Platform Capitalism Quotes

The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors--psychology, sociology, women's studies--to prove that nothing is anybody's fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you'd have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.

One of the curious aspects of the Twenty-First Century was the great delusion amongst many people, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, that freedom of speech and freedom of expression were best exercised on technological platforms owned by corporations dedicated to making as much money as possible.

The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving. And, more important, the internet already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of contemporary life. It has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while overloading us with much more sensory input than was ever possible in primitive times. It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought #tbt meant “truth be told” for ages—you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control.

Today we are not put up on the platforms and sold at the courthouse square. But we are forced to sell our strength, our time, our souls during almost every hour that we live. We have been freed from one kind of slavery only to be delivered into another. Is this freedom?

We believe that the capital in our portfolio should be a platform for utility and a facilitator of life.

This book is about how to hold open that place in the sun. It is a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy, with all the stubbornness of a Chinese “nail house” blocking a major highway. I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive. —

Business will forever be a platform for people to exchange value. People are largely unpredictable, and value is largely subjective. This is the space where humans will always outperform AI – the space where active management will always be necessary.

A lot of folks look to non-profits as platforms to solve major societal scale problems. But the major capital allocators like banks, Hedge Funds, Venture Capital firms and so forth - these are the kinds of ent that have the capacity to affect real change.

A lot of folks look to non-profits as platforms to solve major societal scale problems. But the major capital allocators like banks, Hedge Funds, Venture Capital firms and so forth - these are the kinds of entities that have the capacity to affect real change.

while piracy signifies “a repudiation of information capitalism at one extreme,” it marks information capitalism’s “consummation” on the other.

The rise of corporatism (as opposed to capitalism) forced people into cubicles instead of out into the world, exploring and inventing and manifesting. The ethic of the Choose Yourself era is to not depend on those stifling trends that are defeating you. Instead, build your own platform, have faith and confidence in yourself instead of a jury-rigged system, and define success by your own terms.

One thing that the left and right now seem to agree on is that the society in which we live is called capitalism.1 And strangely enough, both now seem to agree that it is eternal. Even the left seems to think that there is an eternal essence to Capital and that only its appearances change. The parade of changing appearances yields a series of modifiers: this could be necro capitalism, communicative capitalism, cognitive capitalism, platform capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, or computational capitalism.

In real life, the value capture process is sometimes deliberately managed by elites to manipulate and control others with game design-like tactics. Gig economy platforms like Uber and Lyft use "badges" and rating systems to manage the decision-making environment of their driver employees. Even outside of work, social media features such as likes, shares, and retweets play the role of points in games. Over time, these simple metrics threaten to distort or take the place of values (say, the wish to meaningfully contribute to discussion or to take pride in the quality of one's work) that might otherwise have inflected our behavior on these platforms.

I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.

Even if you avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought #tbt meant “truth be told” for ages—you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control.

I am a congenital optimist about America, but I worry that American democracy is exhibiting fatal symptoms. DC has become an acronym for Dysfunctional Capital: a swamp in which partisanship has grown poisonous, relations between the White House and Congress have paralyzed basic functions like budgets and foreign agreements, and public trust in government has all but disappeared. These symptoms are rooted in the decline of a public ethic, legalized and institutionalized corruption, a poorly educated and attention-deficit-driven electorate, and a 'gotcha' press - all exacerbated by digital devices and platforms that reward sensationalism and degrade deliberation. Without stronger and more determined leadership from the president and a recovery of a sense of civic responsibility among the governing class, the United States may follow Europe down the road of decline.

Beyond the public relations efforts of platforms like Uber and Airbnb, there may be deeper reasons why the term “sharing economy” is so popular: It captures some of the thinking and the idealism of the early proponents of economy-wide sharing approaches. It hints at the shift away from faceless, impersonal 20th-century capitalism and toward exchange that is somehow more connected, more embedded in community, more reflective of a shared purpose.

The fact that the information platform requires an extension of sensors means that it is countering the tendency towards a lean platform. These are not asset-less companies – far from it; they spend billions of dollars to purchase fixed capital and take other companies over. Importantly, ‘once we understand this [tendency], it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand’.15 Calls for privacy miss how the suppression of privacy is at the heart of this business model. This tendency involves constantly pressing against the limits of what is socially and legally acceptable in terms of data collection. For the most part, the strategy has been to collect data, then apologise and roll back programs if there is an uproar, rather than consulting with users beforehand.16 This is why we will continue to see frequent uproars over the collection of data by these companies.

The head of the initiative was the former CEO of a website that served as a repository of humorous images and videos optimized for social media virality—mostly cats doing improbable things, like riding robotic vacuum cleaners and getting stuck in hamburger buns. The website had raised nearly forty-two million dollars in venture capital. He would be working alongside another entrepreneur, a woman who had founded an on-demand housekeeping platform that had shut down amid a spate of lawsuits. The audacity was breathtaking.

That law of nature whereby everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. The bread he eats is first strength and animal spirits; it becomes, in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and endurance. This is the right compound interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest power. The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation and not in augmenting animal existence.

Mrs. Crisparkle had need of her own share of philanthropy when she beheld this very large and very loud excrescence on the little party. Always something in the nature of a Boil upon the face of society, Mr. Honeythunder expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon Corner. Though it was not literally true, as was facetiously charged against him by public unbelievers, that he called aloud to his fellow-creatures: ‘Curse your souls and bodies, come here and be blessed!’ still his philanthropy was of that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it and animosity was hard to determine. You were to abolish military force, but you were first to bring all commanding officers who had done their duty, to trial by court-martial for that offence, and shoot them. You were to abolish war, but were to make converts by making war upon them, and charging them with loving war as the apple of their eye. You were to have no capital punishment, but were first to sweep off the face of the earth all legislators, jurists, and judges, who were of the contrary opinion. You were to have universal concord, and were to get it by eliminating all the people who wouldn’t, or conscientiously couldn’t, be concordant. You were to love your brother as yourself, but after an indefinite interval of maligning him (very much as if you hated him), and calling him all manner of names. Above all things, you were to do nothing in private, or on your own account. You were to go to the offices of the Haven of Philanthropy, and put your name down as a Member and a Professing Philanthropist. Then, you were to pay up your subscription, get your card of membership and your riband and medal, and were evermore to live upon a platform, and evermore to say what Mr. Honeythunder said, and what the Treasurer said, and what the sub-Treasurer said, and what the Committee said, and what the sub-Committee said, and what the Secretary said, and what the Vice-Secretary said. And this was usually said in the unanimously-carried resolution under hand and seal, to the effect: ‘That this assembled Body of Professing Philanthropists views, with indignant scorn and contempt, not unmixed with utter detestation and loathing abhorrence’—in short, the baseness of all those who do not belong to it, and pledges itself to make as many obnoxious statements as possible about them, without being at all particular as to facts.

Wright advocates for some salutary counterhegemonic strategies, based in geographic rootedness, local public goods, and worker’s cooperatives. But one has to wonder whether such things are all that viable (at least as traditionally conceived), given that the forces of production drive increasingly abstract relations of production, which appear then as transnational legal and treaty forms protecting information as private property. Trebor Scholz proposes a form of platform cooperativism as a more contemporary approach.47 The vectoralist stack needs to be countered with a counterstack on the infrastructural level.

