When I read about the richest people on Forbes now, and those who are going to likely break into the billionaire category, I am troubled.
I'm not one of those hate-the-rich people. I think it's great if people like Warren Beaty make a buck and "add value" as the Silicon Valley tekkies always describe the phenomenon of having a knack to make a buck and get other people to work for you -- no trivial matter.
But it's not only all the reviews out for "The Social Network" (the story of Zuckerberg and Facebook) that has me wondering exactly whether these riches are in a way ill-gotten gains.
I'm not a socialist, and certainly not a techno-commie like the rest of the wired world, and I don't subscribe to the religious belief of some of the Internet that one man's riches are another man's losses. That's Soviet thinking, of the type "If he has two cows, rather than emulating him and earning one, too, I'll get the state to seize one of them and give it to me." Jesus Christ didn't teach that the Church or the State should take your shirt off your back to give to the man without one, but that you should give it voluntarily. Difference.
Even so, I wonder about these millions. Are they real? I mean, aren't they all on paper? Or on pixels. If they are all in pixels of Microsoft or the Valley's valuation, are they really available to give to the Newark school system? What happens to Newark if everybody stampedes out of Facebook like they did out of Myspace? Do the kids in Newark get Madoffed?
But the larger question is: where did these riches come from? They didn't come from making a tangible product in the real world, a widget that got sold and advertised so that more widgets could be manufactured. It didn't come from a tangible service like a railroad. It came out of thin air, literally, and not even as a digital commodity, like a song, but as merely a connection. A platform where everybody *else* takes their digital commodities like pictures or thoughts or facts or news and exchanges them largely for free. So its everybody else -- all of us, 500 million -- working, and working for free.
Oh, to be sure, some of the super big users of this platform like Zynga or certain API engineers struck it rich and collect all the game gold. But most people can't really say they ever earned a dime off facebook, although they might have spent even $50 or $100 or more on buying virtual gifts to send to friends or game pieces. The actual money that comes in from the VC guys itself isn't real, and comes from...some other fake place of valuation and loans and non-reality.
So it strikes me that it's not like the railroad or mineral or even Hollywood wealth of past centuries, but really a house of cards.
Of course, these big social media businesses employ people, so you could say that the provide jobs like any tycoon's business provided jobs in yesteryear. But the jobs seem insecure, with large layoffs or collapses of the lesser businesses around the social media magnates getting bought up or forced out of business into failure.
I couldn't seem to get more data about this but then I stumbled on this blogger named John Robb with a blog named Global Guerillas who had the same concerns about the social media giants' wealth not really seeming to benefit users or society at large -- but for different motivations than mine. This fellow seems like a quintessentially techocommie of the early anarcho-communist phase, i.e. where he's praising disruption and flippantly asking his friends whether globalization (the Internet) has undermined values, and then not condemning this, but acting as if it is something to take advantage of.
He's more likely one of those transhumanist Randians like Brian McGroarty (Soft Linden) -- his blog banner says this, the sort of thing where I reach for my gun:
"Networked tribes, systems disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. Resilient Communities, decentralized platforms, and self-organizing futures".
All the arrogance of the Yalie and the former USAF, and always leaves you wondering whether his stark analysis about all the "unstoppable" evil and crime in the world is part of what...makes it possible to go on existing because he's smart, yet believes in its power -- and worse, believes in "open source networks" as modern tools of warfare to stop *what those networks* define as evil. Gosh, that's fun. 4chan on steroids.
Even so, it's one of the few brainy and interesting blogs out there in a world where most people just copy other people and CNET, so his "Cognitive Slaves" makes interesting reading, especially if you figure that the "Cognitive Surplus" that Clay Shirky warbles about is in fact turning into...this. Millions of people diddling on Facebook.Robb has a thesis that there are 100,000 "power users" on Facebook are what enables Zuckerman to make his billions:
Let's take Facebook as an example. Currently it's valued at ~$25 billion by the market. However, it could be argued that ~100,000 superusers out of 500 million part time users, are the reason that Facebook is valuable. They generate the core network that is the backbone of the tool. Their devoted use, high levels of connectivity, and loyalty forms the engine that grows Facebook, year in and year out. They are the materials, labor, and product of Facebook's assembly line. Yet they aren't paid for their effort. They aren't generating wealth for themselves or their families.
I'd like to understand more about that. I understand how that attention and participation helps moneterize the platform of Second Life for the Lindens and how may wage-slavery there benefits them with their rents and commissions even when I'm in business making a buck.
But how do users provide the materials and labour? Does he mean the API engineers? They make a buck, but not much of one, in most cases. Or does he mean the sheer fact that the power curve content-creators who always make the 10 percent that the 90 percent look at are busy photographing, thinking, writing, culling news articles that keep the others glued to Facebook, and of course clicking on the ads and buying the game pieces. I guess that's his point.
In SL, we can value our piece of the $550 million in actual sales by looking at the actual $55 million or whatever it is that actually cashes out, and the concrete list of people (statistics now being hidden) that made $10 US or $5000 US (there were some 2,000 that made more than $2000 US).
But how does that work in FB?
Here's where we need to page VW skeptic of decades cube3. Says Lind:
One way to look at this is that we are truly in trouble. If the industries of the future are based on cognitive slavery, we all lose. However, as an entrepreneur, an optimist (believe it or not), and a believer in the potential for social/economic improvement, I think this can be corrected. I believe it's possible to build tools and the companies that manage them, in a way that actually rewards the people that do most of the work. All we need to do is make it possible.
Well, news flash, big guy. We *already* lost. You beloved disruptive ethics-free entrepreneurial friends *already* destroyed the music, news, book-publishing and movie business, and could be credited for some of the banking disaster as well. Had enough yet? Now they will be headed toward destroying government, health care, and education by disrupting existing institutions of governance, exposing people's privacy, and disintegrating formal studies in to splinters, in the "all knowledge is on the network" (KoN) plan. Happy?
Where's the wealth going to come from? When the Roosevelts and the Vanderbilts and the Fords and such of the world made their fortunes, they left behind cars and roads and then hospitals and foundations. What will Zuckerman leave? Your Farmville tractor and lots of pictures of your friends drunk at parties? The legacy in Newark is going to be a story about how technological hubris destroyed the chances of yet another city's children.
BTW, this blog delivers, and the comments have some smart people in them too, although of course it has that geeky loon stuff you find in people who glory in "disruptive technology."
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