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Taking back power from tech oligarchs

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SUMMARY

The forum discussion centers on the need to reclaim power from tech oligarchs such as Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk through personal boycotts of their platforms and products. Participants emphasize that individual actions, like deleting accounts from Facebook and Amazon, can contribute to a larger movement against these entities. Additionally, the conversation touches on the upcoming special elections in Florida, which could shift the balance of power in Congress. The discussion highlights the importance of both individual boycotts and collective action to challenge the influence of billionaires in society.

PREREQUISITES
  • Understanding of social media dynamics and their impact on society
  • Knowledge of current political events, particularly U.S. elections
  • Familiarity with the concept of principled consumption and boycotts
  • Awareness of the influence of billionaires on politics and public policy
NEXT STEPS
  • Research the impact of social media boycotts on corporate behavior
  • Explore the role of grassroots movements in political change, using examples like Vida Além do Trabalho
  • Investigate the implications of the upcoming Florida special elections on national politics
  • Learn about the mechanisms of popular pressure and how they can influence legislative outcomes
USEFUL FOR

This discussion is beneficial for activists, political enthusiasts, and consumers interested in understanding the dynamics of power held by tech oligarchs and the potential for collective action to effect change.

Greg Bernhardt

Greg Bernhardt

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The tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Elon and crypto bros only have power because we give it to them. I have begun a personal boycott and removal. Remove your accounts from Facebook, Instagram. Stop buying from Amazon and Tesla. Stop buying crypo currencies. We are funding these malevolent forces, but we have take back control and power. Boycott social media and the tech bros!
 
While I support this kind of action, I don't think it will have any rapid effects.
More likely is for the Democrats to win the 3 seats that are up for election soon. These would change to balance of control in the house to the democrats and allow them to foul up the stupid MAGA plan's progress.
 
I prefer to compromise, up to a point. I rarely use FB but kept an early account to retain communication with scattered family members. I cancled Amazon prime account but kept basic to handle gift certificates, again from family members.

I converted from local newspaper delivery to digital over 11 years ago, selecting New York Times (NYT) and Washinton Post (WaPo) as 'papers of record'. My, how WaPo has changed. I have barely kept the latter subscription preferring to monitor this information source.

FTR I have read daily newspapers for civics information and enjoyment since I learned to read. My parents received over 3 papers a day across the political spectrum; i.e., San Francisco Chronicle to San Jose Mecury News.
 
BillTre said:
While I support this kind of action, I don't think it will have any rapid effects.
More likely is for the Democrats to win the 3 seats that are up for election soon. These would change to balance of control in the house to the democrats and allow them to foul up the stupid MAGA plan's progress.
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When are those elections?
 
That other representative just died:
Texas Rep. Sylvester Turner, the former mayor of Houston, has died suddenly at 70 years old, just two months after joining Congress.


Current Houston Mayor John Whitmire announced Turner’s death at the beginning of a city council meeting on Wednesday, per local news reports.
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Gov. Greg Abbott can call a special election to fill Turner's congressional seat for the rest of his term. State law does not specify a deadline to call a special election, but if it is called the election is required to happen within two months of the announcement.

Turner's death comes at a critical time in Congress. House Republicans have few votes to spare as they look to advance President Donald Trump's agenda, including extending his 2017 tax cuts. With Turner's safely Democratic seat vacant, Republicans now control 218 seats to Democrats' 214 — an extra vote of breathing room in the narrowly divided chamber.
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Greg Bernhardt said:
...Boycott social media and the tech bros!
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BillTre said:
While I support this kind of action, I don't think it will have any rapid effects.
... change to balance of control in the house to the democrats...
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You are both right at the same time! Rapid effects aren't the only effects. There is no opportunity cost to doing both.

Sustained principled consumption - voting with your wallet - does stand to affect the burgeoning oligarchy, and it does not require that you draw your eye from more immediately impactful courses. Billionaires are manufactured by consumers and still to a large extent can be unmade by consumers. There may come a day when they don't need your complicity at all, and that will be a scary day indeed - and one that we are nearing as more and more of your taxes which are extracted from you under threat of violence find their way into their accounts - but we are not there yet.

I would also add that principled consumption is the right thing to do, regardless of any estimation of how effective it might be. If you are the only person on the planet who does the right thing, and the world doesn't tilt a smidge on its axis for all your striving, you have still done the right thing. All the time, I think about Frodo Baggins. He could not have succeeded if he stopped to weigh his likelihood of success. He did what he did because it was the right thing to do, full stop.
 
