If had a nickel for every time I had a person with a passing interest in Marxism mansplain the world to me. This is a starting point, materialism is not exclusively how socialists and anarchists criticize or understand capitalism.

You seem to think this is contradictory, which should spur you to question something more fundamental instead of assuming others are just dumber than you. “Coordination” would require a conspiratorial level of organizing between groups that, while maintaining common interests, distorts the reality of this system to the point of incomprehensibility. If your way of thinking finds it impossible to analyze the interaction between people – individual actors – and the system they are positioned in – as in their class interests – then you will find this system incomprehensible. This is so because, guess what, there are individual actors who are not powerlessly making decisions in accordance with their positionality.

In order to do that, you must start understanding these things as relational. There are class interests motivating these policies, those class interests are not the sole mover of these actions. To suggest as much would do what you are trying to do right now, which is universalise human action. I wonder if you’ve thought about power dynamics in indigenous nations under settler-colonialism, and what it would mean to only interpret their navigation of this system with the frameworks that originate from Europe with the goal of understanding European ways of organizing. How do you understand conflicting interests within shared classes even under the same material conditions?

Getting fuckin tired of people on here presuming they’re all-knowing; many of these interactions happen to occur in discussions on Europe, go figure. Won’t be responding to anything else from you unless it is actually serious.

Strange, I didn’t realize there was any non-liberal, anti-capitalist states within the EU.

I think you’ve misunderstood the point, what I’m saying is that these sorts of policies are an inevitable consequence of liberalism because it requires an oppressive level of population control to function. The internet is a threat to that control, and therefore liberal states have responded predictably and consistently by moving to create as many vectors of restriction and punishment as they can. The UK is not part of the EU, Canada (which has been pushing for this for half a decade now) isn’t, Australia isn’t, but they are all capitalist and imperialist liberal states.

I don’t know how contrived the mechanisms have to be before people just accept that these ideological forces do not need specific mechanisms to exist. Tech firms did not produce liberalism and capitalism, as they did not exist when these ways of organizing emerged. Everything you described here are consequences of this system and the means by which it reproduces itself, they are not the system itself. Yeah, they organize, they do so because they have a common interest which is capital, and the imperatives of profit and infinite growth historically manifest consistently in formal and informal mechanisms of control like this.

Class warfare doesn’t apply here any better than it does to the informal consequences of neoliberal individualism which is both intentionally reinforced in media and culturally through its subscription by middle-class property owners. It may look coordinated, but that term distorts how these systems of power function and reproduce by creating the narrative that there is a select group of people responsible for this outcome, even while individual actions are taken to realise it.

It’s not “coordinated” any more than every action in service of capital is. These policies and values coincide because all of these liberal states share common imperatives. The internet is a problem for liberals; it is impossible to fully control without diminishing its use for industry, anti-capitalism has flourished online even with the overwhelming corporate promotion of fascism and liberalism, and the international nature of the medium has made imperialism more visible to the metropole than ever.

They correctly identify that the internet is a threat to their security, and they are moving to secure it and punish as many people as they can to discourage its use for disruptive purposes.

Shit-flinging desperation at the realization that they have failed to contain dissent via internet-based coordination. Elbit and the UK’s protection of property was defeated by persistent disruption thanks to the work by Palestine Action. Unlike previous forms of communication, the empire has had tremendous difficulty wrestling control away because the materiality of the internet is so dispersed, accessible, and impossible to restrict without dire economic and military consequences.

I mean, they wouldn’t be wrong, but they don’t know why they aren’t wrong.

Learned helplessness.

Yeah I’ve had interactions like that as well. Another issue is a lot of this work is done through contracts with third-party developers too. I’ve met people who could say the name of the company they work for and you’d have to dig to find out they develop software for US military tank systems, so it is also easy for them to obscure their work if they understand people will challenge their participation in it.

Louis Rossman talked about this potential in consumer routers via ISP data collection a few months ago. I mean, there are feasible measures to disrupt the accuracy of this surveillance method in the same way there is for any. But, even if the new standard implements protections against use cases of human surveillance, there’s no real way to prevent authoritarian states from applying the technology illegally or otherwise. Doesn’t help that corporations with a vested interest in both data collection and compliance with authoritarian states also have tremendous influence on the kind of people who are in the IEEE.

I’m tellin ya, people have to bully STEM majors who cooperate like they should ICE agents who (enthusiastically) cooperate.