Private government
Based on two lectures given in 2014 by the author during the Tanner Lectures on Human Values delivered at Princeton University, followed by four commentaries by eminent scholars and the author's response to the commentators. Anderson questions the authoritarian control workers have been forced to give to their employers in order to remain employed and historically why this goes against American ideology of free market values.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
9mentions
8people
2018–2024years
56% recommend44% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > i think this is expecting to much from corporate america.
I'll push back on this by adding something from the book, Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176512/pr.... She makes the case, with evidence and history, how no one in America can get by without using corporations to survive. Until we have free housing and healthcare (instead of bombs falling on the rest of the world), we have no choice but to demand better from corporate America.
> As far as separating your self from tech and being technologist. I think its like music, the pop stuff sucks and is mass produced. tech that used to be cool is mass produced, im sure there is cool stuff out there if you put the work into finding it. like underground music. i think trying to label your self is a mistake in general.
I'll quote what I mentioned at the end: "And to play on an idea of separation of the "art from the artwork" while actively defending their organizations (failing that, their outputs and indirectly their contributions) works to be a free agent of marketing for them. It's similar to a private company opening up a non-profit to launder the notion of doing good to build a moat of social capital. How does one comfortably reconcile that?" In the case of Haiti, a musician decided to run for president. Similar to what happened in America when an actor did, both invoked violent wars on the citizens (one was selling blood and killing people, another dropped bombs around the world and blamed a set of people for a viral disease that they refused to do any research on).
It's nigh impossible to separate something that _can't_ exist without the other. We can try to believe that (hence the use of money to create a bubble).
- For anyone who is concerned about the level of authoritarian control companies like Amazon have over employees, you might find the book Private Government worth a read: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176512/pr...
- Should we still have due process in the external world? After all, the United States is a "safe haven" for people who talk about killing pretty much every minority group under the sun.
> the world is a little more complex than "privacy at all costs."
The line doesn't have to do with the infringement of privacy, it's about whether that infringement is being done by publicly sanctioned power, or the whim of the arbitrary, domineering power of private (tech) actors. Elizabeth Anderson has written quite well on this topic in "Private Government."
- I would very much recommend Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson (specifically, chapter 2).
It's a relatively short read, and very relevant to your comment. Personally, I found the book quite enlightening, it gives a very different perspective to the jobs landscape than the one we usually have. An uncomfortable perspective, but one I feel one that is much more accurate.
- You may be interested in reading Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson. In it, she explores the scope and implications of employer power in the US and compares them with the power of governments.
- i agree companies shouldn’t have political sway, but why shouldn’t the place you spend so much time and effort for be democratically governed? what’s the argument that government should be, but industry shouldn’t?
that’s the whole basis of Elizabeth Anderson’s “Private Government”