The realisation that what are usually called ‘predictive’ technologies are in fact interested more in ‘nudging’ and mapping out the new rhythms of the city than in simply monitoring or surveilling also suggests the need for a new conception of digital time. Armen Arvanessian argues that as a result of digital data time itself – the direction of time – has changed. We no longer have a linear time, in the sense of the past being followed by the present and then the future. It’s rather the other way around: the future happens before the present, time arrives from the future. If people have the impression that time is out of joint, or that time doesn’t make sense anymore, or it isn’t as it used to be, then the reason is, I think, that they have – or we all have – problems getting used to living in such a speculative time or within a speculative temporality. Data technologies do not simply predict the future by guessing what an individual or group might do or want to do in the future. It is rather that those futures already exist, completely realised, and they reach backwards into the present to guide it. The possible paths for our desires to travel are mapped ahead of time by algorithms in the hands of platform capitalists.

For example, Twitter and Facebook—both of which happily hosted Kim Kardashian’s nude bottom—removed the word “vagina” from an advertisement marketing a book about female anatomy, written by prominent gynecologist Dr. Jen Gunter.21 Similarly, journalist Sarah Lacy found that she was unable to advertise her book, entitled A Uterus Is a Feature, on Facebook.22 Plus-sized women have had their Instagram accounts removed for posting selfies in bikinis—something that skinny women do all the time without reprisal.23 Both platforms have also blocked advertisements for information about teen pregnancy, proper bra fitting, and gynecologist visits.24

Bell Centennial’s bizarre “4” and “M” are a perfect lesson in type made specifically for its intended medium. In this case, the platform was telephone books. In 1974, AT&T asked Matthew Carter to replace their previous typeface, Bell Gothic, with something that could save costs by fitting more lines per page. To keep the type legible at tiny sizes on cheap paper, Carter made extensive use of a compensation technique called “ink trapping.” This reduces the amount of ink-spread that distorts letters by filling junctions and counters. So, what looks strange, even ugly, at large sizes, actually takes its proper form on the pulpy pages of a directory. Many capitalize on Bell Centennial’s curiosity to set eye-catching

The corporate state seeks to discredit and shut down the anticapitalist left. Its natural allies are the neo-Nazis and the Christian fascists. The alt-right is bankrolled by the most retrograde forces in American capitalism. It has huge media platforms. It has placed its ideologues and sympathizers in positions of power, including in law enforcement, the military, and the White House. And it has carried out acts of domestic terrorism that dwarf anything carried out by the left. White supremacists were responsible for forty-nine homicides in twenty-six attacks in the United States from 2006 to 2016, far more than those committed by members of any other extremist group, according to a report issued in May 2017 by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.109

It is interesting that the rhetoric and some state initiatives of multiculturalism in the West are accompanied by the gathering strength of right wing politics....Everywhere in the West 'immigration,' a euphemistic expression for racist labor and citizenship policies, has become a major election platform....The media and some members of the Canadian intelligentsia speak in terms of the end of 'Canadian culture,' displaying signs of feeling threatened by these 'others,' who are portrayed as an invasive force. In the meantime, Western capital roves in a world without borders, with trade agreements such as GATT and NAFTA ensuring their legal predations, while labour from third world countries is both locked in their national spaces and locked out from Western countries, marked by a discourse of illegality and alienness.

Silicon Valley mythology holds that Minitel failed because it was too dirigiste, too state-directed. As Julien Mailland points outs, however, both Minitel and the internet were the products of different quantities of state investment, private capital, and thriving cultures of amateur enthusiasts and experts improving the technology and proselytizing for it. Both Mintel and the internet show that there is no 'free market' without substantial pubic-sector intervention and backing. The internet's history also shows us that when we rely on the private sector and its hallowed bromide of 'innovation,' quite often that will result in technical innovations that are designed for manipulation, surveillance and exploitation. The tax-evading, offshore wealth-hoarding, data-monopolizing, privacy-invading silicon giants benefit from the internet's 'free market' mythology, but the brief flourishing of Minitel shows is that other ways, other worlds, other platforms, are possible. The question is, given that there's no way to reverse history, how can we actualize these possibilities? What sort of power do we have? As users, it turns out, very little. We are not voters on the platforms; we are not even customers. We are the unpaid products of raw material. We could, if we were organized, withdraw our labor power, commit social media suicide: but then what other platforms do we have access to with anything like the same reach?

On the train I had a lot of time to think. I thought how in the thirty years of my life I had seldom gotten on a train in America without being conscious of my color. In the South, there are Jim Crow cars and Negroes must ride separate from the whites, usually in a filthy antiquated coach next to the engine, getting all the smoke and bumps and dirt. In the South, we cannot buy sleeping car tickets. Such comforts are only for white folks. And in the North where segregated travel is not the law, colored people have, nevertheless, many difficulties. In auto buses they must take the seats in the rear, over the wheels. On the boats they must occupy the worst cabins. The ticket agents always say that all other accommodations are sold. On trains, if one sits down by a white person, the white person will sometimes get up, flinging back an insult at the Negro who has dared to take a seat beside him. Thus it is that in America, if you are yellow, brown, or black, you can never travel anywhere without being reminded of your color, and oft-times suffering great inconveniences. I sat in the comfortable sleeping car on my first day out of Moscow and remembered many things about trips I had taken in America. I remembered how, once as a youngster going alone to see my father who was working in Mexico, I went into the dining car of the train to eat. I sat down at a table with a white man. The man looked at me and said, "You're a nigger, ain't you?" and left the table. It was beneath his dignity to eat with a Negro child. At St. Louis I went onto the station platform to buy a glass of milk. The clerk behind the counter said, “We don't serve niggers," and refused to sell me anything. As I grew older I learned to expect this often when traveling. So when I went South to lecture on my poetry at Negro universities, I carried my own food because I knew I could not go into the dining cars. Once from Washington to New Orleans, I lived all the way on the train on cold food. I remembered this miserable trip as I sat eating a hot dinner on the diner of the Moscow-Tashkent express. Traveling South from New York, at Washington, the capital of our country, the official Jim Crow begins. There the conductor comes through the train and, if you are a Negro, touches you on the shoulder and says, "The last coach forward is the car for colored people." Then you must move your baggage and yourself up near the engine, because when the train crosses the Potomac River into Virginia, and the dome of the Capitol disappears, it is illegal any longer for white people and colored people to ride together. (Or to eat together, or sleep together, or in some places even to work together.) Now I am riding South from Moscow and am not Jim-Crowed, and none of the darker people on the train with me are Jim-Crowed, so I make a happy mental note in the back of my mind to write home to the Negro papers: "There is no Jim Crow on the trains of the Soviet Union.

