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Tag: economics (page 2 of 3)

This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

June 7, 2016

Exporting Japanese Currency & Culture

Sponsor: Bret Bernhoft

I’m thrilled to announce Exolymph’s first sponsor! Bret Bernhoft is creating an experimental futuristic character called Ruby Leander:

“In 2034 (age 18), Ruby decided to have transhuman implants ‘installed’ into her physiology. Devices/technologies that will follow her throughout the rest of her life. […] She was hired into a new policing program/effort dedicated to sniffing out impurities, forgeries and/or attempts at sabotaging/misusing modern technologies.”

Read the first installment of Ruby’s story and learn more about Bret on his website.

Exporting Japanese Currency & Culture

Artwork by ThvnderKat.

Thomas Vallance of Virtual Mech (website currently under maintenance) emailed me the following contribution. Lightly edited for this venue.

While the information is flowing I would contend that the gatekeeper is merely a man. Matt Pearce hasn’t spent a considerable enough time sitting by Satan’s eye to say such things. [Vallance is referencing Pearce’s comment about the Panama Papers — “Nobody loves a gatekeeper” — which I quoted in a previous dispatch.]

The euro continues to subdue smaller state currencies — this is true for most except Japan, who has a more powerful running economy than its larger counterpart China. In fact, they contend with economic giants like the United States, Britain, and Europe. This leads one to question; how is it that a nation so small outweighs those with populaces and landmass well beyond their own? Asia in general should be posting a considerable yield, yet we turn to little Tokyo for our Eastern trade opportunities. And that’s the kicker, the yen clocks in so high that unless you speak their language you won’t get a foot in the door.

Not surprisingly, the yen is growing more powerful. Where is China’s great and powerful yuan; is it just another case of outsourcing? An example: when I spoke to my local paper about advertising the comic I am currently writing, they didn’t respond. When I dropped into their office to ask why I hadn’t received a reply, I was referred to an advertising group in Malaysia (they don’t even have the same first language). This off-handing of all queries to Asia, specifically in Japan, seems a common trend, if not an absurd one. You want to ask questions? Just translate them into an Asian language.

Yoshide Suga reported on emergency call numbers as they currently experience 7.3 earthquakes in Kumamoto. Sendai Nuclear Power Plant has reported “no irregularities” — meanwhile US markets will eventually crash under the pressure from China.

I am presently reading the Japanese version of The Godfather, Yakuza — it details their overarching presence in Japan, one that has seemingly spread well beyond their border. I find it interesting that the Yakuza is quite well known while the Triad hardly appears on our radar, apart from niche features.

Back to Sonya again. The Triad is actually pretty well-known in the Bay Area due to its influence on San Francisco’s Chinatown.

I can’t speak for Vallance directly, but I think he’s reflecting on some of the oddities of globalization. The interactions between various national economies are exceedingly complex, but fundamentally human-defined, whereas the natural disasters capable of disrupting everyday life come from deeper powers.

The unleashed energy of nature, pressure built up over centuries — it’s easy to liken it to rage, but an earthquake is more like a cat stretching. Just instinct, just built-up tension following the path of least resistance.

May 5, 2016

Uncertainty + Risk + Trying to Make Money

“A thing I had long suspected — the world’s absurdity — became obvious to me. I suddenly felt unbelievably free, and the freedom itself was an indication of that absurdity. […] Cautiously, clumsily, I loaded the revolver, then turned off the light. The thought of death, which had once so frightened me, was now an intimate and simple affair.” — The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov

Uncertainty blazing at the end of a tunnel.

Photo by darkday.

The wide variety of possible futures poses a problem. It’s very simple: uncertainty. Uncertainty creates risk, and it’s stressful. By definition the true future is unknown, and therefore scary. You can attempt to prepare for the future, but you can’t really prepare for it — because you’ll prepare for the future you expect, which will differ significantly from the future that actually happens.

Technology analyst Ben Thompson likes to say that the worst-case scenario for a five-year plan is that you achieve your goals, but the ground has shifted under you in the meantime. The ground is constantly shifting underneath us. It’s easy to project consumer gadget trends, but it’s not so easy to call the election (Hillary will win) or what will happen in Syria (no guesses here). Will self-driving cars take over the roads in ten years or fifteen? You can’t cash out if you don’t buy and sell the stocks at the right time. Will universal basic income ever be applied beyond a few one-off experiments?

The way to deal with uncertainty is not to try to eliminate it — that’s a futile task. Uncertainty and risk are inherent features of reality. The way to deal with uncertainty is to absorb it. Make it part of your being and your reactions. Come to peace with the fact that life is cruelly unpredictable. Embrace the instability of your circumstances, and practice honing your reflexes. You’ll need to jump at some point.

