
A different cluetrain - robin_reala
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/02/a-different-cluetrain.html
======
HarryHirsch
The extreme short-termism of capitalism that stifles innovation is missing
from the analysis. Right now we are seeing an overinvestment in Sillicon
Valley and an underinvestment in Biotech. The money is flowing to ad-selling
services like Google and Facebook, and to intermediaries like Uber and
friends, but biotech startups are funded below replacement rates. The
development pipeline is drying up, it's not that the IP wasn't there, it's
just not getting funded. Locust investors like Valeant don't help either.
(Their business model is to buy up companies and then immediately divest of
R&D.)

Any money in biotech goes to cancer instead of antibacterials, because the
price points of cancer medicines are highest. The future was in the news last
week: superbugs spread through colonoscopy procedures in LA. We'll see more of
that in the coming years, but there is no alternative funding model within
sight.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Investment in biotech is low because the returns are low, not because of a
high discount rate.

It's getting harder to discover new drugs and get them through the FDA
gauntlet. Most of the low hanging fruit has been found, and additional fruit
won't necessarily pass comparative effectiveness without huge (and expensive)
trials. After it makes it to market you are subject to political risks - price
controls, lawsuits over side effects too small to find in clinical trials,
etc.

It's hardly clear that the valley is even a good short term investment. Most
tech companies focus heavily on growth, not profits.

Why do you believe that biotech has higher long term returns than the valley?

~~~
HarryHirsch
_Why do you believe that biotech has higher long term returns than the
valley?_

That's precisely the problem. Within my lifetime the current antibiotics will
become useless, we will be where we were before 1937 (discovery of
sulfanilamide), physicians will be as good as they always were at prognosis,
but helpless in the face of bacterial infections. The apocalypse is coming,
and capitalism is no tool against it.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The issue of fewer drug targets than in the past is not something that any
economic system can solve. That's just chemistry.

As for the rest of it, it's true that capitalism can't fix the FDA or foreign
price controls. Lets hope Charlie Stross is right and the capitalists can take
over the government and fix this.

~~~
mcguire
" _Lets hope Charlie Stross is right and the capitalists can take over the
government and fix this._ "

> ...but [capitalism does not require democracy] means that the interests of
> the public (labour) are ignored by states increasingly dominated by capital
> (because of [automation privileges capital over labour]) unless there's a
> threat of civil disorder. So states are tooling up for large-scale civil
> unrest.

Let us hope, indeed. Sounds like fun.

~~~
digi_owl
In the Chinese curse sense?

------
grandpa
The "cluetrain" in the title refers to the Cluetrain Manifesto from 1999:
[http://www.cluetrain.com/book/95-theses.html](http://www.cluetrain.com/book/95-theses.html)

------
murbard2
I mostly agree with the axioms as stated, but there's an obvious subtext that
is more questionable and that carries a few unstated assumptions

\- Democracy, or more generally giving political power to the people is a good
thing, maybe an end in itself.

\- Increases in inequalities between capital and labor are intrinsically a bad
thing.

If your focus is on people being able to live happy, fulfilling lives, the
whole Maslow hierarchy of need thing, it's not clear at all that these
assumptions are warranted.

~~~
istjohn
Those aren't assumptions. Axiom 18, the final conclusion, states, "we're on
the receiving end of a war fought for control of our societies by opposing
forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are." The reader is left to
decide whether that is a good or bad thing.

Edit: And if you are labor, if you are the people of the democracy, of course
these things are bad. It is self-evident. It is not a hidden assumption, but
rather falls out of the conclusion. No one wants to be under the finger of
another's control. These things are only good for capital.

~~~
murbard2
You're right of course, these aren't stated assumptions which is why I
mentioned the subtext.

I could of course be reading Stross's intentions wrong, but given what he's
written before, and given how widespread those assumptions are, I tend to
think they're taken as a given.

------
DanielBMarkham
I agree with the other commenter that "capitalism does not require democracy"
is interesting enough to kick around. The rest of it seems more and more
tenuous the further you get down the list (and the more things that are
combined in some sort of quasi-logic to reach a conclusion). I'm not saying
the guy is wrong, just that there's a lot to digest there -- too much for a
forum like this.

From what I've read, there are clear things that separate various
civilizations. A quick list that I pulled out of the air might look like this:

\- Private property \- Rule of law (contracts) \- Freedom of political speech
\- Consent of the governed \- Ability to freely associate into commercial
units (corporations) \- Peaceful transfer of authority

Societies that have these things, on average, are able to solve more problems
for more people over a longer period of time than those who do not. These
problems are usually solved from the bottom-up; whether through innovation or
grassroots political efforts, distributed, self-optimizing systems beat
centralized ones.

The various forms of democracies that we see instantiated usually have more of
these things than the other types of governments we've tried as a planet.

Capitalism refers to a very specific type of financial arrangement. It seems
to map man's desire to trade with the above values -- at least as good as
anything else.

To say "captialism does not require democracy", then, is true -- but it's
woefully incomplete. The Chinese are getting away with rapid growth because
they've met many but not all of the criteria, and that's only for the last
decade or two. The problem with the statement is that it wants to form a broad
conclusion about complex topics using simple language. If you do that, you
miss out on the important parts. This is also the problem with the rest of the
list. Do enough of this and string a thread through it, you can prove pretty
much any dang thing you'd like.

------
bonn1
While I find the post a bit odd I value the 3rd bullet legitimate for debate:

 _Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has
become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. Or even
benefit from it. Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of
democracy._

I am also quite impressed and wonder how China got there where it is today in
the absence of democracy. But I am not sure if I would agree with the OP since
there many examples where states economically failed/are failing and
assumingly because of the absence of democracy.

