by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
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 states with global hegemony over surveillance, censorship, data collection and behavioral influence–what Jesse calls network states.