Over the past few years, Apple seems increasingly willing to cooperate with authoritarian governments, uninterested in protecting its own users, and unwilling to actually standup for human rights in broad terms, as often portrayed by its marketing department or direct statements from CEO Tim Cook.
The company is quick to position itself as a prominent human rights advocate in the corporate world, especially regarding issues like user privacy and security. Although, as Ole Begemann has aptly pointed out, this is increasingly disingenuous to the point of deliberately deceiving its customers and the general public. There are even (unconfirmed) reports that the lack of end-to-end encryption that Ole criticizes is actually due to willful coordination and cooperation with the FBI. And like most companies in the industry, Apple employs a highly problematic supply chain, which makes its human rights crusade seem even less authentic.
A good overview of Apple’s and Tim Cook’s incredibly close ties with genocidal, totalitarian regimes, and how the company seems to have zero issues selling out their users as long as they’re not in the west. I guess for Apple and Tim Cook, western lives simply matter more.
Absolutely reasonable questions to Apple IF (!) there are “authoritarian governments” they cooperate with.
But Russia is almost equal democratic as US & more democratic as, for example, GB from point of view inside Russia.
Sure we have to ask Chinese what does they think about democracy in PRC.
And so on.
All we have to rely on basic ethical principles. Put the labels here & there are wrong way.
(Re)read The Ethical Engineer, it’s absolute classic,
https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Engineer-Classic-Literature/dp/1546456422
As problematic as the US’ democracy is, I am unaware of any cases of Trump or Biden or Obama having opposition leaders and others critical of their governments executed, assassinated, or sent to Siberia. This idea of equating Russia to the US is nothing but nonsense from trolls and bots.
How’s Navalny doing?
How Assange, Snowden, Manning or Harrison are doing ?
I will give that Russia is not as bad as before, thanks to lots of oligarchs competing with each other, and giving some breathing room to the public. But still there is a very long way to go.
China on the other hand…
Once you put university professors on forced “re-education” camps for “teaching job skills”, something must be really, really wrong.
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/professors-09182018151339.html
> How’s Navalny doing?
As any criminal.
Corruption is a very serious crime in US too.
Navalny convicted for a few FINANCIAL offenses and violation of probation conditions.
Does CNN/BBC/name your preferred source mentioned that “tiny” detail?
And, please, Navalny is an “opposition leader” only in his wet dreams & NSA/CIA/Soros Fund plans. Here in Russia he has nothing common with both “real” and “nominal” opposition. And does not lead any party/alliance/league or something else.
Civil prison in which Navalny sits located in a region next to Moscow district, in European part of Russia, far far away from Siberia and does not looks like Guantanamo military prison used by American presidents for political opponents.
Oh! Can You please remind me what American president start the war against Yugoslavia (1,700 civilians killed, 400 kids) right in center of Europe? Against Libya (50000-100000 civilians killed, country is ruined)? Against Iraq (750000-1500000 civilians killed, war does not finished yet)?
Well, what problem do You have with Siberia? I was born and lived 50 years in Siberia (until relocate to Black Sea region to be closer to kids). It is very beautiful and comfortable place.
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But Russia is almost equal democratic as US & more democratic as, for example, GB from point of view inside Russia.
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You almost got me, but thank god its 1. april, so it must be a joke
It is not. Russian government uses an old yet very effective propaganda technique relying on people’s flawed perception of trustworthiness.
We know that healthy people, we’ve evolved to deal with, lie rather rarely and for specific reasons. It takes a lot of effort to deceive someone and individuals don’t have an interest in lying about everything.
Organisations are different and sometimes they use that to their advantage – they may be lying almost all the time and still not be judged as much worse than others lying, say, 5% of the time. They have resources for pulling this off and interest in changing perception of large groups of people. When caught, they always try to relativise their actions by pointing out a lie of a much more trustworthy organisation, thus blurring the difference.
It is not easy (it is not natural) but we should treat every information from Russian, Chinese governments, or anyone running large scale propaganda programmes (some corporations and religions come to mind) as false until proven otherwise. This is very different from not trusting everything blindly we are used to.
The same is true for any other government. You should not really trust any info from US government more than from Russian or EU for that matter. They all self-serving. And given the amount of money involved I won’t trust US government the most.
You are falling in the very trap I was writing about. Has US government ever mislead us? Yes. Has Chinese government ever been saying truth? Yes. Does it make them equal? Not at all but we have second thoughts because we are rubbish at perceiving scale.
Now, there is no guarantee that won’t change, and Trump clearly had establishing a propaganda machine high on his agenda. But for the time being comparing USA to China or Russia equals to feeding propaganda machines of the latter countries.
Well…
In some areas it looks like Russia is more democratic than US.
Equal rights for genders, nationalities etc. is 100+ years law in Russia.
Corporations and governments are the same thing. And they are all authoritarian, just in different forms.
Look no further: you think the global response to covid19 is really about health?
There is a fundamental difference though.
You can disassociate with corporations, but you cannot easily do the same with governments.
An employee can resign, a customer can choose an alternative, a town hosting them can vote to shut down corporate offices. Unless they are protected by a government mandate, there are *always* alternatives.
A citizen cannot easily change allegiance to another country without an expensive and emotionally costly move. Even entire populations can be held captive under bad rulers for decades on end, with no way to fix the issue.
sukru,
I agree with you that for profit corporations are not fundamentally the same, but we shouldn’t overstate the case that there are always alternatives with corporations. That isn’t always true, and when it is true it isn’t always helpful, especially when it comes to monopolies and oligopolies.
