This is a very lucid and clear conversation on the reality of the internet economy that we are ignoring at our peril. Although social media appears powerful, it is really fictitious and a waste of programmers talents. Programmers should be producing products, not working on what are effectively 21st century advertising billboards that just show metrics of internet traffic and likes, not production or real economic growth.
I am not 100% sold on this. I somewhat agree with him that a large portion of our economy can't (or should not) be advertising, however if you are a small/mid sized company that produces a good such as the company Ironsides you need people with likes and views to sell your product, because you can't get shelf space at best buy, wal mart, or other electronics stores. I only know of them because of them partnering with a youtuber with 1m subs.
We've done work for a furniture store chain and for a winery. We've gotten them strong online presence and a solid foundation with tens of thousands of fans on the major social networks. Nice percentage of whom are "loyal" fans who are active, share and interact regularly. However in my heart of hearts I don't believe the investment in social is worth it in actual new clients and actual real life new purchases. It's important from an image stand point today but the return of investment is not paying off as well as traditional advertising imo. When we do games and give out prizes on social even though the numbers look great, most of those accounts are "professional" deal seekers with profiles that constantly share into the void. The economy of "likes" is an over priced bubble economy that will burst.
On a broader note, why do so many people think that a service-based economy is sustainable? You can only go so far when your national product is "Let me do that for you.".
As a professional programmer, I feel that most programmers are given requirements a little at a time and don't have as much control or influence over these things as the video might lead one to think. This is usually controlled by management, sales people, marketers, and so on.
Really comes down to intention, correct? The "like" might be an effect of that intention. Or, the intention is not to create value, only a "like." Those intentions are becoming more difficult to spot as the online economy is feeding more and more in itself, a cannibalism of sorts.
+ThePreciseMoment Watch out for the next dot com/land bubble crash and recession in San Fran 2018/19. We shall see precisely how different it is this time, then.
+ThePreciseMoment these companies are toxic to society in so many ways. if you don't dislike a '2 min worth of reading' article here's a couple of big dangers with these businesses - anywherein12seconds.tumblr.com/post/143461772680/the-tech-companies-extract-a-huge-wealth-in-data
+Rinoa Super-Genius ZOMG it's Rinoa! love your vids on broken cars, told tools and arcades! It's not that machines will take over what humans do, it's that they must take it over. This shouldn't be feared, but embraced. The opposite thinking would have all shovelling coal into steam engines still. A robot will not figure out the intricacies of quantum mechanics, nor will it care about being the first visit to the other planets and moons. Those wonders, are for us. ...Well, at least the ones that are happy to have robots doing their old jobs.
+Roop Singh There is too much wishful thinking in your assetment. You must have a purely technical background. okay that's fine.. Here's a social scientist/political scientist who specializes in conflict analysis and resolution telling you that in our current tehnological revolution. We are going to experience very destructive forms of social upheaval. Not because the robots will overthrow us. But simply because automation takes jobs away. While people do retrain and go into different fields. In the US atleast retraining and education costs aren't really subsidized and it's very expensive IE: accessible to only a few unless you take out the student loans..The problem with that is the time it takes to retrain either that job gets automated now or that job has become obsolete because of new technology. technological development current outpaces social development. In the US this means that the real unemployment rate is actually higher than the official numbers let on. Which is true as the US doesn't count giving up on job hunting or being underemployed as being unemployed. Less people can afford the things. More people are in debt, and unable to pay it back. big bubbles are being created around this. companies have become extremely predatory and parasitic. The last thing that hasn't happened in the US atleast is that the price of food and fuel hasn't gotten out of control (that got delayed, the US gov't purposely flooded the market with domestic US oil so that the price in oil would drop. by 2020 shit is about to get real because there is actually less oil than what's being let on. Once the US gov't is unable to continue to subsidize oil like it has. food prices will increase. Once that happens. A lot of social unrest is going to turn into open conflict. This is kinda why everyone is watching the 2016 elections closely. if someone like bernie sanders can win. then that means a paradigm shift in the political dialogue that goes in the direction of developing social and economic policies that will allow us to cope with the current societal transition (away from human labor creating value) towards automation. IF that can happen then a lot of stuff that causes civilizations to collapse can be very much avoided.. Of course if Trump becomes president things might turn fascists.. but if Hillary wins the oligarchy maintains the status quo and social unrest will happen and become a very normal everyday occurrence of our lives.
+Roop Singh the greatest indicator that we haven't coped with our technological development fast enough is that even after 120-130 years of having light bulbs we still operate on a day/night cycle and orient our daily schedules as we have done so for thousands of years. IE we have not socially adapts to something that's been around for over a century now. So how do you think we are adapting socially to advances being made now? shit we aren't even using the full potential of the internet right now because businesses and society decided it was a tool and platform used solely for advertisement. In 100 years the internet will be something that we can't even conceptualize right now.
+Roop Singh Also we could easily with the resources we currently have if managed properly could ensure that every human on this planet has a high quality of life at the level of a developed country if we simply did away with our economy of creating junk.. We create an endless list of products with resources and land we could be using to make sure no one on this planet is going to bed on an empty stomach.. world hunger could easily end. We waste our money and resources instead of making cheap gadgets, and on manufacturing weapons, used to kill each other.. we are squandering the planet's resources on fake bullshit.. overall we haven't even socially developed enough as a species to cope with why we decided to organize civilizations to begin with. and so the cycle of collapse and development of civilizations continue. this time though, there is only one civilization in the human species and it is a global one.. We cannot squander it. But we have done a spectacular job at it.. we seriously have to develop a new social and economic system if we hope to survive the 21st century.
"Now, consumers don't have money anymore. People are poor." So sad this fact just rolls off the tongue unnoticed. As though it were a law of nature, not the unrightfulness that has come again.
Thank you for your correction. Yes, I know and love ourworldindata.org and Gapminder who show that almost all living standards have risen across the world in a steady pace, and that too few people know this. What I was referring to was the rise of austerity policy in Western economies since the nineties, which is true despite the global argument.
Irrazzo Afaik, there's also no real rise in poverty in western countries. Many don't even have a rise in inequality (although the US does). I think Poverty, or a rise in poverty, is ust something that a lot of people reference without any real gard evidence. Obviously, there's too much poverty, but there's no poverty epidemic. It's ust something leftist politicians love to throw around, just like crime was by conservatives in the 80s/90s. And it's surely not because of the digital economy. It's not like Facebook steals my money. In fact, if you just use factors like living standards, live expectancy, literacy or education, poverty has decreased a whole lot. The thing that people talk about it relative poverty. Which I find questionable to begin with. Relative poverty is about inequality, not about actual poverty. It just a different issue.
+Ideally Jekyl Lol. People are suddenly poor? Every data suggests that this is bs, but sure, it fits your narrative. FACEBOOK MAKES PEOPLE POOR. LETS IGNORE THAT POVERTY HAS GREATLY DECREASED AROUND THE WORLD.
+Alex Entrepreneur he's having logic and all the evidence behind him. you could squint your mind against it all you want, you can't turn that around i'm afraid...
Filip Molin the whole world is screaming facts at us from all places but many people still believe in fairytales. like in the movie '12 years a slave", some of the most ferocious individuals were other slaves that were doing the 'policing' for the master. here's a '1 minute worth of reading' article with a couple of interesting links in it - anywherein12seconds.tumblr.com/post/143079892391/we-were-watching-tv-meanwhile-they-were-making#notes
I gave this video a like. Seriously though: the next phase is that the data being collected is used for training AI; thats why it's valuable. Combined with enough processing power (e.g. imminent neuromorphic accelerators), it becomes a form of labour.
+Sandman 休伯特 "labelled data" is particularly useful (tagged photographs etc). even the like/dislike is a label. Notice how much buzz there is about machine learning now.
+walter0bz You're right. Machine learning is huge right now in tech and the public is mostly unaware of how much our mainstream lives will be impacted by the work of artificially intelligent machine systems. Unfortunately, our concept of economies and how human labor should be structured and organized has not progressed along with technological innovation. If we aren't careful to adopt AI technology in a more mutualistic manner, unemployment will rise dangerously and a host of other issues resulting from our unscrupulous treatment of the planet and each other will plague humanity, arguably, for generations to come.
