Amazon vs small bookshops | Aaron Bastani and Kenneth Cukier go head to head
37Watch an economist and a communist lock horns over bookshops, via Kenneth Cukier and Aaron Bastani.
This excerpt was taken from the debate 'Capitalism, Big Tech and the nation state, filmed at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in September 2023.
Watch the full debate at https://iai.tv/video/capitalism-big-tech-and-the-nation-state?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=description
We all know Big Tech is hugely influential. But the scale of its reach is not always appreciated. The largest of the Big Tech firms, Apple, has a valuation equivalent to the GDP of the UK. Along with the other four Big Tech corporations, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, they have a value greater than the GDP of the UK, France and Italy combined. Critics argue capitalism always tends to monopoly and the internet has turbocharged this phenomenon creating unprecedentedly powerful organisations that manipulate our lives and opinions as well as our buying habits.
Can we break up Big Tech, or like China do we need to build our own national internet companies to retain some control? Or is it too late and the financial power of Big Tech already sufficient to buy political influence, media comment, and up and coming competitors? Or is the scale of Big Tech a sign that the power of the nation state is no longer as great as the power of capital?
#BigTech #Amazon #Capitalism
Aaron Bastani co-founded the left-wing media organisation Novara Media in 2011, and has hosted and co-hosted many of its podcasts and videos. After a 2014 video for the publication, he popularised the term "fully automated luxury communism", which describes a post-capitalist society in which automation greatly reduces the amount of labour humans need to do.
Kenneth Cukier is an American journalist and author of books on technology and society. He is best known for his work at The Economist and the book 'Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Work, Live and Think,' coauthored with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2013.
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