Facebooks of this world by politicians across the planet. To many of us, this seems like government’s desperately trying to protect their turf and maintain control. Sam Volkering wrote an interesting article which I thought I would follow up on.
In modern times, most empires have a life span of around 100 years. The American Empire is about 100 years old and it is possible our time is running out. The obvious successor is China, but perhaps the New Empire isn’t actually a nation-state? When it comes to modern power and control, there’s a transition taking place. This transition is rooted in finance and the individual. And the way this is playing out, it’s possibly not good news for the American Empire.
Is the idea of a non-governmental entity controlling parts of the world really far fetched? Maybe there’s a better way to run the world? Imagine a world where leadership is egalitarian, with decentralized boundaries and borders. Essentially a world where there’s no ‘government’ per se. Imagine…a world free from central control and economic mismanagement? Throw the concept of a nation state away; it may not be the way the world works in the future. The big players of the tech world, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle, are all financial giants poised to wrestle control away from government.
Their combined total revenues are over US$801 billion. And in terms of cash, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook, are sitting on a cash war chest of US$96.2 billion. That’s not including the hundreds of billions in ‘short term investments’ that exist on their balance sheets. In short, pooled together the might, power and influence of the world’s biggest tech companies and their combined networks, arguably, you’d be looking at the most powerful group on Earth.
They are collectively more powerful than the US government. All the regulators and authorities can really do is try and build a fence around the growing might of ‘Big Tech’. US politicians are terrified of Big Tech because Big Tech poses an immediate threat to the most successful weapon the US has in their global empire arsenal…banking and finance. The US has a strong Army, Air Force, Navy and nuclear armaments. But these aren’t as powerful as the might of the US financial system.
The US is so fearful of Big Tech entering banking and finance and wrestling away power, influence and control, there’s now a draft piece of legislation to prevent it. This legislation is known as: ‘Keep Big Tech Out Of Finance Act’. The Senate and House Committee on Finance’s grilling of Facebook over the last two days, shows how resistant the US is going to be to the global dreams of Big Tech. Big Tech is getting a hand on consumer dollars through consumer friendly applications like Google Pay, Apple Pay, or credit provisions that you can get through Amazon. More recently it’s Apple’s Apple Card and then, the giant elephant in the room, Facebook’s Libra and Calibra project.
But what Big Tech has going for it is the network effect. These companies combined, span the entire globe (except for China) with their network reach. They have a global distributed network of users that no other entity on Earth can compete with. They’ve built their companies on consumer power, and now they’re looking at way to redistribute the power of Wall St and government amongst themselves as a new global power.
Facebook’s Libra is the first direct foray into this. So, the question is: Does the Keep Big Tech Out Of Finance Act succeed? Does Libra get shut down? Do Wall St and the US retain power? Or are we on the cusp of a massive change to the status quo?
Imagine there’s no countries, It isn’t hard to doImagine all the people, Living life in peace I hope someday you’ll join us, And the world will be as one