Dave Winer: Occupy Silicon Valley?

There's a world of difference between the massively publicly subsidized, mostly zero sum financial industry and the technology driven entrepreneurship of the Valley. One hedge fund's gains are another hedge fund's losses.* Google and Facebook make money by improving the matching between buyers and sellers. I would argue that thus far, my trade of privacy for useful communication tools has worked wondrously in my favor. Does anyone disagree with that?

Privacy? I absolutely agree that's an issue. If you do too, then do something about it. Create a company that consumers can flee too when/if Facebook et al. overstep their bounds. That's competition. It actually exists in the Valley. After the tech bubble did Uncle Sam bail out the entrepreneurs and VCs? No.

Yet when Wall Street managed to destroy more wealth than they ever created, the taxpayer had to basically insure them against losses (it doesn't matter if the government was made whole afterwards - the value of the insurance itself is an implicit subsidy as well as a moral hazard).

Of course, government subsidies, particularly military subsidies, were crucial to the early development of the Valley, but can anyone argue that we haven't earned rich dividends on those public dollars?

Tech entrepreneurship is much more likely to be a positive sum game than the financial speculation that has enriched the Street and the City.

Many of the biggest problems we face as a society can only be solved by technology entrepreneurship. Information technology is ushering in an era of personalized medicine that holds the promise of finally offering us effective care at reasonable cost. New models of web-based and social learning promise to disrupt the academic status quo and provide a new outlet for smart people to learn skills quickly and efficiently. The Valley has also been at the forefront of investing in energy technologies that will reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

Seriously, what has Wall Street done? What can they do? Is loaning someone money to buy a house really so hard you need a 100 PhD quants figuring out how to do it? Probably not. However, if your goal is to fight a zero sum game in the financial markets with other hedge funds then that brain power comes in handy. But what has society gained in that scenario? Nothing. Instead we've just lost brain power that could have been developing the next disruptive technology.

* This is only true in highly liquid markets. I think the evidence suggests that financial trading is valuable up to a point to create liquidity. I would argue that the US and UK have well exceeded the point where we need to shuffle more brains and talent into Wall Street and the City.

And people don't hate Wall Street because they are rich - the riches are the insult added to the injury. They hate the financial industry because they appeared to have recklessly gambled away our future, and then left the people holding the bag.

I am ambivalent on the topic.