In the wake of Travis Kalanick’s ouster at UBER, Nikil Saval writes about the incompatibility of democratic principles with Silicon Valley’s “disrupt culture.”   “The taxi system was and is an exploitative one, in which drivers were often classified as independent contractors. But ride-sharing is incalculably more exploitative. In regulated markets, taxi companies are at least required to maintain, acquire, ...

Photo by DelmasLehman Pretty much since Napster (1999), tech pundits have been presumptuously lecturing pro-copyright creators about economist Joseph Schumpeter’s principle of “creative destruction.”  This is the observation that the market will naturally produce innovations which will displace existing products or services, often rendering the older models obsolete.  Take Schumpeter, add hubris and piles of money, and you get the “disrupt everything” culture ...

Photo by CarlosYudica Remember that theme “make the world better” that’s been pitched, promoted, and even believed by many a Silicon Valley innovator?  Well, according to Evan Osnos, writing for The New Yorker, a considerable number of tech-industry billionaires, rather than ask themselves what they might do as leaders to effect positive social change, are instead preparing for the day we ...

There is a lot of anxiety about jobs these days and with good reason.  The subject of trade has a lot of people on edge, and we’re only just beginning to talk seriously about the very real prospect of automation killing middle-class jobs in places other than the obvious repetitive factory work.  As theoretical physicist Michio Kaku predicts in a ...

It’s very common to encounter broad complaints saying things like, “Copyright law should not stop me from fixing or altering my technology.”  Often, this generalization is made by people who don’t necessarily know they’re referring to Title I of the DMCA but who have read somewhere that copyright law prevents reverse engineering, maintenance, jail-breaking, and overall tinkering with products ranging ...

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