Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.
We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!
Wow. This is a Mastodon account posting to Lemmy and we are getting cross platform engagement and it's all working pretty seamlessly. This is the first time I've seen this kind of thing on Lemmy. The Mastodon users don't get to see the upvotes though, right? The @ thing when they reply is kind of annoying but it seems like a fairly easy fix to hide those when browsing from Lemmy.
Wow. You just somehow accurately summed up the modern day result of late stage capitalism in one post. Nicely done
It took longer than I care to admit to realize this was satire.
Which says something about the world and life.
I suspect Satire is indeed dead.
Yooo Mastodon post on Lemmy let's goooo
"Michael was driving a car from a company that shows every private residence in the country. But it's also a company that won't let us show the car that takes those pictures. In fairness to them, it is their property. If you want to know what the company is, all you have to do is 'something' it."
- Arrested Development Narrator
@CannaVet @ajsadauskas I laughed so hard at this, I wanted to thank you. I’ve been with DuckDuckGo for as long as I can remember.
@CannaVet @ajsadauskas I love you both. Thank you so much for this. Season 4 was great.
@ajsadauskas @technology The one thing I don't sympathise with in that list is the taxi services — at least here in #Ottawa, they were even more exploitative than Uber or Lyft, with a small number of plate holders acting as feudal lords for the drivers, and extracting rent from their vassals even on a bad shift with few fares.
The city could have fixed that by issuing more plates, but the plate-owner lobby was too powerful.
Exact same system in Paris, with the same issues.
It's not all black or white, those startups brought some good things like breaking highly profitable monopolies and creating well designed apps that provide a much better service which ended up being picked up by the former monopolies, overall the quality of service often improved and we sometimes have more choice now, like picking the less human exploiting alternative that still has a usable app.
Ah yes, the “local taxi lobby.” Uber helped show a lot of us what a fucking joke that is, not just in Ottawa.
Innovation, choice, quality and freedom are the choice spices for capitalism soup. These shit-cook-legislators kept sprinkling in taint like protectionism, cronyism, extortion and corruption thinking nobody would notice. Well guess what? Now it’s just taint soup.
Why does it matter who’s serving you taint soup? The problem is there’s no other soup and they keep telling you it’s fine.
While we don't like what these services have become, lots of people forget how bad comparative services were before these came along. Example: bookstores. Everyone dreams up some ideal bookstore that didn't exist for the majority. Growing up, my local bookstore was run by a religious nut who refused to get Devil literature like Lord of the Rings. The good bookstores were in Ann Arbor, which was a 45 minute drive away. Chains like Borders, B&N, or web stores like Amazon were a huge positive change.
“It’s all on the blockchain now, so it’s not even us who’s doing it.
What are you gonna do, arrest me and these 7,000 graphics cards?”
Its weird how Uber isn't already possible to replicate via blockchain akin to the way cryptocurrencies transact and perpetuate
@ajsadauskas @technology "enshitify" is my new favorite word.
Here's the source of that term. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Excellent article.
Thanks, @ajsadauskas, for summarising extractivist platform capitalism strategies. The patterns are so clear that mainstreet is getting aware these days. At least partially. Time to rebuild the economy and the internet with collective & public interest first.
@wtebbens
hope you're aware that this means to abolish #capitalism!
@ajsadauskas @technology
We are not just a startup. We are a mix of dreams, passions, and a ton of passionate slogans.
When we aren't drinking craft beer...
@ajsadauskas @technology One factual point I'm not clear on--how exactly are Lyft/Uber getting away with operating unlicensed taxi services? Are they just ignoring the law but getting away with it because city governments are tech-enthralled? (But could, theoretically, bust every uber driver for operating a taxi without a license)? Or do they actually have some legal basis for not needing medallions?
It totally depends of the jurisdiction. In some parts of the world calling up a ride sharing app with get you a totally normal taxi at normal metered taxi rates. In other parts of the world its pretty much they do it and nobody can stop them. A private citizen can pick up anyone they want and the laws all assumed that a taxi would have to find passengers and handle money in person. By the time politicians get around to doing anything about it they've already taken over the market and voters would take it personally if they had to go back to regular cabs.
Because people don't hail them on the street when they're passing, they're not legally a taxi service.
So they don't need medalions, cab licenses or whatever the system is in that country and, more importantly, don't need to obbey the rules for taxi services both for the vehicle (most noteable the rules about the colors of the vehicle and in some countries even the kind of vehicle itself), clear transparent predictable upfront pricing, and for the actual cabbies (for example, in London they don't need to have "The Knowledge" - which is basically having memorized all the streets - which cabbies do have to have before they get a license or obbey any of the other legal requirements for licensing of the actual drivers that cabbies have) so operation is much cheaper.
From what I've seen they're generally operating under the local legislation of "rental driver cars" (i.e. cars rented with a driver) and the arrangement of getting, for example a Uber via their app, is treated in legal terms as a booking not as a hailing, even though it is pretty close in de facto terms to hailing a cab.
