Slavery 2.0
Unlike the physical realm—where if one owns the land, that person almost owns the people on that land too. Look at what is happening in Gaza, for example, to see how control over physical land dictates the very fate of the people living on it. In the digital realm, however, the dynamic is different: the people actively create the real estate. We are the ones building value in the digital realm, yet the billionaires are moving in to enclose it.
Larry Ellison has just bought major pillars of media in America, but Americans, if they so choose, can start actively creating media outside Larry's empire. They are capable of creating entirely alternative sources of content so that Larry doesn't get the option to extract from them by artificially creating scarcity in the media space, because that is obviously the end goal.
Consider Elon Musk, too. While Larry is buying up the studios and infrastructure that create the actual content Americans consume, Musk is buying and building the infrastructure that transports that content. What Starlink is going to end up becoming is a global internet company that takes the power of internet censorship away from your bad government and puts it into the hands of Musk's empire.
This form of centralization is necessary to control the American and global mind, because if one man is in charge of all the content you consume and another man is in charge of how you consume that content, it is just a matter of time until those two men own you attention entirely and can tell you what is right to think and what is wrong to think.
Very soon, as is the case with land, you shall mysteriously struggle to communicate digitally when the feudalists manufacture an artificial digital scarcity. By that time, we shall be too dependent on their infrastructure to reasonably demand fairness.
Unfortunately, this is the all-too-familiar colonial game. They come and build a church. Then they build a school. Then they build a hospital. They build research centers, and you thank them for how wonderfully great they are as people. Then they kill your gods, and your children worship theirs. Then they set exams to extract the most compliant from your kind. Then they replace your healing practices with their medicine. Then they make your seed impotent and sell you their proprietary version. Then they call you poor because you need them to access God, to raise your children, to cure your sick, and to feed yourself.
They already use the digital realm to control how you think and feel about anything by tuning your attention at will. Imagine a world where they own all of your attention.
Welcome to Slavery 2.0!
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