Capital Without Labour: A Founder's Guide to the Changing VC Equation
felixbarbalet.com
felixbarbalet.com
The "written with AI" charge is used so indiscriminately on HN now that it mostly functions as a way to dismiss an argument without engaging with it.
If there's a substantive point you disagree with, I'd genuinely like to hear it.
On point, the article is too long for what it attempts to say, in my view, and the reliance on AI phrasing is so obvious and annoying that it would in fact put off most people who would like to engage with it meaningfully. To paraphrase someone on HN, it's a bit insulting to read texts from authors that don't bother to produce their own mistakes, let alone long texts produced by/with bots.
I am also aware that many people these days will quickly dismiss things for being "written with Ai", which of course I don't believe is automatically a good thing. But I think that in many cases the reasoning should go this way: no one owes us any time and attention for - or engagement with - the stuff we put out there. No one asked or expected us to produce that. On the contrary, the fact that we do put our thoughts out there means that it is on us to make it worthwhile for the readers; it is us who appear to ask for time and attention. We better make sure that once we receive them we treat our audience properly. If they dismiss it, perhaps sometimes it's not them, it's us.
Imagine that rather than spending any time to read through the article myself, I run it through some AI tool, ask it to rip it apart and paste a similarly long worded reply (only 5.3k words, or 40 minutes of your time) to say what I already said, which is that the article basically normalises and optimises for a labour-displacing, techno-capitalist reality that many people would reasonably call dystopian.
More to the point, you seem to imply that there is an argument worth engaging with. I beg to differ. The text is too long, too winding, written with AI (which I find somewhat insulting and unserious), and accommodating or legitimising a dystopian labour-reduction trajectory whereby some people enrich themselves to the detriment of the entire society. I dislike the fact that I've spent this much time to read through it so that I arrived at this conclusion (and I've skipped many lines).
It could be argued that both of my comments are actually engaging with the substance of the article despite the fact that it does not seem to deserve that effort.
I'm writing publically for a few reasons - one being to help arrange my own thoughts (which this capital without labour piece did), another being so that people (or bots) who do want to understand my thought process - perhaps because they're thinking about working with me - have a chance to see into my thinking on a particular subject. I accept that's going to be a pretty small audience!
I'm not suggesting the future isn't dystopian, where capital is further enriched, in fact it's pretty clear it does look that way. For me though, I'm figuring out what's my place in that. I don't honestly think I could affect the course of history here.
But, just to say, your feedback did resonate with me, and I've already taken it on board, and will endeavour to produce (more of) my own mistakes in the writing I publish.
Cheers