
After Technology Destroys Capitalism - oreiro
http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/03/after-technology-destroys-capitalism/
======
tormeh
The alternative is a continued and ever more absurd growth in the service
sector. In the end 95% of the population will be cutting each others' hair and
saying nice things to each other for money. With the most detail and attention
dedicated to the 5% that actually does useful stuff, then trickling down. It
does sound absurd, doesn't it? But we're already getting there. Does your
kitchen really need a marble counter top? No, but you want to feel
important/worthy enough to have a luxurious lifestyle, and a luxurious
lifestyle includes a marble counter top, so you get one. Replace "kitchen" and
"marble counter top" with whatever you want to.

The two great expanding economic sectors of the future I foresee is
conspicuous consumption (luxury cars, clothes) and emotional prostitution
(massages, photoshoots, personal trainers). Indeed, prostitutes are a great
example of this. High-end prostitutes earn as much as doctors and lawyers, all
for providing emotional support for their clients/johns. They are the ultimate
modern workers, in my opinion, and most of us will be following in their
footsteps soon enough.

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waterlesscloud
Re that pg tweet - "Will ownership turn out to be largely a hack people
resorted to before they had the infrastructure to manage sharing properly?"

We have the technology to share the profits of AirBNB right now. The "sharing
economy" can work on many levels now that we have the technology. Or we could
all share YC, or Google, or even TechCrunch.

Who will step up to the plate first, then?

That's where this line of thinking goes, universal ownership not just of
commodity resources, but of everything.

Who will lead us?

Note- While I sound satirical, I'm really not. This is the logical and likely
necessary progression. And it really does require some leadership.

~~~
greggman
I'm genuinely curious but how to do prevent abuse with shared stuff? There's
lots of people in the world who will abuse, destroy, hog, etc. There was that
story about the airbnb sex party just over a month ago as just one example.

I'm sure there are good ideas. Maybe that's yet another tech solution?

A quick google about abuse of Zipcars brought up this article

[http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/07/zipcar-users-dont-
good-c...](http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/07/zipcar-users-dont-good-care-
cars-new-research-offers-4-lessons-access-economy/)

~~~
dalke
That link makes 4 good points.

I'll add another observation - library books. They are "shared stuff" by any
definition. Libraries will rebind books to make them more durable and
sharable. This suggests that a 5th point is to design shared things for higher
amounts of abuse.

However, it's much easier to rebind a book than a car.

~~~
zo1
Don't forget to include a few common and important properties of the library
model that I think are very pertinent to this discussion:

1\. If you damage the book that you are "borrowing" or "sharing" then you are
to pay a fixing/repair fee.

2\. Natural degradation/wear & tear of books is covered by a general library
fee/subscription.

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klunger
The crux: "It seems to me that technology will soon destroy jobs faster than
it creates them, if it hasn’t started to already. Which is a good thing! Most
of the jobs it destroys are bad, and most of the ones it creates are good. Net
human happiness should be vastly increased, not decreased, by this process —
but, unfortunately, capitalism doesn’t work that way."

Instead of trying to lower costs for big companies by creating software that
replaces people, we should strive to create something of value that can also
employ people in meaningful numbers. Don't know what exactly, but that is the
shape of it.

~~~
vidarh
Basically, that quote was the foundation of Marx' argument for why he saw
capitalism as doomed to eventual failure.

People tend to think that Marx argued for the overthrow of capitalism because
it is/was in his eyes morally "bad" or "evil", but that's not really the case.

Marx argued that capitalism was better than any previous system, and - despite
failings - vitally necessary to bring the world to a point where production
would for the first time in history make it possible to meet the basic needs
of everyone

(without which, he insisted, a socialist revolution would be doomed to
failure: in such a situation, redistribution would just make want common, and
cause the old class struggle to re-assert itself - like it did in the Soviet
Union etc. with the party installing itself as a new upper class).

