The Bloodbath of Tech Corporatism

The Jipshow with Mr. Menger

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The Bloodbath of Tech Corporatism

And Another Adventure in Newspeak

Mr. Menger

Mar 24, 2024

Transcript

Time Stamps:

Opening (0:00)
Lobbied Out of Optimism (1:55)
A New Age of People Power (4:33)
Big Tech's Oppressive Blob (8:54)
Forming a Ruling Class Conspiracy (10:42)
De Facto State Actors (13:26)
Amazon Boasts About its Chokehold on Government Cash (14:13)
Bloodbaths, Mob Wetwork, and Media Hotheads (15:33)
Google's Orwellian Newspeak Stunt (18:07)

Lobbied Out of Optimism

Your Dictionary provides the following definition of corporatism:

Political / Economic system in which power is exercised through large organizations (businesses, trade unions, their associated lobbying efforts, etc.) working in concert or conflict with each other; usually with the goal of influencing or subsuming the direction of the state and generally only to benefit their own socioeconomic agendas at the expense of the will of the people, and to the detriment of the common good.

This definition will be instructive as we wade through a recent article by Jeffrey Tucker.

In the 1990s, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backward.
We were all gaining access to fabulous things, including the web, apps, search tools and social media. But governments at all levels were stuck in the past using IBM mainframes and large floppy disks.
I recall the days of thinking government would never catch up to the glories and might of the market itself. I wrote several books on it, full of techno-optimism.
The new tech sector had a libertarian ethos about it. They didn’t care about the government and its bureaucrats. They didn’t have lobbyists in Washington. They were the new technologies of freedom and didn’t care much about the old analogue world of command and control. They’d usher in a new age of people power.

For many of us, this is looked back upon as a golden era of Western innovation. But while we fell in love with the “Wild West” era of the internet, the powers that be had vowed to impose gatekeepers. And in turn, a very different world had arisen.

An industry we once embraced as the modern face of optimism eventually sold us down the river.

Big Tech's Oppressive Blob

Tucker continues:

Here we sit a quarter-century later with documented evidence that the opposite happened. The private sector collects the data that the government buys and uses as a tool of control.
It’s determined by algorithms agreed upon by a combination of government agencies, university centers, various nonprofits and the companies themselves. The whole thing has become an oppressive blob.

Without shame, Amazon Web Services boasts of “[p]aving the way for innovation and supporting world-changing projects in government, education, nonprofit, and healthcare organizations" on their official site.

The language of public service is employed to tout the attraction of billions in tax dollars and counting.

Public sector leaders engaged in true cloud computing projects overwhelmingly turn to the power and speed of Amazon Web Services (AWS) when they want to serve citizens more effectively, accelerate innovation and digital transformation, and put more of their time and resources into their core missions.

Bloodbaths, Mob Wetwork, and Media Hotheads

It's essentially campaign season, so obviously, the Hoax Machine plans to make do with whatever floats the boat. Or doesn't.

The latest example is Donald Trump's use of the word “bloodbath” to describe the economy if he fails to get elected in 2024, and thus tariffs on automobile imports from China would fall short of 100 percent.

Instead of asking if the “"tariff bloodbath” would fall on American consumers - already overwhelmed by the expenses of car ownership - the media and the Biden Administration took the context elsewhere to foment the hysteria necessary to win ratings, sell papers, and garner political support.

Trump is not to be questioned or opposed with any sensible inquiry, but with panic. Electoral politics is served to the lowest common denominator, and establishment commentators are stumped as to why nobody trusts them anymore.

“Misinformation?”

They aren't even attempting to inform you.

Somewhat understandably, less attention was given to James Carville for his own inflammatory rhetoric.

President Biden is not the best attack politician I’ve ever seen in my life and hopefully [we can] leave it at that. But there are a lot of people to do what I call a quote, the wetwork, unquote.

But unlike Carville, Donald Trump - wittingly or not - manages to trigger Google into twerping out revisions into their Newspeak Dictionary.