(3/6) VCs love Thiel's thesis because they believe the "landlord of x" business model to be superior (e.g. Uber is a landlord of drivers, AirBnB is a landlord of landlords). Guaranteed rents from building a web app? Who could turn that down?
But as @pluralistic has pointed out, the unit economics for many of these businesses stink to high hell. Profit can only come from capturing and then squeezing the shit out of a captive audience. Sound familiar?
(4/6) And if VCs can't make a return, well they'll just sell the company to the public. In either case they're rewarded for building what is effectively a giant societal honeypot.
What's disappointing to see is the state shred its capacity to innovate. It can't even identify firms actually doing real work. But this has been a failure in the making for the last 60+ years because we've been misled about how progress works.
(5/6) Now we have markets flipping out because of the belief that total addressable markets are infinite ("everyone will use AI for everything forever"). Or worse yet, create a group of addicted superusers (whales) who will pay increasing amounts of money for a service, again and again... forever.
Even outside capital markets companies are rewarded for tricking people into acting on bad information. Modern capitalism reminds me a lot of social engineering and hacking.
(6/6) I think one of the first steps to escaping #neoliberal hell is reframing the role of capitalism in innovation. Maybe it's naive to think that, but even my own well-rounded education failed to do this. That's why I'm building Misaligned Markets.
#enshittification as a mode of progress is baked into capitalism. We need everyone to know this so we can move toward commoditized, open, and competitive innovation rather than continually rewarding the business equivalent of script kiddies.
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