Alfman,
You are right that monopolies are indeed problematic. However monopoly positions cannot be maintained naturally for long, except…
Except… when they use the monopoly power to alter the playing ground.
Either, by breaking the infrastructure, like Standard Oil purchasing rail roads, and hence forcing competing oil companies to sell their wells (which are otherwise unable to market the products anymore).
Or, by buying politicians to prevent further infrastructure, like cable companies passing laws to ban any competing residential Internet alternatives, even municipal community efforts.
sukru,
I technically agree, but those “Except” scenarios have become kind of dominant. A negative feedback loop is self balancing, like an op-amp circuit. The greater the error, the greater the corrective measure. However a positive feedback loop amplifies the imbalance, making recovery less and less likely. Capitalistic wealth generates a positive feedback loop making it far easier for a billionaire to earn a million dollars than it is for a middle class earner to earn $100k. Over time this leads to gentrification and more and more wealth and power accumulating in the hands of those at the top. And to make things worse, politicians are mostly looking out for the interests of those at the top and their corporations. This bodes poorly for the middle class, and IMHO that’s a shame given that we once had a strong middle class.
Ah sorry, you didn’t deserve this rant of mine, haha.
Alfman,
No worries. A strong middle class would be great for everyone, even to those who are in the upper or lower incomes.
However that requires significant changes from the status quo. And I don’t think the current political climate allows it.
For example the “Nordic” model can work in theory, but that requires
(a) lowering corporate tax rates (!!)
(b) but at the same time increasing personal and capital gain tax rates (!!), and maybe adding a VAT
There are other similar changes where “both” (or many) need to happen at the same time, and doing only one is counter-productive.
Unfortunately I don’t have any practical solutions to the dilemma.
Let’s turn the argument around for a change. Assume that you have a Chinese company (say TikTok) that gives your information to the Chinese government, as required by the Chinese law. The company now expands to the Netherlands, or US (or pick your favorite western democracy). There are two ways of doing it:
1) The company adheres to Dutch laws, since it’s operating in the Kingdom.
2) The company gives information on Dutch citizens to the Chinese government, just like it would with Chinese citizens.
You obviously pick option #1. But by doing that, you impose a double standard for companies. You want Apple not to respect local laws (as malefic as they are) in some non-western country it operates and go by the laws of the originating country. But you want the Chinese companies to respect local laws and ignore the laws of the originating country.
This is not a question about what is right, it’s about imposing western morality on other countries. This was tried all throughout history and it always backfired. They need to choose that kind of morality by themselves, assuming its superiority. You can help them adopt western values by leading by example, and we’re doing quite poorly at this.
Don’t get me wrong, I find those regimes despicable, and I chose not to be involved with them, by the virtue of a western luxury called free choice. But we can’t impose our morality on other countries by force, we can only advocate it by example. If we try it by force, we get Al-Quaeda, ISIS and many other fundamentalist terrorist organizations that (rightfully) accuse us of imperialistic behavior.
There is also a 3rd choice, that the company doesn’t operate in countries that have incompatible legal systems with the originating country. But that is a loose-loose scenario.
Apple is playing a complicated game and it is playing it quite well. Apple is always approaching this as a non-zero sum game, and there are only two kinds of non-zero sum game: loose-loose and win-win. They chose win-win and I personally can’t blame them for their choice. If you choose the loose-loose scenario, the 3rd world dictators are able to better lock their country into submission without access to western technologies and values. If you choose win-win, western values slowly sip through the cracks and eventually the regimes get toppled. This is how the cold war was won. Cuba was under embargo with no access to anything and Cuba is still a people’s republic. Eastern Europe had limited access to western values and eventually it made the voluntary conversion (still some catching up to do, but a lot better). And before you bring China as an example, know this: China is special. It won’t follow any known tracks and nobody can do what China did.
I already pointed out Thom was boasting about his iPhone X only three years ago. The comment got deleted. I guess “consequence culture” is only for those without moderating powers to silence the opposition.
Apple would sell off their European and American customer base, too, if it made them money instead of losing it. If people, including Chinese, keep buying iPhones despite the negative actions by Apple, then what does it matter?
I have not bought an Apple product in years. And if your comment got deleted, it’s most likely because you were being an asshole, because very few websites tolerate the kind of comments we allow.
In any event, “vote with your wallet” is a massive cop-out, and something that you simply cannot expect from mere consumers. There is no way to keep track of and avoid products from troublesome regimes, often exactly because corporations do everything they can to obfuscate their involvement with these regimes. The power here lies with corporations, and they are the ones who can lead to change, not us.
Interesting to read that so many still think Russia is the real big problem, I’d say Apple’s collaboration and conformation within China is a much much bigger issue! Russia is all a bit passé, most of the world sees it as a regime throwing it’s last few rocks in the throws of economic death!
The problem is no matter how bad Russia is, or perceived as bad. It is the country which probably hold more nuclear warheads than all the rest combined. Fragmenting such country is risk of leaving these arsenals in the hands of unstable governments which would be just calling for nuclear war.
For that matter it is ridiculous that some people in EU keep planning how they can attack some Russia territory and like Russian army would not be able to do anything. They just obviously miss the point that any large scale conflict with Russian Federation would trigger nuclear war.
I agree, but not because Russia’s economy is on the rocks, rather because China is doing a much better job controlling popular resistance.
The US government is complicit because of its overwhelming support of unbridled corporations (Apple gets to do what it wants) and politically / financially biased media. (Apple gets to say what it wants). Mainstream is mostly biased towards Democrats whereas Social Media is a strong hold of Republicanism. The truth is left as an exercise for the reader.