Here’s some startup pedagogy for you: When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed? If the answer is zero, you’re not looking at a startup, you’re just dealing with a regular business like a laundry or a trucking business. All you need is capital and minimal execution, and assuming a two-way market, you’ll make some profit. To be a startup, miracles need to happen. But a precise number of miracles. Most successful startups depend on one miracle only. For Airbnb, it was getting people to let strangers into their spare bedrooms and weekend cottages. This was a user-behavior miracle. For Google, it was creating an exponentially better search service than anything that had existed to date. This was a technical miracle. For Uber or Instacart, it was getting people to book and pay for real-world services via websites or phones. This was a consumer-workflow miracle. For Slack, it was getting people to work like they formerly chatted with their girlfriends. This is a business-workflow miracle. For the makers of most consumer apps (e.g., Instagram), the miracle was quite simple: getting users to use your app, and then to realize the financial value of your particular twist on a human brain interacting with keyboard or touchscreen. That was Facebook’s miracle, getting every college student in America to use its platform during its early years. While there was much technical know-how required in scaling it—and had they fucked that up it would have killed them—that’s not why it succeeded. The uniqueness and complete fickleness of such a miracle are what make investing in consumer-facing apps such a lottery. It really is a user-growth roulette wheel with razor-thin odds. The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed. This was what was wrong with ours. We had a Bible’s worth of miracles to perform:

Power is seeping away from autocrats and single-party systems whether they embrace reform or not. It is spreading from large and long-established political parties to small ones with narrow agendas or niche constituencies. Even within parties, party bosses who make decisions, pick candidates, and hammer out platforms behind closed doors are giving way to insurgents and outsiders—to new politicians who haven’t risen up in the party machine, who never bothered to kiss the ring. People entirely outside the party structure—charismatic individuals, some with wealthy backers from outside the political class, others simply catching a wave of support thanks to new messaging and mobilization tools that don’t require parties—are blazing a new path to political power. Whatever path they followed to get there, politicians in government are finding that their tenure is getting shorter and their power to shape policy is decaying. Politics was always the art of the compromise, but now politics is downright frustrating—sometimes it feels like the art of nothing at all. Gridlock is more common at every level of decision-making in the political system, in all areas of government, and in most countries. Coalitions collapse, elections take place more often, and “mandates” prove ever more elusive. Decentralization and devolution are creating new legislative and executive bodies. In turn, more politicians and elected or appointed officials are emerging from these stronger municipalities and regional assemblies, eating into the power of top politicians in national capitals. Even the judicial branch is contributing: judges are getting friskier and more likely to investigate political leaders, block or reverse their actions, or drag them into corruption inquiries that divert them from passing laws and making policy. Winning an election may still be one of life’s great thrills, but the afterglow is diminishing. Even being at the top of an authoritarian government is no longer as safe and powerful a perch as it once was. As Professor Minxin Pei, one of the world’s most respected experts on China, told me: “The members of the politburo now openly talk about the old good times when their predecessors at the top of the Chinese Communist Party did not have to worry about bloggers, hackers, transnational criminals, rogue provincial leaders or activists that stage 180,000 public protests each year. When challengers appeared, the old leaders had more power to deal with them. Today’s leaders are still very powerful but not as much as those of a few decades back and their powers are constantly declining.”3

What is the Sharing Economy? “This boom marks a striking new stage in a deeper transformation. Using the now ubiquitous platform of the smartphone to deliver labour and services in a variety of new ways will challenge many of the fundamental assumptions of 20th-century capitalism, from the nature of the firm to the structure of careers.” – Economist, December 24, 2014 The sharing economy has many synonyms: tech-based capitalism, sharing marketplaces, collaborative consumption, access economy, collaborative economy, 1099 economy, and the list goes on and on. Although we appreciate the complexity of this disruptive technological shift, for the purposes of this book we will simply refer to it as the sharing economy. In its simplest form, the sharing economy is composed of hundreds of online platforms that enable people to turn otherwise unproductive assets into income producing ones. These include their homes, cars, parking spots, clothes, consumer items, pets, hobbies, and many others.

A New Yorker by birth is David Karp, the child prodigy who at age 21, in 2007, founded Tumblr, whose headquarters are located just one block east of Hunch. The son of a composer and a science teacher, at 14 Karp began working as an intern in an online animation company; at 15, tired of traditional school, he continued to study at home alone, learning, among other things, Japanese; then he became the chief technology officer of the Internet site UrbanBaby and at 17 he went to Tokyo for five months by himself. In 2006, UrbanBaby was bought by CNET, and Karp used his share of proceeds to establish Tumblr, a blogging platform with elements of social networking that allows its users to follow other bloggers. Tumblr allows users to build a collection of content according to their own tastes and interests. Easy to use, with a format of short entries to be enriched with photos and videos, Tumblr has quickly gained many followers among the creative community as well as the public at large. Today it is home to nearly 70 million blogs, including those of Lady Gaga and Barack Obama, with a total audience of 140 million users. At 26, Karp is leading a company with over 100 employees, valued at more than $800 million, with shareholders of the caliber of Virgin Group’s Richard Branson. He defines Tumblr as new media, as opposed to technology, and seeks to attract non-traditional ads, inviting brands to create awareness and desire in their ads, rather than just trying to capture intent. Karp has already received several acquisition offers from other media groups, but he has always refused because he thinks big: he wants to reach billions, not millions of users and one day be in a position to acquire rather than be acquired. Meanwhile, in order to grow he is convinced that New York City, the capital of media and advertising, is the right city.[47]

Josh Miller, 22 years old. He is co-founder of Branch, a “platform for chatting online as if you were sitting around the table after dinner.” Miller works at Betaworks, a hybrid company encapsulating a co-working space, an incubator and a venture capital fund, headquartered on 13th Street in the heart of the Meatpacking District. This kid in T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, and a potential star of the 2.0 version of Sex and the City, is super-excited by his new life as a digital neo-entrepreneur. He dropped out of Princeton in the summer of 2011 a year before getting his degree—heresy for the almost 30,000 students who annually apply to the prestigious Ivy League school in the hope of being among the 9% of applicants accepted. What made him decide to take such a big step? An internship in the summer of 2011 at Meetup, the community site for those who organize meetings in the flesh for like-minded people. His leader, Scott Heiferman, took him to one of the monthly meetings of New York Tech Meetup and it was there that Miller saw the light. “It was the coolest thing that ever happened to me,” he remembers. “All those people with such incredible energy. It was nothing like the sheltered atmosphere of Princeton.” The next step was to take part in a seminar on startups where the idea for Branch came to him. He found two partners –students at NYU who could design a website. Heartened by having won a contest for Internet projects, Miller dropped out of Princeton. “My parents told me I was crazy but I think they understood because they had also made unconventional choices when they were kids,” says Miller. “My father, who is now a lawyer, played drums when he was at college, and he and my mother, who left home at 16, traveled around Europe for a year. I want to be a part of the new creative class that is pushing the boundaries farther. I want to contribute to making online discussion important again. Today there is nothing but the soliloquy of bloggers or rude anonymous comments.” The idea, something like a public group email exchange where one can contribute by invitation only, interested Twitter cofounder Biz Stone and other California investors who invited Miller and his team to move to San Francisco, financing them with a two million dollar investment. After only four months in California, Branch returned to New York, where it now employs a dozen or so people. “San Francisco was beautiful and I learned a lot from Biz and my other mentors, but there’s much more adrenaline here,” explains Miller, who is from California, born and raised in Santa Monica. “Life is more varied here and creating a technological startup is something new, unlike in San Francisco or Silicon Valley where everyone’s doing it: it grabs you like a drug. Besides New York is the media capital and we’re an online publishing organization so it’s only right to be here.”[52]

