March 31, 2019 (1281 words)
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A summary of the last 31 posts. Also: subscribe to my newsletter!
Tags: recap
This post is day 90 of a personal challenge to write every day in 2019. See the other fragments, or sign up for my weekly newsletter.
This month’s posts
- 60: Brief interviews with the gig economy. A fictionalised interview written in response to DoorDash’s opaque pay structure which essentially allows for tip theft. They do not seem to have changed this practice yet despite pressure from workers and customers, and it seems like some restaurants aren’t happy with DoorDash either. I wonder how many billions they’ll raise when they IPO.
- 61: Brief interviews with HR. I had a lot of fun writing the fictionalised interview the previous day, so I took this format and applied it to various scenarios involving talking to a tech company’s HR department.
- 62: Class denialism. The main reason the left appeals to me so much is because its political/economic analysis acknowledges the possibility of class antagonism, something that liberalism rarely does.
- 63: Free software, free ethics. Free software is a great idea, but the movement was never strong enough to overcome the monetary appeal of non-free software under capitalism.
- 64: The payday lender your boss recommends. About a payday loan startup called Even, which bills itself as addressing poverty even as it partners with Walmart (which itself bears some responsibility for poverty).
- 65: Capitalism and freedom. The “freedom” that capitalism brings is a very emaciated sort of freedom - it’s the freedom of consumer choice. But our socioeconomic system should be driven by a much broader notion of freedom.
- 66: Homeless? There’s an app for that. About an app called “Samaritan”, which is a quintessential tech startup attempt at addressing the problem of homelessness - i.e., addressing the symptoms, rather than the cause.
- 67: What will we do without the entrepreneurs?. Jason Calacanis suggests that socialists unfairly dismiss the value of hardworking entrepreneurs. This seems like a misguided theory in the current climate, when the public is starting to wake up to the downsides of widespread glorification of entrepreneurship for its own sake.
- 68: The struggle is ongoing. The world is not fine, as pleasant as it would be to believe that it is.
- 69: Corn: the source of all value?. Some thoughts on Marx’s labour theory of value, and why it makes more sense than, say, a corn theory of value.
- 70: Just tell me what to do. Oh boy. In hindsight, this fragment is a little overly dramatic, but I would like to know how best to spend my time ahead of our potentially apocalyptic future.
- 71: The unfortunate reality behind meritocracy. The elite colleges scandal showed that even rich people don’t really believe in meritocracy.
- 72: Capitalism only ever claims its successes. Whenever something goes wrong in a self-styled socialist country, blame socialism. Whenever something goes in a purportedly capitalist country, blame … no one?
- 73: Is UBI the answer?. An analysis of Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang & his flagship “Freedom Dividend” policy, which proposes paying every US adult citizen $1,000 a month to prepare for when robots take our jobs.
- 74: How do you convince someone to resist?. In which I try to understand the motives of a character in The Man in the High Castle who ends up working for a fascist regime.
- 75: Enterprise AI: We’re hiring!. There is a “we’re hiring” billboard in San Francisco that tells you nothing more than the fact that they work on “Enterprise AI”.
- 76: Making US immigration fair again. Pretty much everyone know that the US immigration system is deeply flawed, but it can’t be reformed on its own, because its flaws are a reflection of the broader socioeconomic system.
- 77: When it’s time to refactor. A programming analogy for refactoring our ecomomic system that could equally apply to unionising your workplace. (Why not do both.)
- 78: Why are Asians so good at school?. Looking deeper into the ‘model minority’ myth, given the unusually high proportion of Asian-Americans at “merit-based” elite schools like Stuyvesant High in NYC.
- 79: Three cheers for financial assets. Financial assets may be ultimately fictitious, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have power.
- 80: If you have a boss, you need a union. Dissecting that anti-union memo by Kickstarter senior staffers in response to some workers wanting to organise. See also, Alex Press’s article in Jacobin from earlier this week on the same topic.
- 81: Payday loans but with ‘tips’ instead of ‘interest’. I found a payday loan startup that’s even worse than the one in day 64. Not only has it deliberately eschewed calling its loans as such in order to avoid regulation, but just like Even, it’s tackling the problem from the wrong end.
- 82: Not all millennials. Millennials as a whole may be suffering economically, but a small subset of them are not. Why is this, and what does it mean for political strategy?
- 83: How to avoid the misappropriation of unions. Basically the fragment from day 80 but shorter and in illustrated form.
- 84: Lyft is the best capitalism has to offer. The fact that Lyft’s IPO will make its investors, execs and early employees tremendously wealthy should not be cause for celebration, given how much worse conditions have gotten for drivers. It’s an absolute disgrace that indicts the economic system that allowed him to happen.
- 85: Tech startup valuations are dumb, part 1. McDonald’s bought a recommendation-tech startup for $300m to help it sell more products. This may all be perfectly rational, but it’s hardly good.
- 86: Rent-seeking as a service. Tech company execs hate having to pay their taxes, yet they all seem to be trying to become (private) tax collectors.
- 87: The rise of the Instagram influencer. Lenin got it wrong - influencer marketing is actually the highest stage of capitalism.
- 88: The envy of the failed entrepreneur. I hate to spend too much time thinking about Jason Calacanis, but some of the things he says are just so revealing. Surely those who criticise society’s glorification of entrepreneurship are just failed entrepreneurs, right?
- 89: Art should be free. Art should be free. Artists should get paid. The two are not necessarily incompatible, if you find the right funding mechanism - we can have free healthcare while still paying healthcare workers, for example.
Major themes
- Startups (as an organisational model with a particular funding mechanism) are not well-equipped to solve social problems like poverty or homelessness. That would require changing the political terrain altogether, not merely monetising the problems that occur within it.
- Financial assets are really messing up the economy. IPOs in particular are a bad thing when the economy is so stratified, but they’re just a symptom of a deeper problem.
- Don’t trust HR, especially if you work at a fancy tech company where management claims you’re all one big family. Also: join a union.
- Capitalism’s flaws are getting to the point where they can no longer be dismissed. The status quo is crumbling. Do with that information what you will.
What’s coming
I can’t believe I’ve already gotten through a whole quarter of writing a blog post every day. I must have written close to 100k words by now. Good lord. I think they’ll get shorter in the future, as I really need to focus on my book for the next couple of months, and then I’ll be working on some other projects after that.
I’m also going to stop linking to my posts on Twitter, just to make sure I spend less time on Twitter. If you want to get my fragments in your email inbox every Sunday, sign up for my newsletter!