But he expected capitalism to continue to push production efficiency to the
point where it would overproduce and under-employ, and that _this_ would
eventually trigger socialist revolutions.

> Instead of trying to lower costs for big companies by creating software that
> replaces people, we should strive to create something of value that can also
> employ people in meaningful numbers. Don't know what exactly, but that is
> the shape of it.

Why? If we can reduce or remove the need for people to work, why should we
not?

~~~
muuh-gnu
We can not remove the need to work, because there will always be a need to
eat, and to be able to eat, you need to work because nobody will feed you
voluntarily.

If somebody else has to work so you can eat without working, thats theft and
your victims will try to kill you to stop you taking the products of their
labor.

~~~
wcarss
I believe the parent is thinking of a hypothetical reality trending toward one
where technology is capable of solving nearly any arbitrary problem at no
material cost.

Imagine, say, a world where clouds of von Neumann self-replicating builder
robots fly around and plant seeds, tend trees, harvest, and deliver food. They
also charge and repair and modify themselves, take material from mined
asteroids, and are so plentiful that they may respond to every nonviolent
human whim.

That world may have problems (which I don't care to discuss, I am just
throwing out a possibility), and it's nowhere near reality. Not close. But I
think such a pie-in-the-sky scenario is the one under discussion, where
assumptions like 'nobody will feed you voluntarily' are not as bedrock as they
are for us.

~~~
muuh-gnu
Lets set aside the fact that somebody has to build those robots and wants to
profit for building them...

Once we have that hypothetical robot slave army feeding everyone of us, the
discussion would be over by itself because there would be nothing left to
discuss. Everyone would have all he needs and that would be it.

The only reason we do have the discussion already now, long before the star-
trekian replicator utopia has been realized is because a lot of people are so
impatient to stop working, that they want to engineer a system where not
robots, but _other people_ are working for them, of course involuntarily.

------
jt2190
The article contends that we'll replace capitalism with a "reputation
economy":

    
    
      > I strongly suspect that any post-capitalist society 
      > will be built around a technologically sophisticated 
      > reputation economy, very very loosely a la Cory 
      > Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
    
      > Obviously we already live in a world full of subtle 
      > reputation economies — you see one in action any time a 
      > celebrity gets special treatment. Nowadays, though, 
      > technology could enable something much more codified and 
      > quantitative. (Crude hacks like Klout may at least light
      > the way, for all their flaws.)
    

Perhaps I'm being thick, but isn't reputation just a form of capital? Why
would it replace capital?

~~~
moron4hire
You're not being thick. The author conflates currency with capital and
corporatism with capitalism. The only question is whether or not the author is
making this mistake out of ignorance or malice.

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coldcode
Or after Capitalism destroys technology (such as TWC/Comcast or RIAA/MPAA). Or
even after Technology destroys technology (NSA). People are still greedy and
power wants more power. If you push powerful people too far they will fight
back. If you push governments with power you usually wind up dead. If you try
to take people's wealth away they usually have the resources to beat you back.
A few exceptions is not a rule.

History is full of people who tried to fix society's ills and virtually always
have things wind up even worse. The French revolution started out as idealism
and wound up using "technology" to chop off people's heads.

I'm not at all against technology trying to make things better but unless we
eliminate people it's not going to change basic human behavior.

------
ryanong
This is a really awesome book that explains what that it is and how it might
work.

Race Against the Machine,

by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

[http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-
Accelerating-...](http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-Accelerating-
ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI)

It has some ideas on how to get from where we are to there. I think the
philosophies of Race Against the Machine and Capital in the 21st century are
pretty insightful and the truth may be somewhere in between the two.

------
moron4hire
I think it's a mistake to call the ubiquitous emphasis on corporate growth in
the US for the last 40 years "capitalism". The argument really breaks down if
you try to call this all laissez-faire capitalism. There has been nothing
"hands off" about our government's handling of the economic infrastructure.
They have walked campaign-contribution-hand in regulation-and-subsidy-hand
down the aisle of oligopoly and oligarchy. It's much closer to the
mercantilism of Europe out of which the US was _created_ than it is to
laissez-faire.