In one of the most profound moments in the series, Avon Barksdale’s nephew D’Angelo, a lieutenant in the family drug organization, teaches his young street crew that “the king stay the king” and that the pawns die early. Using the pieces of a chess game, D’Angelo explains how everyone in the “the game” has a role and few, if any, can transcend those roles. While the king has the queen and all of the pawns to “watch his back,” the pawns are frequently sacrificed to protect the more powerful pieces and have no one to shield them from the brutality of the game. If we read the chess board as yet another metaphor for the American city, D’Angelo’s teachings draw parallels between the “king” and the powerful state actors and between the “pawns” and those who are dispensable in society. Virtually every political decision in The Wire, including decisions about whom to punish and why, are ultimately designed to preserve political power and ensure the personal and institutional success of those with voice and capital. In the most blatant ways, political candidates manipulate crime and punishment to increase their votes and make their careers by running on tough-on-crime platforms regardless of whether those platforms provide fair and effective strategies for controlling crime. The politics of crime is easily discernible in the mayoral campaign of Mayor Clarence Royce and his challenger, Tommy Carcetti.

In the days leading up to the war with Germany, the British government commissioned a series of posters. The idea was to capture encouraging slogans on paper and distribute them about the country. Capital letters in a distinct typeface were used, and a simple two-color format was selected. The only graphic was the crown of King George VI. The first poster was distributed in September of 1939: YOUR COURAGE YOUR CHEERFULNESS YOUR RESOLUTION WILL BRING US VICTORY Soon thereafter a second poster was produced: FREEDOM IS IN PERIL DEFEND IT WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT These two posters appeared up and down the British countryside. On railroad platforms and in pubs, stores, and restaurants. They were everywhere. A third poster was created yet never distributed. More than 2.5 million copies were printed yet never seen until nearly sixty years later when a bookstore owner in northeast England discovered one in a box of old books he had purchased at an auction. It read: KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON The poster bore the same crown and style of the first two posters. It was never released to the public, however, but was held in reserve for an extreme crisis, such as invasion by Germany. The bookstore owner framed it and hung it on the wall. It became so popular that the bookstore began producing identical images of the original design on coffee mugs, postcards, and posters. Everyone, it seems, appreciated the reminder from another generation to keep calm and carry on.1

To make matters worse, society has built a rigorous, stubborn platform that capitalizes on your short-term desires. There’s a reason why there are so many takeaway places at every corner. There’s a reason why the “latest” product promises to make your pain go away now and forever. An example is the problem of being overweight. Not only has society created the problem of obesity by advertising and making fatty food so freely available (it’s where the money is made), but society has even gone a step further and created a solution to the problem that they’ve created in the first place, by giving you diet plans (a very profitable market).

But the flock of Silicon Valley unicorns had grown so large that Benioff himself had become nervous. The kind of rapid expansion that venture capital made possible wasn’t sustainable without discipline. In the middle of the decade, Benioff had issued a warning: “There’s going to be a lot of dead unicorns.” Neumann had begun pitching WeWork as a new breed of SaaS business: “space as a service.” The idea was that companies of all sizes would no longer handle their own real estate portfolios but would instead turn over the management of their physical space to WeWork, transforming the company into something like a real estate cloud—a “platform.” This was a goal shared by every ambitious start-up of the decade, no matter how specious the claim. Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb identified as platforms, as did Beyond Meat, the pea-protein burger maker (“plant-based-product platforms”); Peloton, the indoor exercise bike company (“the largest interactive fitness platform in the world”); and Casper, the mattress company (a “platform built for better sleep”). It was no longer good enough for companies to simply be what they were.

Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them.

Its official platform, the so-called Erfurt Program, adopted in 1891, contended that the interests of the “bourgeois” state and the working class were irreconcilable and that, accordingly, workers had no stake in their nation: they owed loyalty only to their class. It reaffirmed the international unity of labor and the imminence of a revolution that would crush capitalism and the bourgeoisie around the globe.

In the January 2015 Greek general elections, a motley coalition of communists and anti-globalists came to power, grouped in a party called Syriza and headed by Alexis Tsipras, who at 40 was the country’s youngest prime minister in the modern era. Syriza had existed only since 2004, but in 2015 it won, and won big, chiefly on a platform of negation and repudiation. The party stood firmly against the European Union, the euro, austere budgets, debt payments, capitalism, the Germans, the banks, “the rich, the markets, the super-rich, the top 10 percent.”31 Syriza had promised what Greek voters wanted: the impossible. Reality intervened. By September 2015, the cranks and unrepentant radicals had been weeded out of the government. Greece remained in the EU, kept the euro, put up with austerity, and bowed respectfully to capitalists, the Germans, and the banks. The promise of radical change had devolved into stasis. Under the youthful communist Tsipras, conditions for the Greek public were similar to what they had been under his middle-aged conservative predecessor. Not surprisingly, support for the populist experiment Syriza represented has collapsed, while Tsipras’s ratings have “nosedived.

technology to stabilize his regime. In the United States, Putin was able to weaponize the same technology against us. Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms empowered marginalized groups, undermined social cohesion and social capital, and eroded Americans’ sense

digital technology is becoming systematically important, much in the same way as finance. As the digital economy is an increasingly pervasive infrastructure for the contemporary economy, its collapse would be economically devastating.

In this chapter I will argue that there are three moments in the relatively recent history of capitalism that are particularly relevant to the current conjuncture: the response to the 1970s downturn; the boom and bust of the 1990s; and the response to the 2008 crisis. Each of these moments has set the stage for the new digital economy and has determined the ways in which it has developed.

The digital economy is becoming a hegemonic model: cities are to become smart, businesses must be disruptive, workers are to become flexible, and governments must be lean and intelligent. In this environment those who work hard can take advantage of the changes and win out. Or so we are told.

By contrast, these actors are compelled to seek out profits in order to fend off competition.

It attempts to historicise emerging technologies as an outcome of deeper capitalist tendencies, showing how they are implicated within a system of exploitation, exclusion, and competition.

As a preliminary definition, we can say that the digital economy refers to those businesses that increasingly rely upon information technology, data, and the internet for their business models. This is an area that cuts across traditional sectors – including manufacturing, services, transportation, mining,

by 1990 it had reached $154.6 billion; and at the height of the bubble, in 2000, it reached an unsurpassed peak of $412.8 billion.

Since platforms have to attract a number of different groups, part of their business is fine-tuning the balance between what is paid, what is not paid, what is subsidised, and what is not subsidised. This is a far cry from the lean model, which aimed to reduce a company down to its core competencies and sell off any unprofitable ventures.16

Platforms, in sum, are a new type of firm; they are characterised by providing the infrastructure to intermediate between different user groups, by displaying monopoly tendencies driven by network effects, by employing cross-subsidisation to draw in different user groups, and by having a designed core architecture that governs the interaction possibilities.

the most significant aspects of the 1990s’ boom and bust are the installation of an infrastructural basis for the digital economy and the turn to an ultraaccommodative monetary policy in response to economic problems.

All told, more than 50,000 companies were formed to commercialise the internet and more than $256 billion was provided to them.13 Investors chased hopes for future profitability and companies adopted a ‘growth before profits’ model. While many of these businesses lacked a revenue source and, even more, lacked any profits, the hope was that through rapid growth they would be able to grab market share and eventually dominate what was assumed to be a major new industry.

