Autoenshittification. How the computer killed capitalism. – by Cory Doctorow
doctorow.medium.com
doctorow.medium.com
"Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread!"
You'll be denied.. but you can request it.
Like I _can_ install my banks app on my rooted phone. It won't run but I can install it.
I think the customer has just changed. Consumers don't have money anymore. Businesses do. Maybe said a different way, for the highest margin products you are targeting businesses.
A consumer spending 100k is a often a lifetime purchase. A business spending that may just be so they can improve efficiency by 5% or hang onto onto their budget next year.
Your competition are large companies taking small amounts of value from a huge number of customers. Consumers have gotten used to "not paying" (e.g. paying through ad views) and, for that reason, a more traditional exchange has become difficult.
This problem seems to be that consumer companies are moving toward an extraction at scale model. It is less market choice but often produces a free or subsidized product.
A lot of companies are going down the “captive customer” path wherever they can. Rental properties are a good example of this.
Nowadays, there are a handful of compulsory services that you, the renter, must pay for on top the rent and there are no options to cancel (the federal government is currently targeting this practice).
I worked for a startup in the media space that did the exact same thing. As soon as we figured out that we could pitch our product to media properties while onboarding their advertisers and forcing them to become our paying users instead of the media companies themselves, we found product-market fit and took off.
Off the top of my head:
- cable TV I don't use
- a trash retrieval service my friends don't use (the service is to take it from the apartment door to the dumpster)
- parking space someone without a car doesn't use
Good to know I might be able to tell my landlord someday that I don't care about the deal they got with Comcast, I'm not paying for the stupid cable.
The garbage collection service cut a deal with the landlord to pay them $X/mo./unit, and helpfully suggested adding it to the lease so they have a 100% subscription rate.
The landlord is the customer, not you.
- Can't have more than one trash bag per night
- Trash and recycling must be taken on different nights (I think largely as a result of the above)
- they don't service Friday or Saturday, the two biggest days for trash during the week. This means trash is often sitting outside for 24-48 hours because the complex doesn't have any rules around how long your trash can be set out for.
- Trash can't be too heavy or bulky. These things are not quantified, so sometimes the trash just isn't taken and you have no idea why
- You must use 13 gallon trash bags or larger. They won't pickup smaller ones (no idea why this exists)
- You must use their exceedingly small bin or they won't pick it up. The bin has no lid. If the trash doesn't slide out of the bin naturally, they will refuse to pick it up (IE, they won't tip it to empty it. If it pulls at all they just leave it)
On top of all that, they constantly leave fliers on our doors trying to sell trash bag subscription service through the company. I looked it up out of curiosity and they want $17 a month for the privilege
...You...recognize that's not a sustainable state of affairs, right?
Ultimately, if consumers don't have money, the economy will start to collapse. The upper echelons can feed on each other for a while, but you need an economic base to support the whole edifice.
Plus, if "consumers" are unable to get what they need for survival and thriving for long enough, they're going to decide (correctly) that someone has taken it from them, and take steps to get it back by whatever means necessary.
> Plus, if "consumers" are unable to get what they need for survival and thriving for long enough, they're going to decide (correctly) that someone has taken it from them, and take steps to get it back by whatever means necessary.
They'd better do it fast before rich people figure out that robot dogs with lethal weapons and AI vision are a great replacement for human guards that might have the downside of having any empathy. As soon as defense of property rights is fully automated, revolution is impossible.
All entities run out of deployable assets eventually.
A lot of this could be a zero interest rate phenomenon.
They will take on debt in lieu of money. And all signs point to lots of that happening, since spending is still high.
Anti-trust enforcement. Each and every big-name company you can name needs to be broken up into at least 30 different business entities. The current FTC is taking the first steps in the right direction, but it's going to take a lot of time & effort to build that department back up after 30+ years of them being inactive.
- reversal of Citizens United
- higher taxes on extremely rich businesses and individuals
All these things would help, but they are also government actions, which have been captured by business interests.
there is a lot of history as to how this was done before.
The more inequality grows, the poorer average man becomes, the more this becomes true.
The more everything is enshittified, the harder it becomes to hold on to your money. It's a vicious circle.
That's seems like a fact-free assertion. Both (inflation adjusted) disposable income and actual consumption spending for US households have grown at a steady rate since WWII. The only substantial deviation from trend (upwards for income, downward for consumption) were 2 yeas of COVID.
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6rtoh4/produc...
The game online for a very long time has been: grow as fast as possible, then figure out a way to monetize. Free wins in this game, making it almost impossible for anything paid for by the consumer to compete.
So thus we have today's world where the game is: grow fast with free, then enshittify once your network effect has locked everyone in.
It works incredibly well.
It may be less ironic than it seems. If there is anyone impervious to the concept of enshittification it would have to be the paid Mediumm subscriber, they need to get this message more than anyone.
He has a rundown of the various ways to access his content at the bottom:
> How to get Pluralistic:
> Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
> Pluralistic.net
> Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
> https://pluralistic.net/plura-list
> Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
> https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic
> Medium (no ads, paywalled):
> https://doctorow.medium.com/
(Latest Medium column: "When the Town Square Shatters: Once again, sf fandom shows us how to use the internet" https://doctorow.medium.com/when-the-town-square-shatters-a7...)
> Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):
> https://twitter.com/doctorow
> Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):
> https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralisti...
To the point of the commenter, you can't read that as it's blocked. A better approach is to change the link to this HN post.
I did register (free), and am now paywalled to upgrade to read almost anything on there - it would be ok if it was just 'paid content' where the authors are getting paid, but it seems to be way beyond that.
The taxi permits also fit to some extent, though the one time payment isn't exactly rent seeking but more for creating artificial scarcity. They're BabyTaxiShibaCoins from the 60s with about as much price fluctuation as the average crypto shitcoin according to wikipedia.
This is a worthwhile talking point. There was nothing holding back taxi companies from building an uber-like experience, just there was no incentive to do so.
Uber took advantage of that opportunity to spin up an exploitative business that did an end-run around existing regulation of that industry.
All that said - many cab companies now have uber-like apps.
I don't feel bad for the cab companies particularly; there's too many damn cars in big cities. That's a city planning problem. I do feel sorry for all the drivers out there, as it's a tough gig no matter who you're working for.