I’ve also been wondering whether I can make money from Exolymph. I don’t want to charge for the newsletter directly, and advertising won’t be lucrative unless I can gain several multiples of the subscriber base I have now. Sorry, I know it’s crass to talk about #monetizing, but I would love to be able to support myself by writing quasi sci-fi thinkpieces and story snippets. However, in order to convince people to give you money, you need to satisfy a market need — in other words, to solve a problem.

What problem most torments the kind of person who subscribes to Exolymph? Based on the anxious discussions about Donald Trump in the chat group — as well as automation and surveillance and the everything-industrial complex — the core worry that captivates us is uncertainty. I can write blasé dismissals of the utility of obsessing over uncertainty, but of course I’m still preoccupied with it. It seems that I’m not alone.

Because I’m a writer, I immediately thought, “Okay, I’ll write a guide to embracing uncertainty.” But that’s a silly idea. I’m not an expert, and besides, such a guide already exists. Neither am I a researcher, nor a scientist, nor a successful investor, nor any of those people who have either studied or experienced uncertainty to the degree that they can talk about it with anything approaching, well, certainty.

All I’m equipped to do is explore. Find out how people dealt with economic upheaval in the past. Dive into the long Wikipedia list of cognitive biases. I’m throwing ideas at the wall, but I still don’t know if anyone would pay for this.

Would you pay $5 per month for a weekly offshoot newsletter that delivered meditations and investigations on functioning and thriving in a world of uncertainty? If no one can be bothered to respond to this email, I can safely assume that no one would bother to pay actual money.

March 27, 2016

Software Meets Capitalism: Interview with Steve Klabnik

Old woman working at a loom. Photo by silas8six.

I interviewed Steve Klabnik via email. If you’re part of the open-source world, you might recognize his name. Otherwise I’ll let him introduce himself. We discussed economics, technological unemployment, and software.

Exolymph: The initial reason I reached out is that you’re a technologist who tweets about labor exploitation and other class issues. I’m currently fascinated by how tech and society influence each other, and I’m particularly interested in the power jockeying within open-source communities. You seem uniquely situated to comment on these issues.

Originally I planned to launch right into questions in this email, but then I start opening your blog posts in new tabs, and now I need a little more time still. But! Here’s a softball one for starters: How would you introduce yourself to an oddball group of futurists (which is my readership)?

Steve Klabnik: It’s funny that you describe this one as a softball, because it should be, yet I think it’s actually really tough. I find it really difficult to sum up a person in a few words; there’s just so much you miss out on. Identity is a precarious and complex topic.

I generally see myself as someone who’s fundamentally interdisciplinary. I’m more about the in-betweens than I am about any specific thing. The discipline that I’m most trained in is software; it’s something I’ve done for virtually my entire life, and I have a degree in it. But software by itself is not that interesting to me. It’s the stuff that you can do with software, the impact that it has on our world, questions of ethics, of social interaction. This draws a connection to my second favorite thing: philosophy. I’m an amateur here, unfortunately. I almost got a higher degree in this stuff, but life has a way of happening. More specifically, I’m deeply enthralled with the family of philosophy that is colloquially referred to as “continental” philosophy, though I’m not sure I find that distinction useful. My favorites in this realm are Spinoza, Nietzsche, Marx, and Deleuze. I find that their philosophical ideas can have deep implications for software, its place in the world, and society at large.

Since we live under capitalism, “who are you” is often conflated with “what do you do for work”. As far as that goes, I work for Mozilla, the company that makes Firefox. More specifically, I write documentation for Rust, a programming language that we and a broader community have developed. I literally wrote the book on it 🙂 Mozilla has a strong open-source ethic, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve ended up working there; I do a lot of open-source work. On GitHub, a place where open-source developers share their code, this metric says that I’m the twenty-ninth most active contributor, with 4,362 contributions in the last 365 days. Before Rust, I was heavily involved with the Ruby on Rails community, and the broader Ruby community at large. I still maintain a few packages in Ruby.

Exolymph: To be fair, I described it as a softball question precisely because of the capitalist shortcut you mentioned, although I’m not sure I would have articulated it like that. Darn predictable social conditioning.

What appeals to you about open source? What frustrates you about open source?

Steve Klabnik: I love the idea of working towards a commons. I’d prefer to write software that helps as many people as possible.

