Dissolving Markets: How Sharing Technology Redistributes Power
9 hours ago
- #Market Asymmetries
- #Economic Empowerment
- #Technology and Power
- Throughout history, professional scribes were essential for writing tasks, but widespread literacy eliminated that market, illustrating how true empowerment can come from dissolving markets rather than improving them.
- Technological innovation is often viewed through efficiency, but its distribution of power is crucial. Access terms determine whether it democratizes or centralizes power, as seen with firearms and the telegraph.
- How technology is shared matters. Keeping it private reinforces hierarchies, while open sharing can disrupt them, determining if it serves as a democratizing force.
- Markets rely on asymmetries between participants, such as division of labor, which can benefit communities, but others like trade secrets or property rights can be exploitative.
- Trade secrets create unfair advantages, allowing companies to outcompete others and potentially lead to monopolization, undermining market plurality and contestability.
- Property asymmetries, like patent trolling or rent-seeking, extract value without productive labor, weakening autonomy, though some property rights from genuine labor can incentivize innovation.
- Capital is a highly fungible asymmetry that enables predatory tactics and passive exclusion through high fixed costs, such as in semiconductor fabrication, which openness alone cannot counter without design changes.
- Capital can buy control asymmetries, like ownership of information platforms (e.g., social media, marketplaces), shaping demand and opinions through algorithms, a dynamic termed vectoralism or cloud capital.
- To counter vectoralism, shifting to decentralized protocols is needed, as alternatives to centralized networks, requiring novel algorithms for transition.
- True empowerment involves reducing non-labor-based asymmetries, such as trade secrets, rent extraction, and network control, focusing on making people more capable rather than creating better markets.