Do you support sustainability, social responsibility, tech ethics, or trust and safety? Congratulations, you’re an enemy of progress. That’s according to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
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Billionaires are a symptom, not a cause
They can be both. Let’s step away from the disease terminology and put it plainly.
When there is this much suffering and inequality, billionaires shouldn’t be allowed to happen.
No one deserves that much power nor that much wealth when around 75% of all human beings are facing such a disproportionate amount of struggle that its difficult to even describe the comparison.
Billionaires live in a utopic paradise while the majority of humans are trapped in an existence that ranges from intolerable to abhorrent, abject poverty to barely surviving, all the while spending the majority of their time working, which contributes to the billionaires wealth…
People in extreme poverty world-wide are less than 10% and lessening over time. The majority of people don’t have an intolerable or abhorrent life.
Neither do majority of people work more than 80 hours a week
People in extreme poverty world-wide are less than 10% and lessening over time. The majority of people don’t have an intolerable or abhorrent life.
Ah yes when you state the world extreme poverty level at $2.85 a fucking day. What fucking fantasy world do you live in??
Neither do majority of people work more than 80 hours a week
Are you just retarded? The majority working over 80hrs a week are low skilled laborers working multiple jobs to make ends meet, tell me all about there amazing life when 2/3rds of the work week is just straight work which doesnt yeild enough time for a proper 8hrs of sleep when accounting for getting ready, eating, commuting or taking care of family?
That’s not the majority of the people, majority of people work less now than in the 19th century
The amount it people leaving poverty is happening so quickly it’s amazing.
Compare abject poverty rates of now to 60 years ago and 100 years ago.
What’s the point of being progressiv if you never accept that progress actually happens?
I see you subscribe to the Journal of Rectally Sourced Statistics.
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A fever is a symptom and similarly it is one that must be treated directly to save the life of the patient.
I agree because obviously capitalism pre-exists billionaires by default, but there is also no denying that them being means they have so much more power over every aspect of life than the rest of us, that they now completely control our lives and are absolutely making sure that fighting back becomes harder and harder. To abolish capitalism, we must get rid of the billionaires, they are our biggest hurdle (and are only people, after all).
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Nope, multimillionaires would perpetuate the same problems.
capitalism + legal bribery (aka lobbying) = widening wealth gap
You, as an individual or a group, cannot beat corporations.
For more information, please see consumer right to repair.
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For everyone debating numbers, billionaires, millionaires, whatever. The absolute numbers are irrelevant, what matters is the wealth gap. If the absolute top of the wealth pyramid, 0.01%, earns more than the bottom 5% combined, it’s a problem. A bigger ratio means more wealth concentration, or inequality, whichever term you prefer. The 1% controlling nearly half the wealth of any place, whether city, state or nation, should sound all alarms to do something ASAP to reduce the inequality.
Which never happens, because when you have that much money, you call the shots. Capitalism became a neofeudalism.
I’m gonna say what the author - as well as many here - don’t dare to.
We all know modern capitalism is bad, many know capitalism in general is bad and its modern form is inevitable, but that’s magically where people stop.
I’m gonna say it. We need to revisit socialism. This is the only way.
What ultimately helped to solve the issue luddites have raised is the rise of socialist agenda, the idea of secure workplace, fair pay, and technology bringing equal prosperity for everyone.
You can relate to socialism whichever way you want, but through the previous industrial revolution the socialist rise was the thing that finally delivered that prosperity, even in capitalist countries, and allowed people to actually benefit from progress. When first states turned socialist, we suddenly got fairer working conditions, free education and healthcare (except for redscared America), and yes - a giant boost in prosperity and equality.
Now, on the brink of the next technological revolution, we either allow those on the top to reap everything they can, or we fight back again to reclaim technology for the benefit of everyone. And socialism is the structure allowing us to do the latter.
We should return to that discourse, no matter how much red scare we face to this day. Saying capitalism is bad is not gonna hurt them. Saying “capitalism is bad, and here’s an alternative” will.
I agree.
