Bookmarked Have you heard about Silicon Valley’s unpaid research and development department? It’s called the EU. (by Aral Balkan)
This is very interesting reasoning. Especially because I end up in a lot of conversations on the flip side of this: government client saying they’d ‘like to use alternatives to big tech’ but ‘can’t’ because none are visible to them. Also my sense of public procurement procedures is that they are currently incapable of detecting such options and lifting them to the front.
Looking at this way of investing, also means public institutions will more easily stay out of conflicts with e.g. market regulations.
Today, the EU acts like an unpaid research and development department for Silicon Valley. We fund startups, which, if they’re successful, get sold to companies in Silicon Valley. If they fail, the European taxpayer foots the bill.
….
The EC must stop funding startups and invest in stayups instead. Invest €5M in ten stayups in each area where we want ethical alternatives. Unlike a startup, when stayups are successful, they don’t exit. They can’t get bought by Google or Facebook. They remain sustainable European not-for-profits working to deliver technology as a social good.Aral Balkan
Have you heard about Silicon Valley’s unpaid research and development department? It’s called the EU. by Aral Balkan (ar.al)
via Tom ZylstraI have used the phare, “I’m busy”, in the past. It’s not part of West Indian culture so I must have learned this way of signalling one’s worth from living in the USA. I’m not sure when I stopped trying to be busy.
The Internet Judgment Machine is a forever machine, not unlike, the Terminator. Mistakes are forever punishable. Forgiveness is becoming a word with no meaning. The Intenet never forgets is a problem.
These are the same cohort who routinely fall off cliffs and building and get mauled by wild animals while attempting to capture the best selfie.
Western society is headed toward a place where we are trading real freedoms in exchange for perceived freedoms.
I’m starting to see a pattern to these articles. The theme seems to be “judgment”; judging others against one’s moral standard and trying to “force” them to live by that standard. It’s a dangerous trend.
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The Guardian writes about how left wing economics seems to be landing on their own economic narrative and proposition. Mostly until now leftwing economic policies aim(ed) at shaving off some of the rough edges of the rightwing ones. Making them rear-guard skirmishes almost by definition.
Last Monday in a conversation on government and markets, I remarked it baffles me that most discussions seem to pretend there’s only government task / public ownership on one end, and (unregulated) free market on the other end. As if there isn’t an entire spectrum in between of structures, legal entities and tools that deal with ownership, control, (immoral) externalising of costs, and influence in very different ways. Aral Balkan’s recent proposal is an example of such alternatives. That false dichotomy is a ruse it seems to put any suggestion of change into a default defensive position. Which is where left wing economic politics has been for decades.
Our economic structures, as any structure humans come up with, are tools, not a force of nature, and as such can be done away with when we find we want different tools. Now definitely seems to be such a time, in the light of global challenges and many people feeling disempowered in the face of those challenges. A search for novel agency is on.
The Guardian posits that this emerging leftwing economic approach is new. The article quotes Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill saying “If we want to live in democratic societies, then we need to … allow communities to shape their local economies …. It is no longer good enough to see the economy as some kind of separate technocratic domain in which the central values of a democratic society somehow do not apply.”
This is hardly new as economics, maybe as leftwing position. Karl Polanyi (died 1964) posited much the same thing, that economic structures need to serve communities, and warned that for most of the 20th century “Instead of the economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.” Leading an article in Renewable Matters from a year before this Guardian article to ask “What if Karl Polanyi was right?”
Read The new left economics: how a network of thinkers is transforming capitalism (the Guardian)