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[...] tech companies are under fire for creating problems instead of solving them. At the top of the list is Russian interference in last year's presidential election. Social media might have originally promised liberation, but it proved an even more useful tool for stoking anger. The manipulation was so efficient and so lacking in transparency that the companies themselves barely noticed it was happening.
The election is far from the only area of concern. Tech companies have accrued a tremendous amount of power and influence. Amazon determines how people shop, Google how they acquire knowledge, Facebook how they communicate. All of them are making decisions about who gets a digital megaphone and who should be unplugged from the web.
Their amount of concentrated authority resembles the divine right of kings, and is sparking a backlash that is still gathering force.
Is it that the tech companies are creating problems for society as a whole, or merely disrupting the status quo for the old Powers-That-Be?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 15 2017, @10:13PM (8 children)
I'd pretty much equate the fall of Rome and even the French Revolution to destruction of human society to animal, or even sub-animal levels. Unsustainable social change via low-tech murder.
Now, of course, with navies and air force and all, we have to have a functioning infrastructure to wage effective war on any significant scale - and that is run on money.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 16 2017, @12:44PM (7 children)
Militaries are run on a lot of things. Money is handy militarily to simplify logistics in some ways, but you can't do anything else with it. You can't eat it. You can't burn it in internal combustion or jet engines. And you certainly can't shoot someone else with it. This is a continuation of the same delusion. Just because you can value power to some degree with money doesn't make money power, and it certainly doesn't make money a prerequisite for power.
This whole thing is just a rationalization for elevating wimpy businesses, "corporations" above the real sources of power. But maybe that's a consequence of the cognitive dissonance that comes from trying to mitigate the harm of a form of power by using a more dangerous form of power.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 16 2017, @06:43PM (6 children)
Again, when it hits the fan, money becomes worthless. That's why you need a protected rear area with a functioning economy where you can continue maintenance and production.
You might manage to equip a small militia with simple rifles and small boats without an infrastructure that runs on money, but if you want anything as fancy as a tank, or a bomber more advanced than a Sopwith Camel tossing hand-grenades over the side, you'd be breaking historical tradition to be able to build and stockpile those types of weapons without a functioning economy. Even the Romans got their swords and shields made using coin of the realm to control the labor.
I, for one, prefer the yoke of the mortgage and bi-weekly direct deposit to trucks that drive around with armed men who "draft" people off the street into the army. Both are sucky outgrowths of technological progress, but at least the illusion of free will can be attained for a couple of weeks a year under the wage-slave regime.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 16 2017, @08:02PM (5 children)
Logistics and a functional economic aren't money (you are conflating the component of money with the whole). They aren't decisive either.
I can think of several wars where the losing side had the better logistics and functional economy, yet still lost (particularly, a number of colonial wars such as the two wars in Vietnam and the US Revolutionary War).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 16 2017, @09:41PM (4 children)
and serious political problems preventing them from focusing their full military power and potential on the conflict.
Tell you what, run a simulation of America vs Europe, start both sides at bows and arrows level of technology - but give America money, fungible and readily exchanged, and keep Europe on a bartering economy. Which side wins 500 years later? With money, America can concentrate population in cities and maintain those cities with diverse sources of food beyond the nearby fields - potentially preventing the collapse of the Mayan empire (would be nice if they'd go ahead and use the wheel in more than toys, too...) With the high density cities, they'd have more disease, and build resistance to that disease, so on first contact it would be the Europeans dying of something horrible, not the Americans. What do you think the weapons would look like on both sides? Remember, there's no exchange of gold or silver coin in Europe, so I'm guessing that blacksmiths wouldn't get much past sword making based on trade for goats and chickens.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 16 2017, @10:31PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 16 2017, @11:00PM (2 children)
The point is: without money, you do limit what a society can produce. How do you setup a supply chain to make something as complex as a tank without money? How do you attempt to control politics without money? Once you've shaken every hand in town, can you really reach out to the entire state or country without money to support the political campaign? Money is what takes you out of the Germanic barbarian king / Viking / North American Indian tribe stage into a larger organized unit. Genghis Khan had a fearsome army, but it was economics that held the Mongol empire together - for a time.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 17 2017, @05:56AM (1 child)
And you can do that through a variety of means. Again, you are completely missing the point. The economic efficiencies introduced by money is just one of many critical aspects of creating power, military or otherwise. You are cherry picking this and assigning money artificial importance.
Quid pro quo. That's how much of it is done today as well.
Economics != money.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 17 2017, @12:09PM
And how do you organize quid pro quo across an empire? In Rome, it was done with money. Today, Marco Rubio's vote was bought by paying a 2008 price for his home in 2012 (roughly speaking) - that was quid pro quo, but only really practical with money. If the issue had been a tax on goat herders, it would have been far more difficult for Rubio to explain the sudden appearance of 1000 goats on his land.
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