Hi, we’re a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We’re not a newspaper, we’re a content portal.
We’re not a taxi service, we’re a ride sharing app.
We’re not a pay TV service, we’re a streaming platform.
We’re not a department store, we’re an e-commerce marketplace.
We’re not a financial services firm, we’re crypto.
We’re not a space agency, we’re a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We’re not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we’re a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we’re totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don’t apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections… They totally don’t apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we’re talking about everyone else’s intellectual property.
We’re going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We’ve also raised several billion in VC funding, and we’ll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we’ll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won’t believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we’re doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don’t forget to check out our latest innovation. It’s the Uber of toothpaste!
@ajsadauskas @technology These guys are not “libertarians”, at all. They are, in fact, the antithesis of libertarian. They are authoritarians who believe in liberty only for themselves.
Seems like a fair description of many who would call themselves “libertarian”, even if not the going definition.
Every libertarian thinks every other libertarian isn’t really because they don’t subscribe to every set of their specific beliefs.
@GarlicBender Unfortunately. Such people give the very idea of Liberty a bad name. They have now become what libertarianism is in the public’s eye.
There are no “true” libertarians. There are more libertarian denominations than their are people who identify as libertarian. And all denominations are orthodox. A group of libertarians is called an impasse.
It’s not an accident that people who identify that way are incapable of getting along: the individual is the weakest political unit. Add in the fact that libertarians will eschew government benefits for themselves just to spite those lower on the ladder, and I can’t think of a better friend to the ruling class. What can we say about people who’d rather live in a fiefdom than a democracy? That they all imagine themselves as lords I guess.
(I’m told people in Europe identify as libertarians and oppose government power to hurt people. I’m talking about US libertarians who oppose government power to help)
Liberatianism is all about the Freedom of the Power Of Money from the Power Of The State (which in Democracies is yielded by the elected representatives of all citizens in a system which is way more even in the power each person has than Money).
It was never about Freedom For People, which is why, for example, Libertarians want Private Education (a major gatekeeper into being monetarily better off), they absolutelly do not want communal Land Ownership (as it stands, most people are born landless, so having to pay for a place to sleep in and for food to eat - rather than having the chance to build their own house and grow their own food - so they are forced to work and do so within the constraints of the system, to pay the owners of the land (directly or indirectly) for food and shelter, both essentials, the very opposite of being born Free) and they certainly don’t want Money to loose its ability to buy different outcomes in the Justice System being in countries with such systems strong defenders of defunding things like Public Defenders.
Libertarianism is all about freedom for the larges yielders of the Power Of Money from the power of the elected representatives of citizens in a Democracy, not about freedom for the riff-raff.
@Aceticon You are confusing the fact that the majority of people who self-identify as “libertarian” are not actually interested in Liberty with actual Liberty. This is not a new problem. It is the central conflict within libertarianism, and it always has been.
@Aceticon Of course, hypocrisy in Politics is nothing new. Most “Democrats” have no interest in democracy, and most “liberals” have no interest in liberalism. Neither do most “Republicans” have any interest in republicanism. Cry me a river, why don’t you.
@Aceticon In any case, please do not continue to mansplain Liberty and Libertarianism to me. I’m quite certain that I know more about both than you do.
You might want to go see a mental health professional as you seem to be unusually high in the Narcistic Personality scale, possibly at the level of it being considered a Disorder.
The world doesn’t revolve around you, other people on the Internet don’t know your gender and even if they did they don’t necessarily give a rats arse about it or you and they certainly don’t think and act with motivations fitting exactly the specific, simplistic, highly reductive (one dimensional even) thin line in the political and social universe which you live in.