In China, you can’t exist without a smartphone, because for all existential things you have to do (paying bills, buying tickets etc.) , you are forced to use the almighty wechat app. Smartphones are a tool to manipulate and to spy on the population. It is a tool utilized by the ruling class, to control the masses. I hate the future and I hate “progress”.
It’s unironically good that there is further centralisation, integration and efficiency in payments, reservations, bills. What China is doing is It’s progress and future. You just can’t imagine that anything big and centralised can even in principle work for the people. WELL IT CAN AND IT SHOULD. No need to be a Luddite or dogmatic libertarian about it. What you are really worried that government or big corporation would control it. And if you are one of those that can’t process the idea that government could ever be trusted in anything, because of bad experience (and probably partly because of propaganda) then it gets to be understandable position, but it isn’t in reality like that and doesn’t have to be like that.
Yeah, you can totally trust government and big corporation, just like in Canada. /s
web.archive.org/web/20220317115211/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-protest-finances.html
Canada banks froze hundreds of accounts during trucker protests, some of them were just some random supporters which sent some bucks to support… So its not propaganda, and its enough to read history, there are plenty of examples, how governments struck down on its own people, why do you think there is a second amendment in US constitution ?
I want regulation and preferably nationalisation and putting them under democratic control to work towards social ends and not profit. Not corporate power, not fragmentation.
that impulse came from the socialistic Canadian government mainly, so tying them even more with state doesnt come with more freedom, but just more restrictions and control… Without their approval and suggestions, that would absolutely not happen.
We basically need fragmentation - to small local counties, instead of a multinational hegemony.
That’s unbelievably reactionary and impossible. Is this just one of those takes that is founded on the belief that governments are shit and they will be shit no matter what and we the people cannon change anything or hope for anything better? So the solution is that we all go back to the “peasant commune” where we will each build our treehouses with people like to live and see life like us? Will work fine until one realises that supply chains enabling modern western lifestyle and technology are global and dismantling central states will both take down the infrastructure and bureaucracy that makes everything run. Plus if one doesn’t have the same or greater violence monopoly of centralised state there is no way to force outsiders or the neighbouring country just rolling over you.
People have tried this “going back to the simple, communal and smaller scale” many times and every time they failed, as if for example the transition from feudalism to modern states and towards higher centralisation wasn’t the next stage in the evolution of human condition and just some singular shit choice made by evil, ignorant or bad leaders of the past that we can just walk back on any time we wish. Genie is already out of the bottle as we say and now the only way is forward.
Its actually pretty simple, the same blanket rules which most governments try to push doesnt work, just for a simple fact, that the diversity of environments and needs coming from that cant be captured and decided by centralized point of control. Lets just take guns - most city ppl try to ban them and reduce, because in crowded environments, even if a cop trying to stop someone, he can often put others in to danger just due to how crowded those places are. But on the other hand, if you live on a remote location, where all kind of wild life threatens you, and any help hour away, not having a gun is basically a death sentence. Yet, governments trying to push a blanket policy for both - and that simply shows how ignorant that centralization can become. And this is true in basically all aspects of life, which more and more the government try to regulate.
There can be some level of centralized coordination, but it always have to be tied to the needs of those smaller local units and they have to have the last say in it and it must be a hierarchy of this control coming from the bottom…
That is not an argument against central government, it’s an argumenta against bad governance. Many things have clauses for special events and circumstances.
OK corpocuck.