Misses the point completely: Tech companies are a huge part of Silicon Valley, have enormous wealth, and that wealth isn't used to develop the social and economic infrastructure they rely on. Tech companies are quite willing to throw money at their own problems while ignoring how those problems affect everyone else around them. I don't blame the "tech companies" per se, but their owners, their investors, and the subset of their employees who are upset that the streets around their office are crawling with "riff raff" they despise.
Nothing is more disgusting than a human being that profits off of society and insists they have no responsibility to anyone else. Let the sham that is the social contract collapse and reveal the exploitative nature of capitalism for what it is.
There is currently a $400+ million funding shortfall in electrifying and otherwise modernizing the Caltrain corridor [1]. Companies large and small everywhere between SF and SJ stand to benefit, and a lot of public goodwill would come to Google, Apple, Facebook, etc, if they put some of their money towards getting that project done instead of just running private bus fleets.
No, i don't believe the world would burn if the social contract were to break down. It would signal the failure of the current system, which i believe is fundamentally unstable, and would force people to reexamine the question of how to build a society.
the social contract is a foundational concept of Liberalism. without it, the current relations of property, state, government, and people are unintelligible. a breakdown of the system is a breakdown means a breakdown of its premises.
Don't you worry that a lot of people would die if the social contract was to break down or is this an acceptable loss to you?
I understand that you might expect something better to rise from its ashes, but it seems like in the short term it could be horrifically bad for many people.
Typically cities levy taxes to pay for infrastructure. If a lot of rich people live somewhere, that should be a windfall.
Why are tech companies supposed to donate more than their share to "develop infrastructure"? No one has ever been expected to do something like this in the past, AFAIK. Just raise taxes in SV and publicly fund more of what you want.
> No one has ever been expected to do something like this in the past, AFAIK.
They're not legally required to, but there certainly is historical precedent. I live in LA, and many of the parks, museums, university buildings, and charitable institutions bare the names of the cities oil/property barons. Even those that don't were still financed by that money. There's also the "company town," where the dominate industry in town shoulders even more of the infrastructure.
Back then those barons didn't pay as many taxes, and the towns relied on their charity. The Federal government, for example, took 3% in taxes at the beginning of the 20th century.
And I'm pretty sure the robber barons are criticized more than the current Googles of the world.
What you are saying when you say these companies should be doing social projects and planning, is that the cities are failing the citizens to do those projects and planning.
I agree that they can do it from a perception point of view, but I've found that Social Justice is usually 80% distraction and opportunism, and real solutions should be properly architected by the right entities, and usually have the character of benefiting everyone, not just the oppressed group. Just as a couple examples: body cameras and inverting the clasroom, are not particularly "Black lives matter" solutions, more like improving "all lives" and yet they'd help more than Al Sharpton's opportunistic appearances and all that type of activism.
All these movements that make an enemy of those who they should instead try to enlist in the solution, just wind up doing more harm than good. Take for example the BDS movement. And before that, the other "social justice for Palestinians" movements. It's been decades and Palestinians are still stateless. Is BDS gonna topple Israel? No, it's just an outrage-fueled meme to protest Zionism. It doesn't actually help. The way things move forward is not by activists yelling against an enemy, but rather when people constructively get the stakeholders all together and do something that benefits everyone.
do you think Tech companies don't lobby and participate in municipal governments? The interests in favor of ignoring systemic societal problems are much more powerful than the people who are being crushed and forced out of participating in society. Politics are ruled by the interests of the rich. Everything that has been gained to the detriment of the rich has been through popular struggle and oftentimes bloodshed. There is in liberal democracy always a constant pressure to roll back such gains and subdue populism. This has been the momentum in the United States for decades. It might be shifting now, perhaps too late to avoid a serious glitch of the system.
It's not ridiculous to think that the powerful and influential have a responsibility to the society that supports them. have we so fallen down the neoliberalism hole that civic duty is a completely alien concept? If the rich have no responsibility to society, liberal democracies will break down.
Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.