Concretely, this investment meant that millions of miles of fibre-optic and submarine cables were laid out, major advances in software and network design were established, and large investments in databases and servers were made.

The most important action, however, was that key interest rates across the world dropped precipitously: the US federal funds target rate went from 5.25 per cent in August 2007 to a 0–0.25 per cent target by December 2008. Likewise, the Bank of England dropped its primary interest rate from 5.0 per cent in October 2008 to 0.5 per cent by March 2009.

Since fiscal stimulus is politically unpalatable, governments have been left with only one mechanism for reviving their sluggish economies: monetary policy.

This is the key to its advantage over traditional business models when it comes to data, since a platform positions itself (1) between users, and (2) as the ground upon which their activities occur, which thus gives it privileged access to record them. Google, as the platform for searching, draws on vast amounts of search activity (which express the fluctuating desires of individuals). Uber, as the platform for taxis, draws on traffic data and the activities of drivers and riders. Facebook, as the platform for social networking, brings in a variety of intimate social interactions that can then be recorded.

The first type is that of advertising platforms (e.g. Google, Facebook), which extract information on users, undertake a labour of analysis, and then use the products of that process to sell ad space. The second type is that of cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, Salesforce), which own the hardware and software of digital-dependent businesses and are renting them out as needed. The third type is that of industrial platforms (e.g. GE, Siemens), which build the hardware and software necessary to transform traditional manufacturing into internet-connected processes that lower the costs of production and transform goods into services. The fourth type is that of product platforms (e.g. Rolls Royce, Spotify), which generate revenue by using other platforms to transform a traditional good into a service and by collecting rent or subscription fees on them. Finally, the fifth type is that of lean platforms (e.g. Uber, Airbnb), which attempt to reduce their ownership of assets to a minimum and to profit by reducing costs as much as possible.

One of the most important consequences of this schematic model of capitalism is that it demands constant technological change. In the effort to cut costs, beat out competitors, control workers, reduce turnover time, and gain market share, capitalists are incentivised to continually transform the labour process. This was the source of capitalism’s immense dynamism,

In Italian autonomism, this would be a claim about the ‘general intellect’, where collective cooperation and knowledge become a source of value.3 Such an argument also entails that the labour process is increasingly immaterial, oriented towards the use and manipulation of symbols and affects.

Working sufficiently hard to gain the resources necessary for survival was all that was needed. Under capitalism, this changes. Economic agents are now separated from the means of subsistence and, in order to secure the goods they need for survival, they must now turn to the market. While markets had existed for thousands of years, under capitalism economic agents were uniquely faced with generalised market dependence.

The primary argument for using quantitative easing is that it should lower the yields of other assets. If traditional monetary policy operates primarily by altering the short-term interest rate, quantitative easing seeks to affect the interest rates of longer term and alternative assets. The key idea here is a ‘portfolio balance channel’. Given that assets are not perfect substitutes for one another (they have different values, different risks, different returns), taking away or restricting supply of one asset should have an effect on demand for other assets. In particular, reducing the supply of government bonds should increase the demand for other financial assets. It should both lower the yield of bonds (e.g. corporate debt), thereby easing credit, and raise the asset prices of stocks (e.g. corporate equities) and subsequently create a wealth effect to spur spending.

A different business model was necessary if capitalist firms were to take full advantage of dwindling recording costs. This chapter argues that the new business model that eventually emerged is a powerful new type of firm: the platform.10 Often arising out of internal needs to handle data, platforms became an efficient way to monopolise, extract, analyse, and use the increasingly large amounts of data that were being recorded. Now this model has come to expand across the economy, as numerous companies incorporate platforms: powerful technology companies (Google, Facebook, and Amazon), dynamic start-ups (Uber, Airbnb), industrial leaders (GE, Siemens), and agricultural powerhouses (John Deere, Monsanto), to name just a few. What are platforms?11 At the most general level, platforms are digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact.

The second essential characteristic is that digital platforms produce and are reliant on ‘network effects’: the more numerous the users who use a platform, the more valuable that platform becomes for everyone else.

Mixing culture war and capitalism is not just a personal quirk shared by these three individuals; it is writ in the very manifesto of the Kansas conservative movement, the platform of the state Republican Party for 1998. Moaning that “the signs of a degenerating society are all around us,” railing against abortion and homosexuality and gun control and evolution (“a theory, not a fact”), the document went on to propound a list of demands as friendly to plutocracy as anything ever dreamed up by Monsanto or Microsoft. The platform called for: • A flat tax or national sales tax to replace the graduated income tax (in which the rich pay more than the poor). • The abolition of taxes on capital gains (that is, on money you make when you sell stock). • The abolition of the estate tax. • No “governmental intervention in health care.” • The eventual privatization of Social Security. • Privatization in general. • Deregulation in general and “the operation of the free market system without government interference.” • The turning over of all federal lands to the states. • A prohibition on “the use of taxpayer dollars to fund any election campaign.” Along

Mixing culture war and capitalism is not just a personal quirk shared by these three individuals; it is writ in the very manifesto of the Kansas conservative movement, the platform of the state Republican Party for 1998. Moaning that “the signs of a degenerating society are all around us,” railing against abortion and homosexuality and gun control and evolution (“a theory, not a fact”), the document went on to propound a list of demands as friendly to plutocracy as anything ever dreamed up by Monsanto or Microsoft. The platform called for: • A flat tax or national sales tax to replace the graduated income tax (in which the rich pay more than the poor). • The abolition of taxes on capital gains (that is, on money you make when you sell stock). • The abolition of the estate tax. • No “governmental intervention in health care.” • The eventual privatization of Social Security. • Privatization in general. • Deregulation in general and “the operation of the free market system without government interference.” • The turning over of all federal lands to the states. • A prohibition on “the use of taxpayer dollars to fund any election campaign.” Along the way the document specifically endorsed the disastrous Freedom to Farm Act, condemned agricultural price supports, and came out in favor of making soil conservation programs “voluntary,” perhaps out of nostalgia for the Dust Bowl days, when Kansans learned a healthy fear of the Almighty.17

Public administration must be as nonpartisan as possible. Though it’s never been a sexy platform for any politician to run on, maintaining infrastructure, budgeting funds, and using them well to keep it updated and in good working order matters more than splashy new capital projects. The failure of basic things like transit, sanitation, and water, streets, fire protection, and parks undermines confidence in the city more than any particular crisis, but rather than guaranteeing reliable, efficient, equitable services, the answer to problems has usually been more “catalytic bigness,

