What the market deems valuable is not necessarily aligned with what is ultimately good for us as a society or even what we want. Because under conditions of extreme inequality, the market is biased towards people who have lots of money, at the expense of virtually everyone else.
Most of us outside of Palo Alto have no idea how a product as fucking stupid as Peeple gets valued at $7.6 million while a 4th grade teacher can't pay off her student loans and pay rent at the same time. But according to Paul Graham, those creepy Peeple women created value where that school teacher is just a stupid loser.
Ask a nurse who saved, like, three lives today what her salary is and then go ask the guy who made Candy Crush Saga what he got paid for it. Candy Crush Saga was valorized at over $7 billion. According to that same market, a human life is only valorized at $129,000. Meaning Candy Crush Saga is worth more to society than the combined value of 54,264 human lives.
Because that's where this stupid game gets you. You end up going to absurd lengths to rationalize mediocre ideas because they happen to make tons of money instead of questioning the legitimacy of a system that confers so much value on to stupid things.
A reader sends this article with more details about the beliefs of Silicon Valley elites, and I'm skeptical of the idea that a few smart people are doing more for the good of the world than everyone else, because it's based on dumb ideas about what's good for the world.
On basically the same subject, Anne has another new post, Entrepreneurship Means I Give Up, or Entrepreneurship is Hopium for the Economy: with the 20th century economy dying, and real wages steadily falling, we can still believe in capitalism and economic growth by focusing on a few people who strike it rich in the small business lottery.
]]>The first "job" today's kids have to answer is, what the hell am I going to do that anyone is willing to pay me for? And each kid, increasingly, is expected to answer this alone as an individual. When poor or less-educated people do this, it's called "hustling" but when it trickles upwards to the children of the 1%, it's our national economic plan.
]]>...the surest sign of an actual technological collapse would be the inability to encompass and interpret what was happening; if a collapse is to be irremediable, it would also have to be permanently inexplicable. This is beyond the radio station going down and you can't figure out why the internet has been out for a week - this would place the root causes beyond the technology of human knowledge and understanding for the meaningful future.
...
In an age of total information awareness, unknowable blankness is emerging as an existential horror all its own and - pace Melville - is accumulating its own color, mass and meaning, becoming a rebuke to the very assumption of narrative continuity.
]]>They are elves/not-elves. They don't appear, they kind of ooze out of the woodwork seductively and before you know it they're there... They make Faberge egg concoctions with ingredient lists like: 1) space, 2) lust, 3) politics, 4) circus sideshows, 5) time, 6) gall bladders, 7) existential notions of polyfidelity, 8) cucumbers, 9) Beethoven's 5th symphony, 10) the smell of petunias, and so on. This is somewhat of an arbitrary list, but the point is, all my categories of mind fell away because they were being ceaselessly synthesized and re-synthesized... What you do with these elves is some sort of a game of catch, only the physics of the game has been replaced by the physics of synesthesia... Being there I came to understand the Heraclitus fragment: 'The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls'. It is this. As well I understand, 'Still the first day, All Fool's Day, here at the center.'