Silicon Valley wants to trick us into thinking capitalism is revolutionary
qz.com
qz.com
This statement is crazy and captures the folly of this article. Silicon Valley is not conservative in any sense of the word. SV is about as radical as you can get without losing touch with reality.
The author seems to think that anything that touches money must be evil. But you can't make much positive impact on the world by sitting around a fire singing kumbaya. Ultimately money has to be part of the equation for the vast majority of worthy causes.
And if you think I'm just one of those greedy capitalists peddling propaganda: I say this as someone who took a 60% pay cut in hopes of ultimately making more impact on the world.
One thing we all can agree it's radical.
Whenever discussing what "SV" wants, we should try to distinguish whether we're talking about the leaders, venture capitalists, prominent opinion-formers etc versus trying to find an average of what the public in that area think. And there's an extreme diversity of views to average over.
(basic income, etc.), it's like Communist propaganda once again
Basic Income is just classical liberalism. Helping people survive who are under privileged within a capitalistic economy while leaving the existing capitalistic economy and power structures largely intact.
Calling basic income communism is just GOP propaganda, not even libertarian propaganda.
:.:.:
Communists see Basic Income as a bourgeoisie hand out necessary to preserve existing class structures of a post scarcity capitalist society. By pacifying the proletariat and ensuring that in the event the bourgeoisie no longer require proletariat labor, they will still be able to exploit them for profit.
But if there is no scarcity or labor, why must there be profit?
Have you seriously ever read Marx as an adult? Not under a teachers supervision? He disagrees with >75% of everything Stalin, and everyone who came after him did. A strong argument can even be made that Leninism is a fundamental diversion from Marxism.
But (assuming you are European) non-Leninist communist literature was banned.
The divergence actually goes back further than Stalin to Lenin and his rather extensive deviations from classical Marxism to come up with a new program that could plausibly be deployed in a society that was itself pre-capitalist without developing mature capitalism on the road to the socialism that Marx saw as the necessary stage between capitalism and the end-state goal of utopian communism. Outside of the utopian ultimate end-state that both strove for in principle, this required complete revision of every part of the Marxist program starting with the preconditions and working through the whole rest of the policy path.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Zg4XgbxYd3k/Ul2WhkOQUiI/AAAAAAAAAI...
We heard it all before, down to every word.
Basic income as an alternative to existing social welfare programs has a substantial amount of support on the right, particularly the libertarian right (and, likewise, a substantial amount of opposition from the left, particularly outside of the small left-libertarian segment, which is actually probably where the most fervent support for BI is), though the more extreme position of "no social support structure at all" is even more popular on the right (both libertarian and not).
BI, IOW, is not a distinctively left-wing position.
> One thing we all can agree it's radical.
There's some support for truly radical (or reactionary) ideas in SV, but overall its not really "radical" except in being a radical break from the establishment orthodoxy of either the left or the right. SV, on the whole, is a weird mix of naivete and pragmatism when it comes to policy preferences, with some leanings (though perhaps not as strong as one would expect from the people making up SV) toward the self-interest of relatively wealthy white men.
Being outside of the SV bubble looking in, this is patently false. These companies make grandiose claims like "we're going to democratize the social web!" and "we're changing the world for good!" when this most often translates to "we're building a website that steals all of its users' personal information and sells it to the highest bidder!"
Silicon Valley is not conservative in any sense of the word.
Yes SV is not GOP conservative. But it is nonetheless right of center. I really think you don't understand that libertarians can be liberal on social issues, while being conservative on social issues. This is still very right of center.
Ultimately money has to be part of the equation
for the vast majority of worthy causes.
And if you think I'm just one of those greedy capitalists peddling propaganda
I say this as someone who took a 60% pay cut
in hopes of ultimately making more impact on the world.
The idea that not being paid what you are worth IS some how heroic is capitalist propaganda. The idea is to make you feel morally superior when being paid less, and guilty when being paid more.
Is creative destruction real and good (most of the time)? Yes. Is your startup selling SGaaS (scuba gear as a service) going to radically impact the disinherited and the poor? No. Is there anything new under the sun?
