Drew Atkins reports:
Sawant is actually taking the first steps toward a new tech revolution, based not on game-changing innovations like the iPhone, but on ejecting “profit-making billionaires” from the industry, and shrinking the “digital divide” between big tech companies and small ones, the rich and the poor. It begins by targeting some of the most hated companies in America: telecom giants Comcast and CenturyLink...This is beyond Planned Chaos. It is blind hate of free markets and free exchange between people.
Listening to Sawant describe her vision of a new tech industry, one might be excused for remembering this old cliché. To hear her tell it, much of the competition and innovation within the industry is “an absurd waste of resources.”
“Does it benefit us to have an endless range of phones where, actually, we could have a few models of really well-functioning smartphones, and not have all these massive resources being devoted to having a little bit of an edge here, a little bit of an edge there?” Sawant asks. “Rather than having those resources dedicated to solving the basic problems of society?”
In Sawant’s vision, the overhaul of the tech industry is one of the most needed revolutions in America today. Technology, she says, is inherently neutral. There are smart people at Comcast and CenturyLink, same as at any major company; the problem is that their intelligence is misapplied, and the resources of their companies are misused.
“How do we bring the global economy to function in an efficient way, where resources are directed to the most pressing needs, rather than this nonsense of competition? The alternative would be these technological companies, or any other company really, being democratically owned by humanity, by people, precisely because we all have an interest in solving these basic problems.” Those problems, she says, include “malnutrition, starvation, (and) entire continents without basic tech conveniences that could save backbreaking labor for large swaths of humanity.”
-RW
"Does it benefit us to have an endless range of phones where, actually, we could have a few models of really well-functioning smartphones, and not have all these massive resources being devoted to having a little bit of an edge here, a little bit of an edge there?”
ReplyDeleteThis is cute because what's inside of nearly all smartphones at this point is either designed by Qualcomm or Apple, and manufactured by Samsung or TSMC. Sounds like, "a few models of really well-functioning smartphones," to me.
Oh, the redundant competition! Think of all the potato chips they could be making instead of computer chips to feed the starving children!
Are these people ever going to come up with a different strategy other than making things up?
A 'few models of really well-functioning smartphones'? That sounds like evil corporate monopoly to me.
DeleteSee, that is how they get you. Heads they win, tails we lose. There's no way to win at this game.
Someone please email her some links to pertinent Mises Media videos.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that won't help. Probably the Mises Institute is secretly funded by the Koch brothers or something according to them.
DeleteIt reminds me of stories from USSR. There would be quotas for goods; like nails...so the quota would be X tons of nails. And because work is merely a means to an ends they would wind up with X tons of nails the size of railroad spikes...there would be shortages for carpentry sizes...How many times must mankind repeat the same empirically failed systems, oh the hubris.
ReplyDeleteWell, that's an Idiot Sawant for you...
ReplyDeleteHa! Nicely done. I like your name too.
DeleteThere is no difference between this lady and Donald Trump. Their mindsets both boil down to "I'm really insightful and I have a plan for you and your time. Your plans be damned."
ReplyDeleteWhat gets my goat the most is that this ideology is being implemented in Venezuela right now and has turned that country into a hell hole. Yet these socialists still see it as a vision for America. WTF
ReplyDelete