I don't have a full essay on the subject, but I have a gut feeling that the informalization of society has relieved a ton of useless costs on people. Spending money on cultural imperatives like going to church, wearing a tie to the office, wearing diamonds to look prosperous are no longer mandatory in much of the first world.
Wow. Love this.
I didn't follow the links. I generally like Cory Doctorow but this was just a huge doom rant.
Everythings' terrible. Got it.
Now how do I participate in fixing it?
* Not 'cromulent'
But it's profane.
I wish I could remember where I heard this quote:
"We find two things to always happen in human societies across time and geography:
1. People dancing to rhythmic music at night especially if it is a moonlit night.
2. Some form of feudalism."
I wonder how much of it is game theory (e.g. all companies want to become monopolies) and how much is human psychology (e.g. "I want to be the alpha monkey"). Probably some combination of both.
We tend to judge the whole feudalism by its late stage, when pampered barons lived in huge estates and their only real risk was eating and drinking themselves to death, but that was also the stage which led to the system's demise.
So they did "cloud farming" :) The people who had access to wider markets and had enough wealth to be able to survive one bad season - provided the infrastructure and shouldered most of the risks. In exchange for the only thing available to peasants - their labor.
As any power hierarchy it quickly turned to shit, but the idea was sound.
One way i've been thinking of this is crowd sourced alternatives to major apps but the problem with this is the backends. Lets say you make a anti-enshittified youtube client. Well youtube is just gonna change their backend to break the app. Well now you gotta have crowdsourced efforts to constantly reverse engineer their backend.
This to me is what is really happening. A good symbol of this is income inequality and to a lesser extent, no real action on climate change.
Eventually, the "lords" will be in their castles were we most people bake. The "knights" could be the tech people.
Unfortunately the lords think they will be able to survive in little mansions and that climate change will never make them miserable personally. So they have spent small amounts of capital brainwashing rubes against taking any action so they can continue raking in large amounts of capital with destructive practices.
That way "upper management" has been turning workers against themselves for ages; just convince the more lucky of them that they are entitled and destined to be part of the elite. Someday.
It's working splendidly.
In it the Knights were the devs, CEOs were earls, Kings were presidents/dictators.
Users (naturally) were serfs.
It fits pretty well to current megacorp structure.
It is MOLOCH. We keep re-summoning MOLOCH.
- Sign up with Google
- Sign up with Facebook
- Sign up with email "
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-de...
Incidentally I follow him on Mastodon and saw this yesterday. Hacker News is really slow to pick up Cory Doctorow's stuff despite ostensibly being full of freedom-loving techies.
Doctorow's egalitarian, syndicalist and somewhat socialist tendencies don't usually play well with that crowd.
I'm going to continue shouting into the void until the void realizes that independent and distributed ownership is a necessary precondition for libertarian forms of governance. Authoritarianism and monopolies go hand in hand. If you don't understand this, then you aren't a freedom fighter, you're an antipope.
Seems rather silly to think we have to be discussing a new opinion piece, that is not tied to any particular recent event, as soon as it comes out.
> ostensibly
this is a tech news site in an incubator. they're not here for freedom, they're here to make $$$.
a non-trivial number of posters here are, or wish to be, the people that Doctorow is criticizing.
For a while he was trending towards clickbaity articles.
To the extent that cars did get worse, it was mostly to meet stringent emissions regulations, not computers or capitalism. So yeah, maybe worse for owners but better for people around them.
Sadly, it seems like capitalism, yet again, delivered what people really wanted, whether it's shitty toy cars or algorithmic Tik Tok feed. It held a mirror to the society and we don't like what we're seeing.
That mirror is heavily influencing the way we behave.
And we really, really don't like some of the things that some people want.
There was a recent story about how people do not like the touchscreens and tech in their cars.
https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-...
Personally I'm not a fan of most of the recent car tech, it's often trying too hard and not making things any easier for people.
I would love a car that does not have a single display and just connects to my phone or pad for setting things up and streaming audio. All controls should be haptic buttons, switches, whatever. Minimal software required to run the car. No internet connection, no subscriptions.
The only extras that I would keep are:
* Heated seats
* Automatic air conditioning
* Hill hold control
* Automatic transmission (not standard in Europe)
That’s it.
The creation of the "CANbus", two-wire protocol that wraps around the car to communicate, and the movement of all portions of the car to the CANbus, is what has lead to incredible reliability.
It turns out that these two wires can be made incredibly reliable, and that communications across it (steering wheel, accelerator, brakes, tire pressure, speeds, A/C, etc. etc.) just makes sense.
--------------
All those haptic buttons are "just" CANbus interfaces in practice. Now don't get me wrong, I prefer buttons too. But the next leg of "cheapness" naturally was to shift to an iPad-like capacitive screen, since one-tablet connected to the CANbus is far cheaper (and more reliable) than 20 individual buttons (each of which has a set life and dies on their own).
That being said: physical buttons are clearly more intuitive than an iPad-like floating-moving button that is inconsistent and stateful.
Not to mention the various privacy and security risks involved with permanent connectivity, escalating software complexity and questionable ownership of the devices built into the car.
I think they’re all galvanized now. Some parts still rust, but having had some 80s vehicles rust out… plus they always tried to sell some “undercoating” to protect that was snake oil as far as I can tell.
Also has all the features you mentioned.
You need a big screen for cameras and such, because visibility in a lot of modern cars is about the same as the driver's seat in a Sherman tank. Unfortunately.
Malibu vs Bel Air crash test.
You better believe that modern cars are better, its incredible how _BAD_ cars were before we cared about safety.
And that's just safety. Today's cars have better MPG, go faster, have more power, easier to maintain, consistently hit 150,000 miles, etc. etc.
Monkey wrenches, kitchen aids, washing machines. Even static tools like frying pans, screw drivers. You name it.
But not cars.
> Cars are heavily regulated
I love that both of these statements, while reflecting opposing ends of political philosophy, are entirely true.