A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
Martin Gilens is Professor of Politics at Princeton University (mgilens@princeton.edu). His research examines representation, public opinion, and mass media, especially in relation to inequality and public policy. Professor Gilens is the author of Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (2012, Princeton University Press). Benjamin I. Page is Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University (b-page@northwestern.edu). His research interests include public opinion, policy making, the mass media, and U.S. foreign policy. He is currently engaged in a large collaborative project to study Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good. For helpful comments the authors are indebted to Larry Bartels and Jeff Isaac, to the anonymous reviewers from Perspectives on Politics, and to seminar participants at Harvard University and the University of Rochester.
"Those with political power are also often wealthy or represent business interests" is different from "being wealthy or representing a business interest offers you political power"; the abstract seems to support the former (which I'm sure is true, you'd be stupid not to turn some of your power into money) but not really the latter.
Typically, cities are governed by their citizens. If a city is made up of a lot of rich people, they may not tax themselves so as to realize a windfall.
Good luck raising taxes against concerted lobbying efforts and threats to leave the area.
And good luck calculating what a "share" is.
In the UK, Google has come under fire for negotiating a risibly low tax payment.
That has as much to do with the current administration's dislike of corporate taxation as it does with Google. Even so - Google, like all corporations, benefits from the UK's education system, healthcare, transport investment, police force, legal system, and security services. It's hardly unreasonable to expect a larger contribution to all of the above than the company currently makes.
I expect the SV situation is similar, even allowing for local differences.
>If a lot of rich people live somewhere, that should be a windfall.
Not if rich people also own the government and manipulate the taxation system for their own benefit. This is exactly what is happening in the UK, and it's why public infrastructure is creaking while rich people all over central London are pushing up property prices by buying for investment and leaving huge swathes of real estate empty.
That means our efforts for solution should be directed at a broken system, not depending on companies to donate to infrastructure out of moral decency. That is a brittle solution to a stable problem.
Society at scale should depend on mechanisms, not moral expectations.
That this is being down voted suggests that we (people in tech) find it difficult to imagine ourselves as contributors to dischord and stratification. My initial reaction is to disagree, but that is defensiveness. What if there is some truth to it? The influx of tech workers really has raised the cost of living in SF substantially (although zoning laws and insufficient development are implicated as well).
danharaj, in what ways are tech companies relying on social and economic infrastructure to the detriment of others? I'm well aware of the tragedy of the commons, so what is the finite resource in this case?
I don't live in SV, I live in NYC, so I'm more familiar with the interactions of the tech community here with the rest of the city. Tech in NYC is rather small compared to the behemoth that is the financial industry, so our impact on our fellow New Yorkers is more subtle.
The issue ultimately is that the people that constitute a city, work in it, construct it, maintain it, live in it, are completely subject to the whims of capital and private property. Whole districts can be destroyed or forced out by market forces and replaced with a more profitable set of human beings. We are supposed to accept this as not only natural and inevitable, but good! It is fundamentally undemocratic and inhuman. that's why people are angry, because there is no room for their interests in such a system. living in such a system is dehumanizing.
The compromise of Liberalism is that the people control the government, which acts as a counterbalance against the market. When government fails to mediate the conflicts between the workers and the capitalists and property owners, class conflict gets worse.
i would just like tech workers to realize that we're workers who sell their labor for a wage and that means we're exploited. Economic security, even petty wealth is always a temporary illusion for the worker. Events out of our hands can and often do plunge us into economically precarious situations. We have more in common with people who work for less than us than we do with the people who pay our salaries. furthermore, in a society that is increasingly based on technological structures, we have a civic duty to make sure that technology serves to create a more equal, democratic society.
one thing that i personally do towards that end is offer my clients reduced rates if they open source the code i write for them. i'd like to do more activist programming when i'm in between contracts.
I'm probably going to get rate-limited on my replies so i'll stop responding to comments. i sure kicked up a hornets' nest here.
The two biggest issues that San Francisco faces are housing and transportation. You say that they would be accused of influencing local politics, but I am reasonably sure that busting the building height cap and using money to get better mass transit options would be viewed very favorably by all but a few of the NIMBYest citizens.
In any case, the fundamental underlying problem is that tech has created a monotonous economy in the Bay. No locality that has one has good economics for citizens.
