Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube are “partnering to help curb the spread of terrorist content online.” They’ve announced a joint plan to use hashes (“digital fingerprints”) as a way to share that they’ve taken down a particular article or video. Get something banned from one service and it will now be much easier for the other services to block it, too (Ars Technica).
Sounds great! We’ve all read stories about “self-radicalizing” loners who watch one too many ISIS/Daesh recruiting videos and become dangerous. It makes sense for the big platforms to cooperate in fighting this problem, right?
LATELY there’s been renewed discussion of universal income: regular cash payments to everyone, regardless of race, gender or need. Past proponents of the idea have included the essayist Thomas Paine, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., free-market economist Milton Friedman and President Richard Nixon. Today’s interest has been sparked by the income stagnation experienced by America’s middle class and working poor, and by the persistent slow growth experienced by our economy.
The idea finds support across America’s ideological spectrum in an era when hardly anything else does. Liberals, or at least some of them, like it as a way to preserve our middle class when jobs no longer pay enough. Conservatives, or at least some of them, like it as a way to reduce dependence on a byzantine maze of welfare programs.
Kellogg’s pulled its ads from Breitbart News, the fringe-right news site. Breitbart is famous for headlines like “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew” and “The Solution to Online ‘Harassment’ Is Simple: Women Should Log Off” — as well as for being a center of support for team Trump, whose head coach, Stephen Bannon, is Breitbart’s chairman. Now Breitbart is fighting back with a shrill campaign to boycott Kellogg’s (Variety).
If you think this is just a media-biz kerfuffle, think again: It’s more a marker of the end of the era in which brands could stand above the U.S.’s increasingly well-defined political and cultural divides and avoid taking sides. Breitbart claims that Kellogg’s is practicing “un-American” “economic censorship.” Kellogg’s says its decision is not about politics at all but about the company’s values.
With capitalism at a crossroads and tech driving unprecedented change, it’s time to harness the power of uncertainty
Those of us in the technology and startup worlds have thrived in uncertainty, we actively seek out its risks and opportunities. The ground has always shifted beneath us — but the tremors are now tectonic. Even before the results of this extraordinary election, we could feel it building. In the past decade, our creations have aggregated power beyond our control — they have swayed elections, they have concentrated wealth, data, and leverage in the hands of the very few, and they have triggered market panics and social revolutions. Soon our technologies will unleash a wave of AI-driven automation, and with it the loss (or is it the creation?) of millions of jobs. The world now demands we take responsibility for the power we’ve acquired, and that we engage with society at a broader scale. Will we answer that call?
As technology companies acquired power, the leadership of our largest legacy companies — companies that came to dominance during the post war economic boom — can no longer ignore the shifts in nearly every aspect of their business: customers are demanding new experiences, employees are demanding their work ladders to a greater purpose than profit, partners are asking for new ways to work together, and competitors are redefining markets once thought stable. How will our largest companies manage the transition to a world reshaped by technology?
We often talk about the ways that Silicon Valley is selfless. How we improve lives with world changing technology. How we spend our time helping other, younger entrepreneurs. But we rarely spend time talking about the ways that Silicon Valley is selfish.
I must admit that most of my last decade building and investing in tech companies has been spent trying to figure out how to make my businesses work for me. How do you get users to click on more things? How do you get them to spend more time or more money? How do we raise more money, increase our value, sell our company, enrich ourselves? Silicon Valley is the Wall Street of the 80s: Greed is good. For us, the market has been the ultimate arbitrator of value: if you make a product lots of people use and give you money for, you’ve definitionally done something that has made a positive impact in the world. Because here it has been possible to make an incredible fortune so quickly, clearly Silicon Valley must be changing the world!
Visit http://bloom.bg/2fXKRNT for the full Bloomberg interview. Original airdate 11/16/2016.
This week was an eye opener for me. In coastal bubbles a Trump presidency was literally inconceivable. Silicon Valley was optimizing around the margins; the main battle finished, it was picking new battles (sometimes with Thiel affiliates who were pro-Hillary!). The election results showed something completely different: 50% of voting Americans, and the majority of the electoral college sent a giant Fuck You to the establishment and went Trump.
Most consumer-facing companies strive for price transparency. Understandably, consumers want to know how much a good or service will cost before they make a purchase — but what about pricing transparency?
Not transparency over the final price, but transparency over the pricing process?
It’s important to separate the two, because companies can exhibit one or the other, or both, or neither. Companies can change their approach over time as well. Let’s take a look at some quick examples.
Henry Ford famously made inexpensive cars and paid his workers enough so they could afford to buy those cars. Ford aimed for a sort of virtuous cycle, in which a growing business would support a prosperous customer base that could in turn help the business grow further.
In the century since Ford’s heyday American business leaders have largely abandoned this approach, but it’s beginning to creep back into the conversation. Writing in The Atlantic, law professor Michael Dorff argues that too often today’s mission-driven corporations wear their ideals on their sleeves — giving to charity, promoting sustainability initiatives — but fail to build their businesses around a fundamental commitment to the well-being of workers and the wider community, the way Ford at his best did. (He had some execrable traits, too.)
Andy Stern spent his career leading the Service Employees International Union, but he left in 2010, convinced that the nature of work was changing faster than unions, or anyone else, could handle. Now Stern is one of the most prominent advocates of a universal basic income — a kind of Social Security payment for everyone that could “ease the transition and provide a floor for people” whose jobs are automated out of existence (Vox).
With changes in transportation alone likely to eliminate millions of driving jobs in the near future, we’re going to need to do something. Stern emphasizes that the basic-income concept is not a pipe dream: “All the resources and assets are available to make it real. It’s just that we have a huge distribution problem.”
Walmart has long been a target for critics on the left who lament the “Walmart effect” — the way the superstore chain tended to strangle small local merchants and lower wages and benefits as it has conquered the U.S. retail marketplace. Now there’s a new kind of Walmart effect on the horizon.
In 2015 Walmart found that its stores were a mess, its shelves were often empty, and its customers were unhappy. The retail giant took the shocking step of raising wages for its front-line workers, investing in their training, and opening paths for them to advance (The New York Times).
In the late 1800’s, the United States was the dominant presence in the whaling industry. At $10mm — more than $20 billion in today’s dollars — it was the fifth largest sector of the US economy. Whales provided a source of energy (oil for lamps) and the basis of a number of luxuries (perfumes, umbrellas, etc.). Centered in Massachusetts, the industry was a major driver of employment and productivity.
The US’s dominance in whaling was largely due to innovation — larger/faster ships, better harpoons, improved winch technology for hoisting sails, and better compensation. The latter two innovations were especially interesting. The winch technology reduced the manpower needed on ship. Less sailors led to more profits and productivity. And the industry’s compensation model was one of the first true innovations in pay. Instead of an hourly or daily wage, the sailors were paid a percentage of what they brought back to shore. A true alignment of interests, driving higher productivity.