I don't believe in completely unregulated markets, either. But let's not fool
ourselves into thinking government will ride in to save the day. They were
complicity in creating a system whose soul purpose is to drain 99.9% of people
in the country of their money and leave nothing for anyone else. That's not
trade, that's not capitalism. That's scorched earth warfare. You won't get
reform out of Congress, they have too much skin in the game of the current
system.

In a world where corporations can't buy off congresscritters, and
congresscritters can't pass laws to give unfair advantage to their cohorts, I
don't believe you can have an oligopoly of giganto-corporations. There is such
an inefficiency to them that a truly capitalist system would have swarmed,
killed, ate them up, and spat them out already.

We need to continue to push the internet to be independent, to grow an economy
disconnected from governments, one that can, through mutual benefit of trade
(i.e. capitalism) support the individuals within it with understanding and
fairness, with no favor provided to any individual just because they won the
Ivy League roommate lottery.

------
jstalin
Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources. Capitalism is one
method of allocating scarce resources. If some resources become so plentiful
that they are no longer scarce, they are treated as having no value. I don't
see how _everything_ could possibly become non-scarce. Maybe energy, maybe
even food, but we still need to build homes, transportation of some sort, to
provide medical care, and go into court when someone screws you over. And
because of that, there will need to be a way of allocating resources.

Economist Ludwig von Mises a long time ago demonstrated that a cashless
society couldn't function because there would be no method for effectively
allocating scarce resources. While it's nice to predict some moneyless utopia
in the future, it presents real and insurmountable problems.

~~~
crdoconnor
>Economist Ludwig von Mises a long time ago demonstrated that a cashless
society couldn't function because there would be no method for effectively
allocating scarce resources

So I guess he never heard of the Incans.

------
motters
What irked me about this article was the author's immediate need to declare
his love of Marxism and "Marxist-powered technology". It's a reminder of how
entrenched the current ideology is and how people feel they must align
themselves to it, for fear of ridicule (or worse). But I agree with the
overall tone of the article. Maybe there will be a day when Marxism is
considered to be a thing of the past and we can move on to some other socio-
economic paradigm.

~~~
llamataboot
But the idea that capitalism will eventually produce the conditions of its own
demise is /the/ Marxist argument. It's like Marx 101. Capitalism is a stage
(and a necessary one) on the way towards full communism. (Unfortunately we've
seen that attempts to move past that dictatorship of the proletariat time
period haven't worked out so well)

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kybernetyk
> by guaranteeing people money without requiring them to do anything in
> exchange, we decouple their value in society from their ability to do a job

He makes this sound like it was something bad.

~~~
bwanab
He doesn't make it sound like anything - it was a quote from the Boston Globe.

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personlurking
"...a basic income, supplemented by occasional temporary gigs..."

The problem I see with gigs, as can be seen on the various freelancing sites,
is you're competing with people on the other side of the world who need way
less than you to get by. As far as online gigs go, I'd like to see some
borders go up in all but special cases.

~~~
ronaldx
You would like to protect the benefits you get from being far more privileged
than people in other countries.

~~~
personlurking
I would state it differently. I'd like to protect the price generally paid for
certain types of work in my country. Even if that price is low for my country
(but higher in others), I'd still hope to be able to compete with others in my
country. Privilege doesn't necessarily enter into it.

~~~
ronaldx
And by "certain types of work", I guess that you mean services that you get
paid for, but not goods that you have to pay for?

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quomopete
And this new reputation economy will only be as good as the cultural biases of
the engineers of the technology. Which could net us a worse situation than
there is currently.

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daRomansky
The kicker
[http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27253103](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27253103)

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n0rm
ALL HAIL THE HYPNOTOAD!

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mantrax5
Technology has already destroyed capitalism.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
frequency_trading](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading)

