thr0w72594

You mean private companies that have government-enabled monopolies and work together to shut people out of interacting in society, all while getting ban-lists from NGOs funded by billionaires?

I'd rather have the oppressive government, which ostensibly creates rules to benefit the country as a whole, than be ruled by the whims of a network of billionaires.

The authoritarian tech/finance cartel will gladly close your PayPal account without recourse to claim the balance, close your bank account, prevent you from getting access to payment processors, delist your products, kick you off of web hosting, ban your social media accounts, and otherwise shut you out of 99% of what people use the internet for, just for crossing one of them.

I never hold more than leftovers-worth of Bitcoin, so I'm not tied up in its success financially, but it has been a great way to support people who have been oppressed governments and corporations, many of whom who have never even been accused of a crime.

Unless you have a significant number of people working in your office over 70 years old, or if half of your colleagues are at least 60, it's more likely that nobody will die than 4-5.

In Russia they have state-controlled media, but America is a media-controlled state.

I agree with you completely. It actually makes me angry that corporations will seemingly stop at nothing to rape the Earth for their own profit and control. They want to replace everything natural and beautiful with a cheap simulacrum, and hope that the SSRIs and porn keep the population complacent while they take everything away from them.

The big tech companies (and more) act as a cartel, doing things for each other to kick out smaller rivals or just censor and deplatform people and groups they don't like. This is just evidence that it's more than wink-and-nod deals, which I think most of us suspected anyway.

Social media, search, payment processors, hosting sites... they all work in lockstep for the benefit of the cartel. We lose privacy, opportunity, and freedom and these companies gain more power.

There needs to be a bigger crackdown on the power that these companies hold, and not just when some documents happen to leak. America is in the best position to do this theoretically, but neither head of the American uniparty even pretends like they're going to do anything about it.

Capitalism and Socialism aren't the only ways to organize society. The state could force every company that operates within it be beneficial to its citizens.

If this is the only rhetoric, it fails all the other criteria I laid out. If it's not a useful, predictive, and positive worldview then this is not a good group to be in.

As for trust or distrust in authorities. There are many authorities that give you a good reason to trust them, namely a track record of telling the truth and acting in your best interest. There are also many authorities that give you a good reason to distrust them, by abusing their authority for personal profit, exposing themselves as an enemy, or selling out their built up goodwill to the highest bidder.

I don't think echo chambers are a bad thing. You can't verify everything yourself, so you can delegate some subset of your opinions to someone else, and be diligent about verifying that they're not leading you astray.

I've gone through a lot of different echo chambers in my life. From a traditionalist Catholic school to an ultra-liberal public university, and then spent time trying to orient myself and bouncing through a few different ideologies.

Some lines of thinking I've used to determine if I've found the right echo chamber, which, thankfully, I now have.

1. Is the world-view grounded in positive rhetoric? Do the practices and beliefs encourage building up both group members and the group as a whole? If not, there's a good chance you're being manipulated to serve someone else's purposes.

2. Does the group encourage you to think and reason for yourself? You're choosing this group so that you don't have to think about everything for yourself. But in the end you are responsible for your own life, so if a group is telling you to defer to an outside authority, tells you not to critically think about decisions, or tells you that certain topics on inquiry are off limits, stay away.

3. Does the world view accurately predict what will happen? Many ideologies are great at shoe-horning their narrative on past events, and many are great at coming up with logical arguments that are meant to be confusing and hard to refute, but the proof is in the predictive nature of the world-view.

4. Related to the above, when there's a failure in world-view, does the group have a mechanism of incorporating and learning from those failures?

The scanning already isn't necessary. What makes you think everyone getting vaccinated would cut back on government surveillance? You would just have to check in with your vaccine passport to prove that you can enter rather than check in for contact tracing; exact same problem either way.

The "threat of terrorism" has long been used by media and governments in a cynical way to demonize specific groups. The most common act of terrorism in Western countries in the past few years has been arson of historical churches, yet we almost never see mainstream reporting. On the other hand, we are constantly told of the "[insert group] terror threat" that turns up no actual terrorist acts.

The criticism here is entirely self-serving and hypocritical. Why should Google be able to undemocratically decide which parts of the internet it allows, yet deride governments for doing the same thing? At least the governments ostensibly have the best interests of their people in mind. And even the worst "authoritarian" governments need to answer to their population enough to keep legitimacy.

There is no free and open internet, and Google is part of the group of corporations that help prop up the big tech cartel that help kill off each others' competitors, share employee blacklists, and intentionally sacrifice the quality of their product to push their Bay Area bourgeoisie politics around the globe.