(I'm not the author of that article, just a friend of mine)
I expect that if the tech companies were deeply involved in encouraging development and mass transit, then a sizeable percentage of people in SF and elsewhere would decide that this is bad. Most of the press would focus on individual personalities with bad optics and on sub-issues that involve sacred victims, since those are the kinds of things that the readers want to hear about, and "tech companies are villains who do bad things" is an established narrative that it's easy to understand new events by; public opinion follows naturally.
And if that's not the case, one of my takeaways is that there would be something else that people decide is intolerable about the tech companies. The issue is not the issues; the issue is the narrative, into which a limitless number of stories can fit.
I'm a bit confused about land, labour and capital comparison. It seems that he's complaining about 'land' and 'labour' not getting enough as a result of digital economy, but those are potential inputs, not outputs, so the reference is misguided. Plus, the straw-man uber driver surely represents labor in that part, and they get paid for that.
Rushkoff argues that the profit Uber drivers make is not sustainable in the long-term, and that Uber doesn't mind because once that runs dry they can then use their profits to jump to another line of business entirely, while Uber drivers will have to always live hand-to-mouth.
The part about land not getting enough is prima facie false - housing prices in SF are out of control.
But even in the '90s tech boom in Texas, many were using equity in tech companies as leverage to buy and develop land. This in a place with more affordable housing and no water bounding it.
What passes for capital in SF is also not necessarily easily understood as capital without extending the concept quite a bit. It's closer to speculation in early phase equities, which is about the ... third derivative of actual capital. Unlike a building full of machines that add great creative value but are hard to move, this brand of capital is many orders of magnitude more ephemeral.
> I'm a bit confused about land, labour and capital comparison. It seems that he's complaining about 'land' and 'labour' not getting enough as a result of digital economy, but those are potential inputs, not outputs, so the reference is misguided.
Capital also is an input, not an output, so I'm not sure what distinction you are trying to make.
What he's claiming is that in "normal" businesses those who supply the inputs (land, labor, and capital) all get a decent share of the profits, but that in the digital economy most of the profits go to those who supply capital.
The problem I see with his claim is that he doesn't actually make a case that this is inherently bad.
He uses Airbnb and Uber as examples to illustrate how it can be bad. I agree both of those companies are bad...but they are bad because their business model is essentially based on turning many of the costs of the hotel and taxi business, respectively, into negative externalities, not because of how their profits are distributed among the suppliers of land, labor, and capital.
In the same way that one could talk about 'return on capital,' one could talk about 'return on labor' and 'return on land.' I don't think it's controversial to say that capital and "entrepreneurs" [0] have made much better returns in SV then land or labor have. The arguments usually start why that's the case and whether it can/should be otherwise.
[0] Entrepreneur is a concept that AFAIK economics does not have a good way to deal with. It seems to be a special class of labor because entrepreneur make there money by knowing exactly what kind of labor would be most useful. But it also seems to be a special class of capital because they make all of there money on equities (by selling shares in their own companies that they bought for pennies at founding). If anyone has a coherent theory of economics that accounts of entrepreneurs, I'd love to read about it.
I don't think they are protesting the tech industry per se, but they unfairness when rich and speculative companies push unsustainable conditions (high cost of living) on society.
For example- Highly paid engineers from a large Tech Unicorn company that moved to an East Bay city- drive up prices there displacing half the current residents. The city's economy improves- other tech startups follow suit, people buy houses, real estate value go up, people invest in remodeling homes, setting up shops and services.
1 year later Unicorn dies or moves to another city for lower costs. Engineers with high salaries leave, other startups start to fold, city return to pre-Unicorn condition. People left holding the bag are the ones that felt this was long term sustainable or couldn't move because they were tied down.
It's not the entire tech industry's fault, but if you were a resident of that city, who are you going to blame? Probably the company who started it all, although some may argue they also brought prosperity in the first place. Depends on how you were impacted. If you flipped a house profitably, you are happy. If you bought a condo to live in - not so much.
I've been curious lately about lifestyle businesses - the kind of business designed not for growth, but for maintaining a comfortable life for its employees. 4 day work weeks, sustainable paces, avoiding growth for growth's sake.
