Technology

I think the idea is to break up google and apple ;)

We have tools both new and old to work collectively against megacorp consolidation and we can do it directly in the market. Here’s what I would love to see more of:

• Equity crowdfunding: Let’s have users/communities/customer bases finance new companies at the seed stage instead of relying almost exclusively on venture/investment banking-backed startups. I believe this greatly reduces the misalignment of stakeholder interests in finance/business even if they otherwise operate as conventional hierarchies. When customers own the business profit is no longer the fixation. It has to be self-sustaining but beyond that the focus can be on the ethical, sustained production and distribution of the good or service itself.

• Buying collectives: Let’s leverage our buying power to receive lower prices and have more say in the ethics of supply chains. This can happen at the individual level and amongst cooperative/independent/small chain retailers. This combined with equity crowdfunding implies an opportunity to work our way up (and down) the supply chain from consumer to retailer to distributors to manufacturer to collaborate with it when necessary compete with incumbents.

• Open Source R&D via Invective Prizes: Ever heard of the X-Prize? Imagine a crowdfunding platform where the crowd determines the goals for projects and contributes to the purse and people/teams compete to solve it. The winning submission open sources their result in exchange for the prize. This gives the crowd an alternative to corporate-funded IP held behind walled gardens purely to extract profit.

• Open, interoperable web infrastructure: Most features of social media platforms could be baked into protocols and made readable by any 3rd party software that chooses to integrate it. The fediverse we’re posting on right now is a great example. We have to have free, open digital communications to have agency as free peoples.

All these options reside naturally in a market-based economy and IMO empower political action while not inherently relying on it. It’s a powerful “yes, and”.

Yeah, and I don't buy the argument. It only works if the players haven't figured out they have conmon goals and that they have to pool resources to achieve them. That's not a hard thing to figure out. The tendency to cartelization demonstrates this. But cartelization only demonstrates that people can figure out they need to pool resources. They don't need a cartel to pool money and funnel them into politicians pockets. All they need is industry lobbying associations and think tanks. Wouldn't you know it, we have both and they're working splendidly to further the regulatory interests of the corporations funding them. That competing parties won't be able to do this seems like wishful thinking to me. That tech couldn't do it during the Napster days I think is rather circumstantial and evidence for the people running those companies not having their shit together. Which makes sense given their age at the time.