After Ralph Nader published Unsafe at any Speed, the car industry set their goons after him. Blurb from Wikipedia
> In response to Nader's criticisms, GM attempted to sabotage Nader's reputation. It "(1) conducted a series of interviews with acquaintances of the plaintiff, 'questioning them about, and casting aspersions upon [his] political, social, racial and religious views; his integrity; his sexual proclivities and inclinations; and his personal habits'; (2) kept him under surveillance in public places for an unreasonable length of time; (3) caused him to be accosted by girls for the purpose of entrapping him into illicit relationships; (4) made threatening, harassing and obnoxious telephone calls to him; (5) tapped his telephone and eavesdropped, by means of mechanical and electronic equipment, on his private conversations with others; and (6) conducted a 'continuing' and harassing investigation of him."[12]
Bel Air? 1955? We can go well into the 90's with many cars which were little more than sheet metal shells on a frame. My oldest friend was killed in his '89 Nissan sentra after he was hit from behind by a wreckless driver sending the little tin foil box into a pole and tree shredding it into a pile of scrap metal along with him.
> consistently hit 150,000 miles
Tell that to Merc 300D's. But aside from anomalies drive-line reliability greatly improved int he 90's after we ditched carbs and early fuel injection. My 1995 tahoe had 175k on the clock when sold and only needed a transfer case rebuild after my mother shifted it while moving (broke the fork and was stuck in 4hi). After the awful demise of my friend I sold my '96 civic (4th owner) with over 300k on the odo, it broke at 300 and I believe it was around 350-360 when I sold it. My 2004 Jeep Libery made it to 220k before it started falling apart and sold it to a guy who ran it for another few years (the 3.7 v6 in them were crap too).
> easier to maintain, consistently hit 150,000 miles, etc. etc.
Back in March my friend woke up to find that his less than 2 month old 2023 Kia Sportage hybrid stone dead in his driveway. Dealer dropped off a 15 year old loaner and took 40 days to find and fix the problem. They told him it was a "bad wiring harness". Super easy maintenance, eh?
> go faster, have more power,
The amount of morons who think they are the king of the road has massively increased thanks to COVID and the last thing we need is to empower these morons with faster piles of metal.
I'm going to have to strongly disagree here, particularly w/r/t reliability.
We purchased my wife's vehicle new in 2014. While it's relatively well-regarded and we're happy with it overall, it's been far from trouble-free. We recently replaced the engine due to a well-known mechanic defect - but it was a defect that should have been apparent much earlier than it was, but went unnoticed because of a firmware issue in the ECM. In addition to that, we've had problems with the infotainment system needing to be manually rebooted every month or so in response to increasing "weirdness" over time. The buttons on the steering wheel stopped working consistently in ~2019. There were workaround for a while, but these days all of the buttons on the left side do the same thing (activate the connected phone's microphone), and the ones on the right don't work at all. I've torn the whole steering column and dash apart to verify that it's not a wiring issue; it has to be something wrong with the infotainment system at this point.
This wasn't our only experience with newer vehicles. Every one we've ever owned - or just worked on for friends - is plagued by these sorts of electronic "gremlins". They get worse over time, too. Yes, new vehicles are very nice with all the bells and whistles when they're new... but those same features quickly become "just one more thing to break" as the vehicles age. To make matter worse, they're typically very expensive to fix, even if you have the skills, time, and tools to do it yourself. I'm already $1,500 deep into fixing those buttons on the steering wheel, and haven't succeeded yet.
I drive a 2000 Jeep Wrangler. Granted, it's "only" 24 years old, but it has been far more reliable than any other vehicle my family has owned since I got it. When I bought it, in ~2011, I was looking for an older model - ideally it would have been a CJ-7, which was made from 1976-1986 - right at your 40 year cutoff. I've replaced several major components, sure - the engine, the entire rear end, the front suspension, etc. - but it has >200k miles on it, and the engine was poorly maintained when I bought the vehicle. What's more, all of that combined cost less than the engine replacement in my wife's 2015 model year vehicle.
There's much less to go wrong, too. There's no infotainment system to start acting funny, no backup camera to break, no buttons on the steering wheel to start doing random things they're not supposed to... it's just a vehicle.
Complexity is the enemy of reliability, and modern vehicles are very complex. Some of that is due to the market demanding new features. Some of it is due to government regulations. Some of it is just manufacturers using more complex solutions because time marches on.
... I have more to say here, but no time. Maybe I'll come back :)
It's interesting that users of US based web-sites (are you an american?) claim that cars are getting better. While people from developing countries say the opposite. Especially, their mechanics. Particularly, they claim that new cars are less reliable, less repairable, and metal is as thick as a can (popular complaint).
1. The door keylock is frozen over with ice. Chisel way at the lock with your metal car key until you can unlock it (15-20 mins)
2. Put key in ignition lock, turn and
3. rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr
4. rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr
...
5. wroorwr-wroorwr-wroo, @#%!
6. get jumper calbes and running car from family member/friend/stranger
7. remove the air filter cover (big round disk on top of the engine back then), and spray starter fluid directly into the carburetor.
7. start car
8. car immediately stalls as soon as you let off the gas
9. start car again, this time hold at 3000 rpm until engine heats up
10. Enjoy the sweet sweet smell of tetraethyl lead in the copious exhaust while you wait
11. Start driving
12. After about 10 mins steam starts to appear under the hood and temperature gauge maxes out as improper water/coolant mix (sometimes just 100% water) boils
13. Wait 30 mins for radiator to cool enough that you can open it safely and put proper mixture of antifreeze/water (you carry several gallons of each in the trunk)
This is because of state (mostly California) and federal laws passed, with the most aggressive taking effect in 2015.
The only reason Ford isn't selling you a Shit-Wagon is because they can't, by law.
Touchscreens are ass for doing anything while driving. I live in a city and cannot safely change my AC unless I'm at a stoplight. No knobs / only touchscreen is definitely a dealbreaker for my next vehicle, and all research suggests that the "normies" hate them too.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/08/yes-touchscreens-really...
https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/grm/good-news-touchs...
Luckily I'm not dependent on a car, I haven't owned one for 6 years. But this horror will come to all sorts of products, yes.
The text's theory of history requires a hidden variable that controls the feudalism->capitalism->feudalism process, but no candidate for a hidden variable is suggested by the author. Sure, any reader can think up some candidates for the hidden variable, but letting the reader fill in the blanks is a con.
England moved to a landlord-rent model for their agrarian society, whereas France moved to a tax on production model for their agrarian society. The distinction there is subtle, but the English model encourages improvidence to ensure you can make the rent, and that improvidence leads to increased output, pressure on workers to move to cities and away from their familial land. The French model didn't put as much pressure on maximizing productivity, and their post feudal agrarian society was perhaps a little slower to take off economically, but wasn't burdened with quite the same social upheaval that capitalism led to in England.