The criteria that I found most valuable when making my decisions were the following: What is the size of the investor community invested in other offerings on the platform to-date? Does the platform accept investments via credit card? For example, about 40% of my crowdfunding investors invested with a credit card. Does the platform allow for campaign extensions (if you fall short of your goal within your campaign period, can you extend the campaign until you reach your goal)? I’ve extended my campaigns multiple times. Does the platform allow for multiple disbursements? I prefer to disburse money from my campaign once a month. However, many platforms don’t allow you to disburse the funds until after the campaign is over What are the fees? Platforms can charge between 5-20% of your raise as fees, with some platforms having complicated fee structures that involve taking some of your Securities as part of the offering. Some platforms require you to pay them cash upfront before launching an offering. Does the platform allow you to set your own terms? For example, some platforms don’t allow you to sell convertible notes. Some others don’t allow you to sell non-voting common stock. Some platforms insist that they set the valuation for your startup in order to launch—the logic being that they know their investors, and they want to provide them with a “good deal.” For many reasons, you want to sell the Security that’s right for your startup. Does the platform allow you to have design freedom on the campaign page? You want to make sure that your brand is well represented. The aesthetics and optimization of the page are highly correlated with conversion (how many people invest after visiting your page). Does the platform support analytics? You need advanced analytics to market your offering. Some platforms, for example, allow you to enter a Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics code into the campaign page, while others do not. Does the platform have a good reputation? You will be driving a lot of potential investors and media folks to this platform, and you want to be sure that your platform of choice hasn’t been involved in anything shady in the past. Does the platform allow you to update your investors and prospective investors with campaign notifications? Some platforms have a built-in functionality where you can post updates right on the campaign, download email, and mailing contact lists of your investors (allowing you to contact them by email and allowing you to build Facebook “lookalike audiences”). Whereas, other platforms don’t even share the email addresses of the folks who have already invested in your startup. Does the platform support or plan to support secondary trading for the Securities that it sells on its platform? Will your investors be able to sell the Securities that they buy from you? The ability to sell Securities in a marketplace brings a lot of liquidity and increases its value significantly. In order to allow for secondary trading, the platform needs to obtain an Alternative Trading System (ATS) approval from FINRA.

...but I'm also talking about the colonizing of truth, the redesigning of the fabric of reality. I am talking about the imposition of a way of classifying, measuring, and quantifying the world, including everything from time, to temperature, to distance, to weight. All of these things became calculated and bounded by frameworks that were not only European but often peculiarly English ways of understanding reality. Today's activism responds to the world on these terms, operating on terrain already mapped out by white supremacy, Eurocentric logic, and colonialism. This would be less worrying if it was clearly identified, would not pose so grave a danger if there was awareness that the terms of engagement operate within a framework that we need to dissolve. However, that acknowledgement appears to be entirely absent, and we congratulate ourselves on 'speaking truth to power' (often, depressingly, via what we know call 'platform capitalism').

Overcrowding works in a different way for creators than for viewers. For creators, the problem becomes—how do you stand out? How do you get your videos watched? This is particularly acute for new creators, who face a “rich get richer” phenomenon. Across many categories of networked products, when early users join a network and start producing value, algorithms naturally reward them—and this is a good thing. When they do a good job, perhaps they earn five-star ratings, or they quickly gain lots of followers. Perhaps they get featured, or are ranked highly in popularity lists. This helps consumers find what they want, quickly, but the downside is that the already popular just get more popular. Eventually, the problem becomes, how does a new member of the network break in? If everyone else has millions of followers, or thousands of five-star reviews, it can be hard. Eugene Wei, former CTO of Hulu and noted product thinker, writes about the “Old Money” in the context of social networks, arguing that established networks are harder for new users to break into: Some networks reward those who gain a lot of followers early on with so much added exposure that they continue to gain more followers than other users, regardless of whether they’ve earned it through the quality of their posts. One hypothesis on why social networks tend to lose heat at scale is that this type of old money can’t be cleared out, and new money loses the incentive to play the game. It’s not that the existence of old money or old social capital dooms a social network to inevitable stagnation, but a social network should continue to prioritize distribution for the best content, whatever the definition of quality, regardless of the vintage of user producing it. Otherwise a form of social capital inequality sets in, and in the virtual world, where exit costs are much lower than in the real world, new users can easily leave for a new network where their work is more properly rewarded and where status mobility is higher.75 This is true for social networks and also true for marketplaces, app stores, and other networked products as well. Ratings systems, reviews, followers, advertising systems all reinforce this, giving the most established members of a network dominance over everyone else. High-quality users hogging all of the attention is the good version of the problem, but the bad version is much more problematic: What happens, particularly for social products, when the most controversial and opinionated users are rewarded with positive feedback loops? Or when purveyors of low-quality apps in a developer platform—like the Apple AppStore’s initial proliferation of fart apps—are downloaded by users and ranked highly in charts? Ultimately, these loops need to be broken; otherwise your network may go in a direction you don’t want.

The indirect harvesting of valued-per-click leisure time by corporations has led many technocapitalists to support projects like the Universal Basic Income (UBI), which would free up users’ time which could then potential y be spent generating valuable data and content on their own platforms. The driving force of this trend is the Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns that have grown simultaneously with corporations like Google over the last 15 years, but now the value of the click is not based only on the likelihood of purchasing success, as older models of Google AdWords and other targeted ad campaigns functioned. Instead, the click is conceptualised as a data-point that connects two or more actors in the network. It is those moments of connection between subjects and objects that have potential value to data-driven companies from corporate advertisers to election meddlers like Cambridge Analytica and policy influencers like Palantir. This only works because the user can be libidinally motivated to conduct the ‘free labour’ constituted by the click. The situation was prophetically predicted by one of the most historically influential Marxists still alive, Mario Tronti. His 1966 book Workers and Capital gave rise to the concept of ‘neocapitalism’, which anticipates the environment in which the digital worker operates today. For Tronti: At the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation is transformed into a moment of the relation of production. In this environment, the data-point connecting two people, generated at the moment of every click between social media pages, connects the social relation itself to a relation of production in real time. Seeing this in his own future, Tronti worried that society itself would run by the logic of the factory. Each interaction between individuals would incorporate a surplus value turned to profit by the class owning the means. dream lovers of social production. If the factory workers could be made to relate to each other in a way that was productive for the factory owners, so too could the entirety of social life be modified and edited for the profit of the capitalists. The whole of society is turned into an articulation of production, that is, the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society.

In contrast, a new vehicle that brings in cash on the explicit basis that it may be invested in perpetuity could “structure away” this issue, and the associated management fees would be payable for as long as the firm and the investor are in business. And, of course, there would be performance-related fees on top, too. There will be some variation of Two and Twenty still payable—but with investors’ money locked up under management by the firm. These investment platforms are known as “permanent capital” or “perpetual capital” and they are often publicly listed.

Populist and Marxist rhetoric sometimes coincided. The Populist platform of 1892 contained the ringing declaration: “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.” Some historians have concluded from this rhetorical coincidence that the Populist critique of capitalism, though arrived at independently, was essentially the same as the Socialist critique. (Norman Pollack: The Populist Response to Industrial America [Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 1962.]) This conclusion, as I have argued in the Pacific Historical Review (February 1964, pp. 69–73), rests almost entirely on verbal correspondences; it is arrived at by piecing together a series of quotations abstracted from their context and treated with equal weight, without regard for speaker or occasion, so as to form a wholly synthetic system which is then attributed to the Populists themselves. In his Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York: Pantheon Books; 1968), Staughton Lynd, using a similar technique that is open to the same objections, tries to show that the populist tradition of Thoreau and other American radicals complemented and was consistent with Marxism.

This book is about how to hold open that place in the sun. It is a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy, with all the stubbornness of a Chinese “nail house” blocking a major highway. I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.

