Exponential growth devours and corrupts
m.signalvnoise.com
m.signalvnoise.com
https://blog.ycombinator.com/navigating-mid-success/
Something is awry in our understanding of moral capitalism at large for statements like that to be met with anything other than derision, and DHH is getting at the heart of why: We've all become obsessed with growth. When the way to get rich in the world is capital gains, as opposed to value creation, the abnormalities in behavior and ethics, which are glorified elements of Silicon Valley culture, fall out as a natural consequence. Having real, powerful values that help evaluate whether something legal is actually ethical means saying "no" to certain kinds of work. God forbid you do that though, lest your investors punish you.
Where your treasure is, your heart will be also. It comes as no surprise to anyone tarrying long over the facts that SV's treasure is gold.
One of the lines was
I got to about there ^ in the comment before I remembered more of the quote. The article I trying to find was this:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
It is extremely good and it plays well after DHH's intro. I know some of the arguments there against libertarianism are strawman arguments, but overall it's a great article and about a day after reading it and thinking about it I started just calling myself a Liberal (it's more complicated than that, but it's the closest fit).
DHH touches on exponential growth specifically, but more generally what is needed is to recognize the world as a system of forces and feedback functions, and to take actions to limit the consequences of those systems.
For example, democracy is a system to establish which people run our country. If media is allowed to be funded by foreign forces unchecked then it can subvert our democracy. We must now make a choice, do we do something or allow it? For a time we allowed it because our propaganda works better than theirs (mostly because ours is the truth and we live in free societies) but with the advent of social media we may need to make a different choice or change our systems to adapt.
It is this type of thinking. It's a superset of what the Canadians and others call "good government". It's a way of managing systems to enact our ends: a more peaceful, prosperous, sustainable existence.
Capitalism and growth have a place, but that place needs to be carefully considered and guarded.
It's that or we perish in a nuclear holocaust or melted, polluted planet.
He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power."
Insightful and depressing.
We know that this statement is false, BTW, because of the existence of organs like the appendix, which AFAWCT are completely vestigial.
Also, it ignores the part of the dynamic where new values are created because they allow you to throw some other values under the bus. Cooperation, empathy, creativity, intelligence, and pretty much everything that makes us human are all examples: our non-primate ancestors didn't have these, but the evolution of them allowed us to fight more fiercely than a lion, move more quickly than a cheetah, live in colder places than a penguin, and go without foraging longer than a bear.
But your argument could have used Art, which is vestigial other than as a signalling mechanism for pattern abstraction ability and excess resources.
I have a pet theory that is slowly becoming a personal religion of sorts. (Disclaimer: only accreditations are a biochem degree over a decade ago, and this armchair.) It involves a belief that at each level of organization -- atomic, cellular, organismal, societal (which in itself has something of an interesting fractalness) structures try to arrange themselves such that they have "access to the maximum possible future opportunity space"[1][2]. When each structure at every level is operating in such a way, structures tend toward centralization as some parts of the whole become more powerful, and the whole at the next higher level of organization becomes more effective. And so we tend to create hierarchy and oppress our fellow man, for the same reason that our brain cell oppresses and rends subordinate the skin cell of the finger. And so oppression is systemic, almost a law of nature. Decentralization and equality is not what the universe tends toward.
But we can perhaps be clever, and create the society we want and value. It would be a rare organism, in many ways crippled, like a slime-mold among eukaryotes.
So if perhaps centralization and growth (ie control of largest possible future opportunity space) is expected as a physical law of sorts, then the trick would be to create a niche that preserves our value system -- we'd need to engage in systems design that allowed our society to exist is a "test harness", where we get to /feel/ like we're fulfilling desires for these things, but are somehow prevented from engaging in the behaviour that we have subjectively decided (at a societal level) will lead to bad outcomes. I dunno, just riffing here ;)
[1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_...
[2]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170126-information-theory-a...
Concepts like path-dependency seem to have an explanation for this, but they also stand in contrast to "access to the maximum possible future opportunity space". Many structures are clearly sub-optimal; organizations often crystallize in ways that maximize nothing at all but short-term laziness. They centralize by choosing paths that are convenient, not necessarily those that offer the most opportunity.
The money supply has to grow with the growth of the economy and population, and it's better to have excesses than shortages. Or should we infinitely divide a single dollar for everyone to use?
Collective choice, not government mandate as the person to whom I replied suggested.
The way I think of it is this: The fruits of techonological innovation are supposed to be the rising tide that lifts all boats; the mechanism by which it does this is by lowering prices. When you have systematic inflation, you are robbing the poor of their opportunity to get ahead and giving it to those who have first access to cheap money (wall street, political cronies, i.e. big contractor)
Selling advertising space rather than selling one's purported product is the epitome of the dark forces and banal moral failure that DHH talks about. But most YC and SV startups owe their existance to advertising, and they are psychologically resistant to admit such moral failure, no matter how obvious the costs to society.
More detailed arguments against the ad-supported "business model": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773
- Edward Abbey
The obvious solution is antitrust law. Why is Microsoft no longer the competitive boogeyman of the 90s? Because it was prosecuted under section 2 of the Sherman Act in 1998 [1]. Everyone would be using Bing, Zune and Internet Explorer otherwise.
