Image credit: Babylon Bee
Michael Young is a visiting fellow at the Center for
Renewing America. His article in Tablet Mag explores the hazards and risks to
our freedoms in the age of Big Tech and consolidated banking systems. It’s not pretty, and he concludes:
What happens when a government is
no longer required to do the very difficult, friction-filled work of finding
people, writing tickets, arresting them, charging them, granting them due
process, obtaining convictions, and jailing the guilty? When the government can
bring a person’s practical participation in society to a standstill with the
push of a button, it becomes silly to even talk about individual rights or due
process. In the face of this new kind of push-button power, exercised at the
whim of the governing party with zero legal oversight, individuals can simply
be deleted from the system—even if, technically speaking, they are never
charged with or convicted of a crime.
. . .
A deeper concern is what happens
when private institutions like corporations, universities, and media exercise
the same power without even the pretense of accountability. If the large
financial institutions want to, they can act as gatekeepers to society and
would be held accountable only by the market, to which they also hold the keys.
Given that institutions are heavily dependent on each other, if the
institutions that hold important positions in the global financial web decide
to freeze someone out, they can do so with the push of a button. Worse yet, we
can imagine a scenario in which a system of freeze-outs could be automated
based on people’s credit scores, purchasing histories, political donation
patterns, key words in social media postings, carbon footprints, or political
activism. It’s not hard to imagine a situation in which a citizen of a democracy
wakes up one day to find themselves unable to participate in the digital
economy, where almost all financial transactions take place, due to an
automated system which flags them as being undesirable in some way.
Corporations and government have
always exercised tremendous power, of course. Government has a monopoly on the
use of force, using the policing powers to enforce laws. Corporations have
always exercised enormous power via market share, advertising, lobbying, and
other financial instruments. But never before have they been able to lock
ordinary citizens out of social participation with the flip of a switch.
This push-button tyranny is real,
and it represents a greater abuse of power than any that has been exercised
before within the boundaries of liberal democratic government. It is new, it is
breathtaking, and it is very dangerous.
Read the entire article here.