These kinds of businesses don't seem to get much attention.
Anecdotal data point: I work at one. We've capped both the number of clients and the number of employees at around 12. I work 18 hours a week, so does the founder. The most anyone works is 35, but they're the exception, and the next "raise" they get will be the same amount of money but less hours.
We've been a going concern for 4 years now, so there's still time for things to go off the rails; but for the moment we're killing our competition and there's essentially zero internal strife.
To keep the caps we're starting to divide like a bacterium - fostering other companies around our model instead of growing ourselves. We'll see how that goes. It's a little alarming to realize that we're creating our own competition, but there's precedent for it going well (e.g. Anchor Brewing in San Francisco).
It's a great way to make money, and I spend all the other productive hours of my week on my efforts to change the world. There's lots of blue-ocean ways to do that when the need to monetize takes a back seat.
Do you mind sharing a hint of how you got started?
I find the idea of working similar hours as you but still being able to provide for my family while spending a lot of time with them incredibly appealing.
Whereas at the moment, during the week I'm lucky to get more than 2 hours a day, the commute and workday eating up the balance.
The founder got a marketing job, and was good enough at it that when he decided to move cities the company wanted to keep him on as a remote consultant. From there he added a couple more clients, and as the work increased and diversified he started to subcontract (including to me, for IT work). That kept going until it became clear (legally and otherwise) that all the consultants were in fact employees. So the transition for everyone from a group of consultants (who, as a perk of that role, can set their own hours) to a proper organization was seamless, and we were all able to solidify the hours that we wanted as it occurred.
Many tech markets are ruthlessly competitive and will be swallowed by the companies that are designed for growth. Code's biggest advantage is that it scales so well. Lifestyle businesses exist but still take hard work to pull off.
Even among tech companies designed for fast growth, I'd like to see more structured as worker owned co-ops instead of having investor ownership. Without investment money at the outset, they'll have to bootstrap longer, but that's only an issue if the business is following a "me-too" wave and has competitors on similar timescales. Once one gets off the ground I don't see a disadvantage.
And yet, if Google were to throw up their hands and say "fuck it!" and just shutdown, those same people would be up in arms because they no longer have nearly instant access to all the knowledge in the world for free. To say that the tech industry has given the public nothing is disengenuous.
Meanwhile, what has the author done other than blog to remedy the issue? What is he a proponent of exactly, other than "Tech companies suck, boooo"?
Naw, criticize away. But if you put forth no solutions and aren't doing anything more to solve the issue, it sounds more like whining. Not all criticism is created equal, and criticism without a better idea is mostly just noise.
The author does not articulate his critique very well beyond claiming that the VC get disproportionate return compared to land and labor. A much better critique is Jaron Lanier's Who Owns the Future. There he argues that the problem is when companies create monopolies that shrink the overall economy (Instagram vs Kodak, Facebook vs publishing in general). The startup then provides the public with free services but at the same time it decreases employment opportunity. The whole machinery works as long as some other sector of the economy grows, but that is unlikely to be the case forever. Somehow there would need to be economic growth, not just lowered cost.
The entire "job" concept was born with the industrial revolution, relatively recently. Miraculously it survived through post-industrial age, mostly through paper-shuffling clerical jobs (nobody could have predicted it a century ago). Now, either the notion of a job will be gone altogether (see pre-industrial history on how it will look like), or some other activity will take the role of paper shuffling as the archetypal job (instructors? servants? We can only guess now).
That's very much an oversimplification - in pre-industrial society the majority of labor was involved in food production. At the current scale of farming, I don't see this happening.
The article is very poorly written, but I think the concern it is trying to hit on is what happens to the economy when too many jobs are automated out of existence and the overall employment plunges.
Personally, I'm optimistic that the society will adapt, as we have adapted to the industrial revolution, but we need a healthy debate to do so.
>Rushkoff points out that basic economy theory, as laid out economist and philosopher Adam Smith, recognizes three factors of production: Land, labor, and capital. But in the current digital economy, only capital is valued.
Stopped here. Airbnb commoditizes land, and Uber commoditizes labor. They do so very efficiently, but the problem is they take too much for the parent company for how efficiently they commoditize these assets.