Like, more people should ask themselves, what is the function of a society? Is it to merely deliver wealth to the ruling class? Is it to create endless growth for corporations? Is it to maintain the status quo at all costs?
No, when all is said and done, the core fundamental of society should be the following, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” meaning, if you are able to be a good teacher/ doctor/ engineer/ farmer/ programmer/ writer etc etc then do that. Do what you do well. Society requires all of the above to function effectively. However, on the other hand, as a reward or payment for this, you should be guaranteed all the things that a human needs, like housing, education, medical care, heat, food, water, transport, electricity, internet access etc.
Make sure everyone has at least what they need, so that people can then focus on what they want and like.
Now, the above lacks nuance and is probably a huge over simplification, but I truly believe modern society should be more in line with this philosophy. But it’s not. It is largely designed to send wealth and profit to the 1% and everyone else be damned. And there is no good justifiable reason for it.
Elon Musk bought Twitter for 43 billion. His standard of living didn’t change not one iota after the transaction. All he’s done is piss people off and drive away staff and users alike since then. He doesn’t need 43 billion. Heck, he doesn’t even need 1 billion. How many people could be given a home, an education, a clean bill of health with that money. It sickens me to think about it.
But then, if you mention socialism or communism or Marx or Engels, then suddenly, you are the devil incarnate. Like, we don’t need to be saluting statues of Lenin or or adding a hammer and sickle to flags, but maybe just implementing legislation that undoes that money siphon from the working class and ensures people have what they need isn’t such an evil idea ffs.
Anyhow, feel free to downvote, just my thoughts.
Nothing to downvote, that’s spot on
Do you have sources where I can read more about this line of thought?
This is a complex thought, but if you refer particularly to socialism and technology, here are some off the top of my head.
General academic overview: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10455750600704638
Video essays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRepEvmCCIg
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=NRepEvmCCIg
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=6WwHvNDrGV0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Good bot
The socialist rise has been also asociated with stagnation, hunger, neighbors turning neighbors to the secret police, and at least 20 year wide gap in the mindsets of people compared to their western peers. It’s inherently violent, authoritarian ideology. It’s rising popularity in the developed world is similar tragedy as a rise of fascism. Another violent authoritarian ideology.
Capitalism has been also associated with stagnation(recessions, austerity, stagflation or economies such as Japan’s), hunger(poverty, famines), neighbours turning neighbours to secret police(Americans reporting people who have gotten abortions), and at least 20 year wide gap in the mindsets of people compared to their western peers(read this one as conservative Americans and other similar countries vs more liberal and social democracy style countries). It’s inherently violent(state violence eg. police in protecting property), authoritarian ideology. Facisms rising popularity in the developed world is a feature of capatilim.
The capitalist rise has been associated with exploitation, mass executions, imperialist wars, banana republics, extension of international slavery, human trafficking, and inhumane living and working conditions for workers (not only for slaves, mind you). Lots of unchecked power and lack of historical precendents have a tendency to build flawed societies, that’s no secret.
But, just as with the history of capitalism, now we can learn from the mistakes made and correct the course. We have positive examples (early USSR driven internally by worker’s councils, i.e., well, Soviets; Chile with democratically elected socialist leadership; Yugoslavia with League of Communists being elected by the people and republical committees; et cetera et cetera), and we have negative ones (Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China etc.). We know what to do, and we are not doomed to repeat this in whole, just as we don’t have to come back to slavery despite it being present in capitalist societies before.
On the economic side, a lot of it stems from the original disparity in the amount of capital, so just tracing who got more at the end isn’t fair; what is fair is to compare economic dynamics, and on that part socialism wins hands down, especially in times of an industrial revolution. Socialism allows for a rapid change, it is the system that produced some of the highest GDP growths ever recorded, it is the system that took people out of the poverty loop and dustributed the new gains fairly.
But what we’re left with if we continue our course under capitalism? Continued concentration of wealth and unchecked power of certain people over our economy. Those people were not elected, they are not responsible to us, they can do what they please with the capital they have accumulated. And they always get more and more, not just in absolute numbers, but percentage-wise too. This goes in full accordance with an economic theory, and this trend will not change any time in the future.
