Gods talking past each other

I’ve been analyzing the recent GAFA hearing in Congress (Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 6: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google), hoping to find evidence for my theory that one can treat technologies and other social forces mythologically.

Having just finished Euripides' Hippolytus, it struck me that the Members treated the companies as godlike, in the sense that they're simply a given. Politicians on both sides railed against their abuse of power, but nobody questioned that power.  It also feels a little like the committee is like the chorus in a classic Greek play: an impotent commenter on events. Cf. this footnote about the Hippolytus in Richard Rutherford’s introduction to Penguin’s Medea and Other Plays:

36. What shall we do, friends?: the chorus of a tragedy is regularly shown as indecisive and inadequate in a crisis: compare Medea 1275, and note 25. Often, as in this play, they are ordinary people, who witness but cannot influence the behaviour of their superiors or masters.

Petri Mähönen confirmed to me that noted political leaders in Europe, like the European Commission and UK Parliamentary committees, also treat the big technology companies almost as forces of the nature, i.e. in mythical terms, like the gods. He floated the proposition that the politicians do not seem to realize that even if technologies were gods, they are at the best Olympian gods, and they are bound by their fates. Even gods can die – especially in the Norse view. It is the lot of everything to finally disappear.

Thinking about the Congressional hearing, one would have to say that if these were the voices of the state, it has multiple personality disorder: the Democrats and Republicans were talking about almost entirely different things. In a liberal democracy, hopefully, all the voices are heard. In a more repressive state, some voices are suppressed and not publicly expressed – until they suddenly burst into the open.

It’s harder to ascribe a personality to Big Tech, though in these hearings they could be seen as being passive aggressive. Certainly keeping a poker face, but I believe hiding their true opinions.

Working through the House GAFA hearing was like listening to various god-mouthpieces talking past each other. The individuals in the hearing were not, themselves, the state or the companies. This is on the Hobbesian assumption that the state (and a company likewise) is a fictitious entity created by the collective’s appointment of a sovereign. (Cf. David Runciman’s discussion of state (abstraction) vs. government (people) in his Q&A episode at the end of https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/history-of-ideas, and the lecture by Quentin Skinner he cites.) The entities – the state, companies – are entailed by the existence of individuals, and persist even though they change, though with Zuckerberg- and Bezos-levels of control you’re getting close to l’état, c’est moi. The conversation between the state and the corporations must thus take place at a meta/mythical level that individual humans can’t hear, any more than a brain cell can hear a sound. Each of the Members is one melodic line in the chorus/fugue that is the god speaking.