What frustrates me is how many people can’t be paid to do this kind of work. I’ve been lucky to been able to feed myself while working on open source. Very, very lucky. But for most, it’s doing your job without pay. If we truly want a commons, we have to figure out how to fund it.

Exolymph: I’ve been reading a bunch of your blog posts. I’m curious about how you feel about working in an industry — and perhaps doing work personally — that obviates older jobs that people used to count on.

Steve Klabnik: It is something that I think about a lot. This is something that’s a fundamental aspect of capitalism, and has always haunted it: see the Luddites, for example. This problem is very complex, but here’s one aspect of it: workers don’t get to capture the benefits of increased productivity, at least not directly. Let’s dig into an example to make this more clear.

Let’s say that I’m a textile worker, like the Luddite. Let’s make up some numbers to make the math easy: I can make one yard of fabric per hour with my loom. But here’s the catch: I’m paid by the hour, not by the amount of fabric I make. This is because I don’t own the loom; I just work here. So, over the course of a ten hour day, I make ten yards of fabric, and am paid a dollar for this work.

Next week, when I come to work, a new Loom++ has been installed in my workstation. I do the same amount of work, but can produce two yards of fabric now. At the end of my ten hour day, I’ve made twenty yards of fabric: a 2x increase! But I’m still only being paid my dollar. In other words, the owner of the factory gets twice as much fabric for the same price, but I haven’t seen any gain here.

(Sidebar: There’s some complexity in this that does matter, but this is an interview, not a book 🙂 So for example, yes, the capitalist had to pay for the Loom++ in the first place. This is a concept Marx calls “fixed versus variable capital”, and this is a long enough answer already, so I’ll just leave it at that.)

Now, the idea here is that the other factories will also install Loom++s as well, and at least one of the people who’s selling the cloth will decide that 1.75x as much profit is better, so they’ll undercut the others, and eventually, the price of cloth will fall in half, to match the new productivity level. Now, as a worker, I have access to cheaper cloth. But until that happens, I’m not seeing a benefit, yet the capitalist is collecting theirs. Until they invest in a Loom2DX, with double the productivity of the Loom++, and the cycle starts anew.

Yet we, as workers, haven’t actually seen the benefits work out the way they should. There’s nothing that guarantees that it will, other than the religion of economists. And the working class has seen their wages stagnate, while productivity soars, especially recently. Here is a study that gets cited a lot, in articles like this one.

“From 1973 to 2013, hourly compensation of a typical (production/nonsupervisory) worker rose just 9 percent while productivity increased 74 percent. This breakdown of pay growth has been especially evident in the last decade, affecting both college- and non-college-educated workers as well as blue- and white-collar workers. This means that workers have been producing far more than they receive in their paychecks and benefit packages from their employers.”

We haven’t been really getting our side of the deal.

Anyway.

So, this is a futurist blog, yet I’ve just been talking about looms. Why? Well, two reasons: First, technologists are the R&D department that takes the loom, looks at it, and makes the Loom++. It’s important to understand this, and to know in our heart of hearts that under capitalism, yes, our role is to automate people out of jobs. Understanding a problem is the first step towards solving it. But second, it’s to emphasize that this isn’t something that’s specific to computing or anything. It’s the fundamental role of technology. We like to focus on the immediate benefit (“We have Loom++es now!!!”) and skip over the societal effects (“Some people are going to make piles of money from this and others may lose their jobs”). Technologists need to start taking the societal effects more seriously. After all, we’re workers too.

I’m at a technology conference in Europe right now, and on the way here, I watched a movie, The Intern. The idea of the movie is basically, “Anne Hathaway runs Etsy (called About the Fit in the movie), and starts an internship program for senior citizens. Robert De Niro signs up because he’s bored with retirement, and surprise! Culture clash.” It was an okay movie. But one small bit of backstory of De Niro’s character really struck me. It’s revealed that before he retired, he used to work in literally the same building as About the Fit is in now. He worked for a phone book company. It’s pretty obvious why he had to retire. The movie is basically a tale of what we’re talking about here.

Exolymph: I’m also curious about what you’d propose to help society through the Computing Revolution (if you will) and its effect on “gainful employment” opportunities.

Steve Klabnik: Okay, so, I’m not saying that we need to keep phone books around so that De Niro can keep his job. I’m also not saying that we need to smash the looms. What I am saying is that in a society which is built around the idea that you have to work to live, and that also rapidly makes people’s jobs obsolete, is a society in which a lot of people are going to be in a lot of pain. We could be taking those productivity benefits and using them to invest back in people. It might be leisure time, it might be re-training; it could be a number of things. But it’s not something that’s going to go away. It’s a question that we as society have to deal with.

