Startups that build their business on mere financialization of market arbitrage have a tendency become like the industry they sought to disrupt.
I think it’s because ultimately it produces no value and simply brokers, and brokers tend to end up representing the financial interest of the more powerful or financially enriching party to the brokering equation.
So, they have come to serve the landholder’s interests and no longer provide reliability to the consumer, and that is ultimately because the consumer is not the actual customer, merely the input to the product — nights booked per host.
I think it's part of a larger trend.
They say the U.S economy is going through a crazy tech makeover that is totally messing up how people work, hustle, munch, splurge, swipe, binge, and sleep, right? It's disruption and innvation of everything! Right?
Sometimes I wonder if this tall tech tale we have been telling ourselves is more of a big scam — that maybe the last 30 years have been more of a waste of time than we realize and not many things that are huge have really changed in daily life in ways that deeply matter.
People dreamed of jetpacks and got cat videos instead.
We disrupted the hotel industry to have the hotel industry recreated. We disrupted taxis and got Uber taxis. Restaurants got disrupted to create virtual restaurants with delivery. We disrupted television to create Google TV, which is basically television + the Internet but not really that different. We disrupted retail so we could have Internet retail where the primary innovation is again just delivery, and everything is a race to the bottom -- side effects be damned.
We’ve made efficiencies, massively, but sometimes I wonder why the real impact of all this "innovation and disruption" seems actually quite mild, and substantive disruption is so few and far between.
In the end I wonder if we have made technological advancements, but we haven’t made much actual progress. We have such a bias for the new, it tends not to be a popular opinion. But so much of this technology innovation just leads us to create new versions of the same old, because the incentives are to financialize and exploit financial advantage and to reconcentrate wealth and fortune, not actually innovate.
It's perhaps not the most thought out thesis, but I wonder about it, and whenever Airbnb comes up it brings this question up for me. I mean landing rockets changes the economics of space… we have innovation. It’s just that most of it just seems to be merely a greater efficiency of delivery masquerading as “disruption.”
I think it’s because ultimately it produces no value and simply brokers, and brokers tend to end up representing the financial interest of the more powerful or financially enriching party to the brokering equation.
So, they have come to serve the landholder’s interests and no longer provide reliability to the consumer, and that is ultimately because the consumer is not the actual customer, merely the input to the product — nights booked per host.
I think it's part of a larger trend.
They say the U.S economy is going through a crazy tech makeover that is totally messing up how people work, hustle, munch, splurge, swipe, binge, and sleep, right? It's disruption and innvation of everything! Right?
Sometimes I wonder if this tall tech tale we have been telling ourselves is more of a big scam — that maybe the last 30 years have been more of a waste of time than we realize and not many things that are huge have really changed in daily life in ways that deeply matter.
People dreamed of jetpacks and got cat videos instead.
We disrupted the hotel industry to have the hotel industry recreated. We disrupted taxis and got Uber taxis. Restaurants got disrupted to create virtual restaurants with delivery. We disrupted television to create Google TV, which is basically television + the Internet but not really that different. We disrupted retail so we could have Internet retail where the primary innovation is again just delivery, and everything is a race to the bottom -- side effects be damned.
We’ve made efficiencies, massively, but sometimes I wonder why the real impact of all this "innovation and disruption" seems actually quite mild, and substantive disruption is so few and far between.
In the end I wonder if we have made technological advancements, but we haven’t made much actual progress. We have such a bias for the new, it tends not to be a popular opinion. But so much of this technology innovation just leads us to create new versions of the same old, because the incentives are to financialize and exploit financial advantage and to reconcentrate wealth and fortune, not actually innovate.
It's perhaps not the most thought out thesis, but I wonder about it, and whenever Airbnb comes up it brings this question up for me. I mean landing rockets changes the economics of space… we have innovation. It’s just that most of it just seems to be merely a greater efficiency of delivery masquerading as “disruption.”