Greg Bernhardt said:
The tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Elon and crypto bros only have power because we give it to them. I have begun a personal boycott and removal. Remove your accounts from Facebook, Instagram. Stop buying from Amazon and Tesla. Stop buying crypo currencies. We are funding these malevolent forces, but we have take back control and power. Boycott social media and the tech bros!
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I do not believe in individual solutions, such as boycotts, to solve social problems like this. In my opinion, the only way is through popular pressure. It is necessary to educate and organize the people to recognize that the problem, in fact, lies in living within a system that allows the existence of billionaires—individuals with as much financial power as political power, capable of controlling governments for their own profit.
 
Greg Bernhardt said:
When more than one individual joins the boycott, it's no longer an individual solution
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That’s true, but I believe that boycotts alone do not influence a sufficient number of people. It is necessary, alongside boycotts, to politicize the issue in various spaces, making the discussion public and accessible to as many people as possible. In the case of big techs, for many people, boycotting becomes impossible because they are deeply embedded in daily life, whether in work or social interactions.

Greg Bernhardt said:
Can you give examples of this?
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I can give an example of popular pressure that is happening in Brazil right now.

A hardworking young man, who was not influential and had no political power, created a movement called Vida Além do Trabalho (Life Beyond Work), which fights to end the 6x1 work schedule in the country, where people work six days a week with only one day off. After years of distributing flyers, spreading the word on social media, and debating the issue in various spaces, the discussion reached the mainstream media.

Shortly after, a congresswoman embraced the cause and pushed the bill forward, giving it even greater visibility. Even though it wasn’t originally her issue, politicians always seek power. She saw the opportunity to become more relevant and took it, becoming the spokesperson for the project. Currently, people are going to the social media accounts of congress members who have not yet voted in favor of the bill to pressure them. They are organizing nationwide protests in various cities, forcing politicians to vote in favor of the project.

Something that once seemed impossible is slowly becoming a reality, thanks to popular power. I don’t know how the general sentiment of the American population is toward big techs, but the first step is to raise awareness, and then call people to action. I believe there must be large movements against these companies out there—they need to organize and figure out the best way to curb and limit the power of these billionaires.
 
Deric Xavier said:
I do not believe in individual solutions, such as boycotts, to solve social problems like this. In my opinion, the only way is through popular pressure
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I'm not really following, either. I totally hear you when you say boycotts don't tend to work, at least to the extent that they don't tend to catch on, but I don't see the difference between "popular pressure" and "individual solutions" that are adopted by a large number of people.
 
Some useful comments here. One thought is that boycotts or "popular pressure" need to be targeted at the levers that impact those organisations. As their bottom line is financial, moral or popular concerns affect them least but changes to their profits or share price affect them much more. We can fail to be effective in influencing others by assuming they care about the same things we do. Unfortunately, some of these things seem to be "democracy". "separation of powers" and the "rule of law"....(we care but they don't)
 
Deric Xavier said:
the problem, in fact, lies in living within a system that allows the existence of billionaires
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Really? Warren Buffet is a billionaire. Do you think he's an evil guy?

How about Bill Gates, who has given away billions. Evil guy?

My point is that billionaires per se are not the problem. Power hungry nut jobs like Musk and cowards like Bezos are the problem.
 
Private businesses like facebook, twitter (x), instagram, youtube, tiktok or whatever have every right to create whatever they want (within the law of course). They can be partisan if they want, they can push conspiracies and lies if they want.

And as we can see, people easily fall for the lies and conspiracies. Especially when they hear this stuff wherever they look. On their favourite news channel, their favourite talkback show, it comes up top of their youtube, twitter, instagram feed, they hear their trusted politicians saying it, their favourite news commentators saying it, their favourite online youtubers saying it, their family saying and their neighbours saying it.

Obviously the problem is that the people are becoming hyper partisan, especially in USA. It doesn't stop there though. Sky operate in many countries, and typically in the base subscription, Sky give people Fox News which is essentially a partisan propaganda network, may as well be owned and run by Republicans. People like Bannon and Michael Flynn go globally to spread their brand of right wing Christian populism. I expect they make very good money out of speaking engagements.

I don't think, a few people boycotting social media that doesn't appeal to them, will make any difference. Those social media sites are either trying to appeal to one ideology either right or left or they have algorithms that keep the viewer engaged by showing them things that people just like them are viewing.