I don’t think the pursuit of profits over people is the answer.

Go follow Steve on Twitter and check out his website.

March 19, 2016

Universal Basic Income: Is It Feasible?

There was an astute exchange about universal basic income on Hacker News today. Jon Stokes, one of the founders of Ars Technica and a former Wired editor, posted this:

I have the following summary of the how I think that many tech people like [Sam Altman, president of startup accelerator Y Combinator] believe UBI is going to work:

Companies innovate by doing things more cheaply with automation than human workers can do them.

As a result of automation, the more efficient companies reap all the profits in a market as they drive the less efficient companies out of business (and the humans out of jobs).

This bonanza of profits that automation yields is taxed.

The taxes from the accumulated wealth of the winners — wealth that, again, exists because the winning companies’ machines were able to do things more efficiently than the losing companies’ human laborers — go toward paying the laid-off laborers a basic income.

Photo by Nacho Pintos.

Roy Murdock replied:

Optimizing companies will do everything possible to avoid the corporate taxes (>60%) required to make universal basic income a reality. If you are assuming that winning companies are the best at implementing automation and reducing cost, it is a fatal mistake to assume that they will suddenly become charitable when it comes to wealth redistribution — no, they will ‘win’ because they optimize every single aspect of their balance sheets. They’ll move their capital offshore where it will be taxed at a fraction of the US rate. They’ll pay lobbyists to make sure tax loopholes stay open, and that the wealth accretes to the few at the top of the company who run the business. […]

UBI for everyone creates a large misdirection of resources that perpetuates the problem of too many people, too few jobs, social unrest. We have solved this problem in the past through war, which stimulates the economy through government spending, reduces excess labor (especially young, angry, dangerous men), reignites nationalism and social cohesion (against a common and clearly evil enemy such as Hitler), and realigns national incentives towards R&D and infrastructure investment. I am not advocating for war, merely making an observation. Does UBI get distributed to everyone who is unemployed, or only those who are laid off from jobs?

It’s a fair question. How on earth will we fund this endeavor? I’ve written about the intuitive consequence before — if people can’t work, how can they buy?

March 14, 2016

Don’t Show Up If You Won’t Cash Out

Stanford historian Leslie Berlin wrote an homage to Silicon Valley’s success that you may have seen linked around. It’s a good essay, but I was irked by a particular passage about Silicon Valley’s tradition of mentoring and reinvestment:

“This model of one generation succeeding and then turning around to offer the next generation of entrepreneurs financial support and managerial expertise is one of the most important and under-recognized secrets to Silicon Valley’s ongoing success.”

Berlin’s observation is true, but it’s phrased to make the phenomenon sound altruistic. Like I said on Twitter, the last round of entrepreneurs support the rising stars because they’ll get richer by doing it. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I don’t begrudge Marc Andreessen or Peter Thiel their fortunes.

However, I always feel slimy when self-interested profit-seeking is dressed as friendship and fatherly good feeling. Not that they can’t coexist, but no one amasses billions by only funding their friends and nephews (or nieces, theoretically). I’m reminded of Facebook’s Free Basics (née Internet.org), which is a marketing initiative passed off as philanthropy.

Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto. Photo by Franco Folini.

Language is important. Stories are important. The cultural memes that we absorb and the words we use to express them have real-world ramifications. (I know I’m either preaching to the choir or wasting my time, because those are the only two options on the internet…)

Maybe I shouldn’t worry about anyone else’s capitalist instincts, but it’s easy to be exploited when you’re convinced that everyone who helps you is doing it out of the goodness of their heart. If you feel like your business partner or your employer is granting you a favor, you’re less likely to stand up for your own end of the bargain.

inb4 someone calling me paranoid or cynical 😉

March 1, 2016

Amagooglezon

Amazon has a whim machine bolted onto their ecommerce system. The recommendation engine is a combination of practical — “Other people who bought X also bought Y” — and bemusingly enthusiastic: “You clicked on X before so I bet you’d really like ALSDJFLKSAJF too! Wow, look at all those letters! Notice how they’re in the same alphabet as X? Pretty impressive, huh?” It’s bad at nuance but it’s good at throwing out options. There are so many options for it to scan and suggest.

This stock photo amuses me. Image via Robbert Noordzij.

Businesses need to solve hard problems in order to be successful. Shopping on Amazon is cheap and convenient and they have a vast array of goods. Selling things cheaply without collapsing is a hard problem, and so is convenience, and so is being stocked with lots of products. Amazon conquered all three challenges. Now the benefits feed into each other. Customers love the cheapness and convenience, so sellers must stock their storefronts. Sellers are much easier to aggregate than customers, so once you figure out the customer bit, you’re golden.

