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Molly Jean Bennett's avatar

Especially love your point about how much of our cloud architecture is controlled by just a few companies. Every time I've seen the monthly Amazon Web Services bill of even a relatively modestly-sized tech startup it's STAGGERING. It's where so much of the money & control is

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Brian Merchant's avatar

Yeah absolutely — honestly we should be talking about that a lot more; cloud architecture really is a necessity, a public good at this point

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Molly Jean Bennett's avatar

Truly! It would be very challenging to set up any kind of high-traffic website, service, or platform without paying the major players. It’s very very hard to divest from them with our current systems

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Frederick Woodruff's avatar

Much needed insight and 'exposure' about the Dem's long history of courting and supporting tech-mania.

Always a great read on your newsletter Brian.

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Brian Merchant's avatar

Cheers Frederick

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Alexa Maeve's avatar

Every centibillionaire fortune (except for that time when Bill Gates briefly was one during the dot com bubble) was made after 2017: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_centibillionaires

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Jasmine R's avatar

You could say the problem started with social media companies, especially when consolidation was permitted. Facebook should never have been allowed to buy Instagram and WhatsApp and Google shouldn't have been allowed to buy Youtube. With TikTok gone, there will be even less competition and places to share/receive information, as imperfect as social media is for that purpose.

Biden was right, it's time to bust the trusts again. I'm Canadian and we have multiple monopolies entrenched from grocers to banks to telecoms. It only hurts consumers.

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𝓙𝓪𝓼𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓮 𝓦𝓸𝓵𝓯𝓮's avatar

Don't forget the "defense" contractors, the weapons manufacturers, and oil and gas oligarchs who have always owned our government. Genocidal, British Lords stole this land to establish their own kingdom. Both the DNC and RNC are private corporations. It's never been a "democracy" because it's always been a fascist colonial settlement. Fascism is just capitalism operating masks off.

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eg's avatar

Biden has been there the entire time — now we’re supposed to find credible this death-bed conversion? There’s little evidence he understands the words he’s mouthing and even less that he even wrote them.

C’mon, man!

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Peter Jones's avatar

America supports and worships greed... they vote for it...

America's idea of Christianity is the anti christ...

Money talks... everything else is bull.. so the end of nature awaits.

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The Angry Yogi's avatar

This essay linking Israeli soldiers to pretty much all of our tech and AI companies is also terrifying.

https://open.substack.com/pub/donotpanic/p/the-former-israeli-spies-building?r=fu1et&utm_medium=ios

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