So essentially we’re left to three choices:
-Continue with status quo and end up under the control of unelected people with unchecked power (see the first paragraph)
-“Starting again”, forcefully redistributing wealth back to an equal state, only to come to this point again later on
-Building a functioning socialist society and finally moving on to the new chapter in the development of humanity.
What do you pick?
I work in a consulting role and the company I am currently working for is a vc funded provider group specialty healthcare docs. It’s all about volume. They’re completely inept in the way they’re running the company. They are incapable of making decisions that need to be made for the future of the organization so they keep pushing them down the road and papering over the terrible fundamentals because for them it’s all about hoovering up practices to gain market power. Everyone is miserable and always fighting at the highest levels. No one has authority over the organization. And people in lower rungs of the org have some of the worst insticts and are rewarded for it. VCs are making bad businesses significantly worse. They all operate under the same fundamental logic:
Get big enough at all costs until you are undeniable.
Jack up prices.
Then reduce the labor force to reap short term profits.
Then sell off to a bigger player without any regard for how the chips fall.
Or keep getting so big that you are unmanageable.
Consumers suffer.
Rinse.
Repeat.
Don’t forget if you can get them to ipo, open a family office and setup some equity swaps with the bank to short over the float of the company without having to report it and rake in profit as they collapse from your untenable growth targets as well while letting the ip get gobbled up by your big chips and find the next sucker pitching his ‘big idea’.
The American Dream.
What we have now is barely capitalism. Back in the day, companies actually competed. Microsoft wouldn’t make a good version of Word for Mac, so Apple reverse engineered the format and created their own office suite that interoperated.
If anyone tried something like that now they’d get sued or get bought. In fact, the practice of simply buying potential competitors is fairly common. Facebook buying upstart social media app Instagram is just one example.
If there’s no competition, markets can’t work. And to have competition you need to let businesses fail. And to let businesses fail you need a robust safety net so people aren’t destitute when some idiot like Musk drives a company into the ground.
What we have now is barely capitalism.
We have some of the most naked and predatory methods of rent seeking imaginable. How on earth is this “barely” capitalism? It is quintessential capitalism. A near-perfect engine of consolidation, profit-seeking, and value growth.
Back in the day, companies actually competed
Competition isn’t the goal of existing capitalist enterprises. It raises unit costs and dilutes profit. Competition is only a means by which a large enterprise temporarily undercuts a smaller local enterprise, until it is starved of revenue and fails. To quote Peter Thiel, “Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”
If there’s no competition, markets can’t work.
The purpose of markets is to marry nodes in the supply chain at an auction rate. But once the marriages are made, the market no longer serves a purpose. Markets are only a transitory vehicle leading to full vertical integration of the supply chain.
Once you’ve achieved a vertical monopoly, your business model pivots to maximizing margins by raising prices and lowering costs. That’s how you maximize profits. And maximizing profits is the only real goal of a private business enterprise.
you need a robust safety net so people aren’t destitute when some idiot like Musk drives a company into the ground
You don’t want a robust safety net in a capitalist system. Safety nets create a subsidy for unemployment - functionally a wage floor, beyond which people would prefer to be unemployed. Without the threat of poverty hanging over a worker’s head, you won’t get the lowest possible wage rate for their labor. This drives up costs and cuts into profits, which is antithetical to the goals of a capitalist enterprise.
Musk driving his business into the ground serves the end goals of a capitalist system overall (even if it marginally inconveniences Musk and his lenders in the moment). The failure of his firm releases workers into the unemployment pool and allows competitors to hire them at a discount - potentially displacing existing workers who command a higher salary. While Musk’s business flounders, the overall auto market prospers. The profit generated in an individual vehicle sale rises, as supply of vehicles contracts - driving prices up - and cost of labor falls - driving unit costs down.
This is good for the surviving pool of capitalists. Its even good for Musk, over the long term, as a higher rate of profit means more cheap money in the investment pool that he can borrow from in order to pursue his next project.
