Big Digital, also known as Big Tech, has joined Big Oil, Big Tobacco, and Big Pharma in the pantheon of industries capable of exercising vast control over the lives of average people.
However, at present, Big Digital enjoys greater potential for control than do the other biggies. Big Digital, via the growing Internet of Things, is literally everywhere. One can do without a private automobile, refuse to smoke, or try alternative remedies when unwell. But living without some government entity or business requiring on-line interaction for some needed service is becoming increasingly difficult.
Actually, most consumers welcome the Internet of Things. Many cannot imagine living without a baby monitor over their child’s crib or going anywhere without their GPS navigation device. Many welcome the concept of smart cities, where everything and everybody is connected. Cell phones are always at the ready to post one’s dining experience or one’s successful business endeavor.
Big Digital and Corporate Socialism
The assumption that Internet usage is universal combined with consumers’ love affair with digital gadgets translates into fertile ground for control. As in the case of imaginary worlds such as predicted in 1984 or of real worlds such as the former Soviet Union, the objective of control is ideological enforcement that benefits ruling entities.
Michael Rectenwald, retired New York University liberal studies professor and author, recently published The Google Archipelago, in which he discusses “corporate socialism.” One’s first intuition might be to reject such expression. Isn’t Google a big capitalist corporation, and doesn’t socialism hate capitalism? Not so, says professor Rectenwald.
An article in The Epoch Times, The Endgame of Big Tech Is Corporate Socialism, explains Michael Rectenwald’s view of corporate socialism, and how closely the objectives of monopolies align with the objectives of socialism.
Rectenwald acknowledges that Big Digital leaders genuinely believe in leftist politics. He points out, however, that many aspects of leftism align with practical corporate interests too, at least for companies with monopolistic ambitions. The Endgame of Big Tech.
Three good examples of alignment:
* Open borders = free flow of labor
* Identity politics = market niches
* globalization = only one set of rules applied to corporations
Hardly a Free Marketplace of Ideas
If we accept the premise that Big Digital benefits from and thus espouses global socialism, then we need to also accept that Big Digital cannot be the free marketplace of ideas it purports to be. It needs to be a place where control maintains dogma. A free marketplace is where all goods, services and ideas are civilly exchanged without fear of banishment. Is that what today’s on-line or social-media experience offers?
Joseph Stalin made the landed Kulaks and other dissidents disappear. Although not by means as drastic as those of Stalin, one can also easily disappear at the hands of Big Digital by simply using the “wrong” pronoun.
A Just Vote No Blog Postscript
It is the prerogative of private companies to run their business as they wish within the legal framework in which they operate. If a private company wishes to espouse the religious principles of its owner, fine. If a company wishes to adopt progressive views, fine too. The challenge for average consumers is the growing power of government-encouraged monopolies to control thought and action.
In the case of Big Tech, as controlling monopolistic growth becomes harder to camouflage, a new strategy is emerging, one that embraces control as beneficial to consumers. This will be the subject of another Just Vote No Blog post. Stay tuned.
Just Vote No 