It took a decade for states to catch up on this loophole into providing the same service as a taxi services whilst not legally being one (as they're not hailed, they're "hired") made possible by smartphone technology, and by the time they did Uber and similar were so big that most (like Portugal, as mentioned by somebody else) just made those low-regulation quasi-cab services legal without converging the regulations for taxis with theirs (i.e. they simply legalized the competitive advantages that services like Uber got by finding a loophole in the law), and said legalizing of the much (much, MUCH) lower regulatory requirements on them whilst kepting taxi services high-regulation, maintained the uneven market playing field that had allowed the explosive growth of Uber and its ilk.
People don't hail actual licensed taxis on the street in NYC anymore either. I tried when I was there and the taxi drivers said I needed to schedule with the app. The exception was the taxi stations, where you got in line and waited for your ticket to give to the cabbie.
@Aceticon Ok, thx, I did not realize that "hailing on the street" was the essential definition of a Taxi service.
Of course, jurisdictions could easily rewrite their laws to cover app-based hailing if they wanted to.
They're not in the UK, they all have to be registered and lisenced here like any other minicab.
Portugal has the Uber law, all drivers have to be clearly indicated with a TVDE sticker and they need some basic qualification afaik. Also some taxi services double dip of course.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/shorts/l1xNBrg2aKc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Stavros is the best
Had us in the first half not gonna lie
@ajsadauskas @technology don’t forget the fact that a good amount never turn a profit
I was a couple of years in the Tech Startup World not long ago, but at a point when I was already an Old Seadog of a Techie (having crossed a couple of Industries to get there, including Finance, and qualified amonst other things in Business Analysis, so I did saw everything also from a business angle).
People's motivations are not AT ALL about profits or even creating a legacy in the form of a successful company: Tech Startups are made from the very start to make the Founders and Early Adopter filthy rich via an Exist Strategy (normally IPO or Buyout by a larger company).
This is actually all very open (if there is one thing Founders discuss a lot is Exit Strategies) and Pitching is all about convincing early investors that they're going to make a lot of money. Sure, the right bollocks is fed to the (almost always young and naive) techies to make them work crazy hours for little more than promisses (usually broken, often quite purposefully using financial mechanisms like stock dillution) of lots of money from stock options, as well as to the small investors who buy the stock at or post IPO (who are seen as marks no just here but by the Finance Industry, of which Startups are nowadays pretty much just another arm, in general), but if you're actually inside the Industry with enough experience in the right areas, it's pretty obvious what drives those who control it (which nowadays are people from Finance, Marketing and other Sales-similar areas, seldom Techies)
Unlike in the previous wave of Startups (back in the late 90s, during which I was also in the Industry, but more peripherally) people aren't out to make great things or create self-sustained companies: it's all about the big score in the form of a successful IPO or massive buyout.
This could be one of the more important social media posts of all time. And not one in 100,000 people will have enough information to appreciate a single word of it.
Source: @ajsadauskas
https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/110762848575512188I hate how accurate this is.
@ajsadauskas @technology
And we'll change our TOS and user agreement to our advantage whenever we feel like it but won't tell you what changed or why or how it'll effect you. But legally we told you so f*ck off if you have a problem with that.The changes should just be highlighted like a fucking git commit.
@ajsadauskas @technology
> By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next griftFortunately, sometimes the grifters get justice served
https://decrypt.co/148288/lbry-token-plummets-file-sharing-crypto-project-shuts-down
You left out, "once we get the IPO, we're fucking right off with our billions."
Sounds great! Please take all of my savings, my kids' college fund, and the money from mortgaging my house. I'm sure you'll put it to good use and I'll get any sort of return at all.
These services are interfaces for interacting with data that YOU create
Investors: shut up and take my money!
@ajsadauskas @technology These guys are not "libertarians", at all. They are, in fact, the antithesis of libertarian. They are authoritarians who believe in liberty only for themselves.
Seems like a fair description of many who would call themselves "libertarian", even if not the going definition.
Every libertarian thinks every other libertarian isn't really because they don't subscribe to every set of their specific beliefs.
@GarlicBender Unfortunately. Such people give the very idea of Liberty a bad name. They have now become what libertarianism is in the public's eye.
There are no "true" libertarians. There are more libertarian denominations than their are people who identify as libertarian. And all denominations are orthodox. A group of libertarians is called an impasse.
It's not an accident that people who identify that way are incapable of getting along: the individual is the weakest political unit. Add in the fact that libertarians will eschew government benefits for themselves just to spite those lower on the ladder, and I can't think of a better friend to the ruling class. What can we say about people who'd rather live in a fiefdom than a democracy? That they all imagine themselves as lords I guess.
(I'm told people in Europe identify as libertarians and oppose government power to hurt people. I'm talking about US libertarians who oppose government power to help)
@yesman It is absolutely false that there are "no true libertarians". You are engaging in a logical fallacy.
Liberty is not a difficult concept to understand, and if a person professes a belief that is contrary to Liberty, then that belief is not truly libertarian, but this does not imply that it is categorically impossible to be truly libertarian.
The individual is not "the weakest political unit", it is the ONLY political unit.
Liberatianism is all about the Freedom of the Power Of Money from the Power Of The State (which in Democracies is yielded by the elected representatives of all citizens in a system which is way more even in the power each person has than Money).
