Wiped Off the Map
Google still lives by the corporate motto it introduced in the prospectus for its 2004 IPO: Don’t be evil. They’ve just enhanced it a bit to match the times. Don’t be evil unless it’s politically expedient. Hence, we get this: Google Maps Changes ‘Lake Ontario’ to ‘Lake America’ for U.S. Users. The company explained “that the update is in line with its ‘long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country.'” (I wonder what name they’ll use for the sea of vomit that explanation just created.)
+ So that makes two major nation-states (The US and Alphabet) that have changed the name of Lake Ontario. These days, it’s getting harder and harder to differentiate between big tech and big nations. Tech companies are worth more than many nations. “Nvidia, a chip maker with some 42,000 employees, is valued at over $5 trillion, roughly the gross domestic product of Germany, the world’s third-largest economy, with a population of 84 million. Only the United States and China have gross domestic products larger than this one company’s market capitalization. Apple is valued above the annual output of Britain, Alphabet above that of France.” And, while they don’t have their own armies, in the AI age—when private satellite companies decide who gets internet access and software controls who gets targeted and killed—big tech companies have increasing power when it comes to matters of war. Meanwhile, the wealth created by big tech gets cycled back into lobbying and political donations to help determine who runs government and how they run it.
+ The blurred line between nation and corporation is not new. As William Dalrymple explains in the NYT (Gift Article), the East India Company was every bit as powerful and influential as an empire-building nation. “We still speak of the British conquering India. In reality, the conquest of the Indian subcontinent between 1756 and 1803 was the work not of a nation-state but of a private company, the East India Company. Headquartered in a small office in London, it was answerable to nobody but its shareholders … Here, as in so much of imperial history, commerce, colonization and brute corporate power walked in lock step. As Tolstoy later wrote in a letter published by Gandhi, ‘A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising 200 million people.’ All that made the East India Company the most powerful corporation in history — until now. For in the past decade, Big Tech has, too, begun to take on the attributes of sovereign states, and in many ways is now as powerful as the East India Company at its height.” What It Took to Dismantle the Most Powerful Company in the World. “History shows that when a company starts acquiring the attributes of a state—the revenues, the courts, the treaties, the capacity to make war and peace—its transformation can damage the parent country at least as much as the territories it exploits. Its lobbying corrupts the legislature. It captures the treasury, because the corporation’s solvency becomes a public interest. It converts foreign policy into an extension of a balance sheet. And it shows that the threshold, once crossed, is astonishingly hard to recross. The window in which any of this can be undone closes fast.” (Faster than you can say, “Lake America…”)