+walter0bz With the advent of googles deep mind technology being incorporated in the medical field it is sad to say that AI will be the one giving you a diagnoses and not a doctor in the same sense.
+emikochan13 no worries, i complement his buying behaviour beautifully. i only buy de Beers diamonds, petrossian caviar, any technology that comes from robotic assembly lines, and cover myself with the finest insurance. i hate when the poor benefit from my spendings
It would be nice if VC's gave funds to honest startups that actually need it instead of wasting it on ones that don't. That would create real wealth and lift everyone up. In my industry, pharma, billions of dollars are lit on fire because of con artists that have "the appearance of value" rather than the companies with the actual good ideas that would create value.
Finally someone who understand that the economy is not solely driven by capital. I took an economics course last term and I think in the entire course only once was land mentioned and discussed in like 2 pages in the two books in micro and macro combined(maybe 1000 pages total).
You learn about this kind of stuff in upper division and graduate level college courses. Understanding all the background subtleties requires a lot of prerequisite knowledge.
John Shepard Thats simply not true the neoclassical model inherently understates the importance of land in the economy. When an undergraduate course in economics barely mentions land you can't claim that everyone knows of its relevance.
+Masterpiece you won't learn a whole lot in a basic class, you need to take more advanced classes to learn about these concepts. They build on each other, thats why they don't teach concepts like this early on.
Yes, most of what he says makes a lot of sense. However, I think his argument about grinding for the likes instead of cash begs the question of whether the cash itself hasn't been a "meaningless abstraction" all along
+Marcilla Smith Technically in this modern age it kinda is. Little history (if I may): Back before societies had money, they traded things for other things. The more valuable a thing was to someone, the more you could trade it for. Things like gems, spices, livestock, silver and gold were among the more valuable things people would trade with. Money or currency was developed to be a substitute for something valuable. Over time gold had become accepted around the world as something valuable you could use to trade with, so the value of money was measured based on what's called a gold standard. So a $20 bill was equivalent to a certain amount of gold and trading it to a shopkeeper for food meant you were trading him his food for your gold. Shortly after WW2 a bunch of countries agreed that they would use the US dollar as the basis for the gold standard in all trade rates, that way every country had the same exchange rate for all the different currencies. To exchange currencies, all they had to do was compare their currency to the US dollar ($35 = 1 ounce of gold) and they knew how much their money was worth. Everything was fine until years later several different things including the Vietnam War lead to a decline in US economic influence. So President Nixon put an end to the US dollar standard, leaving the US dollar not really any better off than any other currency. It was only supposed to be temporary, but over the years the dollar kept loosing its value in relation to gold, and people (especially banks and the government) didn't like that. So the US government (because we love being on top) officially changed the "definition" of the US dollar in what's called the Washington Consensus. Google it. And now gold has nothing to do with money. Money is printed by the government, and other countries use the US dollar as the basis for the exchange rate, but since gold now has nothing to do with money the government can print as much money as it needs. The US dollar has value because we said it has value. The government was probably able to pull it off because it had support from international banks and such. To put it simply, a dollar doesn't equal a certain amount of gold. Gold just like every other thing in existence, is worth whatever we say it's worth. To say that something has value based on the number of likes isn't really any different than saying gold has value because it's worth money. Unlike the simple days when gold was worth something because it was gold. A UA-cam video has "value" only when people like it. A product at the store only has value when people buy it (which is why stores put their products on sale, to get more buyers, to get more value...more value means more money. It's an empty and meaningless cycle, just like life. Hooray.). And you can call it a "meaningless abstraction" but whoever or whatever government controls it in a way also basically dominates the world's economy. It's all just about power.
+Marcilla Smith Cash is simply a mutually agreed medium of representing real world value. The fundamental question here is "Exactly what is it that we attach the most value to? ... is it getting 1k+ likes on our next twitter pic or the necessities of like, food, water, bread etc"
During the "original" dot com era, companies were NOT measured by how much money they make. It was just the opposite, with the on-going joke in Silicon Valley being, if your startup was profitable, you must not be thinking outside the box hard enough. The mindset was, any idiot could make money--the goal was to do something so out there, that it would take awhile for the masses to realize it was something they needed. Those were the days...
I would go even farther and say it's not the likes that are worth anything, but the people's actively recorded attention at some point in time that is actually what is worth something.
Exactly, consider how valuable the SuperBowl commercial time is. That's one of the few things left where you can ensure people will see your advertisement so ads now have to target individuals.
So true. Expanding on this people in well-off countries including myself are sucked into to this meaninglessness like material and career gains. Nationalism and Religion in post-modern nations have rapidly disappeared, and something needs to fill our nihilism. Although the better way to create meaning in our lives would be to create meaning within ourselves like through meditating or pondering about our life, we have been sucked into this materialistic facade of culture and media. But how did we end up like this? Companies saw that our lives held little meaning and value, and then targeted our thirst for meaning. You can definitely see this in a lot new products, where companies keep changing the products to "look good" yet fail to develop greater functions for the products. Therefore, it's up to us to challenge these social norms and systems among our peers and people around us to help them escape this superficial dream.
+John Law it was a societal choice.. the bigger problem now is that companies and the gov't has decided to do away with the social contract and now everyone who isn't wealthy is being exploited.
You really think it was a choice? Also, how is the less than wealthy now being exploited? All of us has been exploited to a certain degree due to the amoral nature of companies including governments for centuries.
After watching this video I immediately gave it a like and sent it to my dad. He teaches marketing and responded as such take it as you will, "Wrong. There are 5 factors of production. He left out the most important 2...Knowledge and Entrepreneurship. Those 2 make the world go round."
Nice to hear someone actually talk about land as one of the three factors of production, rather than conflating it with capital. A land/housing is the mother of all ponzi's, so troubling as the repeat of the dot com bubble is, it is probably not going to be significantly more severe than 2001. Note when the demand for capital goods goes up, the price goes down, but when the demand for land goes up so does the price. That is because competition forces down price of goods as more can be made, but more land cannot be made as supply is finite and fixed. Land prices tend to cycle about every 18 years, but the credit cycle tends to produce a crash about 7 years into the 14 year upswing period. Expect a dot com induced smaller correction around 2018/19, and following a peak around 2024 a housing led crash around 2026.
The concept of a 'like' is no more ethereal than 'a dollar'. Neither of them really exists except as a shared delusion. Money just happens to have a wider coverage.
Isn't it ironic that he is claiming during the original dot-com bubble that companies had "real revenue", while today they don't? I think he has it backwards...the previous bubble was a bunch of unprofitable businesses shipping dog food around the country at retail prices. Today it is a bunch of (very profitable) SaaS companies and different social networks that scale first and monetize later. Most new companies *ARENT* advertising startups. Every corporation in the US is really just a collection of functions - sales, manufacturing, accounting, management, etc. All of these can be greatly improved with software which is exactly what tons of companies are out there doing (SaaS).
yeah we've had a few tech bubbles so far, and probably will have a few more, but this seems like an unavoidable way to try out a lot of models and then find the few that work, just like industrialization in the early 20th century, this bubble will pop, we'll get a few solid companies, lose so money, but society hopefully moves forward a little bit, and hopefully after that advertising rates will become more reasonable for higher quality, better targeted customers
Is the accumulation of Fiat Currency REALLY that different than trying to get "likes" on social media? Also... it turns out that even gold is just a shiny metal...
+Mom this reply is already a meme; and a proof of social, economical, historical and political ignorance from the part of the person using it. communism failed because it was anything BUT communism. it was totalitarianism and despotism, a huge apparatus of deranged savage brainless individuals that used persecution and brute force to control the people. now if you want to know what communism means you have to first abandon the anathema on the word itself. it's the same thing hitler done with the svastica, which was an ancient sign of spirituality and peace. BUT again a person who "thinks" it knows history, without really knowing anything, might be totally angered at seeing the sign. (i'm not saying we should use it on walls, it would be disrespectful for those who suffered)
I feel it's not that different than how people pick out even the most important things. People say, "I think for myself." However I have complete confidence that most of therapy, dating, working, parenting, and teaching is picking the cutest kid and taking credit for their work.
