Create a Crisis, Capture a Unicorn | Hacker News Reader

Create a Crisis, Capture a Unicorn

nytimes.com

30 pointshoward9417 comments

This is funny, but I'm not sure what the actual point is.

He has a business model[1] that sounds valid, and the reason he cannot implement is because his partner is "burdened with a sense of ethics and even a conscience". Not hard to imagine that there are other people out there who are not burdened with that.

Another aspect might be that there are ways to benefit from stirring up crises without solving them (like ad-financed social media and news sites).

[1] Concocting crises in order to get paid for solving them. Like the Charlie Chaplin scene where the kid gets paid by the window repair guy to break windows.

>Another aspect might be that there are ways to benefit from stirring up crises without solving them (like ad-financed social media and news sites)...

This has become laughably transparent recently. With lots of people out saying that we need to stop the data privacy violations of social media/news sites by "breaking them up", while almost none of the people advocating breakups want to simply make it illegal to share user data for commercial purposes. It didn't occur to me until you mentioned it that, of course! You know? I mean they probably want to be able to have one of those little companies and share your data to make money.

I really should have figured that out before.

This is such a frustrating article because the kernel of the idea is _really_ interesting. It reads like the writer jumbled up a bunch of recent events into a column and called it a day.

There are real-life examples of this phenomenon. The best I can think of is the 'Children Overboard' scandal in Aus [0] that fabricated an 'illegal immigration crisis' that only they could solve. Thus changing the political landscape around refugees for decades

[0] Prepare to be depressed : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_Overboard_affair

This is not funny, but I’m not sure what the actual point is.

That was my thought as well.

I mean this is a valid short strategy so...

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