Careful. Facebook is exercising real and near-uncontested power in an important political domain which state actors have abandoned (speech regulation). If there are ways to translate this power into the enforcement of some desired economic behavior, Libra might not be a dead end. https://t.co/bR29FD44xV
— Solar Imperialist (@SolImperialist) June 18, 2019
Puerile objections that, “Wah, Facebook censoring isn’t real censorship because the government didn’t do it!” ignore that the state has essentially ceded regulatory powers and public space to a cabal of large corporations, Facebook and Twitter among them, and this alters the parameters of our social contract greatly.
Shallow glosses of large systemic changes are all that most people seem capable of now; the world has shifted but all most can see is the after-image of the antediluvian relic imprinted on their retinas. This is changing, but too slowly — the old has already departed but the shape of the new can’t yet be credited to a viable reality by most people.
I would recommend some books to read, but those won’t help. If people wanted to get smarter, they would. It’s not that hard. As with Bernie Sanders and his campaign, most are describing a bygone past that has no chance of restoration, but oh they yearn for it because it is understood, at least illusorily. It had been quantified and the homilies about it sounded like truth. But those bromides no longer work and read as ridiculous with even a moment’s thought, yet still they attempt to apply them. But those spells don’t work, don’t cohere, and it makes these people dismissive and angry as the obsolete world is already long under the waves and the new creation, risen all around them, is invisible and inaudible to them yet controls their lives utterly.