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There's already a solution for this - worker ownership of companies with corresponding democratic rights. We've just emerged from an era where benevolent tech

There's already a solution for this - worker ownership of companies with corresponding democratic rights. We've just emerged from an era where benevolent tech companies were supposed to stand up for us and reflect our values. Instead, they put on a polite face, said the right words to us, and then did whatever served their interests irrespective of our concerns. Repeating this scenario is foolish and only going to worsen the situation.

throwaway29292 10y ago
If the root cause of this problem is that -companies violate privacy rights to gather more big data -more data translates to more investment (I'm seeing this happen at my current company right now) -VCs, who are the top of the food chain, are the ones pushing for higher returns (like any rational actor would do) -then shouldn't the government step in and regulate this area? Define standards that would limit the amount of funding/valuation based on 'user as product'?
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  The root of the problem is the authoritarian structure of modern enterprise. I know many good people who work at bad companies, who, were they given the chance to have their say, would change things wildly for the better.
  - HarryHirsch 10y ago
    You'd rather say that at-will employment and especially the tight labour market outside tech enables the authoritarian structure of the modern workplace.
    - alphonsegaston 10y ago
      No, I meant expressly what I said. A democracy cannot function when it harbors inside itself a system in which the survival of most people is determined by something organized like a dictatorship. The poor conditions in the modern labor market have been engineered by these authoritarian systems in collusion with the governments they corrupt with their outsized wealth and power. It's intended to disenfranchise people politically and economically to ensure a small class of oligarchs maintains control of both systems.
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        At-will employment, tight labour markets, etc., are a significant part of that engineering. I suspect you and HarryHirsch are in violent agreement.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    Eh, I can totally imagine a cooperative that monetizes user data.
- matt4077 10y ago
  Of course the government should do something about it. But I'd bet most people would agree that killing or stealing are immoral, even in the absence of laws against it. In fact, every one here has, on innumerable occasions, not stolen something even though they could have been sure they wouldn't be caught. Your game theory applies to people as well: if you find a wallet on the street, it doesn't make sense to give it back to the owner. And yet, you'll find many people who do give it back. That's because we have evolved emotions such as altruism, or empathy. Those are still useful, even when most of morality has been formalised into criminal law, because societies tend to work better (and are more fun) if you can trust people, at least for the small stuff. There's no reason we shouldn't expect corporations to follow a similar path,
  - throwaway29292 10y ago
    True, some corporations might be altruistic, but probably not all. Murderers still exist in society, and for those we need laws to guide everyone. If all laws and police disappeared suddenly, I think it would take less than 5 years for societies to descend into complete chaos. Laws still seem necessary?
    - matt4077 10y ago
      Absolutely – and in the case of corporations, I'd say there is still a lot to do to improve the law governing their behaviour. But since chances for that seem to be quite low currently, and because even a perfect legal system cannot always capture every eventuality, there should be certain behaviours that are generally frowned upon, just as there are for people. One example I recently heard was from a woman who was fired after attending her husband's funeral. That probably happens less than a dozen times per year, and might just not warrant a law. It still shouldn't happen. (The problem, of course, is that with people our sense of morality is largely guided by other peoples' reaction to our behaviour. Corporations will never have the same sense of shame, and the closest analogy – boycotts – rarely work)
djsumdog 10y ago
I like the fictional future on Mars in the Kim Stanley Robinson novels where there are no companies, but co-ops. Your time goes into the co-op and everyone owns a portion of that for life. This is a greater dramatic shift and I'm not sure if we'll see it in our lifetimes, but it would be nice that, even that first high school job at a cinema would earn you shares in that company equal to the time you put in, for life. In some ways, that would make more sense than basic minimum income.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  It will happen. The limiting factor is we need to get the friction for forking an existing co-op down close to zero. Unfortunately most people who work for a co-op still think of it as proprietary ("this is my co-op, and we don't have any openings right now. If you want yours you have to start your own"). Intellectual resistance from co-opers isn't the main bottleneck though. Management infrastructure needs to be all digital and open source, and forking needs to be technically easy. That means the accounting, staffing, and operations procedures all written out in code, rather than in QuickBooks on some computer in the stock room. On github, with one-touch deployment to Heroku, or some equivalent. Ethereum maybe. Once we're there I think it will be fairly easy to sell the employees on the "you should spend some time training people who are forking your business" concept, since they are (mostly) already amenable to anarchist (you don't really own anything) values. At that point it will be viral and anyone who is providing ops and logistical support for that ecosystem will get very rich.
  - throwaway71958 10y ago
    >> It will happen. As someone who was born and raised in the Soviet Union and spent the last 20 years in the US, I hope to dear god this doesn't ever happen. I don't know where else I'd have to emigrate if it does. To Mars maybe? What you're describing is essentially "collective enterprise" or "kolkhoz", where nominally you own a share in a venture, but in practice you don't own shit, and as a result you don't consider it "your own", and as a direct consequence of not actually owning property, you just can't bring yourself to care. This gives rise to a lot of unsavory and damaging behaviors: from not actually working all that hard, to outright stealing. They had a saying in the USSR: "Everything belongs to the kolkhoz, so everything belongs to me." So who's to judge you if you e.g. steal a couple of tons of kerosene to heat your hothouse in winter? Communists had to _shoot people_ who had even a modicum of entrepreneurial skill ("kulaks"), and take away their property in order to get the rest to join after the October Revolution of 1917. I suspect that's how things looked to the revolutionaries back in late 19th century. They've never experienced their proposed ideology on their own hide and therefore did not see its rough edges and downsides. All of this collectivism in the US can exist only as a part of a broader staunchly capitalist economy, and then only during the "good times" when people's needs are more or less met and they can spare some energy on pursuing ideological purity. All of this discussion about communist ideals from people who have never experienced anything anywhere close to what it's like is like a bad nightmare to any Eastern European who actually has a first hand experience living under a communist regime. Truly, those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. I, for one, will sacrifice everything I've got to prevent any even remotely communist development of events here in the US. Yes, that does include not considering Bernie "Money grows on trees" Sanders seriously. Communism does not work. It never did work. It never will work. I'm 100% certain of it. Cue people explaining to me that the "USSR never actually had communism" and "you're holding it wrong". You're missing the point.

