Comment on The Authoritarian Stack
majster@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
To me this seems like any other big gov procurment. Which is bad of course but isn’t anything new. And I fail to see how this leads to authoritarinism especially in Europe. We have our own local home grown cliques that capture gov contracts.
because calling it authoritarianism makes it sound big and scary…
what you are describing… which is simply the routine processes that have gone on for 100s of years in governments… isn’t big and scary.
people like this need to look up the Dutch East India company.
that have gone on for 100s of years in governments… isn’t big and scary
When I look back there’s several governments I find scary.
Pointing these things out and running alarm bells is important. That is a systematic recurring problem doesn’t change anything about the problems at hand.
Are you saying “there have been things like this before so we should see it as normal and not do anything about it or point it out”?
No, I’m saying people are stupid and ignorant and it’s not some big conspiracy. It’s just business.
I’m no expert, but the issue here seems to be replacing many smaller contracts with one big one for Palantir. I. E., one agenda headed in one dark direction.
But what do I know?
that’s how pretty much all business works though.
as your company grows it’s preferable to have fewer larger providers for services. when you are small you have multiple vendors.
Honestly I don’t know what would be the difference if this was a contract with Oracle, Microsoft, SAP etc. That is democratic stack?
I guess the crows are coming home to roost in that the owners of these companies are prepared to use them as leverage (starlink) and also are more comfortable airing some pretty wild views of how they think the world should work (Thiel with his Antichrist obsession, Ellison with his ideas for a surveillance state, The general tech bro Curtis Yarvin worship).
Start joining the dots and it starts becoming hard not to be concerned where this is headed.
That is true that these aren’t faceless corpos but behind there are men who are out in public.
I’d be concerned regardless of the companies they partner with, or if it’s completely government controlled.
The problem is the surveillance itself. It stated decades ago, accelerated under Bush, and has expanded with each administration since.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yes. If you scroll to the bottom, you find that the project is led by Prof. Francesca Bria.
Looking her up on Wikipedia, one has 2 thoughts: 1) She has a lot of hustle. 2) Why haven’t I heard about any of that?
This is just the Monorail Man doing the song. Except with disturbingly fascist overtones.
majster@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
yeah her bio looks like a lot of EU funds for various projects that are POC and then shelved. US big tech is basically her natural enemy in that regard.