It's a very interesting history, and I do wish we'd been able to see more post-feudal societies develop. I think there's a number of different economic models out there that would be functional. They might not be as economically strong, but they might have different strengths w.r.t. population health, happiness, or sustainability.
During the industrial and chemical revolutions, the technology to feed a large population outpaced the technology to control large populations. Feudalism fell to capitalism because society became too large to be effectively ordered by feudal lords. But this is now changing thanks to the information technology revolution. With information technology, we are developing a new means of feudalism that scales to billions of people.
I don't think the entire economy is reverting back to feudalism, I think it makes more sense to think of the digital economy as its own thing that's speedrunning the exact process we already went through once. Next step is then what, digital commoners and land reform maybe, proper digital currencies and citizenship, actual privacy protection? Feudalism on the internet can only exist for the same reason it existed offline, people flock to fiefdoms because they perform functions in a modern economy provided by a proper state.
The resulting "agency" has historically been pretty violent, when the injustice and tension are too severe. So it's wise to constantly be course-correcting by recognizing the new skins of feudalism and wresting power away from its lords.
> Read the full story with a free account.
Please don't link to Medium when you can link to, in this case, Pluralistic. https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-de...
Medium.com has been thoroughly enshittified :)
> What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:
as i see things there are some major issues are
- Removing money from gold standard, allowing power to accrue to those who can control the supply. Instead of competing for what consumer wants, they just change the rules, or tax the future to line their own pockets today.
- People have bought the lie that the government can do net good things for the economy, not just move the peas around the plate. I think it started with income tax and the social safety net (whereas prior we had charitable works that largely worked by proximity -- you knew the person you were helping or being helped by, meaning you had a spiritual need to treat them humanely, vs a money printer government which seems like it can go on forever, but see my point above about real money.
- An image based society, we no longer appreciate and compete on enduring values like long marriages, objects that last a life time (or longer), making a hard choice that denies ourselves the appearance of gain etc. For example our clothes only need to last long enough to make that IG/TikTok post, then they can be discarded. A BMW when photographed appears identical to the one which has its $120 a month options rented or not.
- Sex (porn/hookups) and attention(likes, foodie calls, onlyfans) have become huge traps to men, and women, respectively. Meaning people feel like why would I work years/decades to get what others print money for, or why would I preserve something my partner might want when I can get what I want in exchange. These tools have made every boy/man a john, and every girl/woman a prostitute exchanging artificial attention for sex, and artificial sex for attention ...
We cannot make real progress while we continue to applaud fake things. A millionaire isnt what it used to be, and neither is anything we see on social media.
also see my pseudo rant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34560255
How would I fix things?
- Return to gold standard and constitutionalize that governments cannot take on debt (they can only work with current cash reserves, not even projected taxes).
- A better education system (likely not a state run monopoly) will help people think smarter about everything.
- Social media influencers need to be held liable for inaccuracies and sued into oblivion for what amounts to false advertising and fraud
- Pornography needs to be age gated (and enforced) like alcohol, lottery, and voting. Sellers need to be held accountable just as selling alcohol to an underage person is the seller's fault. So should be providing pornography. Also it should be an Opt in system at the ISP level meaning the biggest names are not accessible.
I know this will get downvoted into oblivion because there's so much content people are likely to disagree with at least one point. But this is my best working model rn for how to get back to the stability that will allow us to make real progress again as a society.
The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.
Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due
Locke's argument for private property ownership of land beyond space to live in not being obviously-unjust was built entirely on this: improvement of productivity of land through work and investment. Holding private land to sit on or to wildly under-use wasn't compatible with his ethical justification for private land ownership.
(not that the Second Treatise isn't full of weak reasoning—natural rights as anything "real" rather than arbitrary, LOL—but it's considering one of the top influences on the founders of the US, the founding of which was a major step in the rise of capitalism to global dominance)
If those downvoters would comment, we could all have a healthy debate.
[edit to note: this is only one of the many internal contradictions of capitalism, but the most relevant to your argument imo]
More so I'd propose a system of government which has baked into its constitution things which remove the power of capital from politics. For example lobbying and non-individual and non limited campaign donations are 2 such things that must be not allowed.
Public assets (roads, sewers, other kinds of infrastructure) are always going to be "debt" in the myopic accounting from the perspective of the government. Requiring zero debt means selling these assets off to (presumably private) entities, which sounds like a terrible idea for reasons aligned closely with the kinds of arguments found in Doctorow's blog post.
1. Collected sufficient taxes (ie money) to pay for a work 2. Built the work spending down the money 3. counted the work as an asset on the public balance sheet (ie, we own the pipes)
Wouldn't that mean no debt and not selling it off to corporations?
The question you need to ask is “would there generally be a relationship between the amount of gold on hand and the amount of money required in the economy?” There is no reason why the answer to that question would be “yes” over an extended period of time - you can set up some kind of sensible exchange rate at the start but it eventually (and invariably) gets out of whack.
It’s the same with fixed exchange rates, pegged currencies, etc. - these things tend to exist for a time and eventually don’t - because they’re ultimately not sustainable.
I actually think the function is that it's tied to _something_ of intrinsic value, that the intrinsic value isn't wildly fluctuating, and that it's roughly fixed in supply. Then by tying the currency to the resource it means that the currency cannot be created (fiat) without addressing those properties of the backing asset.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/technology/inside-the-hot...
And what can reasonably be described as socialism in the context of these type of broad-strokes grand narrative discussions: compulsory income redistribution to fund social programs, has massively grown—at the expense of the private sector's share of GDP—over the last 60 years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
What has happened is that socialism has advanced due to the nature of democracy and short-term voter considerations, while the private sector has become more feudalistic due to the expansion of regulations (e.g. 5% of jobs required an occupational license in 1950. Today it's 30%).
Another subject that intellectuals of this type won't touch is unions. Doctorow is well aware that all of the major institutions involved in the generation of ideas, like journalism and academia, are captured by unions. He's going to remain politically correct and not talk about the rent-extraction that unions engage in. e.g. unionized government sector workers in California now earn twice as much as private sector workers:
https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-...
Not only are government sector unions seeing their income, as a share of GDP rise as they become kingmakers in municipal and state politics, but they are also successfully getting compliant governments to agree to collective bargaining terms that increasingly shield them from accountability, e.g. only 75 public school teachers were fired in New York over 16 months in 2015 and 2016:
https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-tried...
