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Re: Tech Oligarchs Worse Than Robber Barons?
It took me a bit of time to find this old thread. Here's a current story in Bloomberg related to this subject:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...asses-this-law
Originally posted by dcarrigg
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Reminds me of reggie. I never did quite grasp exactly what he was on about. But then again I never quite fully grokked all that Mandelbrot stuff either.
To me, the motivation seems simple: use tech as an excuse to violate labor laws, local ordinances, roll back labor standards like overtime and workweeks and minimum wage, and even employee status, find ways to leverage millions of people's capital to make you billions in the process--create a new monopoly with you as the middle man controlling the sole brand identity and acting like a new tollbooth in the flow of goods and services via re-routing systems operations through new software. That middle part is very important. No longer can customer pay the worker then the worker pays the owner. The customer must always pay the owner directly now--and the owner decides what, if any, cut goes back to the worker. Even the tip. You need total control over the capital at all times. In fact, if you can hold onto it for a month, you can probably gamble around with the float, which is half the fun.
That's the big difference between uber and taxis. One obeys the law, the other violates it. One seeks to destroy labor law and re-write, the other seeks to obey it. One seeks to employ business capital to provide a service, the other seeks to employ workers' personal capital to shift the depreciation costs. One lets employees touch the money and earn tips, the other doesn't. One has set rates, the other is sky's-the-limit.
But all their stuff works that way. It's just reconfiguring the system somehow.
Facebook is just a new newspaper with less useful information and better targeted advertising. And just like a newspaper, the readers' eyes are the product and the advertisers are the customers and any money you ever get from membership or readership is meaningless and incidental. People can just make up their own stories or re-post crap or whatever. The content is not the point. Never was. The habit is the point, just like it was with the paper. How many eyeballs you got to sell? What's the maximum you can sell them for? How many experiments can we perform on them? Don't worry. Tinder's worse.
And I get all this stuff, right? I mean, it makes perfect sense. The goal is simple. Take everything you can from average jane and joe. Take all their money. Take all their time. Take all their rights. Take all their habits. Take every last bit you can and convert it to wealth for yourself.
That's easy.
That's just "More for me and less for everyone else!"
I get that.
Makes sense.
Hell, even in a positive sum game, you can have a single winner and a whole bunch of losers. Just play Monopoly sometime to see what I mean...
But some of that social control stuff is a bit harder to wrap one's head around. At least for me. Others here seem to be more deeply versed in it.
I know few agree, but the whole thing still feels like a paper moon to me. Like any day we're gonna wake up like it's 1999 and realize that barkbox is the new pets.com and the whole thing is a sham and almost none of even the unicorns have posted a single quarter's profit in a generation and all their stocks will tumble and fall.
But as long as people keep believing and clapping, Tinkerbell can live forever.
And Keynes was right about the market and how long that sucker can stay irrational...
To me, the motivation seems simple: use tech as an excuse to violate labor laws, local ordinances, roll back labor standards like overtime and workweeks and minimum wage, and even employee status, find ways to leverage millions of people's capital to make you billions in the process--create a new monopoly with you as the middle man controlling the sole brand identity and acting like a new tollbooth in the flow of goods and services via re-routing systems operations through new software. That middle part is very important. No longer can customer pay the worker then the worker pays the owner. The customer must always pay the owner directly now--and the owner decides what, if any, cut goes back to the worker. Even the tip. You need total control over the capital at all times. In fact, if you can hold onto it for a month, you can probably gamble around with the float, which is half the fun.
That's the big difference between uber and taxis. One obeys the law, the other violates it. One seeks to destroy labor law and re-write, the other seeks to obey it. One seeks to employ business capital to provide a service, the other seeks to employ workers' personal capital to shift the depreciation costs. One lets employees touch the money and earn tips, the other doesn't. One has set rates, the other is sky's-the-limit.
But all their stuff works that way. It's just reconfiguring the system somehow.
Facebook is just a new newspaper with less useful information and better targeted advertising. And just like a newspaper, the readers' eyes are the product and the advertisers are the customers and any money you ever get from membership or readership is meaningless and incidental. People can just make up their own stories or re-post crap or whatever. The content is not the point. Never was. The habit is the point, just like it was with the paper. How many eyeballs you got to sell? What's the maximum you can sell them for? How many experiments can we perform on them? Don't worry. Tinder's worse.
And I get all this stuff, right? I mean, it makes perfect sense. The goal is simple. Take everything you can from average jane and joe. Take all their money. Take all their time. Take all their rights. Take all their habits. Take every last bit you can and convert it to wealth for yourself.
That's easy.
That's just "More for me and less for everyone else!"
I get that.
Makes sense.
Hell, even in a positive sum game, you can have a single winner and a whole bunch of losers. Just play Monopoly sometime to see what I mean...
But some of that social control stuff is a bit harder to wrap one's head around. At least for me. Others here seem to be more deeply versed in it.
I know few agree, but the whole thing still feels like a paper moon to me. Like any day we're gonna wake up like it's 1999 and realize that barkbox is the new pets.com and the whole thing is a sham and almost none of even the unicorns have posted a single quarter's profit in a generation and all their stocks will tumble and fall.
But as long as people keep believing and clapping, Tinkerbell can live forever.
And Keynes was right about the market and how long that sucker can stay irrational...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...asses-this-law
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