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Maybe you want to re-read this sober? You get more value out of the tech you buy than you pay for it. The seller profits too. Win-win. You are describing every company that sells something for a profit.
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The tech is worth far, far more than the amount for which it is sold. This is its biggest selling point.
If you pay XXXX in wages, and I sell you tech that eliminates those wages, that tech is worth more than X. I have simply chosen to sell you the tech at basement prices to grab all of the market. (Later, I will raise that price.)
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Why? That's how capitalism has worked for hundreds of years?
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Tech, and most notably apps, which cost nothing to produce, are unlike previous innovations. Capitalism is arguably too antiquated to address the disruptions caused by them because the extreme deltas between the cost of labor they eliminate and the cost to produce them, and the cost at which they can be sold, are so extreme. There's no smoothing in the adjustment from prior labor to tech replacing that labor. In the case of things like Uber, it's near immediate, and severe.
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When marginal cost is zero, price can drop to marginal cost.
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I'm not going to argue with what can occur. I am arguing with whether I should be compelled to subsidize a safety net for the externalities.
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I am the last person you need to convince of Google's market power. But if your issue is monopoly, let's have an antitrust conversation. Burger and Adder will like that.
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True. That's pulling in some stuff beyond this discussion.
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As I said, you are name-dropping Lanier to pretend, however briefly, to care. But you don't care.
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I have not read all of Lanier's books simply for fun (although they are entertaining). I have read them because I think he advocates for a tax scheme and form of income to consumers (being paid for use of their info) which would avoid some of the suffering of labor rendered redundant by tech.
Your view - simply make all of us pay more in taxes for a bigger safety net - is neither creative nor realistic. It's an old D platform plank mixed with a European welfare state policy. I think forcing tech to pay people for collection of their data, and forcing consumers of that data from tech companies to pay a special add-on tax, can pump more than adequate dollars to the people rendered redundant. It'd also force the very worst tech companies (google and FB), which live on gobbling up info (often sleazily) and selling it, to shoulder the majority of the costs.
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Why? People freely give it to them.
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Not exactly. I loathe FB and have never participated in it. However, it has a dossier on me, and every other non-FBer in existence. Much of the really useful data is not provided freely, but researched and compiled by companies like FB. Raw, it's nearly impossible to understand (years of playing with Google Analytics taught me that). You can only take away broad meta points. But drilled down to individual profiles using various cookies in various websites it places all over the internet, FB and Google can, as we saw in 2016, target exactly who a candidate needs to go out and vote.
And FB has done this by forcing every website selling anything to put one of those dumb "Like" buttons on their site or use FB as a login.
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No other company that "cause[s] people to lose jobs" is forced to subsidize a safety net. Henry Ford wasn't forced to subsidize buggy whip makers. We have government to do that.
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Henry Ford didn't put 1/1000th of the people out of work that tech does every year. And when you're saying "govt," what you really mean is "taxpayers." Why should a farmer in Idaho who still uses a flip phone and files his taxes on paper have to subsidize via increased taxation a safety net that would not need to be expanded exponentially but for tech? Let tech do that.
(This also applies to Wal Mart and Amazon, for some similar and some different reasons.)
