Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I'll give you two examples. Pierre Omidyar started eBay in his spare time while he was working a day job, as a way for people to connect with each other to sell things. He said he knew he had something with potential when there was a transaction for a broken laser pointer. He was creating value because he created a market where there really wasn't one before. Maybe you could go to a flea market to sell a broken laser pointer, but you'd have a hard time finding a buyer. eBay created value for a lot of people who wanted to buy and sell things that were hard to find, in part through bringing enough people that you could use auctions for price discovery for goods that are hard to value.
Undeniably, eBay has both created jobs and killed jobs. If you had a shop specializing in some sort of collectibles, you're either selling on eBay or you're out of business. But if you think Omidyar's motivation was to cut labor costs, you don't know what you're talking about.
Another example is PayPal, which had a bunch of founders with a bunch of ideas, but which took off because people who were buying and selling on eBay needed a way to take credit cards and the legacy card networks were not interested in solving that problem. They wouldn't use their rails to let the smallest businesses receive funds. So PayPal built a way to use ACH to do that. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Keith Rabois have no love for traditional jobs, but PayPal succeeded because they found a problem to solve by creating value, not because they were trying to find a less labor-intensive way of doing things that other people are already doing.
Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Square, Stripe, Twitter -- they all have similar stories.
Now, give me a counter example. Tell me about a prominent tech company that was started to do what people were already doing, only with less labor. You're going to be tempted to try with Amazon, but you'll be wrong.
Now you're moving the goalposts. Of course there are successful companies that use technology to try to do things cheaper, and there always have been. Eli Whitney's cotton gin is more than two hundred years old. But you were making a different argument, that today's tech companies were founded primarily to eliminate labor costs, in a way that is fundamentally different than the rest of the Industrial Revolution.
I'll leave the rest of what you said for another post.
eta, never mind this is easy. You said, look how bad things are. I said, so which side are you on? You said, your own. You are a combination of selfish, fatalistic, and apathetic, shifting from one to another whenever someone tries to pin you down too well. OK then.
And maybe you read something once about a way to tax tech. I think I've been pretty clear that I'm more inclined than the average bear to regulate or tax tech if we can find a way to do it that works. If you really cared, we could talk about it. But your interest seems to be more about sticking it to people who have found success than about solving a societal problem, because you generally lack any kind of interest in solving any kind of societal problem.
My point was, you "profit" too by using the tech products. If they weren't making your life better, considering the money you pay for them that turns into those companies' profits, you wouldn't use them. Tech creates a lot of consumer welfare, not just for the tech companies. You have a principled position that you want all the stuff you want, but other people shouldn't make money making it for you.
No kidding. I didn't say large companies put their employees on one single campus. I said large companies put their people in offices, and they need large offices, because they have lots of people. You were explaining that the pricy commercial space isn't going to be necessary. I'm saying, large companies are all organized around have people in space like that.
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There’s a lot here, and I’ll get to it, but let me clear this up:
I do not want to stick it to those who’ve found success. You do.
You wish to have people outside your bubble subsidize the safety net for those you render unemployed. So the guy who’s got a fat dermatology practice and pulls down $400k has to pay more. The guy who’s developing projects and makes $500k has to pay more. The small businessman who’s doing well has to pay more.
I’m saying leave them alone and let the unemployed masses fight it out with Wall Street, tech, and DC. I don’t care who wins. I just don’t wish to subsidize any of the players.
ETA: I don’t think people shouldn’t profit by giving stuff to me. I think they should profit all they like, but when their products cause job losses, I shouldn’t be on the hook. That’s their problem, not mine. I pay them for their tech. They get my money. Hitting me with the cost of paying for the safety net is a double dip. If tech needs more money from me to deal with that problem, it can charge me more.
I have the exact same problem with Wal Mart and oil company subsidies.
ETA2: I also love how you reframe arguments. I say tech is displacing people and selling products that render people obsolete. You respond by citing companies and saying none of them were started with the intent of eliminating labor.
All of them, and many other companies you haven’t listed, are nevertheless selling products that replace labor as a feature.
Tech by its very nature is adverse to labor. Through history, it has always displaced or eliminated labor. Are you suggesting that because all tech companies weren’t started with that explicit intent you’re somehow undoing my point? No business person in history has looked at tech and thought, “Hmmm... How can I find a way to pay for this tech which eliminates labor, but still retain that labor?” Conceptually, the labor could be repurposed, but in reality, it never works that way. Redundant labor is jettisoned.
Labor cost elimination may be argued to be collateral in some instances, but it’s always really more a feature. Everybody knows that.
The companies you have cited, most notably Facebook, make significant sums of money selling products that eliminate labor. (Maybe not Twitter, Square, and PayPal.). They have also engaged in old school predation - simply crushing all competition with scale. In this regard, big tech is a Standard Oil of sorts.
John D. Rockefeller provided a whole lot of value, by the way.
My view, my “selfish and apathetic” view is that this only gets fixed when things Get Really Bad. I see no point in crafting a solution here or anywhere else (you should read Lanier, btw) because tech has too much lobbying power to allow one (read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism on that).
I say let the big winners and big losers fight this battle. They have the skin in the game. And that’s the inevitable outcome toward which we hurtle anyway.