It was never about Freedom For People, which is why, for example, Libertarians want Private Education (a major gatekeeper into being monetarily better off), they absolutelly do not want communal Land Ownership (as it stands, most people are born landless, so having to pay for a place to sleep in and for food to eat - rather than having the chance to build their own house and grow their own food - so they are forced to work and do so within the constraints of the system, to pay the owners of the land (directly or indirectly) for food and shelter, both essentials, the very opposite of being born Free) and they certainly don't want Money to loose its ability to buy different outcomes in the Justice System being in countries with such systems strong defenders of defunding things like Public Defenders.
Libertarianism is all about freedom for the larges yielders of the Power Of Money from the power of the elected representatives of citizens in a Democracy, not about freedom for the riff-raff.
@Aceticon You are confusing the fact that the majority of people who self-identify as "libertarian" are not actually interested in Liberty with actual Liberty. This is not a new problem. It is the central conflict within libertarianism, and it always has been.
Torment Nexus (tm) now with an extensive library of add-on modules.
Installing "Uber of toothpaste"
@ajsadauskas @technology We're not an utter vaporware scam, we're an investment opportunity!
@ajsadauskas @technology fucking amen
@ajsadauskas @technology congratulations on this great post! I am now a follower of yours! Enjoy your Sunday/Monday! #mastodon
Sounds like a great startup! Where do I buy shares?
@ajsadauskas @technology
Well put.This sounds just like every startup's pitch to venture capital firms :)
honestly i’ve started to realize that startups are the modern day robin hood. they take and burn money from VCs and turn them into very low cost services. then they try to turn a profit and everyone runs away to the next new startup that is there to “disrupt the competition” but in reality is just the same company in a younger phase.
fucking lol
Except for the ones that actually succeed. They become the opposite of Robin hood when they succeed.
Yo, you looking to recruit? I'm unabashedly brazen with sharing my search history.
Furries have to get to space somehow.
Yep #dotcons is what we have been calling this for 20 years. It's a mess we have pushed over ourselves.
@ajsadauskas @technology I see you know my Facebook friends too 😁
@ajsadauskas @technology this is brilliant.
@ajsadauskas @technology when we go out of business though we expect to be bailed out just like all the regulated industries
@ajsadauskas @technology we also spread the delusion that its sustainable, amongst wannabe us ( aka mass investors )
@ajsadauskas @technology #enshittification is such a needed word
@ajsadauskas @technology Aah yes, my favorite kind of (right-)libertarian: "no step on snek that steps on other snek"
What is X? (aka: #deadbirdsite)
@ajsadauskas @technology And don’t forget their enablers - the investors who pour in billions of dollars of other people’s money, the marketeers who hype these “disruptive” technologies and the copycats who naively follow them. “Disrupter” used to be a bad word - how that became a badge of honor is another of Silicon Valley’s mysteries. #disruptors #SiliconValley
@ajsadauskas @technology "By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!"
From: noreply@tøøther.com
Subject: Account closureDear User,
You have been rated 3 stars or lower by our toothbrushing partners in the last 14 days. For this reason we are closing your Tøøther account and revoking your toothpaste access. This decision is final and there is no appeal process.
Best regards,
Tøøther Trust And Safety Team.
@ajsadauskas @technology adds “enshitify” to personal vernacular
@ajsadauskas @technology could you also be no oil company, please?
@ajsadauskas @technology
Libertarian - Republican without the Jesus gimmick.@ajsadauskas @technology sadly true. This speech has to be famous (congrats). I share it
@ajsadauskas @technology this is perfect.
@ajsadauskas @technology
Nicely said
Clarity is good
Thanks@ajsadauskas @technology This is still, one and a half year later, the best toot I've read.
Amazing work. Aren’t you the person who guessed exactly what Elon was going to do with Twitter?
@ajsadauskas @technology I would not purchase that product or service.
I've seen where that can go with regards to driverless automation.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=Ki7lqI6XE2s
https://piped.video/watch?v=Ki7lqI6XE2s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
@ajsadauskas @technology This doesn't sound like libertarian thought at all..
What the fuck does this have to do with technology?
Though I guess it’s good to see this place hates tech as much as Reddit does.
Does anyone know of any communities here that actually like technology?
Wait. Is it not about technology, or about hating technology?
This post is bitching about “late stage capitalism” while passive aggressively mentioning the occasional technology in parallel to their issues with the two things combined.
It’s not really technology focused at all, sorry if I wasn’t clear, I thought I was, I’m simply asking if anyone here is here because they LIKE technology, and if they happen to know a place that better represents those feelings.
Like, literally you can go almost anywhere and COMPLAIN on the internet, I was hoping this place would be a little better and optimistic for the things I enjoy.
Keep in mind before you guys decide to be hateful assholes, I’m fine with this place being however YOU guys want it, I’m not here to change ALL OF YOU for just me, I’m simply asking if there is a place you can recommend that is more in line with positive technology news, so that I can leave and we can all enjoy these places more.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either of us looking for something we like, and having personal opinions/preferences, that was supposed to be one of the listed strengths of this place!