Big Tech

Tech Workers, Bigger Than Big Tech

November 28, 2021 J S Tan, Progressive International. Educate! Big Tech, Science and technology, Technology, Worker Rights and Jobs

Tech companies are the new empires of today: Alphabet annual revenue surpassed Hungary’s GDP, Facebook employs over 15000 content moderators around the world, and Microsoft has built datavcenters in nearly every corner of our planet. Yet we continue to be sold the myth that the workers of the tech industry, which spans every corner of the globe, have nothing to do with each other. To hold these tech companies accountable, tech workers in the United States have begun to organize. “Help us be Alphabet’s conscience”, proclaimed the recently-formed Alphabet Workers Union, a minority union composed of full-time employees, temporary employees, vendors, and contractors at Google’s parent company.

Eric Schmidt Cashes In On Artificial Intelligence Arms Race

September 23, 2021 Dan Cohen, Mintpress News. Educate! Artificial Intelligence, Big Tech, Eric Schmidt, Wars and Militarism

Mountain View, California - The United States is leading a new artificial intelligence arms race that could spell the end of humanity. Back in 2014, a few years before he died, Stephen Hawking warned us about artificial intelligence: The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have, have proved very useful. But I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.” Today, artificial intelligence, or AI, is the centerpiece of the U.S. empire’s plan to maintain global dominance. AI is essentially computer super-intelligence that does what human brains can not. Exponential technological advances have rendered our human brains, constrained by the slow process of biological evolution, inferior to modern supercomputers.

Carpenters’ Union Halts Work On Amazon, Microsoft, Google And Facebook Expansions

September 21, 2021 Mike Lewis, GeekWire. Resist! Big Tech, Carpenters, Washington State, Worker Rights and Jobs

Construction work on several major tech company expansion projects, including those by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook, slowed to a crawl today as the region largest carpenters’ union halted work over a wage dispute. At 6 a.m. Thursday, 2,000 Northwest Carpenter Union members walked off the job and began picketing at four major job sites, including Microsoft expansions in Redmond and Sammamish; Google and Amazon projects in Bellevue Plaza, and Facebook’s Building X in Redmond. Evelyn Shapiro, the union’s executive secretary-treasurer, said the affected sites were not randomly chosen. In the push for better wages and benefits, the union looked at companies “that are making billions,” she said. Specifically, the union is striking against the contractor consortium, the Associated General Contractors, and not the tech companies themselves.

Scheer Intelligence: What Has Silicon Valley Done To Our Food?

June 25, 2021 Robert Scheer, ScheerPost.com. Create! Big Tech, California, climate crisis, Food and Agriculture, health, Podcast

Companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have started to become household names, producing meat substitutes that taste as close to meat as their scientists have been able to engineer. In the midst of a climate crisis that threatens our very existence, plenty of scientists have been recommending that we all look for ways to cut down on our meat intake because cows produce large amounts of methane that has a significant negative environmental impact. Eating animal products also brings up animal rights questions. One of the main selling points of these Silicon Valley companies is essentially that we can save the planet and eat ethically without sacrificing taste. Yet, there is a key question few people seem to be asking about these new products: Are these meat substitutes good for our health?

Scheer Intelligence: Has Silicon Valley Made It Impossible For Us To Listen?

June 11, 2021 Robert Scheer, ScheerPost.com. Educate! Big Tech, Capitalism, Podcast, Relationship Building

At a time in which distractions seem to multiply by the second thanks to the omnipresence of screens and social media, and COVID-19 pandemic has isolated us further, we’re all having a hard time truly listening to one another and connecting. Silicon Valley veteran Ximena Vengoechea wants to change that with her new book “Listen Like You Mean It.” On this week’s installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” host Robert Scheer speaks to the User Experience designer about her work at Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, and the role tech companies have had on our ability to listen to one another. “I think some of how we lost [our ability to listen] has been the sort of moment that we’re in, which is this culturally, politically divided moment, this technologically accelerated moment,” says Vengoechea...

Tech Giants Face Rising pressure from shareholder activists

May 27, 2021 Rebecca Klar, The Hill. Resist! Big Tech, Finance and the Economy, Shareholder activism, Worker Rights and Jobs

Activist shareholders are pushing for the proposals to be adopted during this week’s annual meetings, the first to be held after a year that’s included nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol and challenging working conditions for many on-site workers in the tech industry.

Biden Continues Conflict With China Through The Quad

March 19, 2021 Vijay Prashad, Asia Times. Educate! Big Tech, China, Joe Biden, New Cold War

On March 12, the heads of government of four countries, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, and US President Joe Biden, met for a virtual meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, better known as the Quad. Modi’s opening remarks illustrate the emptiness of the public agenda; he called the Quad “a force for global good” with no details beyond a list of areas of collaboration (“vaccines, climate change and emerging technologies”). There was no direct mention of China during the meeting. In the details relating to the launching of “an ambitious new joint partnership that is going to boost vaccine manufacturing,” a more disturbing agenda reveals itself

Antitrust Is Back In The United States

March 14, 2021 Eric Posner, Public Syndicate. Educate! Antitrust, Big Tech, Democrats, Monopoly

Chicago – President Joe Biden is signaling that his administration will get tough on monopoly. With the appointments of Columbia University law professors Timothy Wu to the White House National Economic Council and Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), he has selected two well-known proponents of breaking up the Big Tech monopolies. Moreover, these appointments come on the heels of a major antitrust reform bill that Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota introduced in the US Senate last month. Klobuchar’s bill aims to bolster antitrust enforcement in a number of ways. It would increase funding for the FTC and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, establish new bureaucratic offices to investigate and monitor antitrust compliance and market conditions, slap new civil penalties on violators, and expose firms to liability for anticompetitive business practices that currently fall through the cracks.