I’m fucking sick after reading this, where can I learn more?
Wait till you see the shit they pull on Wall Street with your 401k and the market in general. Did you know 90% of trades occur off market and do not hit the tape to affect the prices of stocks? Did you know Bernie Madoffs’ invention of payment for order flow is the default model in your market now? Did you know market makers have an exemption to create fake shares for “liquidities” sake. Did you know if you aren’t selling or buying in lots greater than 100 you most likely do not effect a stocks price if you are buying with a broker utilizing pfof (basically all of them) yet your financial news will claim retail moves markets.
Community college Econ courses?
If you want a dose of memes with it you could always read the superstonk dd library on the stock market as well.
What do you think other word processors do today? Libreoffice?
AppleWorks was never really competitive. But there was a time when Word Perfect and MS Word competed. Even that competition wasn’t decided on merit though. MS leveraged their Windows OS to preference their office suite until all others faded. By then, PDF and the web had stolen a lot of Word’s use cases anyway.
I think we might have to go further back to find good examples. But even then, look at a jackass like Thomas Edison litigating his competition out of business, stealing their secrets, buying them out. This shit goes way back.
Who are all these extremist wackos who don’t already want to abolish capitalism?
How about we just regulate the companies instead. I know, it’s shocking to all of the Americans here, but just think about it. When companies are allowed to do whatever they want, it’s like being locked in a cage with a psychopath.
Kind of need a valid replacement.
Edit The amount of downvotes versus provision of a valid replacement is telling
Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system. It’s not perfect, but neither is any other system.
Industrialization lifts people out of poverty, capitalism sinks them into poverty by stealing the value of their labor as profit.
Also what’s with the phrase “lifted out of poverty?” The fuck does that mean? Why is this same phrase repeated anytime some criticizes capitalism? It’s like a stock phrase or talking point that makes you sound like a robot.
Industrialization happened because of capitalism.
Lol, no steam engines without stealing from the worker, got it. 🙄
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Specifically metallurgy allowing steam engines that don’t explode
That’s pretty amazing considering Adam Smith didn’t write The Wealth of Nations until well after steam engines were in use in Britain.
Capitalism must be so powerful it can time travel!
Modern Capitalism is more a product of the Dutch East India company, chartered in the early 17th century, than Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations which was written as a critique of the subsequent 200 years of capitalist practices.
Industrialization in the USSR didn’t happen? Damn. Where did all those nuclear power plants come from, then? What about that massive agricultural surplus? How did they develop their own computer technologies?
I’m amazed that you chose the three worst things you could have picked from the USSR. They literally stole their nuclear tech from the capitalists, did not believe in genetics, period, and created famines from their poor understanding of environmental science and lack of flexibility (Gigantic centralized serf farms are bad if the local weather isn’t ideal! , and their computers were trinary garbage that barely functioned.
They literally stole their nuclear tech from the capitalists
Soviets had a hydrogen bomb before their Western peers.
What’s more the world’s first nuclear power station at Obninsk was connected to the Moscow grid in June of 1954. The Soviets outpaced their American peers in nuclear power, rocketry, and advanced electronics well into the 1970s.
did not believe in genetics, period
That’s flatly untrue. And it completely neglects their role in eliminating smallpox during the 1950s.
created famines from their poor understanding of environmental science and lack of flexibility
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/01/09/world/cia-says-soviet-can-almost-do-without-imports.html
the average Soviet citizen consumes about 3,300 calories a day, as against 3,520 for an American. The report showed that the Soviet diet consists of far more grain and potatoes than the American diet, but less fish and meat and less sugar.
They ended famine in Asia. A continent that suffered mass famine every ten to fifteen years was fully fed through domestic agricultural production by the end of the 1960s.
Stalin was so stacked with grain in the 50s that he was bailing out the English colonies throughout India and Bangledish.
Are you sure about that, because last I checked the Soviets industrialized and their people still stayed poor as hell.