I can't take someone seriously who can't even get the basics right.
Now let's imagine what will happen when driverless cars start to take away millions of jobs. It may not be that easy for a truck driver to find a new work.
It was extremely shocking for me to see how many poor people are living even in the richest communities of the USA, except on places where poor people are removed from "security men" like if they were dirt.
It is unbelievable how primitive and underdeveloped the society in the USA still is, how anti-social and pre-homo-sapiens-sapiens-like most people with money are behaving.
Very disgusting especially when looking at the enormous amount of money USA puts into its war machinery.
Simply disgusting. You have nothing to be proud of.
I haven't noticed people leaving the United States for Cuba by crossing shark-infested waters on rafts they've made from trash bags filled with styrofoam packing peanuts, have you?
Oddly, all of that traffic seems to be going the other way.
Doomsayers like this have successfully predicted 5 of the last 0 panics.
My favorite sentence: "He also wrote a book on the internet in 1992 that was never published, based on the belief that the online phenomenon would be over by 1993."
That picture isn't even from Silicon Valley; it's S.F.
> My favorite sentence: "He also wrote a book on the internet in 1992 that was never published, based on the belief that the online phenomenon would be over by 1993."
I think that sentence is incorrect. Rushkoff's first book Cyberia was apparently completed in 1992 but not published until 1994 because the publisher initially believed that that the Internet, email, etc. was a fad that would pass.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadhttp://rationalconspiracy.com/2014/01/28/san-franciscos-tech...
Nothing is more disgusting than a human being that profits off of society and insists they have no responsibility to anyone else. Let the sham that is the social contract collapse and reveal the exploitative nature of capitalism for what it is.
[1] http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/...
So basically you just want to watch the world burn?
Peculiar to hear this moral stance from a position of high self regard.
the social contract is a foundational concept of Liberalism. without it, the current relations of property, state, government, and people are unintelligible. a breakdown of the system is a breakdown means a breakdown of its premises.
I understand that you might expect something better to rise from its ashes, but it seems like in the short term it could be horrifically bad for many people.
History disagrees. Strongly.
Show one instance of assent to this contract. Or, maybe, just show us the text of this "contract".
Why are tech companies supposed to donate more than their share to "develop infrastructure"? No one has ever been expected to do something like this in the past, AFAIK. Just raise taxes in SV and publicly fund more of what you want.
They're not legally required to, but there certainly is historical precedent. I live in LA, and many of the parks, museums, university buildings, and charitable institutions bare the names of the cities oil/property barons. Even those that don't were still financed by that money. There's also the "company town," where the dominate industry in town shoulders even more of the infrastructure.
then there shouldn't be any expectation
And I'm pretty sure the robber barons are criticized more than the current Googles of the world.
What you are saying when you say these companies should be doing social projects and planning, is that the cities are failing the citizens to do those projects and planning.
I agree that they can do it from a perception point of view, but I've found that Social Justice is usually 80% distraction and opportunism, and real solutions should be properly architected by the right entities, and usually have the character of benefiting everyone, not just the oppressed group. Just as a couple examples: body cameras and inverting the clasroom, are not particularly "Black lives matter" solutions, more like improving "all lives" and yet they'd help more than Al Sharpton's opportunistic appearances and all that type of activism.
All these movements that make an enemy of those who they should instead try to enlist in the solution, just wind up doing more harm than good. Take for example the BDS movement. And before that, the other "social justice for Palestinians" movements. It's been decades and Palestinians are still stateless. Is BDS gonna topple Israel? No, it's just an outrage-fueled meme to protest Zionism. It doesn't actually help. The way things move forward is not by activists yelling against an enemy, but rather when people constructively get the stakeholders all together and do something that benefits everyone.
It's not ridiculous to think that the powerful and influential have a responsibility to the society that supports them. have we so fallen down the neoliberalism hole that civic duty is a completely alien concept? If the rich have no responsibility to society, liberal democracies will break down.
http://rationalconspiracy.com/2014/04/17/money-doesnt-matter...
Abstract
Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.
