I'm not so sure, I think if GP had expanded on it a little it's an interesting take.
Multiple corporations (with their 'fiefdoms') is decentralised from government, in a similar manner to peers being decentralised from government (or the crown).
You could either argue 'not as much so', or that 'corporate lobbying, unions, and party donations have a similar influence on policy'; regardless I think it's an interesting idea.
First of all this, but even in the very definition of feudalism it's feudalism:
> Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs [...]. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. [0]
Don't really get all the downvotes. I could extend more on it, and explain my reasoning, but I feel like HN is too caught in this "tech moguls are saviors" and even if they weren't and they wouldn't be where they are, somebody else would be a bad actor.
Not in the literal sense of land, but in the economical/capitalistic sense. In capitalism theory, the basic idea behind the growth of capitalism is defined as "land grab", i.e. the system ingests what is foreign and makes it its own. So land in that sense can mean anything that binds people to you. Nowadays this means money in order to pay rent, food, bills etc.
> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.
Now why do I call this feudalism? To be honest I could call it various other things, the most "getting to the root" would be "class warfare". I chose to call it feudalism in this case, because feudalism was basically the last period/time we chose to call it honestly what it is: Getting ruled from above. They want to implement censorship, because even though we always say "one day it might work against you", but for them it does not. Ever.
So when we introduced parliaments we split law-making power from nobility to politicians, elected by the people. But if you are an "accumulator of wealth", you can basically act as a modern fief. Especially if you work together with politicians.
Walled gardens (read fiefdoms) run by megacorporations is decentralised, I don't have to accept Alphabet's TOS if I don't want to. They just have so many people who do want to that they can dictate pretty crazy terms.
Governments asking favours of these corporate lords looks centralised and makes us pay attention, but it requires their consent to get anywhere.
> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.
And then he said it's facism. To which I say, no, it's feudalism:
> Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs [...]. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. [0]
I don't get why people downvote me so much. It's basically a direct answer
You can wait to wake up to a totalitarian government biting you on the nose, but some of us remember that Mussolini was a journalist and rose to power in the media and don't want to let it get that far.
Considering that the term itself comes from his movement, the "Fasces of Revolutionary Action", and that he coined the word fascism personally in 1919 (after the word "fascio"), I think at the very least he gets to be attributed the lions' share of it.
Newton can be credited as being substantially the inventor of Newtonian Physics. That doesn't make alchemy a sub-field of Newtonian Physics, despite the fact that Newton wrote numerous treatises on alchemy.
He literally coined the term when talking about his movement. If anyone has claim to what the definition was, it's him.
But history is written by the winners and I'm sure modern day fascists would like to distance themselves from that history as much as possible...and thus the term gets narrowed and redefined.
So then why not take Mussolini's own words on what fascism is and isn't? His definition required it to be totalitarian: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".
> Considering that the term itself comes from his movement, the "Fasces of Revolutionary Action", and that he coined the word fascism personally in 1919 (after the word "fascio"), I think at the very least he gets to be attributed the lions' share of it.
Sure, but that doesn't mean any one aspect of what he did, in isolation from the rest, is "the definition of fascism". (And the understanding of the genericized term is at least as much shaped by Naziism as Italian fascism, anyhow; this might annoy Mussolini if he was around to be annoyed -- frankly, that Nazis are taken as an example of "fascism" would probably annoy Hitler, too -- but, you know, that's just the way language evolves; if we're talking about Mussolini's movement in Italy specifically, we generally say "Italian fascism", not just "fascism" unless there is context to indicate that we are specifically talking about Italy.)
> a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader
is the definition of fascism. This is a tool often deployed by fascists.
And saying that something is "the (very) definition of" something is a colloquialism drawing comparison that dates back at least to James Madison and the Federalist Papers.
