alt Hacker NewsRoutine corporatism and fascism is shameless to the point of being ho-hum these days. When the president has his own cryptocurrency and the federal government buys stock in this and that company for "strategic reasons", you're looking at a dystopia.
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This is a strong thread that's needs to be plucked on again and again and again.
Cory Doctorow had an excellent thread yesterday that touches on this:
> You could be forgiven for assuming that this is just about reining in Wall Street greed, but that it isn't an especially political maneuver. That's not true: antitrust is the most consequentially political regulation (with the possible exception of regulations on elections). Every fascist power defeated in WWII relied on the backing of their national monopolists to take, hold and wield power. That's why the Marshall Plan technocrats who rewrote the laws of Europe, South Korea and Japan made sure to copy over US antitrust law onto those statute-books.
The well moneyed interests are getting everything they want, for the faintest little bribe. For showing the obsequiousness, for showing fealty to the regime.
The monopolization of power, allowing markets to en taken over by worse and worse foes of democracy, needs to be stopped. Needs to have some limit. The post talks about how:
> Under the Correcting Lapsed Enforcement in Antitrust Norms for Mergers (CLEAN Mergers) Act, any company that was acquired in a deal worth $10b or more will have to break up with its merger partner if it turns out that these mergers were "politically influenced."
https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net/post/3mkuk...
I suspect the accelerationists, who appear more fascist aligned, are the ones upset by this. They go so far as considering regulation a form of murder.
This is probably seen as a win for the Bostrom crowd and the more sane people in the middle. The issues to tackle are incompetence and corruption and that has little to do with AI.