The Rise of Anti-Capitalism | Hacker News Reader

The Rise of Anti-Capitalism

nytimes.com

17 pointsmd22415 comments

Aaaargh.

Author bandies about the Internet of Things as though, somehow, magically, that's going to make production costs for everything zero. That's absurd.

Author goes on to talk about the magical collaboration instead of capitalistic nature of this--and omits that that same "collaboration" really can mean "gigantic panopticon of surveillance".

There's ways to make the post-scarcity argument---this isn't one of them. :(

There's some fallacious reasoning in this article that is the economic equivalent of believing we've broken the laws of thermodynamics. Marginal costs aren't being magically erased. They're simply being shifted from one party to another, or sometimes diffused from one party to a handful of others. Column A shrinks, but Columns B, C, and D grow to account for the shrink in A. As consumers, we're often so far removed from B, C, D,…,N that we perceive the marginal costs to have disappeared into the ether. But the costs are still conserved within the total system, in one form or another, borne out by one party or more.

And so it will be for the "internet of things." Someone's got to make all those things. Someone's got to lease and operate the EM spectrum. Someone's got to build, own, and operate the pipes. That infrastructure is pretty freaking far from cost-free. And it's going to get massively more expensive as we place exponentially larger demands on it.

Net productivity and net value are being created, and so in total, the system is growing. We're getting a lot better at generating systemic upside. Economics is not zero-sum and mercantilist, the way it was hundreds of years ago. But so long as there are scarce resources, someone's got to pay for them. That someone is going to charge someone else for converting the input resources into higher-value output. TANSTAAFL still applies. It's just getting harder for us to understand who's eating the lunch, and who's picking up the tab.

Yes. People have a tendency to want to be paid for their work, equipment usually costs money to acquire, and raw materials almost never come for free (if only because there are the aforementioned people and equipment involved). Even if it's proving easy to lower the cost of producing each additional unit, driving the fixed costs to zero will, I think, prove much harder.

From the point of view of the producer (as I think is your point) the whole thing is moot. Your costs are £(fixed_cost+num_units*marginal_cost), broadly speaking, and if marginal_cost ends up zero then you still need to pay for the people and the equipment. The likelihood of each unit actually costing the customer zero are... well... zero. And to my eyes that means that overall nothing is going to change.

This is unlikely to be news to anybody that runs a software company, which is a good example of a business that has long had large fixed costs and low costs per unit. However much each unit costs, you've spent money to make it, and that money has to come from somewhere.

I'm sure Intel and the like have also got a good deal of experience of spending vast amounts on R&D and fab setup so that they can produce a chip for £0.10 that they then have to sell to you for £500 if they're to make any money out of it.

But I suppose this could be news to people running a non-profit?

I actually had real trouble processing this article, because all the cognitive dissonance made it feel like I was reading something created by a bot that someone built to play buzzword bingo.

I prefer to call this 'Star Trek socialism' and while I support it I think we are kidding ourselves if capitalists will go out peacefully.

Even if creation of a device or food is nearly 0 cost in the future they will stop this through IP law.

And the mention of non-profits is out of place. Hell, the NFL is non-profit.

I think the real issue with advancing technology isn't that products and services will be available for nearly nothing but that doing so destroys jobs. As variable capital (labor) is continually replaced by constant capital (means of production) labor battles will have to intensify.

Capitalism must end but it won't come from what this article talks about but workers organizing to create an efficient democratic economy.

Jesus, somebody really misread some "Internet of Things" Cisco marketing material. They want to sell more IPv6 ready routers, not bring about your favorite economic crank theory.

Good grief. How many times do we have to have this same idiotic conversation?

Wars are not solely fought as a conflict over resources. Capitalism does not solely exist to exploit scarcity.

I could go on. And on. These are -- let's be generous -- oversimplifications used to give people the general gist of things without having to burden them with thousands of hours of study. The problem develops when we start believing our own BS.

Capitalism is trading stuff. I can safely assure you that we're not going to stop trading stuff, no matter what the degree of efficiency in the economy.

wow, i can't really comprehend how the author even came near that conclusion.

And how does attaching a sensor to something make it zero margin? And how do car-sharing services, which actually involve money changing hands, become considered anti-capitalist?

What kind of rand-ian nightmare world does he imagine where people are going to be selling the humidity level of the soil in their potted plants.

at least it's just an opinion column.

Capitalism is such a loaded word these days that it should be tabooed.

An HN clone that intelligently taboos certain words in each thread would be interesting to see.

Another option is a user script that would allow HN users to opt in to have certain words tabooed in their posts in the same manner.

The progressive media recently has been cranking out nonstop economic bs articles. Drumming up class warfare is the end goal. Divide and conquer.

Class warfare is engaged every day in capital hill. Look at the growing inequality. It is clear which class is winning.

Well, what makes you think that's unreasonable?

The progressive media? Really? If anything, they're reporting on the class warfare, sure, but hardly "drumming" it up, conservatives and capitalists have been doing that all by themselves, both intentionally and unintentionally.

Ah,the "progressive media"! Bloooooody Communists hey? More like a few private corporations that are so big they are now the government itself. It doesnt have anything to do with your false progressive/conservative dichotomy, which is a mirage. Do you really think FoxNews speak the truth better than MSNBC? Do you really think there is a difference between democrates and republicans beyond wedge issues?

they serve the same masters.

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