The problem is if you value labor and land you lose some efficiency somewhere, for the sake of keeping everyone involved. Who decides where to lose efficiency and how much of it should be lost? Somewhere, that's a cost to someone. You also lose innovation potential to maintain an older economy structure. In reality i think it would be better to go the other way, and automate everything and then try somehow, to "exploit" the full creative potential of individuals in another way, while gaining all the benefits of the capital created. I'm not sure if it's realistic, and if it's not, maybe we have to realize as a species we don't have the wherewithall to create that capital, and thus we need to care more about people, and not so much about capital
what's an example of a business that has incorporated all three things; land, labor and virtual capital, in their business model. that would help me understand this better.
Cenk uygur was talking about this the other day, he was talking to all these social media experts, who are all trying to grow as fast as possible and sell out like Arianna Huffington. Whereas TYT are based on actual content and subscribers. Everybody has data, what you need is an audience.
+dangerouslytalented He would sell too if offered enough money. He likes acting morally superior on camera but the fact that he recently had to be thrown off a plane shows he's a douche in real life.
Alex Xeon a moron? The guy has built an entire industry from no financial backing. One that is not sustained on a bubble like most of his online media peers.
The problem is that money provides a medium of exchange for other things, including more money. So when you start valuing labor and land more, that leads to increasing capital-investment because everyone wants to grow and shift the burden of work they don't want to do but whose fruits they do want to consume. If people start get paid more and/or land-prices begin going up, they become a profit-making commodity for investors. That means investors will be working harder to control labor and land for the sake of extracting profit from it. On the other hand, they also don't stop trying to control resources as they get cheaper AS LONG AS other, more valuable commodities can be produced from those resources. Take land, for example. Natural land costs less than developed land so investors and developers buy it up, clear it of trees and natural ecology, build buildings and parking lots, and then market those spaces to businesses that can get loans based on revenue projections. If the cost of undeveloped land or labor would rise, it would make it harder to develop land and run businesses, but investors would find ways to commodify undeveloped land and labor and thereby gain economic control for the sake of producing those things they desire to consume.
The only economist that makes sense to me is Steve Keen. Other economists have done a very good job in confusing people in believing in theories that just promote debt and destruction of social programs.
i would like to hear more about this. i feel like he didnt quite manage to capture his point well enough... about how extracting money in vast amounts takes away from the market.
an industrialized world can't employ everyone, unless there are tons of pointless jobs like in the advertisement branch. Work itself will soon be done nearly completely by machines and computers, only requiring a few highly skilled workers to manage and maintain stuff. Unemployment will be the norm someday. I don't know if that's good or bad...
+Evan Kerman we are approaching the great average. for so long western countries have ran away from the rest of the world in terms of capital. now the rest of the world, beginning with east asia, has caught up to the education and capital. you can see how the middle class of the western world is shrinking because the manufacturing jobs are being moved to poor countries by those who have capital. in 100 years the wealth gap between eastern and western people will become a lot smaller, and the gap between the rich and the poor will become huge.
Nice topic, but I think it's comical that we neglect to mention the millions (billions?) of dollars that are being laundered internationally by both corporate and government affiliated entities. It's interesting since a majority of this laundering is possible through digitalization of finance, either through interest accumulation or other (realistically illegal) exemptions from law. Regardless, it's usually not advisable to simplify and binarize complex topics such as this. However, due to the nature of modern marketing techniques and dogma, the "short-but-sweet" approach to spreading information is becoming all too common.
Damn, you nailed it. This is an explanation that is concise and consumable by the average person. It will be on my share list in my crusade against the oligarchy.
So, first we had goods. Then we made currency to substitute the goods, then options, stocks and whatever to represent money, then likes to represent worth... Absurd indeed. How long will it last? Or worse.... How do they make up for it?
+Do not Question Authority it's insane. my country of finland is still in shambles from what housing lenders all the way in the USA did to their citizens. the machine is so complicated it's insane how far teh damage reaches.
The problem, as I see it, is that once you're not dealing directly with goods (rice, wheat, potatoes and other 1st necessity edibles), but with abstract representations of it with fancy names, you remove any ethic dilemmas from the equation. Hence you can screw around with the prices of something many people lack and need in order to live. I think this the only reason some people in finances can sleep at night.
I don't fully agree with Mr. Rushkoff's views because I believe that companies like Google and Facebook provide targeted advertising, and advertising products is a service that has a definite measurable economic value. However, on a different note, reading Henrik Ibsen's brilliant play *"An Enemy of the People"* when I was in high school taught me that sometimes it is better to have a million hates (i.e. to have a million people really passionately hate you) than to have a million likes (where the "likes" are just limp, lukewarm feelings that have no real passion or strength to them). People like Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper who got their initial career boost from being hated by large numbers of people are more remembered and have gotten their message through to more people and have had more staying power in their careers than someone like 2010 American Idol ninth season winner Lee DeWyze who merely had a lot of "likes" but was never truly passionately hated by a large number of people. What lesson can we learn from the fact Jesus of Nazareth was one of the most hated people in the ancient Roman Empire (he was hated so much that they nailed him to a cross while he was still alive) and yet 2,000 years later there are a dozen churches dedicated to him within walking distance of my house?
Google- Its good for sorting information, UA-cam- I learned a lot of information, Facebook-Twitter-Instagram: I don't use it cause they are just a waste of time.
I dont even get on facebook anymore, it's just a bunch of random shit that people like. It's not even about that person, just some meaningless bullshit
The Internet became today what the streets and highway was for millennia, were biggest vendors will get the most public places, the markets and streets where they were positioned to sell the most merchandise, and they got richer and richer. For millennia, nations fought for trade routes, now the internet has become the new Trade Route, the new Silk Road, and if you are Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, doesn't matter what your name is or where you come from, if millions of individuals are seeing you, visiting your site, clicking on your pages, liking them or no, then there´s value there, you can sell, you convert this "virtual foot-traffic" into sales, profits, returns.
he is all over the place despite at the end where he has a sincere care of what's happening to the masses or those who are employed. facebook or google aren't different to what already happened in the past which is television/radio/magazines being run by advertisers and funded by companies. the root of the problem are the rich who influences the government to make them richer while the money lays dormant until they find an expense that makes them more money.
You say it's an abstract and meaningless economy, but isn't all money's value abstract to begin with? And how could it be meaningless if many businesses and individuals are finding ways to be successful around those platforms? Also, saying that people shouldn't be collecting data just because others are doing it is no solid argument. It's actually immensely valuable if you have an online platform - if you're not doing it you're probably being left behind by the competition.
First, there is the pressing issue of your YT username. But setting that aside for a moment, I think what he's saying is that what you refer to as "ways to be successful around those platforms" is a form of extractive wealth creation, comparable to hedge fund trading. Money is a store of wealth, it's the capacity to command resources. Shuffling data around results in some people becoming extremely wealthy, having created no net wealth themselves, instead extracting that wealth from the real economy on which their wealth ultimately depends. Land, labor, and capital, that's where wealth is created. The only value of data is to facilitate the movement of goods and services. To the extent that data increases wealth, it does so by increasing the efficiency of markets. It's pretty safe to say that the amount of data that's currently driving companies like Google and Facebook has far exceeded the financial valuation that has been placed on it, and we'll eventually see this game crash and burn. [Caveat: I'm talking out my ass, so if I'm making sense then it's only by accident.]
Interesting, I am not as sure as he seems to be that this is a bubble about to pop. In order for that to happen either most people would have to become to poor to actually by the things advertised or a major web browser like Firefox or Chrome would have to start coming preloaded with ad blockers so a large number of people don't see the ads to begin with.