Seems we direly need a bit of socialism.
I'm sorry, what was your point?
[0] https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
[1] https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2021/07/american-oligarchs-...
[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/rising-income-inequality-rol...
[3] https://americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness-briefing-bo...
[4] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
The EPI, which you cite twice, is heavily funded by public sector unions who are the primary beneficiaries of this socialism, and puts out misleading graphs.
For example, the graph showing a growing gap between wages and productivity in the first article is based on using measures of wages and GDP that use different inflation indexes. [1]
As for tax rates, the top income tax bracket was $400,000 in 1950, which adjusted for inflation, was equal to $4,000,000 today. And average incomes were lower in real terms too, so very few fell in that bracket.
There were also significant tax loopholes in the 1950s, and a much larger cash economy, which enabled tax avoidance and evasion, respectively. Due to the loopholes being closed, the effective tax rates on the top 1% only decreased slightly since the 1950s, despite a massive decrease in nominal taxes. [2]
When Kennedy decreased the nominal rate, tax revenues increased. So no, there's nothing to suggest we should return to those high nominal tax rates, especially as inflation and income growth would make those high brackets cover a much larger proportion of the population today than when those tax rates were last in place.
Also let's look at the 1950s: that era had huge unions, which led to the destruction of the largest US industries. So the wage growth in the 1950s wasn't sustainable.
And counter-acting the massive burden of the unions, the 1950s had:
* fewer social programs (no Medicare)
* much fewer regulations (no EPA or OSHA)
* lower government spending
* no collective bargaining for the Big Three Automaker workers (that death knell came in the 1960s)
There was zero income tax between 1870 and 1900, when wages doubled and the financial position of industry improved. This was very much unlike the post-war period, where US industry was running on borrowed time, making increasingly burdensome concessions to unions.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sources-of-real-wage-stag...
[2] https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/
That's an unsubstantiated claim. The material you referenced points to other sources as the culprit. But let's start from the beginning.
There has been wage stagnation and the workers share of the profit has been steadily shrinking ever since the 1970ies. The Bosworth piece you link to asserts that much.
To quote from the article:
> all of the evidence points to uncommonly small gains in workers’ real (adjusted for inflation) wages
All the while, non-worker compensation has been rising disproportionately at double digit levels, at times decoupled even from the growth of the associated companies[1]. So, there's money. It's just not going to the workers.
> All of this socialism you claim we need is contributing to that centralization.
I'm not sure I see an argument for that.
> especially as inflation and income growth would make those high brackets cover
That's fine. We don't have to go back to the rates of the 1950ies. But having a person earning hundreds of thousands of USD per year paying a lower effective rate than a janitor is just cynical exploitation.
> Also let's look at the 1950s: that era had huge unions, which led to the destruction of the largest US industries.
The US industry and manufacturing was doing fine - until the shareholders and the management decided it would be more profitable to offshore production.[2]
> So the wage growth in the 1950s wasn't sustainable.
Differences in compensation between management and workers have been continuously expanding ever since the '50ies. So there seems to money around to continue to grow some wages. Just not to grow those of the workers doing the actual work. Strange, right?
Meanwhile, Bosworth makes a compelling argument that offshoring and reduced competition is very much responsible for the drop in real wages. He writes:
> However, some analysts point to the development of a highly competitive global market for labor combined with a more general reduction in product-market competition through reliance of mergers, IT patents, and regulations that suggest a reduced labor share may be a longer-lasting phenomenon.
Percentage of workers represented in unions has not been as low as today in the last fifty years.[3]
So, there you have it; by not having bargaining power, workers are being exploited by companies that leverage their size, reach and influence of regulations, resulting in record profits for these companies[4].
So, maybe we actually need stronger unions. I think there's an argument to be made.
[1] https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/compensatio...
[2] https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/195351/number-of-employe...
[4] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/classroom/2022/04/why-corporati...
The Brookings article asserts that the wage growth stagnation is less severe than what graphs like the EPI's show, and moreover, that the reduction in the workers share of the profit is much less severe than what the EPI graph shows.
The article explains how the primary cause of the slowdown in wage growth is a slowdown in productivity growth:
Still, the data of figure 1 clearly document a major slowdown in real wage growth. It is largely the product of poor productivity performance over the past decade
So I reiterate, that the culprit is slowing productivity growth. The massive rise in social welfare spending, and regulations, since 1950, points to left-wing policies being responsible for the slowdown, and not the free market bogeyman.
And no, the article doesn't say the workers' share has shrunk since the 1970s. It says there has been a slight decrease since 2000:
The basic stability of labor’s share up to 2000 is evident in the minor difference between the growth in labor productivity and real wages (output prices), but the increase in real wages falls short of that of productivity by a substantial ½ percent annual in the 2005-14 period
>I'm not sure I see an argument for that.
The argument is that rent-seeking parties, like those employed in public sector unions, see their incomes increase at the expense of the general population's as social welfare spending, as a percentage of GDP, rises.
This [1] is the situation in California. This [2] is the situation in New York.
>That's fine. We don't have to go back to the rates of the 1950ies. But having a person earning hundreds of thousands of USD per year paying a lower effective rate than a janitor is just cynical exploitation.
The effective tax rate of high income earners is much higher than that of a typical janitor..
>The US industry and manufacturing was doing fine - until the shareholders and the management decided it would be more profitable to offshore production.
Multiple industries went bankrupt. The passenger rail services were crushed under the growing demands of the "brotherhoods". The US Auto industry nearly collapsed. This claim that manufacturing just offshored is unfounded.
>Differences in compensation between management and workers have been continuously expanding ever since the '50ies. So there seems to money around to continue to grow some wages. Just not to grow those of the workers doing the actual work. Strange, right?
Corporate earnings growth has slowed significantly since the 1950s. Productivity growth as a whole has slowed. The US is now inhospitable to large-scale manufacturing, due to laws that put any large operation at the mercy of unions, and regulations that impose enormous compliance costs on them as well.
>Percentage of workers represented in unions has not been as low as today in the last fifty years.[3]
That doesn't matter, because the laws that ensure any large manufacturing operation will inevitably see its workforce unionize, and subsequently be mandated by the government to engage in collective bargaining with the union to the exclusion of all other parties, are still in place. They keep manufacturing from returning.
