People still don't realize how many things from the last fifteen years were LIRPs. Low interest rate phenomena doomed the moment investors can get a halfway-decent yield from fixed-income investments.
I think that's an unfair view of Vice. It got acclaim for its writing and attitude as an independent outlet and seemed to be a legitimately profitable business for the first decade or so. It was only when it decided to become a media giant early/mid 2010s (and ironically people started to like it less and less) that it started hoovering up cheap investor money.
It was only when it decided to become a media giant early/mid 2010s (and ironically people started to like it less and less) that it started hoovering up cheap investor money.
Vice got popular from very early internet videos before YouTube and TikTok kicked off, then it got indoctrinated by political ideas and everybody saw it. It turned trash. What are you on about lol.
It’s also naivety re: the way the internet attention economy would work out. Yahoo and tons of media companies thought the strategy was to pay people to create content, to get eyeballs. The strategy was actually to create a platform for narcissists to create tons of content people want to read for free to get eyeballs.
Meanwhile US housing is politically a zero-risk alternative with costs guaranteed by government subsidy for 30 years. Why innovate when you can own capital?
Its odd to think that both Silicon Valley and Vice were from the same phenomenon, but it does track (radical entrepreneurial libertarian "world-changing" businesses).
But yeah, the whole neoliberal environment just produced a lot of bullshit in the end (in the developed countries). But I don't think, fortunately, the reaction to neoliberalism is going to stymy creativity at all, I think many are ready to embrace a new kind of economy.
Silicon Valley predates low interest rates by decades, and the tsunami of money it generates helped to create an environment where low interest rates for long periods were even possible
This doesn't make sense to me. Low interest rates are possible when inflation is not out of control. Don't you need a money sink instead of a money source to make low interest rates possible for long periods? In a way that could still be SV's doing though. Garbage companies like Juicero were able to absorb capital from the "real" economy to keep inflation from rising.
> Low interest rates are possible when inflation is not out of control.
Not to be pedantic, but it really depends on what you mean by inflation. If you only consider CPI then sure - maybe you're right - but in my opinion we've had out of control asset price inflation together with falling interest rates since around the time of the GFC. I'd go so far as to say it's been the defining feature of western economies over that period. Basically badly implemented quantitative easing.
"While today 'Silly Con Valley' is thought to refer to the prevalent business models, the name was originally derived from the chemical element when people there used to actually make stuff."
The conditions of possibility for Silicon Valley as we know it predate low interest rates, there is always a confluence of forces at work in constructing any economic and social regime. First it goes back to Reagan, then you can go further back to the origins of set theory and phenomenology, then you can go back to Kant, and, if you're so inclined, you can retrogress all the way back to Panini and his systematization of Sanskrit as the first "computer" language.
And in any case "money," is not the most important thing in an economy--monetary and fiscal policy are only relevant with respect to the operations of capital, and neoliberalism was always primarily ideological; Thatcher herself said that it was a moral mission. But Thatcher and Reagan duped themselves, or they didn't realize precisely what they were releasing, the unbounded power of computation, with the creation of neoliberal capitalism.
The environment which you refer to is nothing but the social conditions whereby the power of the market was fused with the power of nature in the form of the "genius" innovater, the "disruptor," the brilliant artist-engineer, which came to develop itself as the total ideology of the state, and only intensified in the wake of the 08' recession--reaching its apotheosis with today's so-called "AI," which (supposedly) is the technology which has the power of the super rationality of nature, Absolute Mimesis. And all that it needs to do to fulfill its holy mission is destroy the world, and humanity with it...
No! We can't be, we cannot remain merely human...but why submit to the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who have tricked you with talk of the "market"? Who hates the world so much they would let a machine destroy humanity; no, no...we cannot destroy the world, we can't destroy man, we must go beyond! We must overcome the whole world.
Well, of course Phenomenology is more important when thinking about computation, but by the time Heidegger was writing about zeros and techne he was already quite old, and computation had developed significantly; the same with Godel, who we consider to be a very important thinker with regard to the theory of computation, but the machinery of the computer was already being put together before the invention of the formal logic that we today consider necessary for computer programming.
I say Kant because I suppose Kant was the first thinker to suggest (after Aristotle) that logic always has an existential import, that it only appears to us in the world and its not really certain if it exists in and of itself--at least, that's how Hegel reads him. And in any case Kant's philosophy is the beginning of modern western society from science to law to aesthetics, and, of course, philosophy.
