In a recent interview, PayPal founder Peter Thiel spoke of a ‘totalitarian’ streak that exists in many of the tech titans. Evidence suggests he might be right. If so, are we closer to China’s ‘Social Credit System‘ than we realize?
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Samizdata quote of the dayApril 5th, 2018 |
 9 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
The article cites a “scholar from Germany” as writing “… if properly implemented the system can have positive impacts—especially when used to keep government officials and business owners accountable.” My emphasis.
Why does this shit always boil down to liquidating the Kulaks? Every fucking time? Big corporations have diffuse ownership and are managed by what Stross calls the beige dictatorship. Typically, the only businesses with readily identifiable owners are small ones. Owned by Kulaks, like me.
I thought that the new Chinese idea of social credit was just a way of copying our social-media system of shunning wrong-thought. Chinese leaders must have been watching Facebook and drooling over the control implications.
Never mind all that- England are leading the Commonwealth Games in gold medals- despite Brexit! Think how much bigger the lead could have been, without brexit…
These people are ‘progressives’, so of course they have a totalitarian streak.
We are not yet as close as the ‘Tech Titans’ want to be, but that is clearly the goal. Closing down conservative accounts, demonetization of YouTube accounts with no explanation, and no response to inquiries about what the guidelines being used for decisions actually are, are the current portents of the desired future of social media.
Tech giants are frat houses run by superannuated college kids.
The Bay Area has always (since the 1930s) had far more than its fair share of Stalinists and their hangers on. That the area’s greatest industry should find itself under commie influence should not surprise anyone.
Good post.
Yes – the tech giants are dominated by people with a certain view of the world, a leftist view of the world. that they were taught in school and university (even though many of them dropped out – they still absorbed this view of the world, perhaps all the MORE so because they did not really study and think about it, they were too busy creating their business enterprises and thus just bought their philosophical and political opinions off-the-peg).
But it will run into reality.
California does not work – and that is where most of the tech giants are based. Eventually the high taxes and endless regulations will hit even the “pet” tech companies.
For example California is thinking of increasing Corporation Tax – to “take up the slack” of the cut in the Federal Corporation Tax. Shareholders will start asking the obvious question “why is the company still here?”
The only winning move is not to play.