A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
Martin Gilens is Professor of Politics at Princeton University (mgilens@princeton.edu). His research examines representation, public opinion, and mass media, especially in relation to inequality and public policy. Professor Gilens is the author of Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (2012, Princeton University Press). Benjamin I. Page is Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University (b-page@northwestern.edu). His research interests include public opinion, policy making, the mass media, and U.S. foreign policy. He is currently engaged in a large collaborative project to study Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good. For helpful comments the authors are indebted to Larry Bartels and Jeff Isaac, to the anonymous reviewers from Perspectives on Politics, and to seminar participants at Harvard University and the University of Rochester.
Cities are not independent entities.
And good luck calculating what a "share" is.
In the UK, Google has come under fire for negotiating a risibly low tax payment.
That has as much to do with the current administration's dislike of corporate taxation as it does with Google. Even so - Google, like all corporations, benefits from the UK's education system, healthcare, transport investment, police force, legal system, and security services. It's hardly unreasonable to expect a larger contribution to all of the above than the company currently makes.
I expect the SV situation is similar, even allowing for local differences.
>If a lot of rich people live somewhere, that should be a windfall.
Not if rich people also own the government and manipulate the taxation system for their own benefit. This is exactly what is happening in the UK, and it's why public infrastructure is creaking while rich people all over central London are pushing up property prices by buying for investment and leaving huge swathes of real estate empty.
Society at scale should depend on mechanisms, not moral expectations.
danharaj, in what ways are tech companies relying on social and economic infrastructure to the detriment of others? I'm well aware of the tragedy of the commons, so what is the finite resource in this case?
The issue ultimately is that the people that constitute a city, work in it, construct it, maintain it, live in it, are completely subject to the whims of capital and private property. Whole districts can be destroyed or forced out by market forces and replaced with a more profitable set of human beings. We are supposed to accept this as not only natural and inevitable, but good! It is fundamentally undemocratic and inhuman. that's why people are angry, because there is no room for their interests in such a system. living in such a system is dehumanizing.
The compromise of Liberalism is that the people control the government, which acts as a counterbalance against the market. When government fails to mediate the conflicts between the workers and the capitalists and property owners, class conflict gets worse.
i would just like tech workers to realize that we're workers who sell their labor for a wage and that means we're exploited. Economic security, even petty wealth is always a temporary illusion for the worker. Events out of our hands can and often do plunge us into economically precarious situations. We have more in common with people who work for less than us than we do with the people who pay our salaries. furthermore, in a society that is increasingly based on technological structures, we have a civic duty to make sure that technology serves to create a more equal, democratic society.
one thing that i personally do towards that end is offer my clients reduced rates if they open source the code i write for them. i'd like to do more activist programming when i'm in between contracts.
I'm probably going to get rate-limited on my replies so i'll stop responding to comments. i sure kicked up a hornets' nest here.
But these trustafarian activists focus most of their energy on tech employees---who are just trying to find a place to live just like everyone else.
In any case, the fundamental underlying problem is that tech has created a monotonous economy in the Bay. No locality that has one has good economics for citizens.
I expect that if the tech companies were deeply involved in encouraging development and mass transit, then a sizeable percentage of people in SF and elsewhere would decide that this is bad. Most of the press would focus on individual personalities with bad optics and on sub-issues that involve sacred victims, since those are the kinds of things that the readers want to hear about, and "tech companies are villains who do bad things" is an established narrative that it's easy to understand new events by; public opinion follows naturally.
And if that's not the case, one of my takeaways is that there would be something else that people decide is intolerable about the tech companies. The issue is not the issues; the issue is the narrative, into which a limitless number of stories can fit.
But even in the '90s tech boom in Texas, many were using equity in tech companies as leverage to buy and develop land. This in a place with more affordable housing and no water bounding it.
What passes for capital in SF is also not necessarily easily understood as capital without extending the concept quite a bit. It's closer to speculation in early phase equities, which is about the ... third derivative of actual capital. Unlike a building full of machines that add great creative value but are hard to move, this brand of capital is many orders of magnitude more ephemeral.
Capital also is an input, not an output, so I'm not sure what distinction you are trying to make.