Contrary to what many well-intentioned people believe, the fact that we have multiple social media platforms today has little effect on spreading genuinely diverse narratives and perspectives. Social media is not only increasingly in the hands of a few billionaires strongly connected to the ruling class (e.g., Meta acquiring some of the most popular and active platforms), but also the fact that social media platforms operate based on carefully designed and manipulated algorithms to promote the viewpoints of the ruling class in what Cathy O’Neil has called ‘weapons of math destruction’, and what Safiya Umoja Noble insightfully calls ‘algorithms of oppression’, which apply not only to racial matters, but extend to every other matter that is potentially at odds with the desires of the ruling class.

Blockchain technology came from Bitcoin. In other words, Bitcoin is the mother of blockchain technology. Bitcoin, with a capital B, is a platform that carries upon it programmable money, known as bitcoin with a lowercase b. The technological foundation to this platform is a distributed and digital ledger referred to as a blockchain. In January 2009, when Bitcoin was first released, it embodied the first working implementation of a blockchain the world had seen.

Let me repeat,” he says stonily, “so there can be no possibility of your misunderstanding the course I intend to pursue. I have spent my entire career with firm and loyal adherence to the platforms and beliefs of the political party I judge best suited to govern this great nation. Now that organization is being threatened by an influx of half-witted rabble, riffraff, and come-to-Jesus nuts. I will not accept that without a fight. I will not allow the party to which I have pledged my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor to become a haven for slum-dwellers, white trash, and the dregs of society who lack the intelligence, pedigree, and noble courage to steer the ship of state safely through the shoals of a complex and frequently hostile world.

From this climate emerged a new party, the Republicans. Eliminating much of the exclusionary politics of the Know Nothings while seeking common ground among the interests of free workingmen, immigrants, abolitionists, and prospective western settlers, the party’s founding platform coalesced neatly into an antislavery position. Its first presidential candidate in 1856 was California’s John Frémont, running with the slogan “Free soil and Fremont.” He lost.

Today, capitalism is more and more driven by large corporations, powerful financial actors and platform unicorns such as Meta, Uber and Amazon. The goal of these companies is not to compete on the market, but rather to own it.

As a result, the platform would evolve to become a check on business and capital. As capitalists wanted endless cheap labor in the form of new immigrants, which suppressed wages for workers already in America, the Democrats during their convention in 1892 asserted their commitment to stop this “foreign pauper” immigration in an effort to gain the labor vote. Labor factions, seeing their economic aims in practical terms, were in the process of severing themselves from the ideological clutches of socialists and anarchists into the mainstream arms of Democrats. But the evolutionary process of American politics would be messy.

In the early 2000s, new malls were sprouting up all over São Paulo and Rio, and industry ownership, as I’ve mentioned, was highly fragmented. We partnered with a local private equity firm to create BR Malls as a growth platform in 2006, investing $86 million. Roughly a year later, we led BR Malls in an IPO on Brazil’s Bovespa at an equity valuation of roughly R$2.1 billion. The capital enabled BR Malls to lead the industry in acquisitions. Five years later, the company had nearly fifty malls. Total returns for public shareholders were over 26 percent, and BR Malls had an equity market cap of R$10.7 billion. By the time we fully exited the investment in 2010, BR Malls was the largest mall company in Brazil, and we had achieved a 4.2x multiple, or 48.6 percent IRR.

PayPal’s big challenge was to get new customers. They tried advertising. It was too expensive. They tried BD [business development] deals with big banks. Bureaucratic hilarity ensued. … the PayPal team reached an important conclusion: BD didn’t work. They needed organic, viral growth. They needed to give people money. So that’s what they did. New customers got $10 for signing up, and existing ones got $10 for referrals. Growth went exponential, and PayPal wound up paying $20 for each new customer. It felt like things were working and not working at the same time; 7 to 10 percent daily growth and 100 million users was good. No revenues and an exponentially growing cost structure were not. Things felt a little unstable. PayPal needed buzz so it could raise more capital and continue on. (Ultimately, this worked out. That does not mean it’s the best way to run a company. Indeed, it probably isn’t.)2

Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms empowered marginalized groups, undermined social cohesion and social capital, and eroded Americans’ sense of common, shared purpose. The Russian intelligence

LIFE FORMULAS I (2008) These are notes to myself. Your frame of reference, and therefore your calculations, may vary. These are not definitions—these are algorithms for success. Contributions are welcome. → Happiness = Health + Wealth + Good Relationships → Health = Exercise + Diet + Sleep → Exercise = High Intensity Resistance Training + Sports + Rest → Diet = Natural Foods + Intermittent Fasting + Plants → Sleep = No alarms + 8–9 hours + Circadian rhythms → Wealth = Income + Wealth * (Return on Investment) → Income = Accountability + Leverage + Specific Knowledge → Accountability = Personal Branding + Personal Platform + Taking Risk? → Leverage = Capital + People + Intellectual Property → Specific Knowledge = Knowing how to do something society cannot yet easily train other people to do → Return on Investment = “Buy-and-Hold” + Valuation + Margin of Safety [72]

It was October 17th, 2084 and stupid opinions were illegal in the United States of America. Up until 2059 stupid opinions had been very legal, very common, and extremely monetized. You could make lots of money off stupid opinions back before 2059. Some people made zounds of money talking about how stupid the stupid opinions were. Other people made zounds of money defending stupid opinions and building a platform on the idea that—no matter how stupid an opinion was—it was each American’s right to have and promote stupid and dangerous opinions. Few people talked about worthwhile opinions then. Worthwhile opinions were not exciting. They did not get likes or views. If something didn’t get likes or views back then, it didn’t exist. But it was 2084. A stupid opinion had not been shared online for 25 years. The internet had atrophied. It was just a big store now. The big store mostly sold banana-flavored cigarettes. Almost everyone smoked banana-flavored cigarettes.

One way to make yourself less vulnerable to copycats is to build a moat around your business. How Can I Build a Moat? As you scale your company, you need to think about how to proactively defend against competition. The more success you have, the more your competitors will grab their battering ram and start storming the castle. In medieval times, you’d dig a moat to keep enemy armies from getting anywhere near your castle. In business, you think about your economic moat. The idea of an economic moat was popularized by the business magnate and investor Warren Buffett. It refers to a company’s distinct advantage over its competitors, which allows it to protect its market share and profitability. This is hugely important in a competitive space because it’s easy to become commoditized if you don’t have some type of differentiation. In SaaS, I’ve seen four types of moats. Integrations (Network Effect) Network effect is when the value of a product or service increases because of the number of users in the network. A network of one telephone isn’t useful. Add a second telephone, and you can call each other. But add a hundred telephones, and the network is suddenly quite valuable. Network effects are fantastic moats. Think about eBay or Craigs-list, which have huge amounts of sellers and buyers already on their platforms. It’s difficult to compete with them because everyone’s already there. In SaaS—particularly in bootstrapped SaaS companies—the network effect moat comes not from users, but integrations. Zapier is the prototypical example of this. It’s a juggernaut, and not only because it’s integrated with over 3,000 apps. It has widened its moat with nonpublic API integrations, meaning that if you want to compete with it, you have to go to that other company and get their internal development team to build an API for you. That’s a huge hill to climb if you want to launch a Zapier competitor. Every integration a customer activates in your product, especially if it puts more of their data into your database, is another reason for them not to switch to a competitor. A Strong Brand When we talk about your brand, we’re not talking about your color scheme or logo. Your brand is your reputation—it’s what people say about your company when you’re not around.