throwaway29292 10y ago

If the root cause of this problem is that -companies violate privacy rights to gather more big data -more data translates to more investment (I'm seeing this happen at my current company right now) -VCs, who are the top of the food chain, are the ones pushing for higher returns (like any rational actor would do) -then shouldn't the government step in and regulate this area? Define standards that would limit the amount of funding/valuation based on 'user as product'?

alphonsegaston 10y ago
The root of the problem is the authoritarian structure of modern enterprise. I know many good people who work at bad companies, who, were they given the chance to have their say, would change things wildly for the better.
- HarryHirsch 10y ago
  You'd rather say that at-will employment and especially the tight labour market outside tech enables the authoritarian structure of the modern workplace.
  - alphonsegaston 10y ago
    No, I meant expressly what I said. A democracy cannot function when it harbors inside itself a system in which the survival of most people is determined by something organized like a dictatorship. The poor conditions in the modern labor market have been engineered by these authoritarian systems in collusion with the governments they corrupt with their outsized wealth and power. It's intended to disenfranchise people politically and economically to ensure a small class of oligarchs maintains control of both systems.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      At-will employment, tight labour markets, etc., are a significant part of that engineering. I suspect you and HarryHirsch are in violent agreement.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  Eh, I can totally imagine a cooperative that monetizes user data.
matt4077 10y ago
Of course the government should do something about it. But I'd bet most people would agree that killing or stealing are immoral, even in the absence of laws against it. In fact, every one here has, on innumerable occasions, not stolen something even though they could have been sure they wouldn't be caught. Your game theory applies to people as well: if you find a wallet on the street, it doesn't make sense to give it back to the owner. And yet, you'll find many people who do give it back. That's because we have evolved emotions such as altruism, or empathy. Those are still useful, even when most of morality has been formalised into criminal law, because societies tend to work better (and are more fun) if you can trust people, at least for the small stuff. There's no reason we shouldn't expect corporations to follow a similar path,
- throwaway29292 10y ago
  True, some corporations might be altruistic, but probably not all. Murderers still exist in society, and for those we need laws to guide everyone. If all laws and police disappeared suddenly, I think it would take less than 5 years for societies to descend into complete chaos. Laws still seem necessary?
  - matt4077 10y ago
    Absolutely – and in the case of corporations, I'd say there is still a lot to do to improve the law governing their behaviour. But since chances for that seem to be quite low currently, and because even a perfect legal system cannot always capture every eventuality, there should be certain behaviours that are generally frowned upon, just as there are for people. One example I recently heard was from a woman who was fired after attending her husband's funeral. That probably happens less than a dozen times per year, and might just not warrant a law. It still shouldn't happen. (The problem, of course, is that with people our sense of morality is largely guided by other peoples' reaction to our behaviour. Corporations will never have the same sense of shame, and the closest analogy – boycotts – rarely work)

