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Tag: capitalism (page 2 of 2)

This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

Don’t Show Up If You Won’t Cash Out

Stanford historian Leslie Berlin wrote an homage to Silicon Valley’s success that you may have seen linked around. It’s a good essay, but I was irked by a particular passage about Silicon Valley’s tradition of mentoring and reinvestment:

“This model of one generation succeeding and then turning around to offer the next generation of entrepreneurs financial support and managerial expertise is one of the most important and under-recognized secrets to Silicon Valley’s ongoing success.”

Berlin’s observation is true, but it’s phrased to make the phenomenon sound altruistic. Like I said on Twitter, the last round of entrepreneurs support the rising stars because they’ll get richer by doing it. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I don’t begrudge Marc Andreessen or Peter Thiel their fortunes.

However, I always feel slimy when self-interested profit-seeking is dressed as friendship and fatherly good feeling. Not that they can’t coexist, but no one amasses billions by only funding their friends and nephews (or nieces, theoretically). I’m reminded of Facebook’s Free Basics (née Internet.org), which is a marketing initiative passed off as philanthropy.

Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto. Photo by Franco Folini.

Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto. Photo by Franco Folini.

Language is important. Stories are important. The cultural memes that we absorb and the words we use to express them have real-world ramifications. (I know I’m either preaching to the choir or wasting my time, because those are the only two options on the internet…)

Maybe I shouldn’t worry about anyone else’s capitalist instincts, but it’s easy to be exploited when you’re convinced that everyone who helps you is doing it out of the goodness of their heart. If you feel like your business partner or your employer is granting you a favor, you’re less likely to stand up for your own end of the bargain.

inb4 someone calling me paranoid or cynical 😉

Garbage & Gold

Alien-girl graffiti in San Francisco.

I saw this graffiti in San Francisco a couple of months ago. The woman got a little alien implanted in her forehead — Google Glass of the future? Or perhaps body mod as witch’s familiar. I’m not sure why her mouth is dripping blood. Maybe it’s… dystopian pudding. Yes, pudding. Not blood at all! Not even slightly sinister!

I grew up in the Bay Area. It seems normal to me. Even though I’d read that San Francisco’s levels of inequality were comparable to Third World countries, the reality didn’t hit home until I was on a date in the city with my boyfriend. We were walking through the financial district and he said, “San Francisco is so cyberpunk.”

“What do you mean?”

He pointed out the animated software ads wrapped around bus shelters and glowing on the sides of buildings. He reminded me that the streets smelled of urine and we were passing homeless people wrapped in rags. Sleeping on the damp sidewalk. Meanwhile, money churned in and out of Silicon Valley’s sister city.

Extreme elements, juxtaposed. A wealth of desperation next to desperation for wealth. Welcome to twenty-first-century capitalism!

Uber Versus Ethics

I’m dwelling on the future of transportation because of an episode of the Exponent podcast about, well, the future of transportation. Electricity replacing combustion engines, autonomous vehicles, and driving as a service, oh my! Ride-sharing startups like Uber and Lyft are currently filling that last niche, and eventually they’ll do it with fleets of self-driving sedans, SUVs, minivans, etc. No humans required — except for the software engineers and passengers.

One of Google's self-driving cars.

Prototype of a self-driving car by Google.

Uber has a cutthroat reputation, and they’ve earned it. I’m not a fan of their company culture, but I think the more interesting question is about the ethics of their business model. They depend on low-paid drivers who are independent contractors rather than employees, and thus are unable to organize and advocate for themselves. In the same vein, drivers have to deal with all the taxes usually handled by businesses, and they don’t get overtime or health insurance.

Is this arrangement immoral? On the one hand, we have labor regulations because companies will exploit people in every way they can. We need those laws. (Capitalism is not a foolproof system!) On the other hand, drivers opt in. They choose to work for Uber.

Who bears responsibility — the company who created the system, or the individuals who choose to participate?

We Can All Agree, Right?

“The Internet can move almost any financial instrument as easily as it moves texts and emails. We just need consensus on how this should happen.” — Cade Metz, “The Plan to Unite Bitcoin With All Other Online Currencies”

Of course, needing consensus is a huge obstacle. Arguably, needing consensus is civilization’s defining problem. Complete agreement isn’t necessary, but you need enough to stave off revolution. A sufficiently powerful autocrat can obviate the need for consensus, but only for a limited amount of time — decades, perhaps, but not even a half-century. True cultural shifts depend on majority opinion, and they inch forward like glaciers: slow but unstoppable. The United States wouldn’t have women’s suffrage or civil rights without something approaching mass consensus.

The other day I chatted with Samio Quijote​ about internalized capitalism. For example: if I’m not “productive”, I feel worthless. Economic systems reinforce particular values, which is not bad — it just is. A type of societal consensus emerges from capitalism, or at least it’s an effect of the market. Without a sort of consensus surrounding supply-demand dynamics, there are no prices and commerce must cease. Seeking decentralized consensus, not dependent on explicit agreement but on behavior incentivized by a certain system, is easy. You just set up conditions and see how people react.

Quick Anarchism

The essence of cyberpunk is anti-corporatism. All the other principles follow from this. Technology wielded by a large company must be combated, by the police (hence Ghost in the Shell) or by hackers (hence The Matrix). A corporation is a quasi-governmental economic organization — a power structure that coalesces in favor of profit.

Personally, I am not inherently opposed to market operations. But I am opposed to power beyond oversight, which corporations tend to aggregate for themselves. Why wouldn’t they? We need to provide them with alternative incentives — selfish motivation is key. The system must be constructed so that personal benefit is good for others as well.

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