You better bow low and pay up, peasant, or your voice in the digital world will disappear just as quickly as your democracy’s control over Big Tech.
Who’s the junior partner in global hegemony, Big Tech or the U.S. government?
The question would have been laughable just a few years ago, but now it’s a viable debate when we ask questions like: which one plays a larger role in your daily life, Big Tech platforms or the government?
If controlling the flow of data is now the primary means of production, then who owns control of data flows? As we all know, the answer is Big Tech platforms: Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix et al.
As Mark, Jesse and I discuss in our latest salon, The Rise and Fall of the Neo-Feudal Network State, these platforms have become defacto sovereign stateswith global hegemony over surveillance, censorship, data collection and behavioral influence–what Jesse calls network states.
Since the leadership of these private-sector sovereign entities is effectively monarchical, it is also effectively neofeudal: these platforms are private, closed source systems, managed by black-box algorithms hidden from users and regulators. This is the acme of neofeudalism: there is no democratic control at all by users or citizens.
Whether Facebook will ever hit upon a more coherent approach to protecting the free expression of the powerless as well as the powerful depends on whether it ever comes to grip with its own role as the largest censor in the history of the world.(emphasis added by CHS)
“Facebook is governing human expression more than any government does or ever has,” said Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. “They have taken on the task of defining hate speech and other unacceptable speech, which is a quasi-sovereign power… and we the public have no opportunity to contribute to the decision-making, as would be the case if the decisions were being made by a government.”
Indeed, despite company executives’ paying lip service to the concept of democracy from time to time, Facebook is structurally monarchical.
To the University of Virginia media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, campaigners against Facebook need to come to grips with the global nature of its threat.
“The US got off easy in 2016– the same year that Rodrigo Duterte took over the Philippines by riding Facebook to victory, and two years after Narendra Modi took over India by riding Facebook to victory. Much of the world suffers from all of the Facebook maladies much worse than the US.”
No comments:
Post a Comment