Videos such as this must kick off a few trains of thought, but to my mind one of them is the long-term trend towards the compulsory consumption of more and more government services. Maybe that should read “services”, but we could call it the BBC Effect.
Governments cannot hope to compete with the likes of Amazon in their service delivery so the choice is stark. Pull back government to its bare, deliverable essentials or make the consumption of government services effectively compulsory via a vast, pervasive network of patronage and dependency.
The BBC already has what may be a terminal problem now that everything it does is done better elsewhere. The UK government has similar problems with everything it does too. It is not only the NHS and and the coronavirus debacle.
In other words, totalitarian government may be an inevitable response to the scary levels of efficiency we see from free enterprise behemoths such as Amazon. If government services are not good enough, make them compulsory or very difficult to escape.
4 comments:
Ah... but what about Britbox? Once BBC and ITV have pulled their shows from Netflix, I will have to sign up to that.
It's difficult to see how governments will manage to keep control of anything, as it will become increasingly difficult to prevent extra-national organisations from taking over what they do. I suppose the only thing they can do is to tax us for the plot of land we inhabit, or the time racked up within UK borders.
If I'm employed by a big multinational company, invest my money privately, consume via outlets such as Amazon, and pay privately to educate my children and to get protection of my property and person, what can the government do about it?
If the ongoing revolution continues to generate jobs (at the moment, somebody is designing and building those robots...) then that's a likely scenario. A different set of problems will arise if we have a massive class of superfluous people who are left behind and who require Universal Basic Income. Then the main issue will be how governments extract the money to keep us all as happy unemployed peaceful sports consumers. Presumably the multinationals and other wealth-creators will require a large stable population of consumers, so deals will need to be done...
The BBC Effect? The Anti Midas Touch.
No, unfair.
A lot of Radio 3 and Bells On Sunday are the exceptiohs.
And I am not a reboot.Hurrah.
Mark - I don't think the BBC knows if BritBox is the rock or the hard place.
Sam - that massive class of superfluous people seems to be building up already. I'm sure many middle class people see a world where they need to be a significant actor within the tentacles of government or a capable cog in a big big multinational. That "large stable population of consumers" is the interesting one though.
Doonhamer - not that unfair surely.
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