[1] https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why...
You should continue reading the paragraph you cited. Because it continues
> but that may not be surprising in view of the enormous economic losses that were precipitated by the financial crises.
So, Bosworth does not see power of the unions as the reason for the slowing productivity. He sees it in the financial crisis.
Please also see that in Fig. 1 of the article, we see that the goes up and down and up and down, without correlation to any union laws that would explain this; there were no big changes between 2005 an 2014 that would explain the numbers according to your hypothesis. Bosworth doesn't even mention unions.
> The argument is [...]
Neither of the two articles give your argument credible support. One is a pretty shallow opinion peace pulling numbers out of the air and the other one is a list of anecdotes about what looks very much like graft to me. Not sure what the second one has to do with unions.
I think I agree that rent-takers incomes are responsible for reducing the general population's. Social welfare however is not what I have in mind, quite the contrary.
> The effective tax rate of high income earners is much higher than that of a typical janitor..
These people have tax lawyers for a reason. W. Buffet even raised that issue in an 2012 interview[1]. It's become so bad, even millionaires are asking to fix the loopholes big as barn doors[2].
> This claim that manufacturing just offshored is unfounded.
How devastating offshoring was to US industry is well examined.[3,4] Just 1993-2000 the U.S. economy lost an average of 30.3 million jobs per year.
> Corporate earnings growth has slowed significantly since the 1950s
A finite world can only allow for finite growth. It's basic physics. Not that that matters; corporate profits are still sky high - and growing higher still. But labor's share is shrinking and shrinking. Again, I cite Bosworth:
> he new phenomenon is the decline in labor’s share of income for which we have no satisfactory explanation.
And as a possible explanation he refers to the already mentioned causes; reduced bargaining power through the global market and through corporate consolidation, reduced competition between companies.
> regulations that impose enormous compliance
Bosworth also mentioned regulations as a cause for the reduced share of worker. And you know what? I agree with that. Especially gratuitous regulation that allows regulatory capture or that otherwise reduces competition should be carefully weeded out.
> They keep manufacturing from returning.
European manufacturing, although also impacted by offshoring, seems stable despite much, much stronger union laws than those of the U.S. Germany especially has very strong unions and is nevertheless considered a manufacturing powerhouse.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/01/warren-buffett...
[2] https://patrioticmillionaires.org/2023/06/22/the-real-reason...
[3] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/offshoring-by-the-n...
[4] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/new-assessment-role-offshorin...
Bosworth is referencing the period after 2005, which of course had its productivity affected by the financial crisis. The slowdown since 1973 has other more structural causes.
>These people have tax lawyers for a reason.
It doesn't change the fact that their effective tax rate is much higher than a typical janitor's.
>Just 1993-2000 the U.S. economy lost an average of 30.3 million jobs per year.
You're misreading your sources. They say 300,000 - 500,000 jobs per year.
And outsourcing was in large part a symptom of the widespread hostility to industry in the wake of its takeover by unions.
>A finite world can only allow for finite growth. It's basic physics. Not that that matters; corporate profits are still sky high - and growing higher still. But labor's share is shrinking and shrinking.
The primary cause of the slowdown in wage growth is the slowdown in productivity growth. So you blaming a slight decrease in labor's share of income is misplaced.
As for corporate profits, of course as long as revenue growth is not negative, new profit records will be reached every year.
As for the physical limits of growth: we are nowhere near them. There are orders of magnitude more physical resources that human civilization can harvest for production.
The slowdown is most likely due to obviously harmful economic policy, like increasing forced income redistribution to pay into wasteful union run social programs, and letting unions take control of industry through laws mandating that companies engage in collective bargaining with unions to the exclusion of all other parties.
>European manufacturing, although also impacted by offshoring, seems stable despite much, much stronger union laws than those of the U.S.
European manufacturing growth and global market share has plummetted right alongside the US's. And Europe, due to higher income redistribution through social programs and more labor regulations, has been outperformed by the US. Since 2008 in fact, US nomimal GDP has doubled, while Europe's has stayed stagnant.
It seems that this sources is not consistent, so I'll disregard it. Thanks for pointing out this obvious incongruity, I should have noticed that myself.
> The primary cause of the slowdown in wage growth is the slowdown in productivity growth
> And Europe, due to higher income redistribution through social programs and more labor regulations,
> The slowdown is most likely due to obviously harmful economic policy,
Again and again you make the same assumptions without having any evidence supporting these claims. If we compare the growth curves of the US and Europe, the growth rates look very much the same, despite having very different labor laws and union strengths [1].
That seems to suggest that labor laws indeed don't have too much of an impact.
> It doesn't change the fact that their effective tax rate is much higher than a typical janitor's.
Buffet and his millionaire friends have already explained how they and their friends are cheating. Buffet hat a lower effective tax rate than his secretary. Has had for years.
> As for the physical limits of growth: we are nowhere near them.
The practical limits of growth will kick in much earlier than the physical limits. Ever diminishing returns will necessarily reduce growth; when there's not even a path, a street will greatly improve productivity. Once you have a road, a better road will only do so much. You can see that kind of growth slowdown in any developed economy. The Asian tigers are following the same curve as the US and Europe; continuously accelerated growth is impossible.
> US nomimal GDP has doubled
So what is is now? GDP has doubled, despite the oppressive socialist union laws? I'm certain you realize that something doesn't quite add up with your argument, right?
Meanwhile minimal wage has not been increased for 14 years.
[1] https://statisticstimes.com/economy/united-states-vs-eu-econ...
Your graph confirms what I stated: the growth rate since 2010 has sharply diverged. After the EU finished enjoying the growth benefits of integrating newly freed former-Easter-Bloc countries, the harmful effects of being more centralized through regulatory regimentation and social welfare forced redistribution became more apparent.
The evidence overwhelmingly shows that unions and the free-market-suppressing laws they advocate are harmful to economic growth. This is broadly accepted by economists, as politically incorrect as it may be.
More centralization, via higher levels of government spending as a percentage of GDP, is strongly correlated with lower rates of economic growth:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170821004405/http://ime.bg/upl...
>>Buffet and his millionaire friends have already explained how they and their friends are cheating. Buffet hat a lower effective tax rate than his secretary. Has had for years.
Buffett is wrong. The top 1% have a much higher effective tax rate than the typical secretary.
