So eager is Reason magazine to find possible allies among the entpreneurial technocommunists in the new "sharing economy" that they peer at the collective and miss the forest for the trees. "All Hail the Share Economy," they say, though they of all people should know better.
Except, as time wears on, I've become more and more disgusted with Reason, which seems to become more and more an exaggerated version of Ayn Rand with each passing year -- it has an ugly cast of characters among the writers and commenters who aggressively -- viciously -- stump for drug legalization beyond all reason, gun rights beyond all reason, capitalism uber alles without regulation, and so on. They are now a kind of caricature. They never seem to recognize when the extension of their endless rights and liberties encroach on others and thus take them away worse than any state because of how hard it is to fight non-state actors with institutions disintegrating.
I used to read Reason regularly because it seemed to be good on the communist countries, back in the 1970s and 1980s. It was good at debunking the hippie left. But it is so extreme -- Ron Paul extreme -- that it is now hideous to read. The spirit of it has changed. Reason has gone, as such. In its place is Zeal.
When we get to the Internet of Things, this will get worse, i.e. more collectivized, more unfair.
My reply:
Technolibertarianism and technocommunism appear similar and intertwine and some entrepreneurs try to exploit both, so they are hard to tell apart sometimes.
Reason should stop being snowed by the idea that this is capitalism or "redistributed capitalism" away from multi-nationals. What it is, is communist-style oligarchy.
First, your property is collectivized -- AirBnB, GetAround etc. collectivize everybody's rooms, car time, dinner table seat, etc. and own it all and put it on *their* platform that *they code and control*. You no longer own your property, or to be more precise, the value of your property as yours alone has now been made nil, and you know only have value to the extent that you particulate in the coded collective.
Next, in exchange for a substantial percentage of your income from the transactions -- you know, like share-cropping, you are allowed to rent out part of your collectivized property to the collectivized public (who is now using these services as "cheaper" than regular motels, rental cars etc in the regulated economy).
It's not that you yourself decide to rent out your room or sell a meal in your home and use a neutral platform or tool under your control to do so; instead, you submit to the collectivization of the platform owner. He wins and makes big money. You don't, you're a mouse trying to take crumbs from your own property.
Worse, as the coders' collectivation machine gets more and more data points -- you know, yourself and your former-property -- there is more and more competition of sorts, or rather favouritism in the "reputation economy." Reputation is supposed to manage everything. What that means is the worst sort of self-criticism circle as in the Soviet Union or China -- and the worst sort of anonymous denunciation as in those police states. Indeed, it's small wonder that the collectivization platform adopts those police-state tactics. So just as on Yelp, one yuppie malcontent can ruin the business of a family struggling to run a little restaurant forever and have no recourse, so in the "sharing economy" bad reviews drive away your business and those who know how to best manipulate the gamification of reputation win. Hideous.
Then, precisely because it *isn't* regulated and not part of the free-enterprise economy, middlemen appear just as they did in the communist systems and begin to harvest large numbers of rooms, either they get welfare apartments, or they take various rooms they'd have to submit to a regulatory system that would make equals of everyone under the law, and they capitalize on the affordances of the platform to make more money than honest hotel owners who submit to regulations on safety, insurance, etc.
You pretend that these systems like city agencies regulating taxis or hotels are corrupt or political patronage havens. But that's because you haven't studied the middlemen that emerge in the "share economy" and their exploitative methods which all have less transparency. The courts asked for a simple thing: a list of the tenants and rooms or apartments. Middlemen tried to hide behind customer privacy to avoid having to show whether they had legal access to the properties, whether they were sub-sub-letting illegally in violation of a lease, and so on. The judges said the customer data could retain its privacy; what they needed to see were numbers, generics, and the nature of the properties. And this is all still in play as unaccountable middlemen refuse to deal.
The services ruthlessly suppress customer complaints; customer service is their weak point.Technolibertarianism and technocommunism appear similar and intertwine and some entrepreneurs try to exploit both, so they are hard to tell apart sometimes.
Reason should stop being snowed by the idea that this is capitalism or "redistributed capitalism" away from multi-nationals. What it is, is communist-style oligarchy.
First, your property is collectivized -- AirBnB, GetAround etc. collectivize everybody's rooms, car time, dinner table seat, etc. and own it all and put it on *their* platform that *they code and control*. You no longer own your property, or to be more precise, the value of your property as yours alone has now been made nil, and you know only have value to the extent that you particulate in the coded collective.
Next, in exchange for a substantial percentage of your income from the transactions -- you know, like share-cropping, you are allowed to rent out part of your collectivized property to the collectivized public (who is now using these services as "cheaper" than regular motels, rental cars etc in the regulated economy).
It's not that you yourself decide to rent out your room or sell a meal in your home and use a neutral platform or tool under your control to do so; instead, you submit to the collectivization of the platform owner. He wins and makes big money. You don't, you're a mouse trying to take crumbs from your own property.
Then, precisely because it *isn't* regulated and not part of the free-enterprise economy, middlemen appear just as they did in the communist systems and begin to harvest large numbers of rooms, either they get welfare apartments, or they take various rooms they'd have to submit to a regulatory system that would make equals of everyone under the law, and they capitalize on the affordances of the platform to make more money than honest hotel owners who submit to regulations on safety, insurance, etc.
You pretend that these systems like city agencies regulating taxis or hotels are corrupt or political patronage havens. But that's because you haven't studied the middlemen that emerge in the "share economy" and their exploitative methods which all have less transparency. The courts asked for a simple thing: a list of the tenants and rooms or apartments.
Middlemen tried to hide behind customer privacy to avoid having to show whether they had legal access to the properties, whether they were sub-sub-letting illegally in violation of a lease, and so on. The judges said the customer data could retain its privacy; what they needed to see were numbers, generics, and the nature of the properties. And this is all still in play as unaccountable middlemen refuse to deal.
The services ruthlessly suppress customer complaints; customer service is their weak point.
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