What he's claiming is that in "normal" businesses those who supply the inputs (land, labor, and capital) all get a decent share of the profits, but that in the digital economy most of the profits go to those who supply capital.
The problem I see with his claim is that he doesn't actually make a case that this is inherently bad.
He uses Airbnb and Uber as examples to illustrate how it can be bad. I agree both of those companies are bad...but they are bad because their business model is essentially based on turning many of the costs of the hotel and taxi business, respectively, into negative externalities, not because of how their profits are distributed among the suppliers of land, labor, and capital.
[0] Entrepreneur is a concept that AFAIK economics does not have a good way to deal with. It seems to be a special class of labor because entrepreneur make there money by knowing exactly what kind of labor would be most useful. But it also seems to be a special class of capital because they make all of there money on equities (by selling shares in their own companies that they bought for pennies at founding). If anyone has a coherent theory of economics that accounts of entrepreneurs, I'd love to read about it.
- Provide the central point or argument.
- Provide some supporting points or arguments.
- Provide evidence and support for each, and tie it back to the main point.
For example- Highly paid engineers from a large Tech Unicorn company that moved to an East Bay city- drive up prices there displacing half the current residents. The city's economy improves- other tech startups follow suit, people buy houses, real estate value go up, people invest in remodeling homes, setting up shops and services.
1 year later Unicorn dies or moves to another city for lower costs. Engineers with high salaries leave, other startups start to fold, city return to pre-Unicorn condition. People left holding the bag are the ones that felt this was long term sustainable or couldn't move because they were tied down.
It's not the entire tech industry's fault, but if you were a resident of that city, who are you going to blame? Probably the company who started it all, although some may argue they also brought prosperity in the first place. Depends on how you were impacted. If you flipped a house profitably, you are happy. If you bought a condo to live in - not so much.
These kinds of businesses don't seem to get much attention.
We've been a going concern for 4 years now, so there's still time for things to go off the rails; but for the moment we're killing our competition and there's essentially zero internal strife.
To keep the caps we're starting to divide like a bacterium - fostering other companies around our model instead of growing ourselves. We'll see how that goes. It's a little alarming to realize that we're creating our own competition, but there's precedent for it going well (e.g. Anchor Brewing in San Francisco).
It's a great way to make money, and I spend all the other productive hours of my week on my efforts to change the world. There's lots of blue-ocean ways to do that when the need to monetize takes a back seat.
Edit: I'm trying something similar.
I find the idea of working similar hours as you but still being able to provide for my family while spending a lot of time with them incredibly appealing.
Whereas at the moment, during the week I'm lucky to get more than 2 hours a day, the commute and workday eating up the balance.
Meanwhile, what has the author done other than blog to remedy the issue? What is he a proponent of exactly, other than "Tech companies suck, boooo"?
The article is very poorly written, but I think the concern it is trying to hit on is what happens to the economy when too many jobs are automated out of existence and the overall employment plunges.
Personally, I'm optimistic that the society will adapt, as we have adapted to the industrial revolution, but we need a healthy debate to do so.
Stopped here. Airbnb commoditizes land, and Uber commoditizes labor. They do so very efficiently, but the problem is they take too much for the parent company for how efficiently they commoditize these assets.
I can't take someone seriously who can't even get the basics right.
It is unbelievable how primitive and underdeveloped the society in the USA still is, how anti-social and pre-homo-sapiens-sapiens-like most people with money are behaving.
Very disgusting especially when looking at the enormous amount of money USA puts into its war machinery.
Simply disgusting. You have nothing to be proud of.
I haven't noticed people leaving the United States for Cuba by crossing shark-infested waters on rafts they've made from trash bags filled with styrofoam packing peanuts, have you?
Oddly, all of that traffic seems to be going the other way.
My favorite sentence: "He also wrote a book on the internet in 1992 that was never published, based on the belief that the online phenomenon would be over by 1993."
That picture isn't even from Silicon Valley; it's S.F.
I think that sentence is incorrect. Rushkoff's first book Cyberia was apparently completed in 1992 but not published until 1994 because the publisher initially believed that that the Internet, email, etc. was a fad that would pass.