Giridharadas, Anand. _Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World_. First edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. # Progressive Summary Giridharadas takes aim at the "win-win" mentality that typifies the entreprenuers of Silicon Valley. It is neoliberalism in disguise. At the heart of this win-win mentality is immense concentrated power derived from networks. # Key Points The win-win ideology sees businesses as creating lots of positive value. The value that is captured is the revenue of the business. The value that goes out into the world is a positive externality. (E.g. Google's ad sales are revenue, the way it makes search easy for everyone is a positive externality.) But whatever perceived abundance is created by these businesses will soon be re-captured by the elites absent any kind of regulations and taxes that protect the poor. The American Policy Institude showed that the average American worker's productivity grew 72 percent between 1973 and 2014, but his wages only went up 9 percent. The original template for this win-win thinking is Adam Smith: > It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. After Adam Smith's idea of the invisible hand, there have been many ways of describing this ideology: - trickle-down economics - a rising tide lifts all boats - entrepreneurs expand the pie The following is a representative argument for why entrepeneurs are best suited to save the world: > [Philanthrocapitalists are] “hyperagents” who have the capacity to do some essential things far better than anyone else. They do not face elections every few years, like politicians, or suffer the tyranny of shareholder demands for ever-increasing quarterly profits, like CEOs of most public companies. Nor do they have to devote vast amounts of time and resources to raising money, like most heads of NGOs. That frees them to think long-term, to go against conventional wisdom, to take up ideas too risky for government, to deploy substantial resources quickly when the situation demands it. > - Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World (2008) # Questions How can someone make sure they are not guilty of the same hubris that these folks display? By being allergic to "scaling up", and reading books like Small is Beautiful and Lean Logic. Arming oneself with David Fleming's concept of the [[Intermediate Economy]]. # Resonances He talks about Emmett Carson having to drop the label "social justice", and talk about fairness instead. > But Carson understood one of the implicit rules governing the entrepreneurial class’s contribution to change: It is more forthcoming when you frame problems in ways that make winners feel good. This makes me think of Miki Kashtan's approach which never states anything as a demand, and solicits complete willingness from the other side. -- > A king presides over a multitude of truths. But a rebel, who takes no responsibility for the whole, is free to pursue his singular truth. That is the whole point of being a rebel. It is not in the rebel’s job description to worry about others who might have needs that are different from his. This contrasts with Miki Kashtan's concept of a leader as someone who takes care of the whole. # Quotes > “Uber is no more a ‘technology company' than Yellow Cab is a ‘technology company’ because it uses CB radios to dispatch taxi cabs, John Deere is a ‘technology company’ because it uses computers and robots to manufacture lawn mowers, or Domino Sugar is a ‘technology company’ because it uses modern irrigation techniques to grow its sugar cane.” > - Judge Chen in a ruling about Uber > In a remarkable passage, Judge Chen compared Uber’s power to that of the guards at the center of the Panopticon, which Foucault famously analyzed in Discipline and Punish. The Panopticon was a design for a circular prison building dreamed up in the eighteenth century by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The idea was to empower a solitary guard in the center of the building to watch over a large number of inmates, not because he was actually able to see them all at once, but because the design kept any prisoner from knowing who was being observed at any given moment. Foucault analyzed the nature and working of power in the Panopticon, and the judge found it analogous to Uber’s. He quoted a line about the “state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” > > The judge was suggesting that the various ways in which Uber monitored, tracked, controlled, and gave feedback on the service of its drivers amounted to the “functioning of power,” even if the familiar trappings of power—ownership of assets, control over an employee’s time—were missing. The drivers weren’t like factory workers employed and regimented by a plant, yet they weren’t independent contractors who could do whatever they pleased. They could be fired for small infractions. That is power. > It can be disturbing that the most influential emerging power center of our age is in the habit of denying its power, and therefore of promoting a vision of change that changes nothing meaningful while enriching itself. > power is defined by both profound concentration and by massive distribution. It can’t be understood in simple either/or terms. Power and influence may yet become even more centralized than it was in feudal times and more distributed than it was in the most vibrant democracies. > - Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Seventh Sense > Ramo is arguing that the Ubers and Airbnbs and Facebooks and Googles of the world are at once radically democratic and dangerously oligarchic. Facebook emancipates people in Algerian basements to write whatever they want, for all the world to see. Airbnb allows anyone to rent out their home. Uber allows anyone going through financial hardship to download the app and, without much hassle, get started making money. These platforms are pushing power out to the edges—power once controlled by media companies, hotel chains, and taxi unions. But networks tend toward extreme concentration as well. It is no fun if half of your high school friends are on the other social network, so Facebook becomes a de facto monopoly. > “These platforms,” Manjoo writes, “are inescapable; you may opt out of one or two of them, but together, they form a gilded mesh blanketing the entire economy.” > As technologies like these have eaten the world, a relatively small number of people have come to own much of the infrastructure on which ever more human discourse, motion, buying, selling, reading, writing, teaching, learning, healing, and trading are done or arranged—even as many of them make public pronouncements about fighting against the establishment. > David Heinemeier Hansson is the cofounder of a Chicago-based software company called Basecamp, a successful but modest business that stayed relatively small and avoided the lure of Silicon Valley and of trying to swallow the world. “Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe,” he has written. “No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them.” > "There’s something very fishy about California capitalism. > > Investing has become the genteel occupation of our gentry, like having a country estate used to be in England. It’s a class marker and a socially acceptable way for rich techies to pass their time. Gentlemen investors decide what ideas are worth pursuing, and the people pitching to them tailor their proposals accordingly. > > The companies that come out of this are no longer pursuing profit, or even revenue. Instead, the measure of their success is valuation—how much money they’ve convinced people to tell them they’re worth. > > There’s an element of fantasy to the whole enterprise that even the tech elite is starting to find unsettling. > > We had people like this back in Poland, except instead of venture capitalists we called them central planners. They, too, were in charge of allocating vast amounts of money that didn’t belong to them. > > They, too, honestly believed they were changing the world, and offered the same kinds of excuses about why our day-to-day life bore no relation to the shiny, beautiful world that was supposed to lie just around the corner." > - Maciej Ceglowski, founder of Pinboard