Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.
We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!
@ajsadauskas @technology The one thing I don't sympathise with in that list is the taxi services — at least here in #Ottawa, they were even more exploitative than Uber or Lyft, with a small number of plate holders acting as feudal lords for the drivers, and extracting rent from their vassals even on a bad shift with few fares.
The city could have fixed that by issuing more plates, but the plate-owner lobby was too powerful.
Exact same system in Paris, with the same issues.
It's not all black or white, those startups brought some good things like breaking highly profitable monopolies and creating well designed apps that provide a much better service which ended up being picked up by the former monopolies, overall the quality of service often improved and we sometimes have more choice now, like picking the less human exploiting alternative that still has a usable app.
While we don't like what these services have become, lots of people forget how bad comparative services were before these came along. Example: bookstores. Everyone dreams up some ideal bookstore that didn't exist for the majority. Growing up, my local bookstore was run by a religious nut who refused to get Devil literature like Lord of the Rings. The good bookstores were in Ann Arbor, which was a 45 minute drive away. Chains like Borders, B&N, or web stores like Amazon were a huge positive change.
Isn't LOTR "Christian", somehow? Maybe I'm thinking of C.S. Lewis 🤔
Yeah Narnia was straight up unmistakable Christian allegory. I believe J.R.R. (C.S.'s drinking buddy) always insisted that LOTR was not meant to be taken in that way, or like when people hypothesized that Sauron was Hitler and so on.
There's not really anything about Sauron that is a critique of Hitler or fascism specifically. I think Sauron, like Smaug, was a warning against human greed, for money or for power.
See how the hobbits are like the antithesis of Smaug and Sauron, and each time caused their ultimate downfall.
"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world."
@FaeDrifter @Smatt I read Tolkein's books more in the light of his experience serving on the front in WW1. There's this terrible thing that you have to leave your cozy, safe home to do, and it damages you so much that even after "victory", you can never really go back.
People with strong beliefs are often not exactly rational or analytical.
You're thinking of CS Lewis. Now imagine if pre-early teen me asking this person about Neuromancer by Gibson. Their head would have exploded. One saving grace about my suburban bedroom town is that we had a good public library. If I wanted the good stuff, they either had it or could get it.
@cheese_greater @Banzai51 LOTR isn't very Christian; Tolkein was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, at a time when Old English studies were focussing more on the pagan elements that they thought were more "pure" and corrupted by the arrival of Christianity.
C.S. Lewis's books were allegorical Christian (very high church), but fundamentalists don't go for that kind of thing; for them, Jesus has to be Jesus, not an anthropomorphic lion inspired by the story of the crucifixion.
Sun of God
Ah yes, the “local taxi lobby.” Uber helped show a lot of us what a fucking joke that is, not just in Ottawa.
Innovation, choice, quality and freedom are the choice spices for capitalism soup. These shit-cook-legislators kept sprinkling in taint like protectionism, cronyism, extortion and corruption thinking nobody would notice. Well guess what? Now it’s just taint soup.
Why does it matter who’s serving you taint soup? The problem is there’s no other soup and they keep telling you it’s fine.