Still, the criticism of the author is received: More humility from the collective "we" of SV wouldn't hurt.
Gavrilo Princip was just some angsty kid who wanted to fit in with his fellow revolutionaries. He still succeeded at starting a world war.
Every organization is composed mainly of followers, even ones that have recognizably brought progress to our world.
That claim is demonstrably false.
I've known plenty of creative counter-revolutionaries in my time. They're often fascinating people. They're also often given to misplaces rage and nonsensical notions, like marching against the supposed dehumanizing influence of computers.
Granted, I think it's a little twee when folks claim (to use the article's example) that they are 'building the restaurant of the future,' but that's harmless enough.
This isn't true at all. We had capitalism before we had states and regulation.
How are you going to guarantee that your neighbors won't be better-armed than you and rob (if you're lucky) or kill you?
Why would anyone else want to join you in your utopia?
It's easy: like most people who believe that shit, they likely also believe they'll be on the top of the food chain at that point -- just once the big mean government goes away, that is. It's likely the only thing that's kept them from being on top, after all. There is no consideration for the possibility that they will be ruled over or taken advantage of. That's not a credible theory, you see -- because it assumes they're not at the top.
Thus, this possibility you have entertained is actually an impossibility, you see! Checkmate.
> Why would anyone else want to join you in your utopia?
Total, all-encompassing delusion and market worship.
Wikipedia is helpful here:
Plus, if you were in Athens odds were "you" were a slave. So the state's just a bit involved in your (in)ability to start a business in that case.
Then there's Sparta with its requirements of state service and bizarre, heavy-handed property laws. And again, you're probably a slave.
In some cases it might be fine, in others we might end up with http://i.imgur.com/NhebE.jpg
It really depends.
Not every regulation is good -- look at SF's housing and how you can have multiple overlapping regulations that mean that building a building is impossible in some situations -- but in many ways they're better than "free as software" technology.
Edit: Yes, safety features like seat belts were available before they were mandatory, but not everyone would buy them. I would be surprised if car manufacturers marketed the seat belt much even if they offered it.
1: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS?year_high...
"American car manufacturers Nash (in 1949) and Ford (in 1955) offered seat belts as options, while Swedish Saab first introduced seat belts as standard in 1958.[7] After the Saab GT 750 was introduced at the New York Motor Show in 1958 with safety belts fitted as standard, the practice became commonplace.[8]"
"... The world's first seat belt law was put in place in 1970, in the state of Victoria, Australia, making the wearing of a seat belt compulsory for drivers and front-seat passengers. This legislation was enacted after trialing Hemco seatbelts, designed by Desmond Hemphill (1926–2001), in the front seats of police vehicles, lowering the incidence of officer injury and death."
Wikipedia mentions "in 1959, Congress passed legislation requiring all automobiles to comply with certain safety standards." but the writing leaves it unclear to me whether that included mandating seat belts.
The theory that government regulation is mandatory or companies will never do anything healthy requires a consumer base who assigns no regard to their health and safety, which is obviously false. I'm not say it's all market, either; I think a government that watches a free market but does not participate is generally the ideal. But the idea that we wouldn't have standard seat belts if it weren't for government is silly.
In the general case, the government can't mandate things that don't exist yet. They can at least prod things in certain directions with things like CAFE standards, but that's all.
Either that or companies price health-and-safety options out of the price range of some consumers, resulting in a society where we think it's right that anyone under a certain level of income doesn't deserve to be as safe as we are.
At least in the current system, you can't buy things without much the same level of safety as we have - meaning that you can't realistically push their income+benefits any lower without lots of pushback. If we thought that health and safety features were optional... that'd be a lot different.
This sounds bad, but even current society is like this. You can always use more money to be more safe. Car regulations don't change this but they do make cars less affordable.
To some degree, and for some things. In general, spending more on your car isn't going to help much when you get into a crash.
