Читать книгу The Unintended Consequences of Technology - Chris Ategeka - Страница 33

As noted in the Facebook and Google examples, the sheer size of users on these platforms outnumbers the population of individual states in which they operate.

China has the world's largest population (1.42 billion), followed by India (1.35 billion). The next five most populous nations—the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, and Nigeria—together have fewer people than India.

In a hypothetical example, let's say a nation-state accuses a tech-state of egregious misbehaving. That single country can decide to ban all its citizens from using a certain platform or block it entirely from its airwaves. Yet these technologies will continue to operate just fine and still be profitable. This has been witnessed in countries as tiny as Uganda, which ordered all social media to be blocked in its country (Reuters, 2021), and as big as Australia, when the government introduced a law to make tech-states pay media outlets for their news content and the firms fiercely fought back (de Vynck, 2021).

That's the outsized power of exponential technology and capitalism, which we examined in Chapter 1.