As the public backlash to AI and data centres swells, pro-AI politicians are trying to anxiously spin.
Marcus Werner debunks the PR push underway to justify public handouts to tech oligarchs.
What are people saying about The Breach?
“We need media that enlarges the sense of what’s possible.”
Naomi Klein, journalist and author
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Meta, Google, et al, are as American as are insatiable corporate and oligarchic greed and superfluous profit/wealth. They’ll claim that best business practices, including what’s best for consumers, are best decided by business decision-makers. However, while there must be a point at which greed-fueled practice ends up hurting big business’s own monetary interests, can the unlimited-profit objective/nature be somehow irresistible? It brings to mind the allegorical fox stung by the instinct-abiding scorpion while ferrying it across the river, leaving both to drown.
Also, the biggest of businesses (at least here in Canada) get unaccountably even bigger, defying the very spirit of government rules established to ensure healthy competition by limiting mass consolidation.
Western governments need to cling far less to an outdated capitalist-manifesto mentality and instead open their eyes to increasingly disturbing insatiable greed that’s ignoring, if not exploiting via profiteering from, the legitimate needs of nations and in particular the growing number of financially struggling citizens within. But, of course, fat chance!
I sometimes wonder whether some morbidly and self-mortally greedy corporate officers may know their big businesses will inevitably, if not imminently, collapse due to a great lack of consumers who can afford those big businesses’ products — perhaps including some would-be consumers who’d lost their jobs to employer-profit-maximizing Artificial Intelligence or other forms of non-human automation; and, yet, the corporate officers will nonetheless continue ardently politically supporting (via covert lobbying of governments, of course) the very economic system, especially its below-poverty-line minimum wage, that is basically going to ruin their big businesses.
As strange as it likely sounds, perhaps those corporate officers cannot help themselves, and even they realize an intervention by a truly-independent body/entity may be needed, one completely untouchable by the immoral and/or unethical corporate/oligarchic lobbyists. ‘We scorpions simply cannot help ourselves. We know there needs to be external and independent intervention in our superfluous-profit greed, but we will still resist such intervention. It’s in our nature.’
It seems like a pathologically irresistible obsession or compulsion.
There’s an erroneous refrain that incredibly still prevails amongst ‘free-market’ capitalist governments and corporate circles: Best business practices, including what’s best for consumers, are best decided by business decision-makers. However, while there must be a point at which greed-fueled practice ends up hurting big business’s own monetary interests, can the unlimited-profit objective/nature be somehow irresistible?
It brings to mind the allegorical fox stung by the instinct-abiding scorpion while ferrying it across the river, leaving both to drown.
Also, the biggest of businesses (at least here in Canada) get unaccountably even bigger, defying the very spirit of government rules established to ensure healthy competition by limiting mass consolidation.
Western governments need to cling far less to an outdated capitalist-manifesto mentality and instead open their eyes to increasingly disturbing insatiable greed that’s ignoring, if not exploiting via profiteering from, the legitimate needs of nations and in particular the growing number of financially struggling citizens within. But, of course, fat chance!
I sometimes wonder whether some morbidly and self-mortally greedy corporate officers may know their big businesses will inevitably, if not imminently, collapse due to a great lack of consumers who can afford those big businesses’ products — perhaps including some would-be consumers who’d lost their jobs to employer-profit-maximizing Artificial Intelligence or other forms of non-human automation; and, yet, the corporate officers will nonetheless continue ardently politically supporting (via covert lobbying of governments, of course) the very economic system, especially its below-poverty-line minimum wage, that is basically going to ruin their big businesses.
As strange as it likely sounds, perhaps those corporate officers cannot help themselves, and even they realize an intervention by a truly-independent body/entity may be needed, one completely untouchable by the immoral and/or unethical corporate/oligarchic lobbyists. ‘We scorpions simply cannot help ourselves. We know there needs to be external and independent intervention in our superfluous-profit greed, but we will still resist such intervention. It’s in our nature.’