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Facebook is out of control. If it were a country it would be North Korea

5-7-2020 < Attack the System 38 218 words
 

The important takeaway from this article is that it describes how Big Tech has now become the dominant wing of the capitalist class, as Joel Kotkin has pointed out (along with the national security state and financial sector). The ruling class is not a unified monolith, but comprised of competing interests. Nor is there egalitarianism among the ruling class, which is stratified into layer hierarchies in the same way as the general society.


By Carole Cadwalladr


The Guardian


There is no power on this earth that is capable of holding Facebook to account. No legislature, no law enforcement agency, no regulator. Congress has failed. The EU has failed. When the Federal Trade Commission fined it a record $5bn for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, its stock price actually went up.


Which is what makes this moment so interesting and, possibly, epochal. If the boycott of Facebook by some of the world’s biggest brands – Unilever, Coca-Cola, Starbucks – succeeds, it will be because it has targeted the only thing that Facebook understands: its bottom line. And if it fails, that will be another sort of landmark.


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