The problem is that the straight laced media outlets, the ones that don't do so much opinion or have partisan commentators but instead just present the news. Those ones, most people find boring. They aren't coming up with eye catching titles, they aren't instilling fear so that the audience is scared to miss out on the next show.
 
phinds said:
Really? Warren Buffet is a billionaire. Do you think he's an evil guy?

How about Bill Gates, who has given away billions. Evil guy?

My point is that billionaires per se are not the problem. Power hungry nut jobs like Musk and cowards like Bezos are the problem.
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They are evil in the way that any system that allows for them to exist that way is clearly damaged. The cost to the rest of civilization for them to have what they have is too high and unjustifiable. And that holds true regardless of what kind of person you believe them to be.
 
EricDMMiller said:
They are evil in the way that any system that allows for them to exist that way is clearly damaged. The cost to the rest of civilization for them to have what they have is too high and unjustifiable. And that holds true regardless of what kind of person you believe them to be.
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I disagree with that because like it or not capitalism allows for billionaires and if you just don't want to allow billionaires then you have to have a radically different form of government such as communism or socialism and those are demonstrably failed forms of government.
 
Your statement includes an implied false dichotomy that capitalism must inherently generate billionaires and the only alternative is communism or socialism. It simply is not correct to broadly say that socialism and communism have "demonstrably failed." This is a superficial generalization that ignores mixed-economy models frequently found in stable, prosperous democracies, none of which by nature need to allow for the existence of billionaires.
 
MindlessPieces said:
Don't know what percentage. But from what I gather the politics of USA is entrenched and pervasive.
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My intention was not for a trip up in regards to " the problem is that the people are becoming hyper partisan,..",or just plane partisan. Thinking and deciding takes time and energy, so most people ( if its 99% I would have to agree ) do follow a pattern of letting someone else do it for them, fairly evident in group settings that form from humans being a social animal.
 
EricDMMiller said:
It simply is not correct to broadly say that socialism and communism have "demonstrably failed." This is a superficial generalization that ignores mixed-economy models frequently found in stable, prosperous democracies, none of which by nature need to allow for the existence of billionaires.
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I would say all ideologies fail when taken to the extreme. It is pragmatism rather than the ideological which we should endeavour to achieve.

And, obviously that pragmatic balance differs from person to person. So you have frequent elections allowing people to regularly switch governments when they go too far left or too far right.

But also you don't want everything to be determined by a majority vote. There are certain fundamentals such as human rights and liberties that you don't want govt to be able to infringe upon. e.g the right to choose one's partner, the right to marry, the right to live wherever they want, the right to privacy... So you need some sort of constitution to put limits on the power of government.
 
phinds said:
Really? Warren Buffet is a billionaire. Do you think he's an evil guy?

How about Bill Gates, who has given away billions. Evil guy?

My point is that billionaires per se are not the problem. Power hungry nut jobs like Musk and cowards like Bezos are the problem.
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I think the question of "evilness" is irrelevant. I don't know and it doesn't really matter much if x is a "good guy" or not. It's about what it means for a society to let some people have that amount of resources and power in the first place. Even their charity will inevitably be undemocratic to some extent. That said, while I have no idea what Warren Buffett does, I know that Bill Gates has done and is doing plenty of things that are at the very least controversial.
 
Greg Bernhardt said:
When more than one individual joins the boycott, it's no longer an individual solution

Can you give examples of this?
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Personally I don't understand how there isn't yet a general strike on the entire public sector hasn't been declared. In most countries if some government appointed an unelected committee to run around a bunch of services ordering them to simply fire 80% of their personnel and implement drastic cuts, that's exactly what I would expect to happen: General strike, demanding the disbanding of the committee.
 
Greg Bernhardt said:
The tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Elon and crypto bros only have power because we give it to them. I have begun a personal boycott and removal. Remove your accounts from Facebook, Instagram. Stop buying from Amazon and Tesla. Stop buying crypo currencies. We are funding these malevolent forces, but we have take back control and power. Boycott social media and the tech bros!
Click to expand...
I frankly don't think this is going to do anything, but for what it's worth, I'm trying to do it, just so that I'm not dependent on them. There are also other valid reasons to do that. I've also decided to be very cautious about my use of LLMs, because I see where that ship is going and I don't like it. Besides, they apparently consume way too much power.


But I'm keeping my insta because that's how I communicate with friends and family.
 

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