Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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The submitted title is: "Facebook and Google Are Actually Net States. And They Rule the World ".

The actual article title is: "Net States Rule The World; We Need To Recognize Their Power"

That 2nd clause after the semicolon is not a throwaway line -- it's the essence of her essay.

(EDIT: I originally thought the submitter editorialized the title but I now notice that the html meta tags have the same misleading title: "<title data-react-helmet="true">Facebook and Google Are Actually 'Net States.' And They Rule the World | WIRED</title>")

The editorialized title makes it sound like the author criticizes Google and Facebook like a million previous articles have already done.

However, if one actually reads the article, her main thesis is for governments to use Google/Facebook's influence as a force for positive change. She says a hearts & minds type of campaign by spreading ideas is more effective than military drones and missiles. Since Google/Facebook are the current rulers of information, governmenments should explicitly recognize their power and use them for winning the new battle of ideas. (E.g. she wrote: "The world needs net-states in order to defeat the non-states.")

(I also appreciate the sibling comment from adventured but author Alexis Wichowski's background[1] makes it looks like she's aware of the history of transnationals. Her essay is about proactively harnessing internet giants' power to spread ideas as opposed to overstating their power compared to historical transnationals.)

[1] https://sipa.columbia.edu/faculty-research/faculty-directory...

In my opinion the scarcest human resource is nuance. So many heated breaths of online guff would evaporate in the afternoon sunlight if every netizen took a little more care when editorialising.

A genuine follow-up question is, "What is statehood?" By any accepted definition transnational corporations are not states. Even if you modify the moniker with the prefix net- it still feels wrong to me.

There are very few senses in which the "citizens" of Facebook share a common identity purely because they inhabit Facebooklandia. If anything, the citizens of Facebook are its shareholders, bosses, and employees. We can see this because corporate decisions most often intersect the desires and intentions of those three stakeholders rather than the desires of the customers. Also, even though it is a cliché beaten to death, unless you are paying for a service you are not the customer, you are at best a "user", at worst a productised entity.

Advertisers hold much sway in what content gets shown and produced.

Having said that, I agree with the author's thesis. If you want to reach hearts and minds go to where their eyeballs are – go to where they are plugged into the information streams.

I think we should reserve the term net-state for online/virtual sovereign groups of individuals and potentially bots that have some form of self-governance.

Facebook is not a democratic net-state. Its users are nevertheless its netizens. Comparing it to a traditional state, you might say the shareholders are the nobility, employees are the privileged trade and crafts guilds, and users are the taxed serfs.

I like how you think but to my mind it is still a bit of a stretch.

Facebook can't raise taxes, monopolise the use of force, grant children of its netizens Facebook netizenship, and so forth.

I'm not saying that there never could exist a state that exists purely in the online realm – in fact, technologies like Ethereum makes me think we're not far off from net-states existing.

Facebook can in fact do most of the things you mention.

Their 'taxing' of netizens takes several forms, mainly displaying ads and collecting and selling information about them. Both of these are profitable to Facebook (or they wouldn't do them), and injurious to users (in lost privacy and attention). Facebook can choose how much of it they do; they balance taxation (profits) with user retention (emigration).

Facebook have a monopoly on many kinds of force on their platform. They and only they can remove or block content and ban accounts. And unlike other states, there are no courts, no constitution, and no way for rebels to gain these powers for themselves by force.

The question of granting netizenship is less important, because Facebook encourages immigration: they'd love all the world to be their netizens! But they can exile people they don't like, or block them from joining.

Facebook also have partial control of the presses in their country and of the commerce at its borders (in- and out-going links).

There may be an analogy here but I think you are just introducing confusion by trying to equate ad revenues with "taxes" and customer churn with "emigration".

Facebook's business practices aren't a "monopoly" in any usual sense of the word and so once again it is just making it difficult to discuss the associated concerns/problems by expanding the meaning of "monopoly".

While they may not be considered a state in that sense, they can be considered a nation of sorts. Instead of a common language or shared history, Facebook originally catered only to students of elite universities, who do have their own unique culture.

Facebook can't levy taxes on its citizens like a state, but it can raise revenues. They can't realistically monopolize the use of force, but that is due our current social climate. In the past, the Dutch/British east india companies, Belgian Congo and other early trading corps had their own standing armies. More recently, agricultural corps in Latin America employed their own paramilitary groups. If there was ever a need, they could create a PMC.

> "What is statehood?" By any accepted definition transnational corporations are not states. Even if you modify the moniker with the prefix net- it still feels wrong to me.

A childhood friend was exiled/expelled/told to fuck off from Zimbabwe for being white and his family had to move to Chile. He was a political refugee. I understand a lot of that was made possible by the international mining company his dad worked for.

I'm sorry for your friend. But that to me sounds more like corporate capturing† of the Zimbabwean state.

† http://www.foei.org/what-we-do/corporate-capture

> In my opinion the scarcest human resource is nuance.

Indeed. But our society is dominated by story-telling which has much to gain by underemphasizing the nuance of reality and overstating the choice elements that happen to fit a narrative.

I still wonder if the number of concepts the modern person has to deal with—due to our ever-complexifying society—mean that we are more easily drawn to mental shortcuts. As a kid, I remember being around farmers in my dad's village who never lived in a city and most of whom didn't have high-school level education. By our modern standards, their mental load was low, yet in the things that they dealt with, they were impressively thorough and appreciative of the nuances that existed in their life. And that often translated to a nuanced appreciation of their fellows.

> In my opinion the scarcest human resource is nuance. So many heated breaths of online guff would evaporate in the afternoon sunlight if every netizen took a little more care when editorialising.

The author literally gives a definition in paragraph 2. You're free to discuss the hypothesis, but it feels cheap to simply call it editorializing.

Hold on. I'm not accusing the author of editorialising. I'm talking about that general tendency humans have where they do not take care when reading what someone wrote and then do not take care when giving their interpretation of what that someone wrote.

In fact, if anything, I was praising jasode above who started this thread for writing such a balanced and measured post in response to other posters who were already misrepresenting the substance of the article.

nuclear weapons then religious governments.

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