4 ms·

Tech is fine. It's the money we made along the way that ruined it. Somehow money ruins everything. The internet just made it easier for people to extract money

• mordae 2y ago
  Sadly it's not money. It's inequality. To build a stable business, you need to carer to the rich more then to anybody else.
  • nickff 2y ago
    This is palpably false, as Schumpeter described: “Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend to them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man.”
    • yellowapple 2y ago
      This is palpably false, as evidenced by the tendency for rich people to want to make themselves richer. Notice how the overwhelmingly-vast majority (if not entirety) of the rich happily did away with those candle-lighting servants in favor of electric lighting; why pay a bunch of servants, after all, when that money could be invested elsewhere? Likewise with the cheap cloth and cheap cotton and rayon fabric and boots and motorcars and so on; the ultra-rich have adopted these in droves because the alternatives require money better spent elsewhere. Yeah, candles and silk garments and horse-drawn carriages do still exist, but for the rich they are nothing more than novelties for occasional enjoyment; for their day-to-day lives it's all lightbulbs, cotton, and cars. Not only that, but the rich tend to be the early adopters of these very innovations - that is, capitalism begot these innovations specifically to cater to those able to afford them, and only later (after the requisite infrastructure and economies of scale took hold) did they serve as any sort of boon to the common man. Electric lighting and automobiles are two particularly-egregious examples, and they continue to be examples to this day; it ain't the rich who are still reliant on candlelight and animals pulling wagons, after all, but rather the poorest of the poor.
  • tim333 2y ago
    I don't think that's the issue so much as the global reach of tech makes it winner take all. Instead of 100,000 retailers making a bit of money they go bust and Jeff Bezos makes all the money.
    • eszed 2y ago
      You're re-stating GP's point. I agree with both of you.
    • throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
      That's not what is happening though. Millions of companies and indie developers have a platform to make money. This never existed before. Amazon, Google and Apple also employ thousands of SWEs that make a good living building these services for customers. Bezos doesn't "make all the money".
      • seoulmetro 2y ago
        It's akin to everyone being in a big shopping centre and the shopping centre charging rents though. Eventually you have to admit that the model has changed, people are still able to rent but the building is infinitely large. The building size is quite a disrupter.
  • throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
    This statement keeps getting postulated here and I still don't buy it. The economy is NOT 0 sum. Inequality in itself doesn't doesn't do anything bad. Billionaires existing can be true while poverty shrinks. IMO it is a low value argument to state that we could fix world problems by removing "inequality". I'm happy to be proven otherwise.
    • seoulmetro 2y ago
      Billionaires existing are actually fantastic for poverty. The more the better. BUT we need to somehow poke holes in the billionaire that don't both totally drain them or leave them unharmed. The holes need to be large enough that they can help the government support the people. Problem we have is that the billionaires bought all the hole punchers and aren't letting the gov use them like they used to.