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[...] I'm all on board for Paul Mason's and Kathi Weeks' visions for a post-capitalist, post-work future [...] the chances for this scenario becoming a reality over the next two years are not high. The question then becomes what we can do right now, with and for the most precarious among the contingent third of the American workforce [...]
[...] why does a village in Denmark [...] have to generate profits for some fifty people in Silicon Valley if they can create their own version of Airbnb? Instead of trying to be the next Silicon Valley, generating profits for a few, these cities could mandate the use of a cooperative platform, which could maximise use value for the community.
[...] Those funders then run the show. Satisfied with nothing less than 100x returns on their money, they push the founders to "pivot" the business toward outlandish, "home run" outcomes. The object of the game is not to create a successful business, but to "exit" through an IPO or acquisition before the business fails. In spite of their abuse of the environmentalist's lexicon, they do not create sustainable "ecosystems" at all, but scorched-earth monopolies through which no one--no one-- gets to create or exchange value.
That doesn't really matter. All they have to do is extract enough value from people and places in order to sell themselves to someone else--or leverage their monopoly in one market [...] to another one [...]
Looked at from a digital perspective, these companies are really just software, optimized to extract as much value as they can from the real world, and convert it into share price for their investors. They take real, working, circulating currency, and turn it into frozen, static, useless capital. [...]
this is so eerily similar to what I wrote for my gig economy piece lol (and what I feel in general)
on silicon valley funding