Shock Horror, Big Tech Is Bad For Democracy?!
Shock Horror, Big Tech Is Bad For Democracy?!
A brilliant project confirms what we all thought all along.
Unless you have been living under a rock the past decade, you have probably noticed big-tech corporate America has become more and more anti-democratic, monopolistic, anti-worker rights, and generally more evil. These overlords have held our digital and real lives in a vice-like grip and still expect more and more from us. Or, at least, that’s how it feels. Well, the refreshingly honest project Corporate Underminers of Democracy by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) aims to rank which corporations wreak the most havoc on our democracy and freedom and has discovered that the world’s biggest tech companies top the list. Not only do these companies hold anti-democratic and egregious practices within their operations, but they also “deploy complex lobbying operations to undermine popular will and disrupt existing or nascent global policy that could hold them accountable.” These findings, in effect, confirmed our worst fears. But how bad is it really?
So, who do you think the ITUC ranked as the worst offender?
Well, you might be surprised to find out it was Amazon!
Amazon has become synonymous with violating workers’ rights, from firing people for taking toilet breaks, providing unfit working conditions, pushing workers to breaking point, offering pitiful pay, and making moves to aggressively quash any unions. But this isn’t anything new, and while Amazon does this at a scale unlike any other American corporation, it isn’t why it ranked the worst. Instead, the real reason is its lobbying. You see, you can’t mistreat workers on such a colossal scale without having governments try to levy anti-trust, health and safety, human rights, and worker rights laws against you. So, to protect their deeply questionable business practices, Amazon has engaged in a lobbying campaign that would make the oil companies blush.
Their army of lobbyists is aggressively fighting the US, Canadian, and UK governments to effectively reinterpret, mitigate, or even deregulate these areas of the law. As such, they have gotten into bed with many extreme right-wing political groups that are actively undermining women’s rights and pushing racist agendas. But, because they share the same goal of enabling fascistic corporate overlords and removing as many rights from workers as possible, Amazon is funding them and enabling these morally corrupt individuals into positions of political influence. No wonder the ITUC found that “the sheer scale of Amazon’s global lobbying operation undermines the democratic responsiveness of governments and institutions to the general population.”
To anyone paying attention to Amazon over the years, this shouldn’t be a surprise. The company was founded with the express goal of becoming a monopoly, and a monopoly is just despotic fascistic totalitarianism dressed in a corporate suit.
The next two on the list are oil companies and the highly manipulative banks that fund them. No prizes as to why these companies earned their place on this list. But at number five, there is another big tech giant that also set out to become a monopoly: Meta (also known as Facebook).
Meta is very different from Amazon; its business revolves around your data and your attention. The ITUC rightfully called Meta out for its revenue model exploiting “trillions of personalised data points to deliver highly effective advertising,” which can violate our privacy and enable ethically corrupt advertising. But it also pointed out how Meta has enabled, profited from, and defended echo chambers (such as anti-vaxers or election deniers), Russian propaganda, and political groups. As such, the ITUC found that “Meta’s algorithms can quite literally alter humanity’s perceptions of reality.” Indeed, it has been found that Meta’s wide-ranging influence helped Trump win in 2016 and swayed the Brexit vote, along with many other democratic elections and referendums. And because Meta has been linked to several anti-democratic, anti-free speech, extreme politicians gaining power, who then go on to weaken democracies and undermine citizens’ freedoms, it’s no wonder it is on this list.
However, just behind Meta at number six is a big tech company you might not associate with threatening democracy, but when you stop and think for even a second, you’re entirely convinced: Tesla.
Elon Musk has very much let the mask slip the past few years, and it’s fair to say the man is a political nutcase. From his wildly inaccurate, moronically stupid, hypocritical, and holier-than-thou stance on free speech absolutism (read more here) to his support of Trump and even the deeply unquestionable people he interacts with and supports on X/Twitter (hint: he has reposted favourably and positively interacted with neo-Nazis many times on the platform), he is very much a political ape throwing shit at the walls of democracy.
Many feel like Tesla is separate from Musk’s political agenda. But that isn’t true. You see, Tesla is arguably worse at championing workers’ rights and health and safety than Amazon, just at a smaller scale. The accusations and settled cases against Tesla for its mistreatment of staff are far too long to go into here. Needless to say, there have been settlements for racism, unfair dismissal, highly aggressive union busting, fragrant breaches of basic health and safety codes, and all the aggressive lawsuits and lobbying required to cover up, defend, and legitimise such horrific corporate actions. And ITUC found even more, accusing Tesla of using child labour and horrifically environmentally destructive practices in its supply chain for nickel, copper, and cobalt.
Enabling such horrific practices overseas, mistreating domestic workers so egregiously, and engaging in aggressive legal proceedings to defend both these actions is enough to be labelled an anti-democratic corporation. But with Tesla, its CEO and majority shareholder supports a presidential candidate that attempted to overthrow an election and has voiced many neo-nazi-adjacent views over the years. As such, it’s no wonder the ITUC summed Tesla up by stating, “Tesla’s rapid market success has been outpaced only by the descent of its corporate leaders into anti-democratic, anti-union politics.”
The fact of the matter is that we have laws to stop these companies from committing such abuses, such as workers’ rights to health and safety and even anti-trust laws. However, as the Western political window has gradually swung to the right over the past 80 years, mostly driven by lobbyists and media moguls like the Murdoch empire, these laws haven’t been implemented as thoughtfully or aggressively as intended. As such, fascistic corporate goliaths have been allowed to thrive and now threaten our democracy and freedom. But we can stop them. History paints a clear picture of oppressors being overthrown. We just have to break through the noise and support those who value our genuine freedom and liberty as a collective above all else.
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Sources: ITUC, ITUC, ITUC, ITUC, BS, Reuters, ETUC, CNBC, NY Mag