Seattle Socialist City Council Member Wants to Eject “Profit-Making Billionaires” from the Tech Industry

Kshama  Sawant wants to end competition and replace it with ownership by humanity.

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...

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.”

This is beyond Planned Chaos. It is blind hate of free markets and free exchange between people.

-RW