"...Google execs all work for their shareholders, in a psychotic "market system" in which the myth of "fiduciary duty" is said to require companies to hurt us right up to the point where the harms they inflict on the world cost them more than the additional profits those harms deliver"
There is no legal requirement to maximize shareholder value. The very idea is an economic theory popularized by Friedman and his students.
It gained popularity in corporate governance since then but it’s not a legal requirement it’s a shareholder preference. But that preference is violated all the time.
People often cite a 1919 era case from Henry ford because it has a pithy statement but the court in that case explicitly upheld many of the decisions Ford made that violated the principle.
That is, there is no law or precedent that requires corporate officers to only consider shareholders.
Legally, sure. (there's a citation, a case between craigslist and a minority shareholder (ebay I think?), that backs up your argument about the common trope).
But when stock valuations are completely disconnected from fundamentals like earnings, then regardless of the legality we're kind of circling back to the market pushing that dynamic, aren't we? It's like the market is no longer even optimizing for short term gains per se (eg quarterly earnings), but rather for whatever memes might boost their meme stock. Sometimes this is [still] quarterly earnings, and sometimes it's about the perceived size of the market or how they're cozying up to the fascists in power. So for public companies, it's not like major shareholders, the board, or management really have the ability to work towards longer term plans that go against this dynamic.
This piece is a polemic screed against ad-tech, which seems to conflate fascism and the police state. The majority of citations are either themselves or other polemics.
Word use is important. We have allowed thumos (and epithumia) to rule over nous.
It has become acceptable to misuse words, like "fascist" or "communist" in political contexts, to the detriment of rational and fruitful discourse. Often a false equivalence is drawn between denying something is "fascist" or "communist" and denying something is bad. This is false. Something can be bad without being fascist or communist.
There is plenty to be critical about in American politics and in tech, but calling everything you don't like "fascist" or "communist" isn't helpful. These seem to be go-to words used by those "defending" what is now a crumbling postwar liberal democratic order, i.e., anything that seems at odds with this order is reflexively called one of these two terms, depending on which faction of the American uniparty you align with.
Please explain how the trumpist movement significantly differs from most points of Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism. Because in my estimation, the word is entirely appropriate for what we're facing and people are shouting it down because they don't like the uncomfortable truth.
I'm open to changing my mind, especially if there is a better term that more accurately describes what we're facing. Because the dynamic isn't merely "crumbling postwar liberal democratic order", but rather a particular overly-simplistic reaction to that crumbling.
I'm open to another definition that attempts to faithfully capture the general dynamics of fascism, and avoids the trap of pigeonholing the term into a few specific movements that are now safely in the past.
I think that would definitely make it a more precise polemic, but the incorrect use of the word seems more of a symptom of the author's sloppiness than anything else.
Policymakers supposedly work for us/the people and they could have made surveillance ad tech expensive and thereby severely limited it, but
> "Policymakers failed us because cops and spies hate privacy laws and lobby like hell against them. Cops and spies love commercial surveillance, because the private sector's massive surveillance dossiers are an off-the-books trove of warrantless surveillance data that the government can't legally collect."
Doctorow begs questions in the manner typical of self-hosted and/or expatriated journalists, who must be evangelists, but religious work tends to disregard the labor of research as it's hard work that doesn't pay and it might uncover a contradiction of the orthodoxy.
Let religious voices like Doctorow indicate places where we may examine policy and why we should be interested to look there, but sermons aren't vehicles to carry meaningful analysis.
Sermons must have a righteous tone and term "fascist", used correctly by Doctorow, has a long-standing colloquial connotation of teutonic allegiances during WW2, which emotionally overloads his diatribe.
Yet, he's correct to invoke it, even as his rhetoric is misplaced for audiences whose forbearers were sacrificed to the trauma of WW2, and whose generational scar tissues suppress remembrance that the patterns of evil which exploded across the Axis did emerge within our sacred bastions of liberty and freedom, and that these evils are fomenting again right now.
So I appreciate Doctorow's polemics even as I too regard the details of his claims with skepticism.
You’d still be having fascism here even if the internet didn’t exist. The most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans. Eventually rents/healthcare/tuitions outpace income, so people become desperate and start voting for strongmen.
I worked for an ad-tech company for 3 months. I could not wait to get out of there.
It became clear to me quickly that the data these people wanted to collect on anyone and everyone could be used against me should they want to - not that I was doing anything questionable, but it was just creepy as F**.
The final straw for me was when they got some kind of contract with a major hotel chain and were all-too-giddy to listen in on the smart TVs in every room. I did not want to help them further any of their agendas, so I bailed on that place. Fortunately this was many years ago when dev jobs were easy to come by, I had 3 offers in a week.
HN has ads (job ads for YC companies). When I see people post these deranged takes about ads on HN, I always ask myself: Do they not notice this--a common criticism of ads is that they blend too much into the real content, and this is nowhere more true then on HN--or do words just not mean anything to them, do they just mindlessly repeat memes rather then thinking about what these ideas mean for their own life? Is a sentence which to me expresses an idea to them more akin to a drug that gives them a kind of moral high? Because if I thought that ads were fascist, I'd look for a forum that doesn't have any, like Lobsters[1].
