looking at the specific powers of each entity is a good idea. Just.. keep it in perspective.

Jail is certainly a pretty strong deterrent. But it's actually not as strong as say not being able to eat. Which is contingent upon there being enough competition [0] between providers of food such they can't exercise coercive power. And the surveillance industry has been steadily destroying that open market dynamic we take for granted, for example "the unbanked".

And thinking about coercion in hard discrete terms is fallacious as well. If the government illegalizes some thing, whereas cooperating corporations just make doing that thing such an uphill battle that most people don't do it, the net effect is quite similar. Resist the temptation to think "sure but you can still opt out", because while that can work for a handful of things that really matter to you, this won't actually change much. And conversely, you can actually still do anything the government has declared illegal if you're willing to possibly pay the price.

[0] or more accurately - not too much collusion. these are different measures

But each of these two controlling aspects of our lives, are different entities, with different ways to address, rebuke, curtail, and prevent that control. And the control they each exert is unique. This is why I replied, for even though you stated you didn't want to focus on the dichotomy, you brought it up, and waved it away, stating it was not relevant for this discussion.

But it is. It is, because each of these entities must be fought in unique ways.

I think we mostly agree here on the large points. It's just nuance we're debating.

There are of course differences in the ways you can "address, rebuke, curtail, and prevent that control" based on the specific details of the entity - just as there are stark differences between democracies versus dictatorships, and publicly traded corporations versus privately held. And when we're talking about pushing back, those details should certainly be mentioned.

But my point of emphasizing the similarities between the two large categories is to preempt this all too common pattern of people justifying corporate oppression by framing it in terms of voluntary association, while turning a blind eye to the actual coercive dynamic. I'm sure we do agree on a lot of things, but honestly your first comment is ripe with laying the groundwork for such type of justification. Corporations can certainly prevent you from speaking your mind - for example a geographic-monopoly Internet provider that censors based on content. The next step in the argument is of course "you can still speak your mind, just not using their infrastructure", but given that the sheer majority of speech is online today, that reasoning is specious - it's deliberately ignoring the power the company is actually wielding.

Or coming at it from the other direction - if it's definitionally impossible for corporations to exercise coercive power, then why is accumulating such power one of the tenets of business ("build a moat"), and why are so many people so damn interested in having certain corporations perform censorship?

An uncomfortable truth is that the main thing preventing corporations from having their own full-blown armies is the bona fide government. This circular dynamic is why I've come around to viewing freedom as a kind of logical reduction yin-yang rather as a unidirectional gradient - if the bona fide government disappeared tomorrow, the net effect would actually be the loss of much freedom, as those other aggressors would no longer be kept in check. Big-L Libertarianism sidesteps this by just asserting that having a singular military is one of the few necessary functions of government, but it's not clear why such an exception should only apply to one single topic when that same circular dynamic applies at other levels of abstraction.

Here's an example. Discrimination. Here's a factual phrase: women are less intelligent than men. That's not discriminatory, what is discriminatory, is if I use a minor deviation in averages, to look at $random_woman, and presume she is less intelligent than $random_man.

For example, there are many women that are more intelligent than many men.

My point is, we've had to "dumb down" discrimination, by trying to claim, in many respects, there there is absolutely no difference between men and women. This has led to detrimental outcomes for women, a key example being that as most medical volunteers are men, many models of the brain are predicated upon the male, and therefore? As people say "why, there's no difference between the male and female brain!", it has actually harmed women's outcomes.

I am concerned about the parallel here. That the more we lump things into mega-categories, the more positive outcomes for nuanced groups is lost. And that means that the best solutions may be unavailable, for if they cannot be applied to "overall group", then they may be deemed useless.

I know you're not advocating any of this. And I know your goal is to just ensure people fully understand the risks.

But my point is, much as the fight against discrimination has been whittled down to "there is no difference!", because the stupids cannot understand nuance, you seem to be in a trap of having to whittle down to no-nuance, for the same reasons.

Which is sad.

Hypothetically I can see this happening with my argument, but I'm only imagining more checked-out cynicism. Maybe you see how it's poised for something worse?

What I do commonly see are arguments in the vein of "it's impossible for a company to be coercive", which I'd say is the same exact dogmatic pattern you're describing. They're used to justify a state of affairs, and then offer a fallacious solution like "go start your own company". The wishful thinking here seems to be based on emphasizing the distinction between corporate power and government power [1], which is why I think it's useful to point out the commonalities.

[0] like only now that the mobs have passed, can you use this spicy but technically correct example

[1] see the common trope of people asserting that freedom of speech only pertains to the government, when it's just a general concept and the government-specific bit is the legal framing of the first amendment

The richest guy can say whatever he wants; he's got the means to bypass the usual channels. But what about the average Joe? That's where our concern should be. It's not about agreeing with what's said, but making sure everyone can say it. We need to keep our eyes on the real issue: preventing anyone, government or corporate, from getting too much control over our free speech. It's all about that freedom, not getting bogged down in who's the bigger threat.

It is the current state of the US, but I think it's not inevitable and more due to the circumstances of the US. Regulating billboard usage and advertising limits reach. I'm not sure if this is necessary, but a better online platform ecosystem with rich filtering capabilities could help. Lobbying is harder to curb, since corruption is corruption, but it can probably be done. I think then the big issue is if the corporations amass a private military or something, since they can't artifically extend their voice that much.