Dear Nicholas:

Regarding your challenging article I decided to try and answer every one of your questions.

Should the tech giants reprogram capitalism?

Yes, they should, and in fact it seems that they will do precisely that without even trying (Capitalism the Apple Way vs. Capitalism the Google Way).

Why do so many of us love to hate the tech services we love to use?

Because they treat us like the consumers we are not, and not as the clients we are.

Does Rushkoff’s description of the tech giants sound like it might be true?

Even if I also think the whole system is becoming unsustainable and unpopular, I don’t think that the programmers, engineers and designers could disrupt the business model and replace it with something that creates and distributes wealth instead of extracting it from the rest of the economy, on an internal bottom up. If any real change is to happen it will only come from a coordinated internal top down of the giant’s owners and shareholders.

I believe that Rushkoff’s use of “extractive capitalism” to define the business style of these modern giants, is both naïve and old fashioned, even if they are in fact harvesting and mining the global economy.

When you use Facebook, Google or Uber, do you feel like a customer or a resource?

I feel as a consumer, and not as a client.

And could it be possible to redirect the efforts of the largest tech companies in a way that would make them responsible to the needs of the wider economy?

No, if any real change is to happen it will only come from a coordinated internal top down of the giant’s owners and shareholders.

Is Rushkoff merely a Luddite for refusing to accept the benefits of the profit motive, or is it absurd for his critics to suppose that established economic systems needn’t adapt to profound technological upheavals?

Pass. My interest in your article has nothing to do with Mr. Rushkoff, but with the future of the global economy.

I’m still not exactly sure what an economically and socially sustainable Silicon Valley would look like or how it would work. Do you?

I believe I do, and at this point I will link it my comment to a very interesting article that I just read (Are you ready to consider that capitalism is the real-problem?) and commented the only direct way I found.

As a 69-year-old Chilean semiretired professional engineer, and for the last +30 years, amateur philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist, I had to disagree, however formally, with the author of that article.

I told him that as an anthropologist, he must recognize the following paradox:

Even if capitalism is neither a disease nor a crime, it has never killed anyone, capitalism is relentlessly killing all of us human beings, and at the same time, all other living form on our communitarian spaceship.

I believe that (when it comes to a globalized economy controlled by giant corporations) the word capitalism, on its own, has no meaning whatsoever, and therefore should be qualified by other auxiliary words to make any sense out of it. The same happens with a long list of other “isms” that we talk and fight about every other day.

When it comes to capitalism, the real hitman, who has been doing the actual killing, is this “over-offer-driven-capitalism”, that for lack of a better description we call “wild capitalism”, and private companies and particularly private giant corporations around the world practice without any control from anyone.

Since all known human systems, have always: fattened their apologists, fed their critics, despised their prophets, and, only if extremely necessary, eliminated their reformers, why don’t we stop apologizing or criticizing this undefined capitalism, and simply start reforming the existing lethal version of it?

In other words why don’t we just organize a #WW_Task_Force and #Re_Engineer_Capitalism , into the #Demand_Driven_Economy we need and we are already dreaming of?

Are you already Imagining as we have been invited to?

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