djsumdog 10y ago

I like the fictional future on Mars in the Kim Stanley Robinson novels where there are no companies, but co-ops. Your time goes into the co-op and everyone owns a portion of that for life. This is a greater dramatic shift and I'm not sure if we'll see it in our lifetimes, but it would be nice that, even that first high school job at a cinema would earn you shares in that company equal to the time you put in, for life. In some ways, that would make more sense than basic minimum income.

erikpukinskis 10y ago
It will happen. The limiting factor is we need to get the friction for forking an existing co-op down close to zero. Unfortunately most people who work for a co-op still think of it as proprietary ("this is my co-op, and we don't have any openings right now. If you want yours you have to start your own"). Intellectual resistance from co-opers isn't the main bottleneck though. Management infrastructure needs to be all digital and open source, and forking needs to be technically easy. That means the accounting, staffing, and operations procedures all written out in code, rather than in QuickBooks on some computer in the stock room. On github, with one-touch deployment to Heroku, or some equivalent. Ethereum maybe. Once we're there I think it will be fairly easy to sell the employees on the "you should spend some time training people who are forking your business" concept, since they are (mostly) already amenable to anarchist (you don't really own anything) values. At that point it will be viral and anyone who is providing ops and logistical support for that ecosystem will get very rich.
- throwaway71958 10y ago
  >> It will happen. As someone who was born and raised in the Soviet Union and spent the last 20 years in the US, I hope to dear god this doesn't ever happen. I don't know where else I'd have to emigrate if it does. To Mars maybe? What you're describing is essentially "collective enterprise" or "kolkhoz", where nominally you own a share in a venture, but in practice you don't own shit, and as a result you don't consider it "your own", and as a direct consequence of not actually owning property, you just can't bring yourself to care. This gives rise to a lot of unsavory and damaging behaviors: from not actually working all that hard, to outright stealing. They had a saying in the USSR: "Everything belongs to the kolkhoz, so everything belongs to me." So who's to judge you if you e.g. steal a couple of tons of kerosene to heat your hothouse in winter? Communists had to _shoot people_ who had even a modicum of entrepreneurial skill ("kulaks"), and take away their property in order to get the rest to join after the October Revolution of 1917. I suspect that's how things looked to the revolutionaries back in late 19th century. They've never experienced their proposed ideology on their own hide and therefore did not see its rough edges and downsides. All of this collectivism in the US can exist only as a part of a broader staunchly capitalist economy, and then only during the "good times" when people's needs are more or less met and they can spare some energy on pursuing ideological purity. All of this discussion about communist ideals from people who have never experienced anything anywhere close to what it's like is like a bad nightmare to any Eastern European who actually has a first hand experience living under a communist regime. Truly, those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. I, for one, will sacrifice everything I've got to prevent any even remotely communist development of events here in the US. Yes, that does include not considering Bernie "Money grows on trees" Sanders seriously. Communism does not work. It never did work. It never will work. I'm 100% certain of it. Cue people explaining to me that the "USSR never actually had communism" and "you're holding it wrong". You're missing the point.