Warning: contains spOILers
Have you felt something shifting underfoot?
All of a sudden, the techno-feudalist boy-kings of Silicon Valley have become quite concerned that the thing they’ve been touting incessantly for years - despite warnings about the destruction of the environment, of online discourse, and of posters you see at the farmer’s market - might actually be capable of ending the world.
But could it? Well, it doesn’t really matter to them. Author and activist Corey Doctorow has described the process of “regulatory capture,” in tech, by which large companies can’t ignore the calls for their power to be reined in any longer, and decide that if they’re going to be put on a lead they’d prefer for it to be a long, soft one.
This has been a thing as long as there’s been money to be made. In the U.S., companies have successfully muzzled some of the world’s biggest regulators, including the SEC, FDA (Run by RFK, OK?) and the beautifully succinct Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.
After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, the largest environmental disaster in history, it was the BOEMRE that ensured oil companies wouldn’t be impeded in their efforts to drill, baby, drill.