Marina Hyde: The question every politician should be asking is, what does Mark Zuckerberg want with us?

By Dilip -

NB: Those who have made capitalism into a religious cult, and who resist social regulation as an impingement on the freedom of the market (as if liberty is al about the liberty of corporates) may reflect on why the likes of Zuckerberg and Murdoch have acquired so much power. DS   This is about more than Facebook and news – it’s about the pursuit of power in a world where companies are stronger than countries..  I can’t believe a product created to rate women has ended up as what the business professor and tech commentator Scott Galloway calls “the biggest prostitute of hate in the history of mankind”.

The most alarming way of looking at the Facebook boss is just factually: he’s the world’s most powerful oligarch, selling the lives of 2.7 billion monthly active users to advertisers, and actually modifying the behaviour of those users with a business model that deliberately amplifies incendiary, nasty, and frequently fake and dangerous things because that’s what keeps you on his platform longer. So yes: considering all that, it’s just a comforting cop-out to say “ooh, Zuckerberg looks like the character in a movie who’s just delivered the line ‘leave no trace of the village’”. Forget post-truth. Mark’s basically post-metaphor.

More posts on Facebook

Anyway, Zuckerberg is in the news along with News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch, in a heartwarming generational fight between billionaires for who gets to say: “Bitch, I’m not IN the news, I OWN the news.” In short, Murdoch (and other news publishers) have long demanded Facebook and Google pay for people linking to or discussing their content on their platforms, or including it in search results. Facebook and others have long resisted….

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/19/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-news-australia-power

Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921)

Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist?

Noam Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction (Universalizing Resistance)


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