Why is this post flagged? It is interesting, people can agree or disagree with it, but flagging it seems like propaganda. It is mostly about the dominance of data hungry, advertising backed web sites. But I also blame browser companies (I'm looking at you Firefox) for helping that happen.
We absolutely do demonize a few specific companies, ones that tend to be highly visible already. Ad serving networks & other systems were already proliferating wildly & increasingly vicious about gathering data. But few of those were visible to consumers, & Big Tech, by being consumer-facing, had a much firmer hand on the third rail.ofnthe issue, even though they often were doing better than the emerging ad-industry by lightyears.
BigTech is terrifying in that it holds so much data, but gosh darn it's spread much much much less readily than that we were doing before it became so dominant. There werent any controls, if the IAB & their ilk had their way. Tech defends against capitalism.
The title should be neoliberalism or free-market fundamentalists.
There's nothing inherent in the private ownership of capital that stops regulations which force markets to be competitive. And the article isn't even really arguing this, they're using capitalism as a shorthand for 'free markets'.
I disagree. What's that one about how power corrupts? Power converges and consolidates into fewer and fewer hands if left be. Money begets power and that leads to lobbying which leads to regulatory capture and monopolistic abuses of power like exclusivity agreements. There may be some platonic idea where greed doesn't corrupt, but those examples seem to be few and far between.
> they're using capitalism as a shorthand for 'free markets'
Not at all; see my response to syliconadder. However, they are misusing the term. What they seem to mean by it is neither capitalism nor free markets but advertising/marketing.
Particularly be because, as Piketty shows, again and again and again, amassed concentrations of captial bend all politics to it, with seeming certain inevitability.
Not at all. They're largely orthogonal to one another, one being about market access and the other about factors of production. In many ways they're even antagonistic; a system that asserts the primacy of capital over labor and treats it preferentially reduces access to markets for those whose primary contribution is labor (which is most of us). The two only seem hard to distinguish or disentangle because people are conditioned not to think too hard about the difference.
Pretty much. There's been a tendency among reactionary sorts to attack any piece they don't like by saying the writer is "just a journalist", ignoring the actual piece, and ignoring any credentials that the author has, like in this case, the writer of the piece is an Associate Professor at the University of Miami.
Isn't that kind of the case? Politicians seem to be more and more preoccupied with how well their actions are received by journalists/media, instead of how well their actions actually play out in reality.
I would actually say the opposite. We're getting better. In the 80s and 90s campaigns would do all sorts of crazy contortions to prevent getting caught in"gaffes", whereas today politicians just flood the zone with so much content that a misfire won't damage you.
Think back to the 80s when Dukakis, in attempt to seem more hawkish to the media, did a tank photo-op that ultimately had the opposite effect[1]. I can't think of anything in modern history that's had a similar impact.
Or look at Donald Trump, a candidate who never really cared about what the mainstream media had to say about him, and was openly hostile towards it. He was able to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016, albeit by some narrow margins in certain states.
Pretty bad faith comparison. The implication is that the only alternative to capitalism is state repression. This is a false dichotomy.
As an aside, I've noticed a lot of accounts avoiding bans recently by registering to make a single comment, like this one. I kinda wonder if they're all the same person, and that now they've run out of ideas for account names & are just using keyboard mash. I don't find this one particularly objectionable (except in that I disagree), I don't think you'd be banned for saying this, but the other comments were literal hate speech.
