What I meant by that was that many tech companies hire people, who frequently perform these tasks on a project basis for only short periods of time, and pay them a pittance for their work. Their numbers are likely to fluctuate greatly.

I was by no means trying to emphasise the fact that these people mostly live in countries where wages are particularly low and where there are virtually no labor protections; I was simply pointing out that they are usually hired on a short-term basis.

This exploitative practice, as well as other “gig-work” arrangements, is unfortunately quite widespread, especially in the tech industry, and serves to increase corporate profitability. Many tech companies use this approach to reduce the number of permanent employees—a practice that, of course, isn’t unique to the tech industry—but using these practices there are many tech companies that generate astronomical revenues with a comparatively small workforce.

Mechanical Turk

I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Of course tech companies have a lot of employees if you count all the “mechanical turks”. That’s simply misleading.

None of that has much to do with what my original comment was about.

You’re saying that it’s impossible for powerful, completely degenerate people to be capable of playing their power games.

My take on this is that a look at the history books proves you wrong. LinkedIn-style fairy tales about leadership and all that bogus doesn’t change much about that.

Because they have the money to do so. Those who have it simply pay good people. You should know this if you’ve ever dealt with large companies. It doesn’t take good management—just the money to pay the people who do the work. You should also know that giant online corporations like Meta have an incredibly small number of employees compared to industrial companies, and labor is the biggest cost factor in any business.

What do you actually do for a living? You claim to have insights. Where did you get them?

I’d be an idiot to say here what I do for a living, but yes, I regularly deal with CEOs -and it’s precisely this experience that makes it all the more likely to me that a conspiracy like the one mentioned above is underway. While I’m nowhere near that level, I’m still quite familiar with the politics in companies with 500 or more employees. For me, this is all the more reason to entertain such thoughts, because I know of hardly any company where performance or competence is even remotely appreciated. The people I know as “the decision-makers” should actually be the very last ones to make decisions—they’re self-absorbed, unscrupulous people.

This is a conspiracy theory, but is it really so far-fetched to assume that the most powerful 1% of the populations are joining forces worldwide to establish something like a global feudal regime?

It’s entirely feasible, since we’re talking about just a few thousand people here.

In any case, these people have one thing in common: they view democracy as a problem. This applies to Trump just as much as it does to Putin and Jinping. The same goes for their henchmen, such as Merz in Germany, for example.

It’s not that unthinkable when you consider the fundamental idea behind fascism, as shaped by Mussolini in his day: a brotherhood of the elites striving for absolute rule.

It seems to me that this is now the agenda, especially since in the U.S., with the pseudo-intellectual concept of “Dark Enlightenment,” there doesn’t even seem to be any attempt to hide it.

I’m not usually a fan of such ideas, but it does seem very, very suspicious to me, given that the leaders of the world’s most powerful countries are apparently doing everything in their power to undo the civilizational progress of the last hundred years—and are clearly doing so in a fairly well-coordinated manner.

Nor is the fact mentioned that most prisons in the U.S. are run by and as for-profit private companies.

That is why so many people are incarcerated in the U.S., and unpaid slave labor is part of this multibillion-dollar business.

It is a business that, for entirely obvious reasons, no other democracy in the world allows in this absurd form—only the U.S., the “Land of the Free.”