WhatsappCancel culture is not a new concept – even in the Western world. But, the extent with which it is going on in the Western world is unprecedented. This is due to many factors. But the main reason is that a few enormous companies have so much sway over the information spread in the highly digitized world. Facebook, Twitter, Google, and yes – Amazon. Amazon may actually have more power than any of the other three. But that is certainly a debatable point.
When one searches on Google or YouTube, the response one receives from the world’s most powerful and popular search engines will determine what one sees. When one turns on Facebook, what one sees in one’s Facebook feed is determined by what Facebook chooses to prioritize showing. The one major player that is undergoing a major change is Twitter. Twitter’s ownership change is nothing less than an earthquake in terms of cancel culture. But Amazon hosts more and more of the internet with their massively successful cloud services. So, they have the keys to the internet more than any other company. Downtime is the worst nightmare for nearly every online company and Amazon controls that.
But the hidden power is Amazon. So many people assume that Amazon is an innocent behemoth of a business that only cares how fast the packages arrive at your doorstep. But Amazon, like Facebook, and Google are way past the point of merely being concerned about market share. They are indeed so massive that it seems unimaginable that they could fail. The largest buyer club in the world is only increasing the addiction to their company from day to day. Therefore, they focus on using their power to influence in ways that make them acceptable to the pressure of radical woke progressive activists. Why? Because it is good for their reputation, which allows them to amass even more power and influence. This is not evil. It is normal – but it is also dangerous.
What many often miss out on is that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Amazon are not going anywhere anytime soon. Their power will just continue to grow as they are all so enormously rich and powerful that they can simply gobble up any major competitor. The only competitors that they truly have are each other. That will probably allow them to defend against any attempts to break up their monopoly – or oligopoly – on public opinion. They will all be able to argue that their competitor’s size show that they only have a small chunk of control of public opinion. But in truth, each of the behemoth media outlets control more than 10-20% of public opinion, and there is collusion between the companies in terms of what is “acceptable” to allow and what is “unacceptable”. So, in actuality, more than 50-75% of what people see online is controlled by these companies. These are massive numbers and they are not trending downward, but upwards.
The only thing that will change things is when their is a major backlash of public opinion against the backwards march against freedom of speech that has taken place in the last few years.