~~~
gwern
Let us wait until Chinese per-capita PPP has equaled, never mind passed, the
USA or other major Western countries before we start singing its hosannas
about how wise and effective the Communist Party is at overseeing an advanced
highly-efficient capitalist economy.

We've heard this story before, and it didn't work out well for the USSR.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
The USSR wasn't really capitalist.

Also, you don't need to meet Western development to be a success. China has
incredibly high growth rates and Deng Xiaoping's "Socialism with Chinese
characteristics" (i.e. the mixed economy) basically saved China.

~~~
gwern
> The USSR wasn't really capitalist.

The PRC isn't really capitalist either, consider how much of the economy is
still state-owned enterprises. In any case, the reference class here is more
'fast-growing industrializing economies starting on a primitive agricultural
basis', where regularly you see impressed people (and flacks) declaring that
This Time Is Different and perhaps Western-liberal-democracy-plus-capitalism
has been rendered obsolete. USSR, Japan - China?

------
mcguire
That's funny, I also have a CS degree from 1990 and I use it every day.
Further, I've found it puts me rather significantly ahead of many of my
programming coworkers. But I'm not a novelist.

On the other hand, I suspect that I'm in the "eye-wateringly rich" category
(as is everyone reading this on HN).

------
lukev
This is very insightful.

I wonder however if his partitioning of the economy into "labor" and "capital"
isn't a bit too black and white, though.

In particular, it leaves out knowledge workers who are capable of implementing
automation, inventing new products, performing new research. These activities
can be fueled by capital but they are gated by a not-entirely-fungible
resource; namely, skilled individuals, that I'm not sure it makes sense just
to classify as "labor". Such individuals could wield considerable influence,
aside from capital.

I can't help but wonder what kind of an effect (if any) this observation has
on his analysis.

~~~
guelo
These knowledge workers will continue working automating jobs away until their
own jobs are automated.

~~~
lukev
At that point you've reached a point where humans are no longer the dominant
economic players at all, and this discussion is moot.

------
api
William Gibson got the essence and the aesthetic of it in Neuromancer in 1984.

------
thornygreb
> I have a CS degree from 1990. It's about as much use as an aerospace
> engineering degree from 1927

I'm not sure there was such a thing as an aerospace engineering degree in
1927, but if you think a CS degree from 1990 is worthless than you didn't
learn much. That theory is still applicable today. Just because the shiny bits
on the outside look all new and fancy does not change the underlying theory
one bit.

~~~
dceddia
The theory sure is applicable, but employers don't pay for theory. If you got
a CS degree in 1990 and stopped learning the day you graduated, you'd surely
have a hard to finding a job in 2014.

The CS field moves at an especially breakneck pace, though. The half-life of
the knowledge learned in school is very short.

There are probably some other degrees out there where the knowledge stays
relevant a bit longer. But I think it really comes down to the fact that you
need at least some degree of continual learning to stay employable after
graduation.

~~~
thornygreb
You are confusing computer science with software engineering/programming. They
are not the same.

The CS field does not move at breakneck pace. The core classes taught in CS
are the same now as they were then.

------
sp332
So to stop this from becoming violent, we need a peaceful means of transfer of
power that can keep up with "internet speed". Or the bureaucracy of government
needs to absorb everyone who has political legitimacy and use them to continue
expanding, which I think has been happening lately. Or we could find a way to
"financialize" labor.

~~~
PakG1
Would you prefer public policy that changes at the speed of high-frequency
traders on the stock market, or at the speed of long-term investors that
analyze at the level of Warren Buffett (true value-oriented investments) and
storied venture capitalists (big-play game-changing startups)?

~~~
sp332
It's not that policy should change constantly, but that people who make policy
tend to lose legitimacy in a very abrupt way. Transfer of power has to be very
rapid, or people will rebel and stop following the leader.

------
pdkl95
> ...most of their activity will be devoted to the perpetuation of the
> organization, not to the pursuit of its ostensible objective.

aka, the tyranny of the bureaucratic overhead equation

    
    
        Δw = p ln (st / sg)
    
        w  := "useful work towards the objective"
        g  := "the group of people doing w"
        p  := "effective productivity of g"
        sg := "total size of the g"
        st := "total size of the organization (sg + bureaucracy)"

------
JackFr
>Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has
become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. Or even
benefit from it. Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of
democracy.

It's tough to respond to statements like this as written. 'Capitalism',
'democracy' and 'work well' are not precise terms, and the statement can be
either true or false depending on the shade of meaning.

~~~
metaphorm
I think you're searching for reasons to disagree based on semantics and
technicalities and evading the very cogent points made by the author. While
there is room for disagreement about some of the nuances of what is meant by
"Capitalism" or "democracy", do you think that there is really any
comprehension problem w.r.t Stross' use of those terms? It seemed perfectly
clear to me. His usage is quite conventional.

What about the quoted passage do you actually think is ambiguous?

------
kordless
I'll just remind everyone this is the same Charles Stross that wants Bitcoin
to 'die in a fire': [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-
i-wa...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-
bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html). Beware taking advice from individuals in the throes
of massive cognitive dissonance.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
Not only does this sound like Ad Hominem, but I also think you are taking that
statement too literally... the very sentence it's contained in should give a
clue as to where his sentiment lies on alternative currencies(emphasis mine):

> I want Bitcoin to die in a fire: _this is a start, but it 's not
> sufficient._

~~~
sp332
I think the part you have in italics was referring to BTC losing half its
value.