What’s your definition of poor? Because by the 70s most Soviet citizens had access to modern necessities like food, water, electricity, housing and healthcare, things which some Americans still don’t have. Their standard of living was significantly higher than it was in the early 1900s and better than actual poor countries in the global south. They weren’t as rich as the western nations, but those countries had a 50-100 year headstart on development so that’s to be expected.
People will often compare the Soviet Union to the United States and point to how much less they have and blame it on communism, but that’s not a fair comparison. A fair comparison would be to a mexico that also had everything north of Mexico city bombed out in the 1940s. With that in mind the soviets don’t seem so poor.
Food, the modern necessity
Because by the 70s most Soviet citizens had access to modern necessities like food, water, electricity, housing and healthcare, things which some Americans still don’t have.
This little comparison should be enough to get you laughed out of the room.
That is only true if you use capitalist metrics to measure poverty
(1) It is unlikely that 90% of the human population lived in extreme poverty prior to the 19th century. Historically, unskilled urban labourers in all regions tended to have wages high enough to support a family of four above the poverty line by working 250 days or 12 months a year, except during periods of severe social dislocation, such as famines, wars, and institutionalized dispossession – particularly under colonialism. (2) The rise of capitalism caused a dramatic deterioration of human welfare. In all regions studied here, incorporation into the capitalist world-system was associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality. In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, key welfare metrics have still not recovered. (3) Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began several centuries after the rise of capitalism.
The way capitalists use capitalist metrics to prove capitalism is good is really annoying. “Look at our per-capita GDP!”
“Yeah but you have one billionaire and everyone else goes bankrupt if they get sick.”
“Yeah, but our per-capita GDP is high so we don’t need to do anything.”
Paul Krugman is an innovator in this field. The other day he had that one about how inflation is under control if you remove, food, energy, used cars, and everything else normal people use. That’s basically all my stuff!
Also, obligatory GDP joke that’s been bouncing around the internet for a while now:
As they’re walking, they come across a pile of dog shit. One economist says to the other, “If you eat that dog shit, I’ll give you $50”. The second economist thinks for a minute, then reaches down, picks up the shit, and eats it. The first economist gives him a $50 bill and they keep going on their walk. A few minutes later, they come across another pile of dog shit. This time, the second economist says to the first, “Hey, if you eat that, I’ll give you $50.” So, of course, the first economist picks up the shit, eats it, and gets $50. Walking a little while farther, the first economist looks at the second and says, “You know, I gave you $50 to eat dog shit, then you gave me back the same $50 to eat dog shit. I can’t help but feel like we both just ate dog shit for nothing.” “That’s not true”, responded the second economist. “We increased the GDP by $100!”
It’s a myth that capitalism alone has lifted people out of poverty. In fact, many nations have fought to implement strong social policies just to try and shield their citizens from its excesses. For every claim of progress, there are countless tales of exploitation, dispossession, and environmental ruin. Saying no system is perfect trivialises the issue. With capitalism, the true cost is often hidden behind the glittering façade of consumerism, at the expense of human dignity, ethics, and our planet’s health.
You’re confusing capitalism with industrialization.
The development of modern modes of production came about nearly two centuries after the foundation of modern marketplace practices. The Dutch East India Company did not bring people out of poverty. Just the opposite. It served as a means of rapidly conquering and subjugating large indigenous populations, by using the speculative bubbles created during periods of looting to construct large militaries capable of further conquest. The rapid militarization and trans-continental looting/pillaging of the 17th and 18th centuries resulted in the increased spread of contagious disease, the worst genocides committed since at least the Roman era, and the formalization of Colonial Era chattel slavery.
Industrialization, which was a product of the mathematical and material sciences renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, produced huge surpluses in commercial goods and services. Revolutions in textile manufacturing, fertilization, fossil fuel-based transportation and electrification, materials sciences, and medical innovation brought hundreds of millions of people out of the agricultural economy and brought a functional end to a litany of common causes of death. The industrial era was not specific to the capitalist economic mode, but it was practiced most aggressively early on by capitalist states.