Wow! I have long thought the internets worth was all penny stocks. Douglas Rushkoff brings the internets lack of wealth generation into focus. Short and too the point. How about a similar shakedown of "service economies"? 5 star in my world! Ken Bowd layperson Canada.
I don't know about economy, but facebook is certainly not meaningless; a large number of lives were (and presumably, are still being) saved in the Syrian refugee crisis because of facebook's real time updates on weather and which areas were safe/dangerous to travel through; facebook's "mark as safe" feature gave thousands relief after they heard their loved ones were safe, and that's just to name a few.
Disagree. Frankly, Jay Z still have to write a song and go through the creative process on every song he writes. That is, all the artists still have to create something FIRST - that in itself is beneficial to the society. The only way that it WON'T be is that when something is NOT produced but the creator kept focusing on marketing something (with likes, etc.) without actually creating anything. As an end user / consumer, we just have to watch out for those and I am pretty confident what I like to buy, like see, like to listen, etc. By the way Mr. Rushkoff, NOT everyone on NASDAQ is a marketing company?
LOL, frankly I think an artist would know when he is going to get paid or not - regardless however many likes or marketing scheme he/she has. Now you tell me whether I get it or not, eh?
+Roger Ting Yes, he gets paid. Sorry if I offended you. Your initial comment wasn't aligned with the points being made in the video. I wanted to point out a mistake in your interpretation. The issues he's talking about cumulatively affect the economy in a counterproductive way. Whether the individual artist produces a song or makes money himself isn't really the point. Cheers
No it is not my point nor I am offended by a good discussion. However, to the video's point of whatever effect on the economy / creation process - I cannot agree because: 1. There has to be artists and creators first. Surely, these individuals have a real need for money somewhat? Thus will seek to get paid - assuming whatever created was selling with some quantity? (Thus my initiate comment on there has to be something produced first.) That in itself is productive? 2. To ignore the artists/creators - and everyone else in the chain ... including the bankers, auditors, lawyers, etc. who may be involved in valuing a new (digital related) company is highly impossible. That is, the valuation of a product / company / service in this day and age may have added metrics on the digital paradigm but we are still seeing new company / product / service being bought and sold - thus agreement on a valuation during negotiations? 3. To further imply that this new economy is damaging / counter productive to the creative (being creating art/music/pictures OR an actual product) process is questionable - think of it this way, artists / creators would have the opportunity to VALIDATE new ideas faster than before. IMHO it is actually better as the person can go back to the drawing board and redo it.
+terry breedlove Banks as well. Money hasn't been worth anything since the modern banking system came into being. Money is created by lending when you only have a fraction of that capital.
I think Mr. Rushkoff is right in this case, for the most part. The whole economy isn't suffering from this delusional practice and the real culprit is the Fed's easy money policy and the government bailouts and subsidy. I surmise that a lot of the cheap money (near zero percent interest) goes towards betting on these flimsy business models. It's easy to make the bet because the cost of borrowing is low and if you loose big enough the government is going to bail you out. Of course this is only for the elites, while the entrepreneur, worker, and family man is being robed. There are also bubbles in the housing and auto markets and look at the educational industrial complex.
But how do you make business and capitalism about labour? Money that goes to labour and land is not going to capital, so its always more profitable to reduce the costs of the latter.
i feel like tech gets all the attention in our economy so because it's an unsustainable sector it'll crash our economy but the whole technology industry only accounts for 7 percent of GDP. its way over represented in the stock market and financial markets, so if it crashes the financial economy will potentially crash pretty hard. but the regular economy is a lot healthier than people think.
Soon we will need to add "air quality" to land, labor and capital. Every business that releases any amount of greenhouse gasses at all needs to pay money to a big pot, then that pot needs to be divided and given to every single person on the Earth equally. Sure we would love to get $50 out of the blue for just breathing, but the businesses that have to pay out billions for ruining the Earth are going to start thinking of how to fix the problem so they don't have to pay up.
Investors are not silly. If they invest money in Facebook or Google, then they think that companies producing razor blades, milk or banana still don't understand consumers tastes enough and are willing to pay money to Google to do it for them. It is not a silly idea that instead of every big company creating it's own research centers they pay Google of Facebook to analyze what their potential consumers want. Of course companies like Google can't grow forever, because they are dependent on companies producing those ''razor blades'' who pay them money to analyze their consumers' tastes, but if these companies still grow, then they haven reached their maximum. No one says that Google can replace GM, but if Google analyzes data more sufficiently then companies' analytic centers do, then outsourcing it to Google is a better deal both for companies and for economy as a whole.
+A Wyatt Man I'd disagree, actually. People are worth more than diamonds (as diamonds are just carbon being stored in a static state, and people can change and do things), and the data people provide is infinitely more interesting and organized than a diamond. The energy inside a person is far greater.
This is a very lucid and clear conversation on the reality of the internet economy that we are ignoring at our peril. Although social media appears powerful, it is really fictitious and a waste of programmers talents. Programmers should be producing products, not working on what are effectively 21st century advertising billboards that just show metrics of internet traffic and likes, not production or real economic growth.
NIcely stated. You should have your own BigThink video.
I am not 100% sold on this. I somewhat agree with him that a large portion of our economy can't (or should not) be advertising, however if you are a small/mid sized company that produces a good such as the company Ironsides you need people with likes and views to sell your product, because you can't get shelf space at best buy, wal mart, or other electronics stores. I only know of them because of them partnering with a youtuber with 1m subs.
As someone who has done work as "social network manager" likes are absolutely pointless, and don't translate in to new business or clients!
+Ivo Sotirov Obviously doing it wrong.
We've done work for a furniture store chain and for a winery.
We've gotten them strong online presence and a solid foundation with tens of thousands of fans on the major social networks. Nice percentage of whom are "loyal" fans who are active, share and interact regularly.
However in my heart of hearts I don't believe the investment in social is worth it in actual new clients and actual real life new purchases.
It's important from an image stand point today but the return of investment is not paying off as well as traditional advertising imo.
When we do games and give out prizes on social even though the numbers look great, most of those accounts are "professional" deal seekers with profiles that constantly share into the void.
The economy of "likes" is an over priced bubble economy that will burst.
I love this guy. I would like to hear more from him!
Here, take my valuable like ;)
his books are awesome.. pretty cheap too..
On a broader note, why do so many people think that a service-based economy is sustainable? You can only go so far when your national product is "Let me do that for you.".
As a professional programmer, I feel that most programmers are given requirements a little at a time and don't have as much control or influence over these things as the video might lead one to think. This is usually controlled by management, sales people, marketers, and so on.
The irony is that this vid will be shared on facebook, by people hoping for a "like" or two =]
100% correct nontheless imo
Really comes down to intention, correct? The "like" might be an effect of that intention. Or, the intention is not to create value, only a "like." Those intentions are becoming more difficult to spot as the online economy is feeding more and more in itself, a cannibalism of sorts.
lol
+ThePreciseMoment Watch out for the next dot com/land bubble crash and recession in San Fran 2018/19. We shall see precisely how different it is this time, then.
+ThePreciseMoment LOL that's a brilliant comment! I liked!
+ThePreciseMoment these companies are toxic to society in so many ways. if you don't dislike a '2 min worth of reading' article here's a couple of big dangers with these businesses - anywherein12seconds.tumblr.com/post/143461772680/the-tech-companies-extract-a-huge-wealth-in-data
The economy has been all of those things pretty much ever since the agricultural revolution...
+Goodguy001 Right, because nobody's bought food or any other tangible good in the past 10000 years.
this video actually mirrors many thoughts i worry about almost daily.
mmaaxx1198
yes, machines and robots will take over what humans do. just watch CGPGrey's video "Humans need not apply"
+Rinoa Super-Genius
ZOMG it's Rinoa! love your vids on broken cars, told tools and arcades!
It's not that machines will take over what humans do, it's that they must take it over. This shouldn't be feared, but embraced. The opposite thinking would have all shovelling coal into steam engines still.