Superstar internet businesses — and I guess most high-value companies in general — are all about positive feedback loops. Circular incentives that channel energy from initial success to intermediate success to dominance.

When you search for something on Google, you make Google better by feeding data into their algorithm, and your presence incentivizes both websites and advertisers to cater to this particular search engine. You come back because the algorithm is so good at presenting the information you want. Websites worry about SEO and advertisers drop $$$$$ because that excellent algorithm keeps pulling you back. The incentive structure is great for Google. That ingenious feedback loop made them dominant and it keeps them dominant.

Fast forward to 2037 when we’re surfing Amagooglezon (or whatever supplants them) with our heads swimming in VR buckets. We’ll bounce from product to product, purchasing and appraising and reviewing and returning and diving into on-demand experiences. I wonder how recommendation systems will work then — maybe they’ll have personalities. Maybe we’ll fall in love with them. Maybe we’ll hate them. Maybe our wallets will be managed by AI assistants and none of this will matter.

February 23, 2016

A More Literal Disruption

“Automation did not upend the fundamental logic of the economy. But it did disproportionate harm to less-skilled workers.” — Daniel Akst

Earlier in the article, Akst explains, “technological advances have not reduced overall employment, though they have certainly cost many people their jobs. […] technology has reshaped the job market into something like an hourglass form, with more jobs in fields such as finance and food service and fewer in between.” In other words, the low and high ends of the market are thriving. The middle level of prosperity is fast becoming obsolete. (“Millennials” and “middle class” are two terms that don’t belong together.)

Here’s the “fundamental logic of the economy” that Akst references earlier: efficiency drives growth. When we figure out how to accomplish tasks using less time, materials, and money, then we can devote the extra resources to something else. We can better leverage comparative advantage. This “grows the pie”, as politicians like to say. New forms of human organization — such as the corporation — can produce greater efficiency, but they’re nothing compared to the advent of steam power or computing.

Machinery photographed by MATSUOKA Kohei.

Technology is phenomenally valuable because it frees up time that was formerly occupied by drudgery. However, the transition from one mode of business assumptions to the next is always excruciating. Workers suited to the last paradigm struggle in the new one — observe the devastation of America’s Rust Belt. Or look further back, at the Industrial Revolution! Artisans lost their livelihoods and peasants were forced into tenement cities to serve as human fuel for factories.

After two centuries of industrialization, those of us in “First World” countries have a standard of living higher than a colonial-era villager could imagine. This hypothetical yeoman might predict abundant food and physical comfort, but he could never conceive of the mind-expanding access to information that is normal now. The idea of an on-demand, self-driving car powered not by magic but by math would blow multiple gaskets.

My point is that the Next Big Thing won’t necessarily be “disruptive” in Clay Christensen’s sense — it’ll be DISRUPTIVE like an earthquake that reorders the landscape.

January 18, 2016

Figuring Out What’s Predetermined

Image by Neil Cummings.

You can’t prepare for a future that you haven’t imagined. Of course, the future that you + me + various experts have conceived will not come true in the way that we expect it to. If future-prediction were easy, the stock market wouldn’t exist, and the economy that we’re familiar with might not function either. Lack of accurate or certain information is integral to the current system.

Consider the scarce resource. What’s hard to obtain? From the perspective of media suppliers (publishers), it’s attention. From the perspective of media consumers, especially in the business/tech sphere, the scarce resource is valuable information, the kind that can be used to make decisions or shape strategies.

Participants in abundance economies are forced to sort through a deluge of options to find what’s worthwhile. Thus media businesses like Stratechery and The Information are successful. They don’t rely on volume — they rely on significance per word (I swear that’s a genuine metric).

When we’re dealing with futurism, actionable information is difficult to identify. Most people aren’t even in a position to change their behavior based the likely trends of the next century. (Venture capitalists and other people with resources to deploy, but who else?) Near-future estimates, or insights regarding what powerful people want and expect, are more immediately useful to us commoners.

Of course, we shouldn’t let that stop us from speculating! There might be more advantage in it than I’m guessing. Besides, there’s always grinding:

“So i know that you can implant an RFID chip in your body but is there any form of security. RFID Identification information can be stolen remotely outside of the body, but does it being inside the body change its vulnerability. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and i know that the bio-hacking community has been growing for a while and that as it grows so do the dangers. Not too worried but i just wanted to know the security risks.”

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