The “Influencer Effect” is the exponential impact of an Influencer throwing their popularity, social capital, and platform behind a particular cause or brand.

refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.

Biden’s presidency offered, to borrow a phrase from James Baldwin, “a means of buying time.” By removing the immediate threat of fascism, white nationalism, and extraordinary incompetence, the American people cleared a little bit of space to better fight the perennial threats of white supremacy, capitalism, and empire. Embracing such a sober analysis of president-elect Biden’s platform enables us to set aside any illusions about the current political moment. We recognize that the effects of Trump’s reign will not magically disappear in the wake of the 2020 election. We also understand that President Biden is incapable, and in some cases unwilling, to repair the damage wielded by the previous administration. With such reduced expectations, we have little reason to believe that the Biden presidency will properly attend to the systemic issues that preceded and, indeed, helped produce the Trump phenomenon. This analysis applies not only to domestic matters, but also to U.S. foreign policy.

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But in this next iteration of capitalism, the raw materials are no longer oil or minerals but rather commodified attention and behavior. In this new economy of surveillance capitalism, we are the raw materials. What this means is that there is a new economic incentive to create substantial informational asymmetries between platforms and users. In order to be able to convert user behavior into profit, platforms need to know everything about their users’ behavior, while their users know nothing of the platform’s behavior. As Cambridge Analytica discovered, this becomes the perfect environment to incubate propaganda.

DoppelLab,” a digital platform for combining and visually representing sensor data.15 The idea is to transform any physical space, from the interior of an office building to an entire city, into a “browse-able environment” where you can see and hear everything going on in that space as it flows from thousands or billions or trillions of sensors.

The Libertarian Party platform on which Koch ran in 1980 was unambiguous. It included the following: • We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs. • We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services. . . . • We favor the repeal of the . . . Social Security system. . . . • We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes. • We support the eventual repeal of all taxation. • As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately. • We support repeal of all . . . minimum wage laws. . . . • Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended. . . . • We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency. . . . • We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system. . . . • We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. . . . • We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and “aid to the poor” programs.44 The list went on from there, including ending government oversight of abusive banking practices by ending all usury laws; privatizing our airports, the FAA, Amtrak, and all of our rivers; and shutting down the Post Office.

called for the repeal of all campaign-finance laws and the abolition of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). It also favored the abolition of all government health-care programs, including Medicaid and Medicare. It attacked Social Security as “virtually bankrupt” and called for its abolition, too. The Libertarians also opposed all income and corporate taxes, including capital gains taxes, and called for an end to the prosecution of tax evaders. Their platform called for the abolition too of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, among other government agencies.

PayPal’s big challenge was to get new customers. They tried advertising. It was too expensive. They tried BD [business development] deals with big banks. Bureaucratic hilarity ensued. … the PayPal team reached an important conclusion: BD didn’t work. They needed organic, viral growth. They needed to give people money. So that’s what they did. New customers got $10 for signing up, and existing ones got $10 for referrals. Growth went exponential, and PayPal wound up paying $20 for each new customer. It felt like things were working and not working at the same time; 7 to 10 percent daily growth and 100 million users was good. No revenues and an exponentially growing cost structure were not. Things felt a little unstable. PayPal needed buzz so it could raise more capital and continue on. (Ultimately, this worked out. That does not mean it’s the best way to run a company. Indeed, it probably isn’t.)2 Thiel’s account captures both the desperation of those early days and the almost random experimentation the company resorted to in an effort to get PayPal off the ground. But in the end, the strategy worked. PayPal dramatically increased its base of consumers by incentivizing new sign-ups. Most important, the PayPal team realized that getting users to sign up wasn’t enough; they needed them to try the payment service, recognize its value to them, and become regular users. In other words, user commitment was more important than user acquisition. So PayPal designed the incentives to tip new customers into the ranks of active users. Not only did the incentive payments make joining PayPal feel riskless and attractive, they also virtually guaranteed that new users would start participating in transactions—if only to spend the $10 they’d been gifted in their accounts. PayPal’s explosive growth triggered a number of positive feedback loops. Once users experienced the convenience of PayPal, they often insisted on paying by this method when shopping online, thereby encouraging sellers to sign up. New users spread the word further, recommending PayPal to their friends. Sellers, in turn, began displaying PayPal logos on their product pages to inform buyers that they were prepared to honor this method of online payment. The sight of those logos informed more buyers of PayPal’s existence and encouraged them to sign up. PayPal also introduced a referral fee for sellers, incentivizing them to bring in still more sellers and buyers. Through these feedback loops, the PayPal network went to work on its own behalf—it served the needs of users (buyers and sellers) while spurring its own growth.

STRUCTURAL CHANGE: NETWORK EFFECTS TURN FIRMS INSIDE OUT As we’ve seen, in the industrial era, giant companies relied on supply-side economies of scale. By contrast, most Internet era giants rely on demand-side economies of scale. Firms such as Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox, Threadless, Upwork, Google, and Facebook are not valuable because of their cost structures: the capital they employ, the machinery they run, or the human resources they command. They are valuable because of the communities that participate in their platforms. The reason Instagram sold for $1 billion is not its thirteen employees; the reason WhatsApp sold for $19 billion wasn’t its fifty employees. The reasons were the same: the network effects both organizations had created. Standard accounting practices might not factor the value of communities into the value of a firm, but stock markets do.

But the most significant mistake BranchOut made appears to have been focusing on—and measuring—the wrong things. Flush with investment capital and riding an incredible upsurge in “active user” enrollments, during those fateful months in the middle of 2012, BranchOut kept directing its efforts to boosting membership numbers. It incentivized users to invite as many friends as possible, and made it easy for Facebook members to invite everyone in their network to join BranchOut. As hundreds of millions of invitations flooded cyberspace, BranchOut’s enrollment figures skyrocketed.4 Having a person’s name and email address on a membership list doesn’t promise success for a platform. What matters is activity—the number of satisfying interactions that platform users experience. If BranchOut had tracked the activity numbers as diligently as it tracked membership, it might have realized that its millions of members weren’t finding much value in the service—which led, of course, to plummeting membership rolls.

Capitalism provided a platform—a societal construct, if you will—for distributing value across a population, in particular to reward minds that imagined and implemented things that brought advantage to others.

If the technology platforms of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions aided in the severing and enclosing of the Earth’s myriad ecological interdependencies for market exchange and personal gain, the IoT platform of the Third Industrial Revolution reverses the process. What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet. Using less of the Earth’s resources more efficiently and productively in a circular economy and making the transition from carbon-based fuels to renewable energies are defining features of the emerging economic paradigm. In the new era, we each become a node in the nervous system of the biosphere.

Rather than ending the dominance of platforms, we would suggest that the growth of blockchain technologies will be accompanied by the emergence of many new platform companies. Like HTTP and the Web before it, the blockchain will create a decentralized infrastructure that provides the opportunity for new markets and communities to emerge. But most of these new opportunities won’t take shape without a platform company orchestrating them and capitalizing on their potential.