Bonum Certa Men Certa

"It's time to call these destructive companies out"

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 01, 2024

New acronym?

BINARY FATA MORGANAS: ByteDance Intel NVIDIA AMD RAND Corporation Yahoo Facebook Apple Tencent Amazon Microsoft Oracle RedHat Google Alibaba Netflix Atlassian Salesforce

THE commencement of the new year brings back to mind what we drafted a couple of years ago ("High-Priority Opponents"), listing the various threats and giving examples of companies which represent these threats.

High-Priority Opponents

Psydroid, who suggested the "FATA MORGANA" acronym (he previously suggested MAGMA, as Facebook had rebranded and GAFAM was thus 'outdated'), says "it's finally becoming a real thing after all these years" and "it's time to call these destructive companies out".

Seeing that my last employer was 'outsourced' to really nasty companies, abandoning Free software in the process (Zoom isn't included in the above, but the company mostly 'outsourced' to Google, not Zoom), we really need to talk about power consolidation in so-called 'tech' companies (they're connected to the state and are as much to do with spying as actual technology). Back doors have become the "new normal" and encryption, they insist, should be "weakened" (that means broken). We need to counter those trends, which aren't even limited to American companies. It would also be wrong to attribute those trends to one single company. Many tentacles are connected to the same beast; in the US the "beast" could be dubbed "Pentagon" or "plutocracy" and in China it would be CPC, which controls everything including the military and the private sector.

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