I would say size correlates rather strongly to bad incentives for the shareholder class vs society.
Mark Z was an open source bro who turned down M$ in High School and ended up open sourcing Synapse. He built Facemash and Facebook and was going to build an open-source, decentralized file sharing network (“Wirehog”) but the Venture Capitalists proudly “put a bullet in that thing”. Gotta extract them rents!
I heard Sean Parker myself on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 telling the story. Sean likewise tried to make a file sharing economy (Napster), and got nailed for it by another set of really big monopoly-like organizations, in the music and movie industries. He learned his lesson of capitalism: don’t mess with the centralized control!
Peter Thiel, the first investor in Facebook, says like you: “competition is for losers, build a monopoly”. That’s not hyperbole, that’s the actual title of his talk at Google, that I listened to.
With such investors it is no wonder that Mark Z went from an open source bro to corporate golden boy who buys up the competition, makes unilateral decisions — moves fast, break things — and then says “calm down, breathe, we hear you.”
Society has become like this (lonely, angry, addicted) not by accident. It is the end result of the system where shareholders and venture capitalists and the profit motive shape our platforms.
Mark Z was an open source bro who turned down M$ in High School and ended up open sourcing Synapse. He built Facemash and Facebook and was going to build an open-source, decentralized file sharing network (“Wirehog”) but the Venture Capitalists proudly “put a bullet in that thing”. Gotta extract them rents!
I heard Sean Parker myself on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 telling the story. Sean likewise tried to make a file sharing economy (Napster), and got nailed for it by another set of really big monopoly-like organizations, in the music and movie industries. He learned his lesson of capitalism: don’t mess with the centralized control!
Peter Thiel, the first investor in Facebook, says like you: “competition is for losers, build a monopoly”. That’s not hyperbole, that’s the actual title of his talk at Google, that I listened to.
With such investors it is no wonder that Mark Z went from an open source bro to corporate golden boy who buys up the competition, makes unilateral decisions — moves fast, break things — and then says “calm down, breathe, we hear you.”
Society has become like this (lonely, angry, addicted) not by accident. It is the end result of the system where shareholders and venture capitalists and the profit motive shape our platforms.