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Jure Repinc @lemmy.ml

Hey tech billionaires, if you want to talk about radical change, let’s abolish venture capitalism

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.

153 comments

  • 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.

  • 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

      • I ask the reader, if you could live in any country in the world, what country would that be? Seriously think about it for a moment. Take your time. ... Now, note if the country you just chose is capitalist or not, it almost certainly is.

        Yes, capitalism has flaws, but we have yet to see a better system.

    • 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.

      • Yes, all those wonderful capitalist innovations like minimum wages, the 5-day work week and paid holidays.

        Oh wait those are all things capitalists fought tooth and nail against and social movements made happen. You're assuming that because something good happened under capitalism that it's because of it, but most of the actual good things that lifted people out of poverty were anticapitalist. Meanwhile all the needless suffering and deaths because of capitalism never seem to get attributed to it despite the fact that wealth hoarding is responsible for creating so many resource scarcity problems that we have the ability to solve.

      • 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.

      • 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.

      • Downvoted for saying a simple fact.

        Am I on Reddit?

  • 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.

    • What do you think other word processors do today? Libreoffice?

    • No true scotsman would say such a thing.

    • 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.

  • 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 venture capitalism

    Imagine 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..

  • 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!

153 comments