The New Millennial War

No, I’m not writing about Ukraine or Gaza, or even the whole of the combustible Middle East. None of those wars is likely to last a millennium.

The war I’m writing about is not military—at least not yet. It’s a struggle for secular and political power as important as the struggle between Church and State that took most of the Second Millennium and is still ongoing, for example, in our current battle over reproductive rights.

Our new millennial struggle for power is one between corporations, collectively, and governments, collectively. I first predicted it over nine years ago, in this online essay. Two years later, I noted the results of the first big legal battle inside the US. Corporations won that battle decisively, without much of a fight. With simple “click here” contracts of adhesion, they wiped out most of the legal rights of their Anglo-American customers, developed over eight centuries since Magna Carta.

Our own government refused to fight that battle. Convinced that fluidity in commerce and on the Internet demanded efficiency and speed more than justice, virtually no one in the judiciary or Congress, let alone our Executive, raised a peep.

So the whole eight-century history of individual rights vis-á-vis government vanished for customers of corporations in a flurry of online “flypaper” contracts. Subject to a few general limitations on crimes and torts like assault, mayhem and murder, corporations got to write their own law. Among many other things, they wiped out customers’ right of access to our courts, the right to public trials, the right to a jury, and the right to class-action lawsuits, which make it worthwhile to sue over small swindles that, perpetrated on millions, can reap big bucks. (Our actual Bill of Rights never did restrict corporations or other private parties, only government.)

In that instance, you could say that our government was complicit with corporations, or at least asleep at the switch. But today’s New York Times reports an open battle in a war that will likely continue for most of our new third millennium, at least if our species survives.

As you might expect, the war involved the most flagrant and outrageous proponent of corporate and oligarchic power of our time, Elon Musk. And Brazil, unlike our own government, is not supine. It’s fighting Musk with all the power of its own divided government.

The battle turns on the most important issue of our age: speech. Musk’s notorious Internet mouthpiece, X (formerly Twitter), had been promulgating what a Brazilian Supreme Court Justice reportedly called “disinformation and hate speech.” Musk reportedly refused to obey a court order to take the offending speech down, and he refused to pay fines imposed for that refusal. Instead, he fired some Brazilian staff, so they couldn’t be fined or jailed.

Now, apparently, he’s trying to circumvent the entire government of Brazil by technical means. He’s using his own satellite service, Starlink, to pump the offending speech into Brazil, flouting its authority, and he’s reportedly advising Internet users in Brazil how to circumvent the Brazilian authorities using Internet and satellite technology.

This is hardly subtle. Musk is a notorious free-speech absolutist. He’s attempting to force his personal absolutism on the largest democracy in Latin America and the second largest (after ours) in the Western Hemisphere. And he’s doing it by practical, physical means, without regard to law, order, customs, or traditions. If he wins, he will have become a law unto himself.

The same might be said about our own most dangerous media oligarch, Rupert Murdoch. (I say “our own” because he was granted American citizenship by a special act of Congress, and his media empire reached the peak of its power here.) Protected by our courts’ near-absolutist interpretation of our First Amendment, Murdoch has created the most powerful and pervasive propaganda organ in human history. And it’s entirely private—a corporate empire mostly outside the control of any government.

Murdoch’s empire still hasn’t won its battle against government entirely, however. The Brits have dinged it for unlawful telephone eavesdropping, and last year it settled a defamation suit by a voting machine company falsely accused of helping “steal” the 2020 election for Biden for a record $787 million. But if you want to know how flagrantly and successfully Murdoch’s empire has pursued its private propaganda, watch this clip of John Oliver discussing the false meme of “migrant crime,” which Fox created, systematically and deliberately, over months, out of whole cloth.

As these examples illustrate, corporations can do bad things. They can do really bad things in propagandizing and manipulating voters, freaking everyone out, and driving our nation’s drift toward civil war. The bad things they do could result, next year, in the complete subversion of our government of law and the advent of fascism to America.

But corporations are far from all bad, and that’s the thing that makes this millennial struggle so difficult and interesting. As I’ve outlined in two earlier essays (one [skip the intro, which I now disavow, and search for “role in society”] and two) corporations make and service our airplanes, audio equipment, cars, cell phones, computers, food, homes, furniture, medical equipment, medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, and TVs, among other things. In other words, they are responsible for virtually all of the “creature comforts” that make our lives “modern.” They do a great deal of good.

But precisely because of that, and because they are consequently far more solvent and have far more money than governments, they have the potential to replace governments as the primary practical authority in, and the primary influence on, our individual lives. They are in the process of doing so right now.

The struggle for supremacy between corporations and governments will take centuries, maybe the whole of our new millennium. It will determine not only whether the Western Enlightenment survives the next election and beyond, but whether the Enlightenment and democracy have any ongoing practical effect on human lives as our new century progresses. Just think of all those flypaper contracts you “sign” in the course of your online life.

If governments are to have any real effect on individuals and the evolution and control of corporations, they are doing to have to start waking up now. They are going to have to stand up and resist the avalanches of corporate lobbying and monied corruption and promote the rights of individuals (including the right to organize!) and the power of democratic institutions. The resulting struggle might last as long as, and be even more consequential than, the millennial struggle between Church and State that forged our modern world.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Permalink to this post