>>The practical limits of growth will kick in much earlier than the physical limits. Ever diminishing returns will necessarily reduce growth; when there's not even a path, a street will greatly improve productivity. Once you have a road, a better road will only do so much. You can see that kind of growth slowdown in any developed economy. The Asian tigers are following the same curve as the US and Europe; continuously accelerated growth is impossible.
Your assumption that we are approaching some technological limit of growth is unsubstantiated:
1. Growth has accelerated every century for the past five centuries.
2. The slowdown in growth in the advanced economies corresponded with a massive rise in social welfare spending as a percentage of GDP, and expansion of regulatory regimentation of the economy, and these are perfectly capable of explaining that slowdown, without resorting to any unfounded theories that there is technological limits set an inherent ceiling on growth.
Let's explore some of these:
In 1950, only 5 percent of occupations required a license. Today, it's over 30 percent. In 1950, the Code of Federal Regulations was a tiny fraction of the size it is today, with no EPA or OSHA hounding companies every year.
[Make elites compete: Why the 1% earn so much and what to do about it](https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-t...)
In 1950, healthcare wasn't centralized and heavily bureaucratized due to the all-encompassing regulations left-leaning anti-libertarians have imposed since then:
[Expert Forum: The rise (and rise) of the healthcare administrator](https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-manageme...)
>Here's some food for thought: The number of physicians in the United States grew 150 percent between 1975 and 2010, roughly in keeping with population growth, while the number of healthcare administrators increased 3,200 percent for the same time period.
Healthcare is now controlled by mega-coorporations who are able to pay the huge fixed fees attached with complying with healthcare regulations.
And then there are the enormous public sector unions, who get all of their income from taxpayers, and massively contribute to the Democratic Party to ensure they keep getting more tax dollars:
At $140,000 Per Year, Why Are Government Workers In California Paid Twice As Much As Private Sector Workers?
https://hoover.org/research/california-state-government-work...
>In 2019, California state government workers earned an average of $143,000 per year, while local government employees earned nearly as much, averaging about $131,000 annually. But California’s private sector workers earned about $71,000, roughly half as much as their public sector counterparts. These figures include base pay, as well as overtime, and the value of non-wage benefits, such as employer pension/retirement contributions, health care, and paid days off. > >For over fifty years, public sector and private sector compensation rates were very similar, rising from roughly $17,000 in 1929 to about $45,000 in the early 1980s (both values are measured using 2008 dollars). But after the early 1980s, compensation rates began to diverge, with public sector pay rising much faster than that in the private sector over the last forty years.
And most importantly of all, left-leaning politicians in the 1950s hadn't locked down the housing markets in the most important metropolitan regions in the US:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
The massive increase in regulations on housing since the 1950s explains most of the rise in income inequality since 1950. Most inequality seems to stem from housing scarcity driving up housing costs (see Figure 3):
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...
3. Your argument is similar to that made in the mid 19th century:
"It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object: in those most advanced, what is economically needed is a better distribution"
-John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848, book IV, chap. VI)
The subsequent century saw economic growth rates in advanced countries accelerate, thus proving Mill wrong. If it weren't for the massive increase in social welfarism and free-market-suppressing regulatory regimentation, there's no reason to assume economic growth in advanced countries wouldn't have accelerated over the last few decades.
There are numerous emerging technologies that could massively increase productivity over the coming decades, like robotics, the space industry, nanotechnology, AI, public blockchains, etc. There is absolutely no reason to believe we are anywhere near the technological limits of productivity, or in an era of inherently diminishing returns on investment.
>>So what is is now? GDP has doubled, despite the oppressive socialist union laws? I'm certain you realize that something doesn't quite add up with your argument, right?
Nominal GDP doesn't capture everything of course, but comparing nominal GDP growth between the US and Europe can give us some indication as to which policies are better for economic development, and the US far surpassing the EU in nominal GDP growth suggests that the EU's comparatively greater economic centralization around government is harmful to growth.
>>Meanwhile minimal wage has not been increased for 14 years.
The minimum wage price control is not a measure of prosperity. The minimum wage price control should be zero, and I encourage you to study Economics to see why it, and all other price controls, should be abolished.
There were problems in the free market in the 1900's with employees being slaves, corporations were hiring Pinkertons and killing people. It was actual war. So Unions were the outcome. Maybe Unions were not optimal, but they were not the cause of all this, they were the outcome. Nobody formed Unions to 'extract' rents, they were formed for preservation.
Now --> Things changed. Just like all organizations, maybe Unions then went sideways, became rent extractors. That was much later. Unions weren't formed to extract rent. But this is a boogieman. Unions are at an all time low % of population. Membership has been decreasing for decades, they no longer have much political power, even Democrats barely pay attention to them. SO in some sense maybe 'free' market is already eroding them. They definitely are not big enough or widespread enough to be causing a general problem in the economy.
While at the same time, employee rights have been eroded, many people with full time jobs live in poverty and are on welfare, exactly because the 'free-market' has allowed corporations to pay below-living wage. If any thing, we need more Unions to correct the downward pressure of the free-market.
On Rents. I find the real scary part of this article is discussion of Monopolies that extract rent, under pressure.
From the article.
"" Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The "free market" of Adam Smith wasn't a market that was free from regulation – it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist's due:
https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/
Today, we live in a rentier's paradise. People don't aspire to create value – they aspire to capture it ""
Or if not monopolies, by entire industries that only offer bad choices.
Lets say you want to buy a car that doesn't track you, you go to the free market and through competition try and find an option that does not track you. But, every car company is going down the same path of tracking, now you the customer that wants to make a free choice in the free-market, can't. There are no options.
Pinkertons were brought in when unions set up picket lines, and then beat up or killed any worker who crossed it. Unions call replacement workers "scabs" to dehumanize them, so that they can rationalize brutalizing them.
It was always a racket, and dominated by Communists and organized crime from the very beginning.
I don't think people were taking that risk, and dying, in order to extract rent, to merely get paid more. They were forced by working conditions and limited options. Which is what happens if corporations control all jobs, and thus removing the option to 'shop-around' in a free-market of 'job opportunities'.
If there is no option to leave, one must try to improve the current situation.
Unions were the outcome. In other cases, like current more modern solution, the government pays welfare to makeup difference in wages between corporate pay, and the amount needed to allow people to eat.
But, if Unions are Socialist and bad, and Welfare is Socialist and bad. What is next option?
