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pearlcrexroad (21)in #xxx • 5 years ago

The problem with this model, from a shareholder perspective, is that it eventually stops working. Even goosed by digital platforms, corporate returns on assets have been steadily declining for over 75 years. Corporations are still great at sucking all of the money out of a system, but they’re awful at deploying those assets once they have them. Corporations are getting bigger but less profitable. They’re just sitting on piles of unused money, and taking so much cash out of the system that central banks are forced to print more. This new money gets invested in banks that lend it to corporations, starting the cycle all over again.A digital business does the same thing, only faster. It picks an inefficiently run industry, like taxis or book publishing, and optimizes the system by cutting out most of the people who used to participate. So a taxi service platform charges drivers and passengers for a ride while externalizing the cost of the car, the roads, and the traffic to others. The bookselling website doesn’t care if authors or publishers make a sustainable income; it uses its sole buyer or “monopsony” power to force both sides to accept less money for their labor. The initial monopoly can then expand to other industries, like retail, movies, or cloud services. Such businesses end up destroying the marketplaces on which they initially depend. When the big box store does this, it simply closes one location and starts the process again in another. When a digital business does this, it pivots or expands from its original market to the next — say, from books to toys to all of retail, or from ride-sharing to restaurant delivery to autonomous vehicles — increasing the value of its real product, the stock shares, along the way.Even if we never see another recession like the ones we saw in 2008 and whatever the disaster we’re in now ends up being, the residual trauma won’t ever leave us. I remember sitting in my then-girlfriend’s apartment in Boston the night Barack Obama was elected president. I remember wanting to feel as happy as my brain told me I should feel. I remember not wanting to feel worthless. I remember finding solace in the fact that as bad as things felt, there might be a future worth fighting to see. I remember thinking that if we could get through this, then we could get through anything.
This was section 47 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here and the following section here.
I wanted to tell them there was a light at the end of it, but financial recovery won’t replace the boogeyman of it all happening again. All the while I was fighting my own terror at losing what I’d used to think was impossible to gain in the first place: a family, a home, a belief that next month’s bills will be paid. An ability to tell my family that everything would be okay. Their faith that I had everything under control.
Digital companies work the same way as their extractive forebears. When a big box store moves to a new neighborhood, it undercuts local businesses and eventually becomes the sole retailer and employer in the region. With its local monopoly, it can then raise prices while lowering wages, reduce labor to part-time status, and externalize the costs of health care and food stamps to the government. The net effect of the business on the community is extractive. The town becomes poorer, not richer. The corporation takes money out of the economy — out of the land and labor — and delivers it to its shareholders.
When Covid-19 hit and the “r-word” started getting tossed around again, I would feel the cold sweats come back. My palms would get balmy. The room would spin. And worse, I saw the college students I was teaching experience it. I was watching my trauma renewed through kids who had gotten their graduations canceled, their internships postponed, their job offers rescinded, and seen the return of the “hiring freeze.”My plan of survival was to wait it all out and go to graduate school for a year. By the time I got out, there would be jobs. It worked in that I was able to find a career on the other side of a master’s degree, but the tradeoff is a lifetime of student loan debt that won’t go away no matter how much I pay (or don’t pay) per month.Except in order to stoke and accelerate growth, new, paradigm-busting inventions like smartphones, robots, and drones must not only keep coming, but keep coming faster and faster. The math doesn’t work: We are quickly approaching the moment when we will need a major, civilization-changing innovation to occur on a monthly or even weekly basis in order to support the rate of growth demanded by the underlying operating system.

5 years ago in #xxx by pearlcrexroad (21)

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