But the Industrial Revolution had a huge knock-on effect. Mass media and modern communication reoriented traditional class hierarchies and formed new models for social organization. The seed of socialist theories that had been planted in the 17th and 18th centuries blossomed into massive revolutionary labor movements during the 19th and 20th centuries. This, combined with the industrial collapse of the imperial core in the wake of the First and Second World Wars, signaled the beginning of the end of capitalism as a hegemonic economic force.
By the 1950s, numerous socialist political experiments produced successful industrialized civilizations, some of which even persist into the modern era. Meanwhile, rising standards of living from industrial surpluses in food, fuel, and living space raised living standards globally without regard to one’s economic mode.
The real test of capitalism as an enterprise has kicked in during the last 50 years. By the 1970s, the era of cheap fossil fuel was coming to an end and various economic models were forced to contend with a declining rate of new surplus goods and services. Forced to choose between economic conservation/improved efficiency and a new wave of imperial aggression, the capitalist states have attempted to backpedal into their old traditional colonial models of business. The end result has been a new generation of major military conflicts - from the Vietnamese Jungle to the Iraqi desert - alongside a number of ugly civil wars and domestic insurrections in former capitalist strongholds.
Without a continuous industrial surplus to drive profit, modern capitalist economic models are failing. Quality of life in capitalist states is beginning to decline. And capitalist leaders are turning to more militant methods of seizing natural resources, forcing low-wage labor, and wrecklessly disposing of excess waste.
Capitalism rode the cresting wave of industrialization for a century. But now it is failing. And people in capitalist states - from the UK to Saudi Arabia to the Philippines - are seeing their quality of life erode away at a rapid pace.
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What the hell are you talking about. The nordic countries constantly rate as one of the most economically free countries in the world. Capitalism is everywhere in the nordic countries, but it’s also used to support comprehensive welfare state.
And yes, I come from the “happiest country in the world” so I guess I can literally see that we are quite capitalistic.
Edit: it seems that the original comment was edited so my comment looks kinda unnecessary now
TIL Nordic countries are not capitalist :o
Those countries are capitalist. Research the Nordic Model.
I think it’s been several years in a row now Nordic countries have been rated the happiest in the world.
Those studies tend to be heavily Euro-centric.
Some of the happiest countries on earth are in East Asia. Bhutan, in particular, is the happiest country you’ve never heard about. Vietnam and Singapore also tend to rate very high. Bolivia also tends to punch well above its weight class.
But it should be noted that the Nordic states have historically been very far removed from war. With the Ukraine/Russia conflict, Fins are significantly more unhappy than they’ve been in prior generations. I don’t think you can blame that on their domestic policy or their economic model. As more refugees are forced through Europe in an effort to flee conflicts in Armenia and police crackdowns in Hungary and industrial sabotage through the Baltic Sea, happiness in the region is plummeting.
Based on my experience with venture capital, I’m not convinced venture capital has ever produced anything worthwhile.
Couldn’t agree more. My takeaway from three years working at a VC is that investors are fucking idiots, and lying to get investment is basically normal.
My favorite anecdote from “the cold start problem” is how zoom got funding not because they thought it was a good idea - the investors thought it was a solved problem - but because they were personally friends with the founder of zoom.
That’s the quality of decisions we’re dealing with.
That’s a bit myopic. VC is just a fancy word for large financial backer.
You can basically credit the entire age of discovery (America, Australia, etc.) to “VC” in the form of kings and wealthy elite financing voyages.
I think modern VC goes awry when they become defacto decision makers for the venture in question.
VC accomplishments:
✅ Genocide
Hey now. It produced a ton of Ferraris.
Good point!
Except for funding the majority of the companies that exist, you mean
By shear numbers, most companies are small mom and pop owned businesses.
Edit: The VC shills are out in force. Go read an economics paper if you’re serious about learning something.
Do you have a source for the claim that VC funded companies would have been replaced by equivalent companies if VCs did not exist? I find that somewhat hard to believe.
Post-1980s tech companies maybe. But not most companies, no.
Well, yeah, it didn’t really exist before the 1970s in its current form. But it’s not just tech, other companies like FedEx also got VC funding in the early stages
lol oh yes billionaires care about ethics
They look at ethics the same way I look at any mushroom: with disgust and with plenty of shuttering.
