Introduction
The author focused on the event happened in December 2013 where the residents of San Francisco’s Mission District blocks the way of the Google buses with their flesh in protest of their effect on the rising cost of living and gentrification in the district. Later on, these protests escalated into throwing rocks at these private mean of transportation. These vehicles provided exclusively to Google employees, though help to reduce the carbon footprints up to 2900 metric tons of CO2 of the neighbourhood, used the publicly funded bus stops to pick up their employees. The rent of the house around the bus stops rose as high as 20% as a result of this, forcing out long-time residents and small business owner.
He defended the employees of the Google as they were usually overwork, stressed-out, constantly monitored due to poorly executed Scrum project management where sprints are treated as deadlines. According to Vivian Giang, average Google employee leaves within a year to either accept better positions outside Google or simply resigned. Sitting on those air-conditioned buses on their way to work were their precious time to relax themselves.
The direct cause of the resentments from the residents were coming from the uneven distribution of wealth and benefits between the community and the tech corporates. While Google made boxes in the stock market, the Mission District’s residents were uttering destroyed by the rent hikes. Not even the high-salary Google employee can escape the worrying of their retirement saving, as US doesn’t have a functional social safety net.
The author pointed out that the root cause for this discontent is the mindset of wishing an ever-growing economy, or “grow or die” after the widespread adoption of web technology. Google’s investors, officers or economic elites understand that long-term goal is not necessarily achievable by short-term growth targets. However, they are taught to oblige to the shareholders of their companies, as the law told them to, regardless of how ridiculous the demands and pressures from them might be. And even the shareholders are not necessarily evil by themselves: they are holding the stocks and hoping them to go up or selling them if they don’t, all by using their own savings to support their retirement plans.
And it is a systemic problem that could have catastrophic effects. Classical economists and business experts believe that growth is part of the nature of digital economy while refuse to review the human part of the formulation. Instead of perpetuating this belief, the author advocated a reform of the economic system, shifting to a more distributed mode of value creation and exchange, that values people more than growth itself. He claimed that it was the vision back when the Internet was newly created, only to be hijacked by libertarian economists in order to revive the declining securities markets and restore market faith.
The system creates an illusion of possible success of becoming millionaires. The Wall Street Journal introduced these “paper” billionaires, whose worth is measured in stock instead of profits. A high-valued Internet enterprises on the stock market doesn’t mean they have the equitable profitability. The people who are considered success, often just sell their stocks and turn them into real estates or money. Corporates are willing to change the rule in any field but the financial one, as they hugely benefited or wanted to be benefited from the system. And the further those companies sell their stocks to the markets, the more centralise# the financial capital is. Once the money was bet in the stock market, it tends to sit there indefinitely.
Chapter One: Removing Humans From The Equation
Digital Industrialism
The author noticed that the computer or program is replacing human including those are required to interact with customers. From the corporate view of point, it is to reduce the cost of hiring a human including salaries, health benefits, workplace condition, legal issues etc. However, having a computer to do job doesn’t necessarily translate to increasing in productivity, where the customers are now require to do all the jobs what the previous human employee should do, and subjected to potential program errors and network issues. The costs don’t go away, he argued, and instead passes on to its customers, suppliers, and vendors which will eventually bite back to the corporate itself due to reduced sales volume, higher costs, and less feedback.
We shouldn’t blame the computer technology as alienated the interaction between customers and businesses, he said, and instead focused on the fundamental cause, that is the digitally charged business model. The model stresses the efficiency and growth of companies at the expense of the customers. The author reminded the corporates that doing business is about create ongoing value for customers, employees, and owners.
The author envisioned a revival of craftsmanships and artisanal production since digital landscape is supposed to encourage production from the periphery, lateral trade, and the distribution of wealth. To do so, a radical change need to be done to revise the current business process and the purpose of technology.
Mass Mass Mass
Competition is not always a good solution for market growth. In fact, there is a counterexample brought up by Rushkoff: bazaar, a #p2p commerce framework introduced from Middle-East communities, which brought substantial growth to Late Middle Age in Europe. Such framework builds the business more with human relationships and reputations instead of profits. As the sellers relying on others for self-sufficiency, there is little intends to sell bad products to their customers as it could hurt their reputation in the bazaar and in turn risk buying a bad product needed in the future. Though such system will plant a seed of cronyism as it favours the children of the existing members, there will be a standardisation of prices, the training of apprentices, and the exchange of best practices instead of competition among members.
The introduction of the bazaar gave rise to the merchant class where they gained benefits from this new kind of economic model. In the meantime, the aristocracy tried to usurp the wealth from the merchant class via force or political means as they were losing their wealth, by taxing, guilds busting, outlawed local currencies or bestowed monopoly charter to trusted merchant family. The #p2p economy were reappropriated to suit the need of the aristocracy, which transformed them into capitalists in this new top-down economic system: industrialism.
The #p2p nature of the market is no more. Now the craftspeople had to seek employment to a centralised monopoly charter instead of starting their own business. Instead of selling wares they created, they were now selling their labours and hours. However, remember the goal of industrialism system is not to create growth, it is to extract wealth for individuals. Thus, it’s more intuitive for capitalists to suppress the wage of labours by seeking out unskilled labour instead of a skilled one since the latter were entitled to higher payment according to their expertise. Plus, with cheap labours, they can leverage little political powers over possible abuses as they could be easily replaced.
Industrialisation and technology advancements made using unskilled labours doable. Alienating labourers from the whole process of value creation, and instead teach them to do tiny part of the process repeatedly and efficiently, the productivity seems to increase dramatically. However, the real costs of the production are externalised to other entities with the form of rail and/or road maintenance, environmental stresses etc. The subsequent technology advancements aimed to minimise human interactions as much as possible to create a dumbwaiter effect which distance the producer and customer the reality of the industrialism: unethical labour practices, slave labours, pollutants that destroy rich farming soil and so on.
To compensate the loss of connections between the workers and the customers, branding or marketing are used to build the customer relationship with the corporate. The marketer forges whatever mythology, which has little or nothing to do with the product or its manufacture, into the brand label or icon. If anything, it acts as a distraction from the reality of the factory, its conditions, and its great distance away. With the help of the mass media, born in the industrial age, they can propagate their brand mythologies beyond their country boundaries.
These three Masses: mass production, mass marketing and mass media come with a huge human prices. The devaluing of the human labour, the distancing between customer and producers, and the atomisation or isolation of customers with each other. After all, lonely individuals are more subdue to advertisements.
It is by designed, after all, it is the mission of industrialism to suppress the rising middle class and its #p2p market system. Instead of encouraging the creation of value from the bottom up, it is about preserving the passively earned income of the dominant class. It is to remove human from the equation. We don’t consider human components when evaluating the economy using any measurement. The growth of the businesses and economy start to undermine our own prosperity, and growth-centric (in contrast to human-centric) mindset still dominate our mind and planning. Instead of viewing digital technologies as a base for a new economic framework, we view them as a tool to scale up industrialism more. We’ve entered the digital age, but it’s hardly different from the ages before us.