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How to Fix Big Tech? We Need the Right Language to Describe it, First | The Guardian

Marc DaCosta argues that, in order to deal with new challenges presented by the tech industry, it is important to generate new rhetorical devices for what it is about tech that might bother us. He claims that the right side of the political spectrum deploys such devices with more significant impact than the left.

A growing number of thinktanks, regulators and journalists are grappling with the question of how to best regulate big tech. But we won’t fix it with better public policy alone. We also need better language. We need new metaphors, new discourse, a new set of symbols to illustrate how these companies are rewiring our world, and how we as a democracy can respond.

Tech companies themselves are very aware of the importance of language. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying and PR to preserve control of the narrative.

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The ground on which politics happens has changed — yet our political language has not kept up. We lack a common public vocabulary to express our anxieties and to clearly name what has changed about how we communicate and receive our information about the world.

Source: How to Fix Big Tech? We Need the Right Language to Describe it, First The Guardian