I’m just imagining you hating mushrooms so much, you’re up for surrounding it in shuttering and pouring concrete over it
But why would they want any change? You not going to talk these people out of been greedy sociopaths
The concept of loaning money to start a business is just fine.
The culture of venture capital, especially as exemplified by bloody dochebags like Marc Andreesen, is what’s toxic and should be stamped out.
Venture capital isn’t “loaning money” though. The structure of the deal is fundamentally different from the terms you’d get from the bank. The bank wants principal + interest. VC wants people in your boardroom and a share of the company itself.
IDK if this difference seems subtle, but it’s massive when it comes to the outcome of any company that currently makes a decent product and then gets tainted by the VC poison.
And yes, I agree that a standard loan is perfectly okay. Without that share of the company on the table, the lender can’t steer the company off a cliff to increase its profits.
Yeah you’re quite right. Money is given in both cases but what’s expected in return is quite different. Bank debt needs to start getting paid back immediately. Venture capital is potentially never paid back.
The annoying thing about VC is how they fund 20 different things expecting 19 to fail and 1 to grow 100x. They either want to see you grow 100x or die trying. This does not create healthy businesses and in fact encourages finding ways to raid certain areas of the economy for a quick capture of wealth.
As a simple example, I work on a very large app that provides a key service that unlocks access to wealth. We spend a lot of time trying to ensure we serve people equitably. Sometimes this means not just doing the thing that the wealthiest and most powerful 20% of people want, but also serving the other 80% of people. Other times it means not settling for something that’s good enough for the 80% of people who are easiest to serve, but also paying attention to the other 20% of people and their exceptional, hard to solve needs.
VCs don’t want you to do all that. They want you to get into bed with the wealthiest 20% of people and serve 80% of their needs, and then leave.
If your service provides value, doing this reinforces existing power structures. Of course the wealthiest and best enabled people make the most lucrative customers. Serving only them makes them even MORE wealthy and enabled. It’s a bad spiral.
VC doesn’t give a shit. They live to feed that spiral and run away with the cash.
If you really want to see where the poorest and least enabled 20% of people go to get their needs met, it’s the government and public trust. Not fucking big tech. Where’s the big tech VC venture that’s going to solve homelessness, Marc??? Show me the money on that one.
Of course they’d be against it. It’s basically a free money machine, once you get into it
I know they’re just trying to sound clever but what a dumb framing. “Oh ho ho Greta Thunberg, you want immediate change, let’s nuke the North Pole! Not so into immediate change now, are you?”
Obviously people don’t want a thing that vaguely aligns with a phrase they use but which is 100% antithetical to their interests.
Oh yes. Tethics.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In his new self-published Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Andreessen presents his case for the advancement of technology under capitalism as “virtuous” and capable of creating “abundance that lifts all humans”.
Along the way he champions trickle-down economics (famously effective at increasing inequality), claims technology can solve any problem and suggests that slowing AI development is akin to murder.
Andreessen lambasts academia for being “disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences”.
Echoes can be heard of Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous former motto: move fast and break things, of Sam Altman comparing OpenAI to the Manhattan Project, and of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos’ shared vision of space colonisation.
The future that tech elites imagine looks remarkably similar to the one we’re in: unchecked power, consolidated wealth, low regulation and minimal consequences when technology proves to be harmful.
It is possible for technology to play a prominent and positive role in our collective future but this won’t happen by succumbing to a wilfully ignorant, starry-eyed vision of optimism.
The original article contains 762 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Getting pretty tired of seeing people skirt around the issue and instead of zooming out a little more and seeing the big picture, are surrendering to existence under capitalism, and make a living telling us how to make the “best” of it (like they’re convinced they are? I’m not even sure anymore).
Hey tech billionaires, if you want to talk about radical change, let’s abolish
venturecapitalismImagine that being delivered like a cartoon cigar to all 2000+ of them, and it exploding off their face. That would actually be fucking radical, not this bullshit…
