Fixing the game

The natural conclusion is that you need to enable serious free agency in the working population with respect to their “teams” (corporations). From portable health insurance and IP regimes that favor individuals to protection for whistle-blowers and venture capital markets that are stacked in favor of entrepreneurs rather than VCs, plenty can be done to create a very interesting new dialectic for capitalism.

When individuals, ranging from good to slightly evil to totally evil, find that they can do more with their skills and information in the real market than in the [stock market], innovation will shift to the real game instead of being focused on the design of ever more incomprehensible derivative instruments and frenzied loophole-chasing.

• Venkatesh Rao
  • I revisited it following a conversation on mastodon, thanks Kartik

That was in 2011, but came up following a quote from "Disenshittify or Die" by Cory Doctorow:

If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.

Which makes the case that customers are more or less irrelevant to the large enterprises that rule us, except inasmuch as we affect Wall Street's expectations of them.

The John Deere case helps visualize this problem for many of us, because we're not farmers, and a bit of remove grants perspective

Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.

This is happening to all of us, from every direction.