Last week, 145 CEOs of the largest technology companies in the U.S. signed an open letter to the Senate asking for stricter gun control laws.
Notably, the five tech giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft did not sign the letter. According to the New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg told unnamed members of his staff that signing the letter would “only intensify the spotlight on the company.”
Sending an open letter to a group of elected officials is an obvious case of corporations flexing their power in the political sphere. Those who didn’t sign consistently find more subtle ways to wield their influence.
There are numerous examples of this. Exxon plotted to hide or obscure the relationship between fossil fuels and climate change. Facebook—where a large portion of the population gets its information—was blindsided by foreign interference in American elections. Google ambitiously planned to transform a Toronto waterfront property into a “smart city.”
Or when Amazon persuaded municipalities across North America to throw desperate tax breaks and other incentives at them just to be considered as a future location for their new headquarters. Through all these one truth becomes evident.
It is clear that corporations in the U.S. and Canada are not just working within our countries’ democratic framework. They are manipulating it.
The problem is that these individuals and corporations have influence over our everyday lives and democratic institutions, while having no democratic legitimacy to back them up.
No one voted for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to be head of one of the biggest online public discussion forums in the world. No general ballots were casted for Bill Gates to shape African health policy or privatize entire school systems in the United States.
No polls were opened to elect Jeff Bezos to take virtual control of online shopping through aggressive pricing tactics and chronic abuse of Amazon’s workers.
Yet, these individuals at the top hold a lot more power than many of the elected officials in both the U.S. and Canada.
Common calls to just “vote with our dollars,” otherwise known as boycotting, are severely limited in a market dominated by a handful of large players.
Corporations control what have now become our public squares, our instant access to information, our means of expression and general telecommunication. And they’re spending a large sum on lobbying politicians to keep it this way.
We can’t depend on companies, over which we have no democratic control, to address crises currently facing our societies. The prime example is climate change. While sea levels are poised to rise and extreme weather events are intensifying, the rich and powerful are buying “doomsday getaway properties” in places as far as New Zealand.
It’s clear that we cannot trust anyone but ourselves, the people, to address society’s challenges, instead of praying for a billionaire or two to swoop in to save the day. They haven’t done so in the past, and they won’t in the future.
Feature image from file.