But the last two administrations haven't prosecuted anyone under section 2. Just imagine spinning off Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome etc. and letting them survive on their own merits.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
I think this would be a difficult fight because they all can claim serious competition. For instance, probably your best case could be against Google and their search engine advertising, but they could easily say that they are competing against all advertising mediums in the world. Airbnb could say they are competing against hotel chains. Uber says they are competing against taxi's. Facebook is competing against 100's of social networks. While I agree something should be done to help business compete in these new mediums they are not defined enough to draw a line in the sand.
To your point though you look at a situation where a single company, Google, could shutter a businesses website on a whim... that seems like a valid antitrust case. I'm just not sure how you would make the case though.
It depends how you define the market, right? If we allow substitutes then Standard Oil was not a monopolist because it was competing against the electric utilities for illumination etc. If we define it by "similar business model" it's hard to see how Google doesn't dominate search engine advertising, Facebook social network advertising, Uber the space of apps used to call transportation etc. Doctrines such as product tying [1] and essential facilities [2] seem ready-made for Google and Facebook respectively.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)#Tying_of_Micr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_facilities_doctrine
While Google's products do work together I would argue they also work with competitors. Google is pretty open in this way. If you want to move over to MS Office you can export all your stuff to office files. That's unlike what Microsoft was doing. They were making it difficult for competitors. I think Google was very purposeful in this strategy to at least seem open to competition.
I think there are two ways in which it can be argued that Google's auxiliary products destroy competition. On the one hand Google uses its domination in one market (search engines) to subsidize products that end up dominating other markets (online maps, web email etc.). On the other hand these auxiliary products are making it difficult for other search engines to compete with Google. If your search engine has similar (or even slightly better) results to Google, you still have to break into its being the default search engine on the most used web browser and mobile OS, and integrated with maps and other products. If Altavista had been similarly entrenched in 2000, Page and Brin would have likely hit a brick wall despite having a better algorithm. Even Microsoft with all its resources has failed to make a dent in the search space now.
IDK about the others, but Google is an obvious one.
Google Search, Gmail, Google Docs, Chrome, and Android. Each connects with another and has incredible market share. They are horizontally integrated, just like Windows and IE of the 90s.
I'm sure he'd never just extort a few cool looking concessions from his targets that will help him get reelected.
For decades we've valued the growth of capital over salaries, we are living the results of this policy, and need to see a reverse to a position where the result of salaries grow faster than capital.
Benefit corps have the specific purpose to increase prosperity for all stakeholders - not just shareholders. They are indeed a proposal for a "new operating system" for companies, and it is adopted by many companies (some very well-known) already.
The basic idea is to put a statement of public benefit in corporate bylaws, then sign up for an assessment that audits that your company actions are indeed aligned with public benefit.
This effort, nominally, would seem to address many of the problems laid out in the post, but benefit corps are not mentioned once. I'm not saying its _the_ answer, but seems like a more collaborative, concrete starting point for a solution than "some mass infusion of the 1960s spirit."
Note that if you begin as a public benefit corporation, raising funds will be obstacle number one, since you must compete not just in your market with current-model companies, but also compete with them for funds. So no wonder it's more common for successful private companies to pay back their investors and then transform themselves into public benefit companies. This is still useful as an option, but hardly more than a start at a solution. Unless laws are changed, of course. If the law allowed public companies to change to a public benefit corporation without warning regardless of investor's opinion that would be a huge change - but might thoroughly discourage investment, of course.
Edit: a short video where Rushkoff summarizes the big ideas in his new book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAOyOULWKUo - recommended!
Running Twitter on Wikipedia budget is trivial, we have IRC networks that handle similar volume of traffic on volunteer budget. Distributed open equivalents of Facebook and Google also exist. The problem they face is always marketing. On a shoestring budget you cannot afford that.
On further reflection, I think we passengers might be able to make things less bad for the Uber drivers. DHH mentioned putting on headphones and not interacting with the driver at all when he uses Uber. I've never done that. More often than not, I chat with the driver at least a little during the ride. Once or twice, I used the ability of the Uber app to put my choice of music from Spotify on the car stereo. But then I felt uncomfortable doing that, because I was imposing my choice of music on the driver. So now, I'm happy to let the driver play whatever music he or she wants, or none at all. And I've never rated a driver anything other than five stars, since I know their ability to continue getting work depends on ratings.
So we need to remember that our Uber drivers, AIrbnb hosts, etc. are humans, not machines.
If you dislike the former you should kind of like, or at least respect, the latter.
Or you're just rambling.
The infinite growth trap is what leads to Marx's critique of capitalism. Since that is on the list of verboten ideas we need to come up with a new language that says the same thing so that people can hear it without freaking out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
Smartphones, youtube, facebook and many other success stories had exponential growth. Once a product/idea goes big, there will always be people who do not like something about it. Thats the cost of making a product that everyone can use. A better example is the idea of money itself. Its an invention used by almost everyone in the world, We still have people who absolutely hate money with passion based on their own principles that are right for them. Overall it did more good to humanity.
We have created an economic world, where good ideas travel faster and share the rewards with everyone. Its a good thing. The alternative would be a hierarchical society where some other parts of the society will always be left behind.