Why not? They hold all the cards and have aligned one of the most powerful governments in the world with them, while wielding enough money to make almost any nation, let alone individual, more inclined toward doing what they need. They will only become more powerful.

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jackyinger 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Authoritarian regimes don’t run on facts. They run on the primacy of Authority. Cameras record factual information. Facts are inconvenient for Authority. You know, 1984 Department of Truth style.

	▲	simonh a minute ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It’s not a coincidence that the CIA just took down the World Fact Book.
	▲	PunchyHamster an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		well if you never read about how any of those work you might think that. In reality they are very much interested in facts, because they give them info who to oppress harder
	▲	kevin_thibedeau an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		When you control the cameras you can memory hole any inconvenient truths.
	▲	plagiarist an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They will have the AI just make a video of you doing whatever they feel like accusing you of and publish that from a .gov website.

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plastic-enjoyer 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, that if, the most powerful government stays intact. But as it turns out, tech CEOs want to dissolve the nation state and its government to implement their vision of a utopia. The same nation state, the same government that protect their interests and assets, and make lawfare possible in the first place.

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tavavex an hour ago | parent [-]

I know about these plans, but even if they end up happening to their fullest extent, I don't see why people are so unanimously predicting that they'll definitely fumble the bag. By the time this can happen, they will almost certainly have the most advanced weaponry available and enormous groups of people working on defending them. Again, they can buy anything. In their dream world, power descends directly from them, making their governments obsolete. The direct power of the governments isn't just erased, it'll transition into their hands.

	▲	plastic-enjoyer an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Tech CEOs are not statesmen, even if they consider themselves smart enough to govern. Nor are they warriors, and historically speaking, feudal lords were trained from early childhood in both the art of war and the art of governing. What I mean by that is that these people have no experience of governing, nor do they have any experience of violence and the horrors of war, i.e. they do not have the competence for being feudal lords, and network states or libertarian communes are essentially feudal-like arrangements. What will they do, if they are confronted with large nation-states such as China or Russia? What will they do when other small states don't respect the libertarian non-aggression principle? Will the Andreessens, Thiel and Zuckerbergs of this world be respected by the military, or will they shit their pants when confronted with a military coup, or worse, the enemy's military?

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overfeed an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Why not? They hold all the cards...

Cards that only work because of the current system that they hacking away at. Revolutions tend to eat their young, wannabe American oligarchs should check on how things turned out for the majority of post-soviet Russian oligarchs.

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mothballed 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes the rich have "all the cards" but the thing about societal reorganization is things get completely flip-flopped and the fact society recognizes you as owning a mansion and a screw factory today doesn't mean that they won't recognize Castro's lieutenant as controlling it tomorrow.

Possessions that are "yours" are only yours insofar as you can either defend it or others recognize it as yours. Thus you end up with situations like "Barbeque" in Haiti owning the streets and much of the rich's land/assets are now magically in the hands of barbeque or his crew and whatever money that one thought they could use to resist that turned out to not be their money anymore. The "rich" thus still hold all the cards but who is rich and who isn't isn't the same as when it started.

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xnyan an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Cards can always be taken with violence. Chaos is progression to a state of all versus all, where the most important thing is having the biggest wrench: https://xkcd.com/538/.

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tavavex an hour ago | parent [-]

And they will almost certainly have the biggest wrench. Before you consider the sheer difficulty of making mass violence happen (especially in a world where tech can be used to regulate a sufficient portion of people's worldviews as required), at some point they'll probably just have the upper hand militarily. As military tech gets better, wealth will be able to shift directly into physical power, amplifying their abilities against a comparatively powerless populace.

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Hizonner 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

Difficulty: the "populace" is everywhere.

If you own everything, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own stuff.

If everybody works for you, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own serfs.

And those faceless individuals who are actually holding the weapons, and actually know how they work, and actually know, in a detailed, hands-on way, how to do coordinated violence with them? It turns out they're secretly members of the populace. You'd better make sure they think it's in their interest to keep using the weapons the way you want them to.

	▲	mothballed 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah this is why the US fails everytime they try to keep "boots on the ground." You can bomb people into oblivion but if you actually want to control them, most of the things that give superiority to a fixed group of rich are useless. Violence is still democratic if you're trying to get anything useful out of the people you seek to control. If you have 5 people and 3 of them are slaves with an AK-47 and a donkey, you have 0 slaves not 5 slaves. Obviously the rich/powerful can't stay that way in a glass desert with no plebs to do their bidding, at least for now, so most of the technology the government and rich have are useless for subjecting a hostile populace.

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quickthrowman 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why not? We have examples from history to look at.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...

> Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (Russian: Николай Иванович Ежов, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ (j)ɪˈʐof]; 1 May 1895 – 4 February 1940), also spelt Ezhov, was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, at the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture, and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell out of favour with Stalin and was arrested, subsequently admitting in a confession to a range of anti-Soviet activity including "unfounded arrests" during the Purge. He was executed in 1940 along with others who were blamed for the Purge.

This guy was head of the secret police, didn’t help him out when he was purged aka murdered.