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> The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. I'm unconvinced. The class system is, at its core, money. A

by untog 9y ago

> The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. I'm unconvinced. The class system is, at its core, money. And short of eBay allowing people to sell second hand items peer to peer, I really don't think the internet has enabled economic mobility all that much. A select few in Silicon Valley have gotten very rich, certainly, but an effect on the population at large? Maybe it'll happen one day, but even stuff like Bitcoin has somehow transformed from "the new cash" to "the new speculative investment that promises to make people with disposable income even richer".

stctgion 9y ago
The class system in the US might be about money but here in the UK you can be penniless and still look down upon someone by being born into the right family!
noir_lord 9y ago
Social movement encompasses rather more than just an economic movement, it also covers things like political unrest and direct action campaigns.
danans 9y ago
I think they are saying that the movement to confront the class structure will be social, not economic, fueled by shared outrage, not commerce.
Consultant32452 9y ago
I think you're undervaluing the impact of the internet on small business. Sure, a few guys at the tippy top of Uber-eats are the only ones getting fabulously wealthy, but I've discovered several wonderful mom and pop restaurants through that service. Sure, only a hand full of people at Google are getting fabulously wealthy, but most of the video content I consume these days are regular-ish people on Youtube who now make their living making those videos without having to go through Hollywood gatekeepers. There's been at least a half dozen small businesses I've hired based solely off their Craigslist ads, businesses I likely would've never heard of and might not have ever existed without the internet/Craigslist. I don't understand why people point to the few fabulously wealthy people and exclaim that because everyone else isn't fabulously wealthy that the system is failing us all. We still have a ways to go, but the internet to me has moved several things further down the democratized spectrum than they ever had been before.
- sedachv 9y ago
  The Internet does enable easier local business discovery. Where are all the new small businesses though? The latest Census data is from 2015 and shows the number of new small businesses created is at a level not seen since the mid-1970s: http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-near-40-year-low/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-nea... Whatever combination of factors is at work suppressing small business creation since the 2008 recession is not being overcome by the advantages you listed.
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    The economy tanked and just as it was starting to recover the government made it illegal to take on risk by having no or crappy insurance. Meanwhile healthcare prices skyrocketed. Simultaneously we doubled down on our immigration policy towards providing citizenship for unskilled, impoverished immigrants rather than the kind of means based immigration policy popular in most of Europe. That means we missed out on a lot of talented, educated immigrants who might have either started companies or been willing to work for startups. We cracked down on internships. And we allowed patent trolls to run amok. Let's also not forget the credible threats of doubling minimum wage.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  Just because you’ve thrown a few crumbs of business or exposure at these people doesn’t mean they’ve become any richer than their equivalents would have been in the pre-Internet days. The fact that the technological requirements for small new businesses and cottage content industries have changed shouldn’t be confused with an improvement in the opportunity landscape as a whole. If anything, these “businesses” - especially the content creators - are more like digital feudalisms, as (mostly) low-status low-value workers try to scratch out an existence on territory owned by a single entity they have no democratic influence on. The reality is that wealth concentration among the hyper-rich is accelerating as they capture an ever-increasing share of global productivity. If the Internet were likely to fix this, we’d have seen some evidence of this happening by now. But there is exactly zero evidence for this, and even less reason to believe that it can happen, given where we are today. The only thing that might change this is total disintermediation - open, distributed, publicly owned, non-corporate hardware and software infrastructure, including search, security, content distribution, storage, and applications. You only have to think about that for a few moments to see how far we are from that kind of Internet, and just how locked down, siloed, chokepointed, gated, and obsessively monetised the Internet we have today is.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

by untog 9y ago

stctgion 9y ago

The class system in the US might be about money but here in the UK you can be penniless and still look down upon someone by being born into the right family!

noir_lord 9y ago

Social movement encompasses rather more than just an economic movement, it also covers things like political unrest and direct action campaigns.

danans 9y ago

I think they are saying that the movement to confront the class structure will be social, not economic, fueled by shared outrage, not commerce.

Consultant32452 9y ago

I think you're undervaluing the impact of the internet on small business. Sure, a few guys at the tippy top of Uber-eats are the only ones getting fabulously wealthy, but I've discovered several wonderful mom and pop restaurants through that service. Sure, only a hand full of people at Google are getting fabulously wealthy, but most of the video content I consume these days are regular-ish people on Youtube who now make their living making those videos without having to go through Hollywood gatekeepers. There's been at least a half dozen small businesses I've hired based solely off their Craigslist ads, businesses I likely would've never heard of and might not have ever existed without the internet/Craigslist. I don't understand why people point to the few fabulously wealthy people and exclaim that because everyone else isn't fabulously wealthy that the system is failing us all. We still have a ways to go, but the internet to me has moved several things further down the democratized spectrum than they ever had been before.

sedachv 9y ago
The Internet does enable easier local business discovery. Where are all the new small businesses though? The latest Census data is from 2015 and shows the number of new small businesses created is at a level not seen since the mid-1970s: http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-near-40-year-low/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-nea... Whatever combination of factors is at work suppressing small business creation since the 2008 recession is not being overcome by the advantages you listed.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  The economy tanked and just as it was starting to recover the government made it illegal to take on risk by having no or crappy insurance. Meanwhile healthcare prices skyrocketed. Simultaneously we doubled down on our immigration policy towards providing citizenship for unskilled, impoverished immigrants rather than the kind of means based immigration policy popular in most of Europe. That means we missed out on a lot of talented, educated immigrants who might have either started companies or been willing to work for startups. We cracked down on internships. And we allowed patent trolls to run amok. Let's also not forget the credible threats of doubling minimum wage.
TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
Just because you’ve thrown a few crumbs of business or exposure at these people doesn’t mean they’ve become any richer than their equivalents would have been in the pre-Internet days. The fact that the technological requirements for small new businesses and cottage content industries have changed shouldn’t be confused with an improvement in the opportunity landscape as a whole. If anything, these “businesses” - especially the content creators - are more like digital feudalisms, as (mostly) low-status low-value workers try to scratch out an existence on territory owned by a single entity they have no democratic influence on. The reality is that wealth concentration among the hyper-rich is accelerating as they capture an ever-increasing share of global productivity. If the Internet were likely to fix this, we’d have seen some evidence of this happening by now. But there is exactly zero evidence for this, and even less reason to believe that it can happen, given where we are today. The only thing that might change this is total disintermediation - open, distributed, publicly owned, non-corporate hardware and software infrastructure, including search, security, content distribution, storage, and applications. You only have to think about that for a few moments to see how far we are from that kind of Internet, and just how locked down, siloed, chokepointed, gated, and obsessively monetised the Internet we have today is.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]