Legit question: while fascist states have that whole “corporations and state in tight embrace”, I wonder if the 1930s/40s flavour had to deal with capitalists as rich and powerful as today’s.
For example, if the US fascists try to drum up a conflict to justify crackdowns at home and to use wartime surges to goose a faltering economy, they’d see way more pushback from their billionaire patrons. Domestic unrest will depress domestic consumption, and a total-war economy might not be profitable for them (either “let’s not bomb our customers” resistance or “retooling and changing consumption patterns for the war effort would reduce profits”) You can pay off some of the billionaires with promises of juicy contracts, but too many of them are goung to be a hard sell: the Army is probably not buying Cybertruck tanks, and I’m not sure what you could offer the PE and VC ghoul industries to get buy-in.
Most companies are not in the business they say thay are in. As an example Niantic just announced they have been building the largest Geospatial Model.
Large Geospatial Models will help computers perceive, comprehend, and navigate the physical world in a way that will seem equally advanced. Analogous to LLMs
This no doubt has military applications. Starlink was famously being used by both the Ukrainian Military and the Russian military. Google DeepMind had military contracts and as of 2021 were trying to get back into business with the Pentagon. Meta is on contract with the the feds for use of their Llama model for National Security. Space X has new contracts worth $733.5 million for national security space missions and won a $1.8 billion classified contract with the U.S. government in 2021, according to company documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Google, Facebook, even Twitter have facial recognition models built off user data that can and likely are used in military applications.
It doesn’t work this way. All these corporations are invested in each other to an extent of it being essentially one big “megacorp.” With the wartime economy being such a large portion of the pie, and many of the other large pieces not really being impacted, the rest would never break away from them.
You can’t look at businesses from the standpoint of what that business actually sells or does. You have to look at it from the standpoint of who OWN it and where they have their money. These people are all in one big club. They would tank whatever company they wanted to if it became irrelevant to their stock portfolio increasing. Hell, they regularly bankrupt companies by shorting the shit out of the stocks and walk away with billions in untaxable profits once the company goes under. They have been doing it for years. Blockbuster, Sears, Toys R Us, Circuit city and many more were ALL taken out this way.
Legit question: while fascist states have that whole “corporations and state in tight embrace”, I wonder if the 1930s/40s flavour had to deal with capitalists as rich and powerful as today’s.
For example, if the US fascists try to drum up a conflict to justify crackdowns at home and to use wartime surges to goose a faltering economy, they’d see way more pushback from their billionaire patrons. Domestic unrest will depress domestic consumption, and a total-war economy might not be profitable for them (either “let’s not bomb our customers” resistance or “retooling and changing consumption patterns for the war effort would reduce profits”) You can pay off some of the billionaires with promises of juicy contracts, but too many of them are goung to be a hard sell: the Army is probably not buying Cybertruck tanks, and I’m not sure what you could offer the PE and VC ghoul industries to get buy-in.
Most companies are not in the business they say thay are in. As an example Niantic just announced they have been building the largest Geospatial Model.
This no doubt has military applications. Starlink was famously being used by both the Ukrainian Military and the Russian military. Google DeepMind had military contracts and as of 2021 were trying to get back into business with the Pentagon. Meta is on contract with the the feds for use of their Llama model for National Security. Space X has new contracts worth $733.5 million for national security space missions and won a $1.8 billion classified contract with the U.S. government in 2021, according to company documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Google, Facebook, even Twitter have facial recognition models built off user data that can and likely are used in military applications.
The MIC is a powerful drug. Don’t count it out.
It doesn’t work this way. All these corporations are invested in each other to an extent of it being essentially one big “megacorp.” With the wartime economy being such a large portion of the pie, and many of the other large pieces not really being impacted, the rest would never break away from them.
You can’t look at businesses from the standpoint of what that business actually sells or does. You have to look at it from the standpoint of who OWN it and where they have their money. These people are all in one big club. They would tank whatever company they wanted to if it became irrelevant to their stock portfolio increasing. Hell, they regularly bankrupt companies by shorting the shit out of the stocks and walk away with billions in untaxable profits once the company goes under. They have been doing it for years. Blockbuster, Sears, Toys R Us, Circuit city and many more were ALL taken out this way.