A robot will not figure out the intricacies of quantum mechanics, nor will it care about being the first visit to the other planets and moons. Those wonders, are for us. ...Well, at least the ones that are happy to have robots doing their old jobs.
+Roop Singh
There is too much wishful thinking in your assetment. You must have a purely technical background.
okay that's fine.. Here's a social scientist/political scientist who specializes in conflict analysis and resolution telling you that in our current tehnological revolution. We are going to experience very destructive forms of social upheaval. Not because the robots will overthrow us. But simply because automation takes jobs away. While people do retrain and go into different fields. In the US atleast retraining and education costs aren't really subsidized and it's very expensive IE: accessible to only a few unless you take out the student loans..The problem with that is the time it takes to retrain either that job gets automated now or that job has become obsolete because of new technology. technological development current outpaces social development. In the US this means that the real unemployment rate is actually higher than the official numbers let on. Which is true as the US doesn't count giving up on job hunting or being underemployed as being unemployed. Less people can afford the things. More people are in debt, and unable to pay it back. big bubbles are being created around this. companies have become extremely predatory and parasitic. The last thing that hasn't happened in the US atleast is that the price of food and fuel hasn't gotten out of control (that got delayed, the US gov't purposely flooded the market with domestic US oil so that the price in oil would drop. by 2020 shit is about to get real because there is actually less oil than what's being let on. Once the US gov't is unable to continue to subsidize oil like it has. food prices will increase. Once that happens. A lot of social unrest is going to turn into open conflict. This is kinda why everyone is watching the 2016 elections closely. if someone like bernie sanders can win. then that means a paradigm shift in the political dialogue that goes in the direction of developing social and economic policies that will allow us to cope with the current societal transition (away from human labor creating value) towards automation. IF that can happen then a lot of stuff that causes civilizations to collapse can be very much avoided.. Of course if Trump becomes president things might turn fascists.. but if Hillary wins the oligarchy maintains the status quo and social unrest will happen and become a very normal everyday occurrence of our lives.
+Roop Singh
the greatest indicator that we haven't coped with our technological development fast enough is that even after 120-130 years of having light bulbs we still operate on a day/night cycle and orient our daily schedules as we have done so for thousands of years. IE we have not socially adapts to something that's been around for over a century now. So how do you think we are adapting socially to advances being made now? shit we aren't even using the full potential of the internet right now because businesses and society decided it was a tool and platform used solely for advertisement. In 100 years the internet will be something that we can't even conceptualize right now.
+Roop Singh
Also we could easily with the resources we currently have if managed properly could ensure that every human on this planet has a high quality of life at the level of a developed country if we simply did away with our economy of creating junk.. We create an endless list of products with resources and land we could be using to make sure no one on this planet is going to bed on an empty stomach.. world hunger could easily end. We waste our money and resources instead of making cheap gadgets, and on manufacturing weapons, used to kill each other.. we are squandering the planet's resources on fake bullshit.. overall we haven't even socially developed enough as a species to cope with why we decided to organize civilizations to begin with. and so the cycle of collapse and development of civilizations continue. this time though, there is only one civilization in the human species and it is a global one.. We cannot squander it. But we have done a spectacular job at it.. we seriously have to develop a new social and economic system if we hope to survive the 21st century.
"Now, consumers don't have money anymore. People are poor." So sad this fact just rolls off the tongue unnoticed. As though it were a law of nature, not the unrightfulness that has come again.
+Irrazzo It's also totally unsubstantiated and wrong. ust look at a couple of numbers. It's simply not true.
Thank you for your correction. Yes, I know and love ourworldindata.org and Gapminder who show that almost all living standards have risen across the world in a steady pace, and that too few people know this. What I was referring to was the rise of austerity policy in Western economies since the nineties, which is true despite the global argument.
Irrazzo Afaik, there's also no real rise in poverty in western countries. Many don't even have a rise in inequality (although the US does).
I think Poverty, or a rise in poverty, is ust something that a lot of people reference without any real gard evidence. Obviously, there's too much poverty, but there's no poverty epidemic. It's ust something leftist politicians love to throw around, just like crime
was by conservatives in the 80s/90s. And it's surely not because of the digital economy. It's not like Facebook steals my money.
In fact, if you just use factors like living standards, live expectancy, literacy or education, poverty has decreased a whole lot. The thing that people talk about it relative poverty. Which I find questionable to begin with. Relative poverty is about inequality, not about actual poverty. It just a different issue.
Yeah. When I look at my parent's annuity rate in comparison to their parents', I have my doubts about that.
Irrazzo Even if your parents are doing worse than your grandparents, that is not really a reliable metric to judge the state of the economy on.
Gee I wonder why people are suddenly poor.
+Ideally Jekyl Lol. People are suddenly poor? Every data suggests that this is bs, but sure, it fits your narrative. FACEBOOK MAKES PEOPLE POOR. LETS IGNORE THAT POVERTY HAS GREATLY DECREASED AROUND THE WORLD.
I was skeptical for a lot of the video, but holy shit did he wrap it up at the end. Dude knows what the fuck he's talking about.
+Celebris Nexterra Lool he really doesn't I'm afraid...
+Alex Entrepreneur he's having logic and all the evidence behind him. you could squint your mind against it all you want, you can't turn that around i'm afraid...
What evidence? I haven't heard any...
Alex Entrepreneur all evidence from... LIFE! you have it all around 24/7
Filip Molin the whole world is screaming facts at us from all places but many people still believe in fairytales. like in the movie '12 years a slave", some of the most ferocious individuals were other slaves that were doing the 'policing' for the master. here's a '1 minute worth of reading' article with a couple of interesting links in it - anywherein12seconds.tumblr.com/post/143079892391/we-were-watching-tv-meanwhile-they-were-making#notes
I gave this video a like. Seriously though: the next phase is that the data being collected is used for training AI; thats why it's valuable. Combined with enough processing power (e.g. imminent neuromorphic accelerators), it becomes a form of labour.
+walter0bz interesting point of view
+Sandman 休伯特
"labelled data" is particularly useful (tagged photographs etc). even the like/dislike is a label. Notice how much buzz there is about machine learning now.
+walter0bz You're right. Machine learning is huge right now in tech and the public is mostly unaware of how much our mainstream lives will be impacted by the work of artificially intelligent machine systems. Unfortunately, our concept of economies and how human labor should be structured and organized has not progressed along with technological innovation. If we aren't careful to adopt AI technology in a more mutualistic manner, unemployment will rise dangerously and a host of other issues resulting from our unscrupulous treatment of the planet and each other will plague humanity, arguably, for generations to come.
+Patrice-Morgan Ongoly
oh dude if that happens revolution would occur. we are already at that level of social unrest.
+walter0bz With the advent of googles deep mind technology being incorporated in the medical field it is sad to say that AI will be the one giving you a diagnoses and not a doctor in the same sense.
razor blades, milk and banana is all I ever buy.
+Razor Blazor Thankyou for supporting the entire economy.
+emikochan13 no worries, i complement his buying behaviour beautifully. i only buy de Beers diamonds, petrossian caviar, any technology that comes from robotic assembly lines, and cover myself with the finest insurance. i hate when the poor benefit from my spendings
+Bink115z
He already said razor blades once. Need he repeat himself?
wow, I thought I was the only one who shaved bananas with milk, it's delish!
It would be nice if VC's gave funds to honest startups that actually need it instead of wasting it on ones that don't. That would create real wealth and lift everyone up. In my industry, pharma, billions of dollars are lit on fire because of con artists that have "the appearance of value" rather than the companies with the actual good ideas that would create value.
Thanks for blowing through all of the current bullsh*t generated by these Start Ups & trendy Companies around the globe Douglas. Nice talk.
Finally someone who understand that the economy is not solely driven by capital. I took an economics course last term and I think in the entire course only once was land mentioned and discussed in like 2 pages in the two books in micro and macro combined(maybe 1000 pages total).
Cheeseburgers are good.
You learn about this kind of stuff in upper division and graduate level college courses. Understanding all the background subtleties requires a lot of prerequisite knowledge.
