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Beiträge, die mit Appistocracy getaggt sind
"Donald Trump was inaugurated president on Monday by a Chief Justice most people couldn’t name or recognize. But up in the VIP seats, looking down like an approving collective of Greek gods, were six tech billionaires whose companies practically everyone knows: Elon Musk (Twitter), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook/Instagram), Tim Cook (Apple), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Shou Zi Chew (TikTok).
The media has tended to focus on the net worth of this half dozen, using rusty words like “oligarchy,” in homage to their vast wealth. But their power penetrates much deeper than that. It is literally in my pocket as I write this: their host of apps that dominate our every waking hour, their dominance and control over the very appliance that most now get their news and entertainment from, where they do their banking, receive their advertisements, connect with their friends, date and buy stuff.
Oligarchs are nothing new, but these six men have a power over us that is more intimate than other billionaires. They collectively build, run, and control what can only be likened to an appendage of our own human bodies, a new organ that most can’t imagine losing or losing access to.
I call them the appistocracy.
The power these apps command is so awesome that not even their owners are fully in control. Attempts to rename the companies consistently fail. To any ordinary person, “X” remains Twitter; “Alphabet” remains Google; and “Meta” remains Facebook. The rebrands fail because these apps have lodged themselves so deeply in our minds that unlearning our conception of them is about as realistic as unlearning a native language. They exist in some timeless, platonic realm of ideas. These companies might as well try to rebrand the concept of a tree."
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-appistocracy-inaugurates-trump
#USA #Trump #BigTech #Oligarchy #Appistocracy #Billionaires
The media has tended to focus on the net worth of this half dozen, using rusty words like “oligarchy,” in homage to their vast wealth. But their power penetrates much deeper than that. It is literally in my pocket as I write this: their host of apps that dominate our every waking hour, their dominance and control over the very appliance that most now get their news and entertainment from, where they do their banking, receive their advertisements, connect with their friends, date and buy stuff.
Oligarchs are nothing new, but these six men have a power over us that is more intimate than other billionaires. They collectively build, run, and control what can only be likened to an appendage of our own human bodies, a new organ that most can’t imagine losing or losing access to.
I call them the appistocracy.
The power these apps command is so awesome that not even their owners are fully in control. Attempts to rename the companies consistently fail. To any ordinary person, “X” remains Twitter; “Alphabet” remains Google; and “Meta” remains Facebook. The rebrands fail because these apps have lodged themselves so deeply in our minds that unlearning our conception of them is about as realistic as unlearning a native language. They exist in some timeless, platonic realm of ideas. These companies might as well try to rebrand the concept of a tree."
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-appistocracy-inaugurates-trump
#USA #Trump #BigTech #Oligarchy #Appistocracy #Billionaires