I don't need to research the apple I'm buying at the store. I don't need to look into the company that certified its safety to ensure it's not captured by the very company producing/selling the apple, or that it's not the same company that had huge scandal last year but with a new name (to take the Anarcho-Libertarian idea that private companies would replace government regulators in certifying safety and quality). That huge time/money cost is just gone. Anything in the grocery store will be basically fine. I can just toss it in the cart without a thought. I might gain some benefit from researching the products there, but it will be marginal. I don't have to do that stuff to just probably not die of food poisoning.
Same with car safety and any number of other things. Regulation ensures a baseline under which products will (generally) not drop, making it easier (cheaper) for buyers to spend. It reduces (consumer) overhead and greases wheels.
As a consumer — but it also makes it significantly more difficult to participate as a producer. This is why existing firms are so often pro-regulation: they have the resources to absorb the initial hit and then pass the costs on to consumers, while an upstart has to raise the resources to pay for the hit before having a single customer.
It can be hard to produce food safely, and ensuring food safety often has fixed costs (like buying safety/lab equipment, etc.)
You would think that would be true, but ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/business/energy-environmen...
You're assuming average Joe has any way of knowing wether produced-by-paper seatbelts in car A is any different from vinyl seatbelts in car B without any governed inspecting organ.
> or the medical example, the entire reason pharma can charge that is because of government grants monopolies.
No, the FDA approves things (for good: people don't die from rushed medicine with unseen side effects, and bad: it takes a lot of time and money to market, when people want new treatment now) for a reason. Why the current example has a monopoly is because of corrupt/lobbied regulation, not because the concept of regulation is bad. Don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
Consumer reports?
I save you by knowing how my field works and alerting you/stopping bad practices, and you save me by knowing your field. Then we institutionalize and compartmentalize that to ensure that unlike consumer reports, it's not influenced by market interests (which the US is still brilliant at ruining with lobbying). That is how a community works.
Of course, you can instead pay someone explicitly to look after your interests/safety, to make sure they're not paid by other interests, ie companies wanting to pay as little as possible to sell you as much as possible. The thing is you've now just created a government. If it's not working it's not because of its concept.
Average Joe doesn't spend time figuring out which technology/product is good for him or not because of govt regulation. If not for that, then people would develop a lot more ability to figure these things out. So you can't say that average joe doesn't have a way of knowing something which he today doesn't have any need to know.
Sure, we don't know what average joe would be capable of in such a scenario, but we equally don't know that capitalism would contain itself without regulation. What we however do know because we see it repeatedly is that corporations gladly take any shortcuts possible until they're caught. BP, VW, endless others. You can't be suggesting it would be BETTER without regulation?
Especially since I'm sure there's a "regulation", or three, for that under criminal code.
Those who obey the rules are at the bottom of society and those who break the rules (in clever ways) are at the top.
I think that most of the people at the top are fundamentally evil but they genuinely think of themselves as benevolent.
Companies continue to deliver growth by fostering a culture of hypocrisy and by shielding themselves from unpleasant ideas which would adversely affect their desire to keep growing.
Most companies have negative side effects on society but no one involved wants to admit it (even to themselves).
This is not exclusive to capitalism. It actually goes against the basic idea of a free market.
Companies pretty much all say the same things about themselves, inside of SV or out. It's just whatever happens to be the marketing buzzwords of today.
Capitalism isn't revolutionary. But looking to the corporate world to solve all your social problems might be.
I've never paid more than $10 for a good burger in San Francisco and if you spend a minute of work on it, you won't either.
I wonder though if the burgers the author's parents knew would qualify for the author as "good". Lots of mom and pop diners throwing stuff together in the "rent is cheap" days, and that's still where you'll find the cheap burgers, if you don't mind them leaving off the truffle shavings.
Isn't most of what we hear from SV just typical corporate bro-speak + double espresso?
Dennis Miller once said that 95% of art is shit, 4% shit with an asterisk, but God bless the remaining 1%? That sums up what I see from SV pretty well.
It's not shiny or different - it doesn't have to. As long as it makes X more productive, it will help people in the long-term.