I didn't flag it because it might be the first original thought that blog has had in years, but I totally understand the impulse to flag pluralistic without even reading it.
Is there anything that Doctorow actually enjoys and likes? I used to read his blog but it's constant negativity. He is not wrong at all but it's just not good for our mental health either.
krunck | 3 hours ago
Nailed it.
tptacek | 3 hours ago
fsflover | 3 hours ago
topaz0 | 3 hours ago
But note that the quote does call it out as a myth.
tptacek | 2 hours ago
fsflover | 2 hours ago
kasey_junk | 12 minutes ago
It gained popularity in corporate governance since then but it’s not a legal requirement it’s a shareholder preference. But that preference is violated all the time.
People often cite a 1919 era case from Henry ford because it has a pithy statement but the court in that case explicitly upheld many of the decisions Ford made that violated the principle.
That is, there is no law or precedent that requires corporate officers to only consider shareholders.
text0404 | 3 hours ago
mindslight | 2 hours ago
But when stock valuations are completely disconnected from fundamentals like earnings, then regardless of the legality we're kind of circling back to the market pushing that dynamic, aren't we? It's like the market is no longer even optimizing for short term gains per se (eg quarterly earnings), but rather for whatever memes might boost their meme stock. Sometimes this is [still] quarterly earnings, and sometimes it's about the perceived size of the market or how they're cozying up to the fascists in power. So for public companies, it's not like major shareholders, the board, or management really have the ability to work towards longer term plans that go against this dynamic.
nickff | 3 hours ago
sharkjacobs | 3 hours ago
lo_zamoyski | 3 hours ago
It has become acceptable to misuse words, like "fascist" or "communist" in political contexts, to the detriment of rational and fruitful discourse. Often a false equivalence is drawn between denying something is "fascist" or "communist" and denying something is bad. This is false. Something can be bad without being fascist or communist.
There is plenty to be critical about in American politics and in tech, but calling everything you don't like "fascist" or "communist" isn't helpful. These seem to be go-to words used by those "defending" what is now a crumbling postwar liberal democratic order, i.e., anything that seems at odds with this order is reflexively called one of these two terms, depending on which faction of the American uniparty you align with.
mindslight | 2 hours ago
Please explain how the trumpist movement significantly differs from most points of Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism. Because in my estimation, the word is entirely appropriate for what we're facing and people are shouting it down because they don't like the uncomfortable truth.
I'm open to changing my mind, especially if there is a better term that more accurately describes what we're facing. Because the dynamic isn't merely "crumbling postwar liberal democratic order", but rather a particular overly-simplistic reaction to that crumbling.
OCASMv2 | an hour ago
mindslight | an hour ago
OCASMv2 | an hour ago
nickff | 3 hours ago
JKCalhoun | 23 minutes ago
hananova | 3 hours ago
nickff | 3 hours ago
bobtheborg | 3 hours ago
Policymakers supposedly work for us/the people and they could have made surveillance ad tech expensive and thereby severely limited it, but
> "Policymakers failed us because cops and spies hate privacy laws and lobby like hell against them. Cops and spies love commercial surveillance, because the private sector's massive surveillance dossiers are an off-the-books trove of warrantless surveillance data that the government can't legally collect."
nickff | 3 hours ago
_wire_ | an hour ago
Let religious voices like Doctorow indicate places where we may examine policy and why we should be interested to look there, but sermons aren't vehicles to carry meaningful analysis.
Sermons must have a righteous tone and term "fascist", used correctly by Doctorow, has a long-standing colloquial connotation of teutonic allegiances during WW2, which emotionally overloads his diatribe.
Yet, he's correct to invoke it, even as his rhetoric is misplaced for audiences whose forbearers were sacrificed to the trauma of WW2, and whose generational scar tissues suppress remembrance that the patterns of evil which exploded across the Axis did emerge within our sacred bastions of liberty and freedom, and that these evils are fomenting again right now.
So I appreciate Doctorow's polemics even as I too regard the details of his claims with skepticism.
Herring | 3 hours ago
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
christkv | 3 hours ago
topaz0 | 3 hours ago
Herring | 2 hours ago
pigeons | 3 hours ago
leptons | 3 hours ago
It became clear to me quickly that the data these people wanted to collect on anyone and everyone could be used against me should they want to - not that I was doing anything questionable, but it was just creepy as F**.
The final straw for me was when they got some kind of contract with a major hotel chain and were all-too-giddy to listen in on the smart TVs in every room. I did not want to help them further any of their agendas, so I bailed on that place. Fortunately this was many years ago when dev jobs were easy to come by, I had 3 offers in a week.
amadeuspagel | 3 hours ago
[1]: https://lobste.rs/
topaz0 | 3 hours ago
hightrix | 3 hours ago
Job postings, Show HN, and other ads on HN are contextually relevant to a majority of the users and require no tracking to present.
This post appears to be about the former, not the later.
topaz0 | 3 hours ago
drcongo | 2 hours ago
fsflover | 2 hours ago
afpx | 3 hours ago
Yes, Thiel openly says surveillance tech is the anti-Christ. Then, he goes on to build the tech.
The frustrating thing is seeing it happen in real-time and knowing you can't inform or educate enough people.
afpx | 3 hours ago
xyclonbee | 3 hours ago
haunter | 27 minutes ago