Digital Colonialism: The Evolution Of American Empire

March 6, 2021 Michael Kwet, ROAR Magazine. Educate! Big Tech, China, colonization, United States

In 2020, billionaires made out like bandits. Jeff Bezos’s personal holdings surged from $113 to $184 billion. Elon Musk briefly eclipsed Bezos, with a net worth rise from $27 billion to over $185 billion. For the bourgeoisie presiding over “Big Tech” corporations, life is grand. Yet, while the expanded dominance of these corporations in their domestic markets is the subject of numerous critical analyses, their global reach is a fact seldom discussed, especially by dominant intellectuals in the American empire. In fact, once we investigate the mechanics and numbers, it becomes apparent that Big Tech is not only global in scope, it is fundamentally colonial in character and dominated by the United States. This phenomenon is called “digital colonialism.” We live in a world where digital colonialism now risks becoming as significant and far-reaching a threat to the Global South as classic colonialism was in previous centuries.

Against Big Tech’s Algorithmic Cancel Culture

March 3, 2021 Ann Garrison, Black Agenda Report. Resist! Algorithms, Big Tech, Censorship, Liberal class

The Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas , the lead organizer for that is Dr. Nolan Higdon , whom I've worked with for years on various things. And Project Censored was a co-sponsor of this event. It was also co-sponsored by several academic institutions, including UCLA, USC, UC Santa Cruz, Stanford, and Cal State across the State of California. So, in other words, as I’ve mentioned in a couple of other interviews, Alan Macleod over at Mint Press News, did a pretty in-depth piece on this. I know you talked about it; I think in a Black Agenda Report piece. This is an ongoing issue. This is an issue of Big Tech gatekeeping, algorithmic censorship. We have not been able to get any real feedback from YouTube about what happened, except that they, in true Orwellian fashion, flipped the script, and basically tried to say that Nolan didn't upload the videos or that the videos maybe didn't exist in the first place.

Privacy, Immigrant Rights Groups Slam Biden’s ‘Smart Wall’

February 27, 2021 Chris Mills Rodrigo, The Hill. Educate! Big Tech, Border Patrol, Democrats, Joe Biden, Surveillance

A coalition of privacy and immigrant rights groups are pushing back on the Biden administration’s proposal to deploy a “smart” wall on the southern border. In a statement released Thursday, first obtained by The Hill, the 40 groups slam the legislation introduced in Congress last week as a “continuation of the Trump administration’s racist border policies, not a break from it.” The letter pans the proposed use of "smart technology" at the border as "Trump’s wall by another name." The mammoth immigration bill, which is being spearheaded by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.), authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to develop technology and surveillance infrastructure to “manage and secure the southern border.”

Prisons Prime Testing Ground For Dehumanizing Hi-Tech ‘Advances’

February 23, 2021 Raul Diego, Mintpress News. Educate! Big Tech, Capitalism, Prison, US Postal Service

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is coming under fire again from Democratic lawmakers, as well as from the American Postal Workers Union, who are calling for President Joe Biden to pave the way for DeJoy’s removal after the Trump-appointee announced higher mailing fees and logistical changes that could further slow down mail. The US Postal Service (USPS) has already suffered a more than 50% drop in on-time arrivals for first-class mail deliveries, according to the service’s own data. Nevertheless, thanks to the ubiquitous presence of high-speed internet, the personal communications of most Americans don’t seem to be fundamentally affected by the problems at USPS. Excluding the mail-in-ballots controversy leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the majority of the country remains little more than a...

Congress Escalates Pressure On Tech Giants To Censor More

February 22, 2021 Glenn Greenwald, Substack. Educate! Big Tech, Censorship, Congress, Demorcats

For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.” The Committee’s Chair, Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of the Subcommittees holding the hearings, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), said in a joint statement that the impetus was “falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine” and “debunked claims of election fraud.” They argued that “these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for...

Nevada Bill Would Allow Tech Companies To Create Governments

February 6, 2021 AP News. Educate! Big Tech, Corporatization, Governance, Nevada

Carson City, NV - Planned legislation to establish new business areas in Nevada would allow technology companies to effectively form separate local governments. Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced a plan to launch so-called Innovation Zones in Nevada to jumpstart the state’s economy by attracting technology firms, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Wednesday. The zones would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts and provide government services. The measure to further economic development with the “alternative form of local government” has not yet been introduced in the Legislature.

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