John Shepard Thats simply not true the neoclassical model inherently understates the importance of land in the economy. When an undergraduate course in economics barely mentions land you can't claim that everyone knows of its relevance.
Masterpiece How would you know if I like burgers?
+Masterpiece you won't learn a whole lot in a basic class, you need to take more advanced classes to learn about these concepts. They build on each other, thats why they don't teach concepts like this early on.
When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Likes. (or something...)
Haha, upgrading it according to the times, nice :)
+Hannes Radke JUST TRY AND STOP ME! *dies*
+Do not Question Authority lol
+Hannes Radke Sage wisdom
emikochan13 I tried too. Tastes like chicken.
Wow this is a great video. Thanks
Yes, most of what he says makes a lot of sense. However, I think his argument about grinding for the likes instead of cash begs the question of whether the cash itself hasn't been a "meaningless abstraction" all along
+Marcilla Smith
Bingo!
+Marcilla Smith Technically in this modern age it kinda is. Little history (if I may):
Back before societies had money, they traded things for other things. The more valuable a thing was to someone, the more you could trade it for. Things like gems, spices, livestock, silver and gold were among the more valuable things people would trade with. Money or currency was developed to be a substitute for something valuable. Over time gold had become accepted around the world as something valuable you could use to trade with, so the value of money was measured based on what's called a gold standard. So a $20 bill was equivalent to a certain amount of gold and trading it to a shopkeeper for food meant you were trading him his food for your gold.
Shortly after WW2 a bunch of countries agreed that they would use the US dollar as the basis for the gold standard in all trade rates, that way every country had the same exchange rate for all the different currencies. To exchange currencies, all they had to do was compare their currency to the US dollar ($35 = 1 ounce of gold) and they knew how much their money was worth. Everything was fine until years later several different things including the Vietnam War lead to a decline in US economic influence. So President Nixon put an end to the US dollar standard, leaving the US dollar not really any better off than any other currency.
It was only supposed to be temporary, but over the years the dollar kept loosing its value in relation to gold, and people (especially banks and the government) didn't like that. So the US government (because we love being on top) officially changed the "definition" of the US dollar in what's called the Washington Consensus. Google it.
And now gold has nothing to do with money. Money is printed by the government, and other countries use the US dollar as the basis for the exchange rate, but since gold now has nothing to do with money the government can print as much money as it needs. The US dollar has value because we said it has value. The government was probably able to pull it off because it had support from international banks and such.
To put it simply, a dollar doesn't equal a certain amount of gold. Gold just like every other thing in existence, is worth whatever we say it's worth. To say that something has value based on the number of likes isn't really any different than saying gold has value because it's worth money. Unlike the simple days when gold was worth something because it was gold. A UA-cam video has "value" only when people like it. A product at the store only has value when people buy it (which is why stores put their products on sale, to get more buyers, to get more value...more value means more money. It's an empty and meaningless cycle, just like life. Hooray.).
And you can call it a "meaningless abstraction" but whoever or whatever government controls it in a way also basically dominates the world's economy. It's all just about power.
+David Po ... which is why I say we would benefit by changing the global basic unit of exchange from the United States dollar to the kilowatt-hour
***** Nah, I just had to do a lengthy report on it once, and unfortunately some of it stuck.
+Marcilla Smith
Cash is simply a mutually agreed medium of representing real world value. The fundamental question here is "Exactly what is it that we attach the most value to? ... is it getting 1k+ likes on our next twitter pic or the necessities of like, food, water, bread etc"
During the "original" dot com era, companies were NOT measured by how much money they make. It was just the opposite, with the on-going joke in Silicon Valley being, if your startup was profitable, you must not be thinking outside the box hard enough. The mindset was, any idiot could make money--the goal was to do something so out there, that it would take awhile for the masses to realize it was something they needed. Those were the days...
I would go even farther and say it's not the likes that are worth anything, but the people's actively recorded attention at some point in time that is actually what is worth something.
Exactly, consider how valuable the SuperBowl commercial time is. That's one of the few things left where you can ensure people will see your advertisement so ads now have to target individuals.
Enough views of this video and stocks will crash.
ikr😂😂😂
+Johny “Buzzkill” Kidd Yeah, basically what he's saying is that economics is just a numbers games.
and bitcoin will rise.
So true. Expanding on this people in well-off countries including myself are sucked into to this meaninglessness like material and career gains. Nationalism and Religion in post-modern nations have rapidly disappeared, and something needs to fill our nihilism. Although the better way to create meaning in our lives would be to create meaning within ourselves like through meditating or pondering about our life, we have been sucked into this materialistic facade of culture and media.
But how did we end up like this? Companies saw that our lives held little meaning and value, and then targeted our thirst for meaning. You can definitely see this in a lot new products, where companies keep changing the products to "look good" yet fail to develop greater functions for the products. Therefore, it's up to us to challenge these social norms and systems among our peers and people around us to help them escape this superficial dream.
+John Law
it was a societal choice.. the bigger problem now is that companies and the gov't has decided to do away with the social contract and now everyone who isn't wealthy is being exploited.
You really think it was a choice?
Also, how is the less than wealthy now being exploited? All of us has been exploited to a certain degree due to the amoral nature of companies including governments for centuries.
After watching this video I immediately gave it a like and sent it to my dad. He teaches marketing and responded as such take it as you will, "Wrong. There are 5 factors of production. He left out the most important 2...Knowledge and Entrepreneurship. Those 2 make the world go round."
The equivalent of paying with thoughts and prayers
“So they use meaningless likes as a metric of what they’re worth”
*likes video*
Nice to hear someone actually talk about land as one of the three factors of production, rather than conflating it with capital. A land/housing is the mother of all ponzi's, so troubling as the repeat of the dot com bubble is, it is probably not going to be significantly more severe than 2001.
Note when the demand for capital goods goes up, the price goes down, but when the demand for land goes up so does the price. That is because competition forces down price of goods as more can be made, but more land cannot be made as supply is finite and fixed.
Land prices tend to cycle about every 18 years, but the credit cycle tends to produce a crash about 7 years into the 14 year upswing period. Expect a dot com induced smaller correction around 2018/19, and following a peak around 2024 a housing led crash around 2026.
The concept of a 'like' is no more ethereal than 'a dollar'. Neither of them really exists except as a shared delusion. Money just happens to have a wider coverage.
Isn't it ironic that he is claiming during the original dot-com bubble that companies had "real revenue", while today they don't? I think he has it backwards...the previous bubble was a bunch of unprofitable businesses shipping dog food around the country at retail prices. Today it is a bunch of (very profitable) SaaS companies and different social networks that scale first and monetize later.
Most new companies *ARENT* advertising startups. Every corporation in the US is really just a collection of functions - sales, manufacturing, accounting, management, etc. All of these can be greatly improved with software which is exactly what tons of companies are out there doing (SaaS).
Any analysis of economics that exclude the deleterious effects of fiat money is a deliberate obfuscation.
This is the best "bigthink" video I have seen.
Wow i had never thought about this type of economy .Thanks for expanding my think @BigThink !
yeah we've had a few tech bubbles so far, and probably will have a few more, but this seems like an unavoidable way to try out a lot of models and then find the few that work, just like industrialization in the early 20th century, this bubble will pop, we'll get a few solid companies, lose so money, but society hopefully moves forward a little bit, and hopefully after that advertising rates will become more reasonable for higher quality, better targeted customers
This cleared up a serious argument I had with a friend a few weeks ago. NOICE.
+Bweiss1234 *noise
+The Heretic *Nice
Smart boy, aren't you?
FourTwentyMagic Thats what my momma always says.
You spelled noise wrong again btw
really guys? it was spelled that way for effect. Do you even onomatopoeia, bro?
The single best articulation and identification of the core cancer of our economy. Scary, but also hopeful.
subed . thanks for info
I agree, for the most part.. But there's no stopping the internet at this point.
now this is big think/talk.
This has been so apparent for so long and we are now experiencing the floorlessness
Is the accumulation of Fiat Currency REALLY that different than trying to get "likes" on social media?
