dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

FTA: "It’s getting harder to distinguish brands from nation-states.

The resemblance is not simply semiotics:

logos (flags), anthems (jingles), taglines (mottoes), mission statements (constitutions), founder stories (official histories), terms and conditions (legal codes)

… structures:

customers (citizens), shareholders (legislators), boards of directors (executives), chairmen (monarchs), CEOs (presidents), and oversight boards (judges)

… or even size, though the comparisons are startling:

Walmart Inc. employs roughly the population of Botswana; Microsoft Corp.’s market cap is greater than Brazil’s GDP; FedEx Corp. has five times more planes than Air India Ltd.

The more substantial resemblance derives from the breadth of brand ambition, and the depth of our brand dependence.

Take the current global chip crisis. Nowadays, ever-increasing tracts of the world economy rely on the pure wafer foundry market, of which 55% is controlled by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Not only does TSMC pick which businesses get the chips they need, and which countries get its new “fab” factories, the company’s leadership has warned nation-states against competitive onshoring, and advised China not to invade:

And

In May 2020, Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google set aside their rivalry to launch an “exposure notification” API, available to official public health bodies via iOS and Android. By September 2021, more than 40 countries (and 25 U.S. states) had plugged into this API — including initially resistant nations like England, Finland, Germany and Norway. Significantly, many of the independent state-led solutions — notably Singapore’s BlueTrace, Israel’s HaMagen and France’s TousAntiCovid — were still obliged to interact with Google and Apple, if only to use their app store protocols to get their technology onto their citizen’s phones."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-03/give-amazon-and-facebook-a-seat-at-the-united-nations