Nailed it.
But note that the quote does call it out as a myth.
It gained popularity in corporate governance since then but it’s not a legal requirement it’s a shareholder preference. But that preference is violated all the time.
People often cite a 1919 era case from Henry ford because it has a pithy statement but the court in that case explicitly upheld many of the decisions Ford made that violated the principle.
That is, there is no law or precedent that requires corporate officers to only consider shareholders.
But when stock valuations are completely disconnected from fundamentals like earnings, then regardless of the legality we're kind of circling back to the market pushing that dynamic, aren't we? It's like the market is no longer even optimizing for short term gains per se (eg quarterly earnings), but rather for whatever memes might boost their meme stock. Sometimes this is [still] quarterly earnings, and sometimes it's about the perceived size of the market or how they're cozying up to the fascists in power. So for public companies, it's not like major shareholders, the board, or management really have the ability to work towards longer term plans that go against this dynamic.
Yes, Thiel openly says surveillance tech is the anti-Christ. Then, he goes on to build the tech.
The frustrating thing is seeing it happen in real-time and knowing you can't inform or educate enough people.
It became clear to me quickly that the data these people wanted to collect on anyone and everyone could be used against me should they want to - not that I was doing anything questionable, but it was just creepy as F**.
The final straw for me was when they got some kind of contract with a major hotel chain and were all-too-giddy to listen in on the smart TVs in every room. I did not want to help them further any of their agendas, so I bailed on that place. Fortunately this was many years ago when dev jobs were easy to come by, I had 3 offers in a week.
"Fascism is characterized by support for a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy."
Source: Wikipedia(Emphasis mine)
I think online at least, this has become fairly normal for many of the most charged words/accusations/charges.
The problem with doing this, of course, is that when the word is needed for something it actually represents, you run the risk of people thinking you're talking about something mundane.
Wrong. You can read Umberto Eco's essay "Ur-Fascism" to have a more informed view.
It's available from its original publisher the New York Review of Books: <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/>
If paywalled, also at The Anarchist Library: <https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...>.
Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Facism explores the concept in more detail, at book length. Those looking for a specific definition might prefer to skip forward to Chapter 8, "What Is Fascism?"
<https://files.libcom.org/files/Robert%20O.%20Paxton-The%20An...>
I have seen many arguments supporting the destructionists (aka trumpists) from that exact vein. From the longstanding abstract "immigrants come here and sit on welfare" and "we need to take care of our own" to specifically supporting the recent pogroms as necessary before we can do things like fix healthcare or restore employees' negotiating power. So even by your definition, it seems eminently reasonable to describe the destructionist movement as fascist. And the point isn't to use the label, drop the mic, and consider the topic solved. But rather it's to have a basic dialogue so that we can discuss constructive solutions for opposing it - and that's basically how it's being used in the original post, regardless of your tone policing.
(On the idea itself, I'd say it's preposterous to think that the corpos that drive our politics are going to suddenly switch to supporting socialism if only we racially purify our society, but there are unfortunately a lot of true believers. I'd say the dynamic is more like the only point of the socialist aspect is to assuage people's consciences for having rejected their empathy here and now)
Policymakers supposedly work for us/the people and they could have made surveillance ad tech expensive and thereby severely limited it, but
> "Policymakers failed us because cops and spies hate privacy laws and lobby like hell against them. Cops and spies love commercial surveillance, because the private sector's massive surveillance dossiers are an off-the-books trove of warrantless surveillance data that the government can't legally collect."
Let religious voices like Doctorow indicate places where we may examine policy and why we should be interested to look there, but sermons aren't vehicles to carry meaningful analysis.
Sermons must have a righteous tone and term "fascist", used correctly by Doctorow, has a long-standing colloquial connotation of teutonic allegiances during WW2, which emotionally overloads his diatribe.
Yet, he's correct to invoke it, even as his rhetoric is misplaced for audiences whose forbearers were sacrificed to the trauma of WW2, and whose generational scar tissues suppress remembrance that the patterns of evil which exploded across the Axis did emerge within our sacred bastions of liberty and freedom, and that these evils are fomenting again right now.
So I appreciate Doctorow's polemics even as I too regard the details of his claims with skepticism.
It has become acceptable to misuse words, like "fascist" or "communist" in political contexts, to the detriment of rational and fruitful discourse. Often a false equivalence is drawn between denying something is "fascist" or "communist" and denying something is bad. This is false. Something can be bad without being fascist or communist.
There is plenty to be critical about in American politics and in tech, but calling everything you don't like "fascist" or "communist" isn't helpful. These seem to be go-to words used by those "defending" what is now a crumbling postwar liberal democratic order, i.e., anything that seems at odds with this order is reflexively called one of these two terms, depending on which faction of the American uniparty you align with.
Please explain how the trumpist movement significantly differs from most points of Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism. Because in my estimation, the word is entirely appropriate for what we're facing and people are shouting it down because they don't like the uncomfortable truth.
I'm open to changing my mind, especially if there is a better term that more accurately describes what we're facing. Because the dynamic isn't merely "crumbling postwar liberal democratic order", but rather a particular overly-simplistic reaction to that crumbling.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
[1]: https://lobste.rs/
Job postings, Show HN, and other ads on HN are contextually relevant to a majority of the users and require no tracking to present.
This post appears to be about the former, not the later.