If enough people are starving, and there are no safety nets, then the situation does get violent. This is where more dramatic violent revolutions come from.
Hence why Socialism is the end state of Capitalism, because Socialism is just another way to keep the poor : 'kind of ok enough to not violently revolt.'.
Socialism is the way Capitalist's put a Band-Aid on the population to keep them from revolting. Socialism and Capitalisms aren't opposites.
Because of greed. There was no justification for using violence to coerce employers into paying them above market wages.
>Which is what happens if corporations control all jobs, and thus removing the option to 'shop-around' in a free-market of 'job opportunities'.
The evidence clearly shows that these people who striked were not contrained in employment option from some imagined monopoly held by a corporate cartel on jobs offered.
>If enough people are starving, and there are no safety nets, then the situation does get violent. This is where more dramatic violent revolutions come from.
People were not starving. Millions were migrating to the US because its free market economy was providing unprecedented wages. Wages doubled for unskilled labor between 1870 and 1900 despite this massive influx of new workers.
The answer was to not tolerate violent strikes, and not buy into the strikers' unfounded claims of being victims.
Companies are groups of individuals, that are greedy.
Unions are groups of individuals, that are greedy.
Why is one morally superior to the other?
Also.-- Not all greed. During industrial revolution, in factory jobs. It was not uncommon to have a hand chopped off in an press, or any dozens of injuries. If you lost a hand, and can't work, and your family starved, then what. Fighting against those conditions is not 'greed'.
You might retort, in a free market, workers could just leave. But that doesn't work if all jobs are the same. Leave one factory to got to another, both are unsafe? You are missing where entire systems can lock people in (too poor to leave the factory town), and the only re-course is to try and change the current situation, by forming unions or protesting, or revolt.
Also, think you are missing how power dynamics work.
This short video on 'the implication' helps explain the relationships that exists within corporations (boss-employee)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THvCDn8mGwo
EDIT> DO have to add. I am pretty biased toward unions as they were needed during Industrial Revolution. Some did later morph and become problems. And in modern context, maybe Unions aren't the answer, but we need something to push back against wide spread wage suppression. It is crazy that people can have full time jobs, and still be on welfare. That is Corporations benefiting by the government making up the difference, and allowing the corp to profit more. But, if you just cut people off, they starve and revolt. So what is answer.
Neither is superior to the other. But when anyone, from any group, argues for laws suppressing the free market rights of others, they are abusing others. People do this when in corporations, and when in unions, and I condemn them the same either way. It just so happens that almost all unions do this, because unions have almost no power without suppressing the free market rights of others.
>>You are missing where entire systems can lock people in (too poor to leave the factory town), and the only re-course is to try and change the current situation, by forming unions or protesting, or revolt.
Again, the evidence shows that people were not locked in factory towns:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/in...
https://exhibits.library.duke.edu/exhibits/show/comic-book-c...
Same with jazz, DnD, same with rock music, same with rap
No one seems to have much rage for the environment, just their mind palace
Grandpa’s definitions do not need to be our definitions.
People are playing some banal brinksmanship game “oooh that fall afoul of some vague mutable truth we’ve been conditioned to believe is immutable; get im fellas!”
What are you all going to do to STOP the problems? Debating the diagnosis is allowing it to spread. Only real change in agency will stop it and no one seems into that.
So why sit here thinking answering your questions is useful?
FYI it isn't a strawman to ask whether you have a cogent argument for why technofeudalism isn't happening.
You asserted the proposition that technofeudalism isn't a thing (strongly implied) The respondent didn't construct a superficially similar proposition (I.e. a strawman) and simply asked what support you have for your proposition.
A strawman would have been like if someone argued against your proposition that "But the Snowden leaks showed we live in a surveillance state!" This is a Strawman because it constructs a superficially similar position to "technofeudalism is a thing" without actually at all arguing against the position that technofeudalism is not a thing.
Light from one “edge” of the universe has yet to reach the edge directly across from
Same reason we need shifts in gravity to detect planets
Diffusion, attenuation of signal given all the other stuff are physical properties of the universe, they’re properties in us
The universe prefers tribalism; a quasar far off over there, neutron star far off over there.
There are a lot of meat suits who refuse to propagate the signal.
Doesn’t mean it won’t shine bright in some local part of space.
Even so, are we better off if people decide to stop driving, however misguided their reasons?
Is the future better of setting themselves aside to clean up after us? Are they not allowed to be free from our mess? One unique in the history of the species.
Why is today free from the consequences they put upon tomorrow?
The long term investment in us is actually selfish. It’s akin to expecting our religion to be the next generations
I disagree with this statement - at the very least for safety. Modern safety systems are leagues ahead of anything from even 10 years ago - and microelectronic machines (MEMs) and all the various sensors and processors are key to making that possible. It's not just the obvious things like pedestrian and car collision detection and brake assist - it's also things like sensors that can better time the deployment of airbags.
Cars are only getting safer and safer. (Though there's obviously the problem with trucks and SUVs, but that's a side discussion)
Another aspect is fuel efficiency. In the name of fuel efficiency, many new systems had to be developed and older ones made more complex. We can't just have fixed valve timings anymore - we need varible valve timing. We can't just shoot out exhaust, we use EGR. And again, these systems need advanced sensors and processors more often then not. This complexity hurts the reliability of cars somewhat. But it's worth it to not only increase power, but also improve fuel efficiency.
Also, this isn't true at all:
>The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write.
I guess finite state automata just don't exist.
The rest of this article seems like a mess that almost doesn't deal with cars. There are some real, legitimate complaints with some modern cars. Some automakers have gone the route of touchscreens where physical controls would be far better for a variety of reasons. Subscriptions for features that don't cost the automaker anything after the fact is also awful. But the article rants on about (in my view) unrelated topics so much that it detracts from more concrete problems.
There are less and less cars and more and more SUVs, though, so it's kind of a central issue when discussing safety.
> Better still: don't found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.
People trading options and derivatives on $UBER does not somehow drain Uber shareholders' wealth over the long term. Doctorow makes it sound as if the net proceeds from derivatives trading have grown to dwarf the profits made from businesses themselves, which is far from the case.
A better point may have been made about financialization & the growth of transaction fees (perhaps I-banks making money underwriting Uber's IPO and the like), but the financial sector is still far from replacing the whole real economy with rent-extraction.