Also... it turns out that even gold is just a shiny metal...
***** I don't think you understood my point... because I DEFINITELY didn't understand yours...
+Mom this reply is already a meme; and a proof of social, economical, historical and political ignorance from the part of the person using it. communism failed because it was anything BUT communism. it was totalitarianism and despotism, a huge apparatus of deranged savage brainless individuals that used persecution and brute force to control the people. now if you want to know what communism means you have to first abandon the anathema on the word itself. it's the same thing hitler done with the svastica, which was an ancient sign of spirituality and peace. BUT again a person who "thinks" it knows history, without really knowing anything, might be totally angered at seeing the sign. (i'm not saying we should use it on walls, it would be disrespectful for those who suffered)
I feel it's not that different than how people pick out even the most important things.
People say, "I think for myself." However I have complete confidence that most of therapy, dating, working, parenting, and teaching is picking the cutest kid and taking credit for their work.
The problem is if you value labor and land you lose some efficiency somewhere, for the sake of keeping everyone involved. Who decides where to lose efficiency and how much of it should be lost? Somewhere, that's a cost to someone. You also lose innovation potential to maintain an older economy structure. In reality i think it would be better to go the other way, and automate everything and then try somehow, to "exploit" the full creative potential of individuals in another way, while gaining all the benefits of the capital created. I'm not sure if it's realistic, and if it's not, maybe we have to realize as a species we don't have the wherewithall to create that capital, and thus we need to care more about people, and not so much about capital
what's an example of a business that has incorporated all three things; land, labor and virtual capital, in their business model. that would help me understand this better.
"Now consumers don't have money anymore, people are poor."
+nigel_bd Good idea, the credit cards will install spyware into credit card teller and you can key any amount you want without being charged a penny!
I've never bought anything online because of advertising. Companies who pay a lot to advertise are losing out imo.
Very clever vid, with a very clever guy.
Everybody should listen to that.
Amazing video but it's a shame this won't get through nobodies head smh. I love intellectual people and "Big Think"
Cenk uygur was talking about this the other day, he was talking to all these social media experts, who are all trying to grow as fast as possible and sell out like Arianna Huffington. Whereas TYT are based on actual content and subscribers. Everybody has data, what you need is an audience.
haahahahahhahahaaha ohahhahahabahabhhaaahahha
Wait, you're serious?
Ahahahahahhahaahhhaa
+dangerouslytalented He would sell too if offered enough money. He likes acting morally superior on camera but the fact that he recently had to be thrown off a plane shows he's a douche in real life.
dothedeed cenks a fucking moron leftist, that else to expect?
Alex Xeon a moron? The guy has built an entire industry from no financial backing. One that is not sustained on a bubble like most of his online media peers.
Perhaps we should call it "The Online Econosphere of Likes and Shares."
Finally, an actual big think in Big Think
..OK he says it's a Ponzi Scheme....but where is the money coming from...when will it run out...and what happens then?
All the vast intricacies of individual sufficient movement, to say life is what you make it. Lovely to hear.
The problem is that money provides a medium of exchange for other things, including more money. So when you start valuing labor and land more, that leads to increasing capital-investment because everyone wants to grow and shift the burden of work they don't want to do but whose fruits they do want to consume.
If people start get paid more and/or land-prices begin going up, they become a profit-making commodity for investors. That means investors will be working harder to control labor and land for the sake of extracting profit from it. On the other hand, they also don't stop trying to control resources as they get cheaper AS LONG AS other, more valuable commodities can be produced from those resources.
Take land, for example. Natural land costs less than developed land so investors and developers buy it up, clear it of trees and natural ecology, build buildings and parking lots, and then market those spaces to businesses that can get loans based on revenue projections. If the cost of undeveloped land or labor would rise, it would make it harder to develop land and run businesses, but investors would find ways to commodify undeveloped land and labor and thereby gain economic control for the sake of producing those things they desire to consume.
The only economist that makes sense to me is Steve Keen. Other economists have done a very good job in confusing people in believing in theories that just promote debt and destruction of social programs.
i would like to hear more about this. i feel like he didnt quite manage to capture his point well enough... about how extracting money in vast amounts takes away from the market.
an industrialized world can't employ everyone, unless there are tons of pointless jobs like in the advertisement branch. Work itself will soon be done nearly completely by machines and computers, only requiring a few highly skilled workers to manage and maintain stuff. Unemployment will be the norm someday. I don't know if that's good or bad...
+Evan Kerman we are approaching the great average. for so long western countries have ran away from the rest of the world in terms of capital. now the rest of the world, beginning with east asia, has caught up to the education and capital. you can see how the middle class of the western world is shrinking because the manufacturing jobs are being moved to poor countries by those who have capital. in 100 years the wealth gap between eastern and western people will become a lot smaller, and the gap between the rich and the poor will become huge.
+LustX I only hope that the lower class will have a reasonable basic income to live off then. Otherwise we will go back to the middle ages.
Every time I hear this guy talk, I'm impressed. Finally an economist that values ACTUAL value creation. Think I'm in love.
4:00 caption typo 'investment baking'
Facebook makes its money by selling its users' personal data.
Nice topic, but I think it's comical that we neglect to mention the millions (billions?) of dollars that are being laundered internationally by both corporate and government affiliated entities. It's interesting since a majority of this laundering is possible through digitalization of finance, either through interest accumulation or other (realistically illegal) exemptions from law.
Regardless, it's usually not advisable to simplify and binarize complex topics such as this. However, due to the nature of modern marketing techniques and dogma, the "short-but-sweet" approach to spreading information is becoming all too common.
I think instead of land it should be resources or materials.
I've had this same thought for a while. Still wondering what opinion an economist might have on it.
This is nothing new. The Banking system is far worse in this regard.
Damn, you nailed it. This is an explanation that is concise and consumable
by the average person. It will be on my share list in my crusade against the
oligarchy.
So, first we had goods. Then we made currency to substitute the goods, then options, stocks and whatever to represent money, then likes to represent worth...
Absurd indeed. How long will it last? Or worse.... How do they make up for it?
+Do not Question Authority it's insane. my country of finland is still in shambles from what housing lenders all the way in the USA did to their citizens. the machine is so complicated it's insane how far teh damage reaches.
The problem, as I see it, is that once you're not dealing directly with goods (rice, wheat, potatoes and other 1st necessity edibles), but with abstract representations of it with fancy names, you remove any ethic dilemmas from the equation. Hence you can screw around with the prices of something many people lack and need in order to live.
I think this the only reason some people in finances can sleep at night.
I don't fully agree with Mr. Rushkoff's views because I believe that companies like Google and Facebook provide targeted advertising, and advertising products is a service that has a definite measurable economic value. However, on a different note, reading Henrik Ibsen's brilliant play *"An Enemy of the People"* when I was in high school taught me that sometimes it is better to have a million hates (i.e. to have a million people really passionately hate you) than to have a million likes (where the "likes" are just limp, lukewarm feelings that have no real passion or strength to them). People like Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper who got their initial career boost from being hated by large numbers of people are more remembered and have gotten their message through to more people and have had more staying power in their careers than someone like 2010 American Idol ninth season winner Lee DeWyze who merely had a lot of "likes" but was never truly passionately hated by a large number of people. What lesson can we learn from the fact Jesus of Nazareth was one of the most hated people in the ancient Roman Empire (he was hated so much that they nailed him to a cross while he was still alive) and yet 2,000 years later there are a dozen churches dedicated to him within walking distance of my house?
I don't know whether I should like this video or not now. ..
+Nevets do it, and if u regret it afterwards, you'll know if you should have.
Google- Its good for sorting information, UA-cam- I learned a lot of information, Facebook-Twitter-Instagram: I don't use it cause they are just a waste of time.
I dont even get on facebook anymore, it's just a bunch of random shit that people like. It's not even about that person, just some meaningless bullshit
The Internet became today what the streets and highway was for millennia, were biggest vendors will get the most public places, the markets and streets where they were positioned to sell the most merchandise, and they got richer and richer. For millennia, nations fought for trade routes, now the internet has become the new Trade Route, the new Silk Road, and if you are Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, doesn't matter what your name is or where you come from, if millions of individuals are seeing you, visiting your site, clicking on your pages, liking them or no, then there´s value there, you can sell, you convert this "virtual foot-traffic" into sales, profits, returns.
he is all over the place despite at the end where he has a sincere care of what's happening to the masses or those who are employed. facebook or google aren't different to what already happened in the past which is television/radio/magazines being run by advertisers and funded by companies. the root of the problem are the rich who influences the government to make them richer while the money lays dormant until they find an expense that makes them more money.
great insight
You say it's an abstract and meaningless economy, but isn't all money's value abstract to begin with? And how could it be meaningless if many businesses and individuals are finding ways to be successful around those platforms?
Also, saying that people shouldn't be collecting data just because others are doing it is no solid argument. It's actually immensely valuable if you have an online platform - if you're not doing it you're probably being left behind by the competition.
First, there is the pressing issue of your YT username. But setting that aside for a moment, I think what he's saying is that what you refer to as "ways to be successful around those platforms" is a form of extractive wealth creation, comparable to hedge fund trading. Money is a store of wealth, it's the capacity to command resources. Shuffling data around results in some people becoming extremely wealthy, having created no net wealth themselves, instead extracting that wealth from the real economy on which their wealth ultimately depends. Land, labor, and capital, that's where wealth is created. The only value of data is to facilitate the movement of goods and services. To the extent that data increases wealth, it does so by increasing the efficiency of markets. It's pretty safe to say that the amount of data that's currently driving companies like Google and Facebook has far exceeded the financial valuation that has been placed on it, and we'll eventually see this game crash and burn. [Caveat: I'm talking out my ass, so if I'm making sense then it's only by accident.]
Except at least in music, everything is now an advertisement for making money at the live show.
Wait...do I "like" this or not...?
"Online Companies Like Facebook Have Created a Meaningless Economy" - weeeell yeah.
This guy is on point. It's proven in three words... Dane Cook Myspace.
Interesting, I am not as sure as he seems to be that this is a bubble about to pop. In order for that to happen either most people would have to become to poor to actually by the things advertised or a major web browser like Firefox or Chrome would have to start coming preloaded with ad blockers so a large number of people don't see the ads to begin with.
Wow! I have long thought the internets worth was all penny stocks. Douglas Rushkoff brings the internets lack of wealth generation into focus.
Short and too the point.
How about a similar shakedown of "service economies"?
5 star in my world!
Ken Bowd layperson Canada.
Hm, hypothetically we replace all human labors with robots. Would that be a positive or still be negative?
Nice talk
You say Adam Smith... wasn't the triptych of Land-Labour-Capital first posited by Henry George?
I don't know about economy, but facebook is certainly not meaningless; a large number of lives were (and presumably, are still being) saved in the Syrian refugee crisis because of facebook's real time updates on weather and which areas were safe/dangerous to travel through; facebook's "mark as safe" feature gave thousands relief after they heard their loved ones were safe, and that's just to name a few.
Does his closing argument mean that a business that takes time to get likes means it's less likely or is not Capital driven?
Disagree. Frankly, Jay Z still have to write a song and go through the creative process on every song he writes. That is, all the artists still have to create something FIRST - that in itself is beneficial to the society. The only way that it WON'T be is that when something is NOT produced but the creator kept focusing on marketing something (with likes, etc.) without actually creating anything. As an end user / consumer, we just have to watch out for those and I am pretty confident what I like to buy, like see, like to listen, etc. By the way Mr. Rushkoff, NOT everyone on NASDAQ is a marketing company?
You didn't get it. Producing a song doesn't mean squat if the resulting income is in "like" form.
LOL, frankly I think an artist would know when he is going to get paid or not - regardless however many likes or marketing scheme he/she has. Now you tell me whether I get it or not, eh?
+Roger Ting Yes, he gets paid. Sorry if I offended you. Your initial comment wasn't aligned with the points being made in the video. I wanted to point out a mistake in your interpretation. The issues he's talking about cumulatively affect the economy in a counterproductive way. Whether the individual artist produces a song or makes money himself isn't really the point. Cheers
No it is not my point nor I am offended by a good discussion. However, to the video's point of whatever effect on the economy / creation process - I cannot agree because:
1. There has to be artists and creators first. Surely, these individuals have a real need for money somewhat? Thus will seek to get paid - assuming whatever created was selling with some quantity? (Thus my initiate comment on there has to be something produced first.) That in itself is productive?
2. To ignore the artists/creators - and everyone else in the chain ... including the bankers, auditors, lawyers, etc. who may be involved in valuing a new (digital related) company is highly impossible. That is, the valuation of a product / company / service in this day and age may have added metrics on the digital paradigm but we are still seeing new company / product / service being bought and sold - thus agreement on a valuation during negotiations?
3. To further imply that this new economy is damaging / counter productive to the creative (being creating art/music/pictures OR an actual product) process is questionable - think of it this way, artists / creators would have the opportunity to VALIDATE new ideas faster than before. IMHO it is actually better as the person can go back to the drawing board and redo it.
absolutely fantastic, from a rushkoff fan
Hasn't TV networks and radio been doing this for decades.
+terry breedlove Banks as well. Money hasn't been worth anything since the modern banking system came into being. Money is created by lending when you only have a fraction of that capital.
I think Mr. Rushkoff is right in this case, for the most part. The whole economy isn't suffering from this delusional practice and the real culprit is the Fed's easy money policy and the government bailouts and subsidy. I surmise that a lot of the cheap money (near zero percent interest) goes towards betting on these flimsy business models. It's easy to make the bet because the cost of borrowing is low and if you loose big enough the government is going to bail you out. Of course this is only for the elites, while the entrepreneur, worker, and family man is being robed. There are also bubbles in the housing and auto markets and look at the educational industrial complex.
Could this be the next bubble? The advertising industry bubble?
This video is 16 years late, we already had this in 2000 :D.
So is network TV.
economy has always been meaningless
yeah, because economy has ALWAYS been part of human history
But how do you make business and capitalism about labour? Money that goes to labour and land is not going to capital, so its always more profitable to reduce the costs of the latter.
i feel like tech gets all the attention in our economy so because it's an unsustainable sector it'll crash our economy but the whole technology industry only accounts for 7 percent of GDP. its way over represented in the stock market and financial markets, so if it crashes the financial economy will potentially crash pretty hard. but the regular economy is a lot healthier than people think.
actually we could just have a tornado of people spending money on advertising
Soon we will need to add "air quality" to land, labor and capital. Every business that releases any amount of greenhouse gasses at all needs to pay money to a big pot, then that pot needs to be divided and given to every single person on the Earth equally. Sure we would love to get $50 out of the blue for just breathing, but the businesses that have to pay out billions for ruining the Earth are going to start thinking of how to fix the problem so they don't have to pay up.
Investors are not silly. If they invest money in Facebook or Google, then they think that companies producing razor blades, milk or banana still don't understand consumers tastes enough and are willing to pay money to Google to do it for them. It is not a silly idea that instead of every big company creating it's own research centers they pay Google of Facebook to analyze what their potential consumers want. Of course companies like Google can't grow forever, because they are dependent on companies producing those ''razor blades'' who pay them money to analyze their consumers' tastes, but if these companies still grow, then they haven reached their maximum. No one says that Google can replace GM, but if Google analyzes data more sufficiently then companies' analytic centers do, then outsourcing it to Google is a better deal both for companies and for economy as a whole.
Its as meaningless as the diamond market is.
+A Wyatt Man Almost!
+A Wyatt Man I'd disagree, actually. People are worth more than diamonds (as diamonds are just carbon being stored in a static state, and people can change and do things), and the data people provide is infinitely more interesting and organized than a diamond.
The energy inside a person is far greater.
It’s as though we got addicted to sizzle and forgot the value of steak. We should be innovating new steak.
Someone has been listening to Alain de Botton economics videos about better capitalism..