I find a great deal of parallelism between Greer's observations and Marc Andreesen's "Software is eating everything". The two great economic sectors of the past 20 years in the US have been the FIRE industries (finance, insurance, and real estate), and software / IT.
Broadly speaking, a society facing the end of an anabolic [growth] cycle faces a choice between two strategies. One strategy is to move toward a steady state in which C(p) = M(p), and d(R) = r(R) for every economically significant resource. Barring the presence of environmental limits, this requires social controls to keep capital stocks down to a level at which maintenance costs can be met from current production, and maintain intake of resources at or below replenishment rates. This can require difficult collective choices, but as long as resource availability remains stable, controls on capital growth stay in place, and the society escapes major exogenous crises, this strategy can be pursued indefinitely.
The alternative is to attempt to prolong the anabolic cycle through efforts to accelerate intake of resources through military conquest, new technology, or other means. Since increasing production increases W(p) and increasing capital stocks lead to increased W(c), however, such efforts drive further increases in M(p). A society that attempts to maintain an anabolic cycle indefinitely must therefore expand its use of resources at an ever-increasing rate to keep C(p) from dropping below M(p). Since this exacerbates problems with depletion, as discussed above, this strategy may prove counterproductive.
Yes, software provides efficiencies, and some of the recent chain of startups (Google, Twitter, Facebook) have succeeded in ephemeralizing knowledge, communications, and networking in ways which, to an extent, increase social interaction, but they're doing so at the cost of a highly confounded signal/noise ratio, and with significant externalities.
Then there's the whole "moving financial capital around" aspect of tech funding and investment, which I'm coming to increasingly question. I don't find it particularly productive. The number of firms whose exit strategy is "get bought by Google / Facebook / Apple" reminds me strongly of the late 1990s "get bought by VA Linux" (remember them?).
And for perspective, I'm in my mid 40s and have seen a few cycles so far.
Twitter, Facebook, and G+ offer a constant flood of content, but how much of it's really information? "Confounded" probably isn't quite the right word here, I'm mixing the ideas of "greatly worsened S/N" and "confounded" (as in mixed) "signal and noise". The point being that you've got to parse through a bunch of crud to find the meat.
Social networks are a pretty economically insignificant part of IT, though - Twitter/FB/G+ being worthless doesn't imply all that much about "software eating the world". (Yes, they're socially/culturally/... important; economically, they're outclassed by better business software.)
I'm not going to argue your point much, as I largely agree with it.
There is the question of use-value vs. exchange-value, and you could argue that social networks, as with other electronic communications systems (say, Craigslist) serve mostly to facilitate activities which wouldn't otherwise have occurred, and/or leave money in the pockets of those who make use of the services (where you'd previously have had to use newspaper classified ads, or staple flyers to telephone poles, or stand on a soapbox in the town square, or go out and meet your friends in person).
Most of the social networks have had fairly modest revenues. Let's see.... Facebook are claiming $2.5 billion for the three months ending 2013-12-31. That's actually not too bad. Google's $16.8 billion. Most of that's advertising, and if you think of it that way, Google, Facebook, and the other social networks are skimming off of the total advertising market (not insignificant).
Comments
Nowadays I am pondering whether Silicon Valley is guilty of similar practices.
Read up on John Michael Greer's concept of "catabolic collapse": http://ecoshock.org/transcripts/greer_on_collapse.pdf
I find a great deal of parallelism between Greer's observations and Marc Andreesen's "Software is eating everything". The two great economic sectors of the past 20 years in the US have been the FIRE industries (finance, insurance, and real estate), and software / IT.
Broadly speaking, a society facing the end of an anabolic [growth] cycle faces a choice between two strategies. One strategy is to move toward a steady state in which C(p) = M(p), and d(R) = r(R) for every economically significant resource. Barring the presence of environmental limits, this requires social controls to keep capital stocks down to a level at which maintenance costs can be met from current production, and maintain intake of resources at or below replenishment rates. This can require difficult collective choices, but as long as resource availability remains stable, controls on capital growth stay in place, and the society escapes major exogenous crises, this strategy can be pursued indefinitely.
The alternative is to attempt to prolong the anabolic cycle through efforts to accelerate intake of resources through military conquest, new technology, or other means. Since increasing production increases W(p) and increasing capital stocks lead to increased W(c), however, such efforts drive further increases in M(p). A society that attempts to maintain an anabolic cycle indefinitely must therefore expand its use of resources at an ever-increasing rate to keep C(p) from dropping below M(p). Since this exacerbates problems with depletion, as discussed above, this strategy may prove counterproductive.
Yes, software provides efficiencies, and some of the recent chain of startups (Google, Twitter, Facebook) have succeeded in ephemeralizing knowledge, communications, and networking in ways which, to an extent, increase social interaction, but they're doing so at the cost of a highly confounded signal/noise ratio, and with significant externalities.
Then there's the whole "moving financial capital around" aspect of tech funding and investment, which I'm coming to increasingly question. I don't find it particularly productive. The number of firms whose exit strategy is "get bought by Google / Facebook / Apple" reminds me strongly of the late 1990s "get bought by VA Linux" (remember them?).
And for perspective, I'm in my mid 40s and have seen a few cycles so far.
What does it mean "confounded signal/noise ratio"?
Look up Clay Shirkey's talk, "It's not information overload, it's filter failure":
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10142298-16.html
Twitter, Facebook, and G+ offer a constant flood of content, but how much of it's really information? "Confounded" probably isn't quite the right word here, I'm mixing the ideas of "greatly worsened S/N" and "confounded" (as in mixed) "signal and noise". The point being that you've got to parse through a bunch of crud to find the meat.
Ezra Klein hit on this in " "The problem with Twitter", leaning on Nick Beaudrot: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/01/t...
Infographic: http://i.imgur.com/OpONYVz.png
I've expanded that to "The Problem with $PLATFORM": http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1x1j1o/the_prob...
Social networks are a pretty economically insignificant part of IT, though - Twitter/FB/G+ being worthless doesn't imply all that much about "software eating the world". (Yes, they're socially/culturally/... important; economically, they're outclassed by better business software.)
I'm not going to argue your point much, as I largely agree with it.
There is the question of use-value vs. exchange-value, and you could argue that social networks, as with other electronic communications systems (say, Craigslist) serve mostly to facilitate activities which wouldn't otherwise have occurred, and/or leave money in the pockets of those who make use of the services (where you'd previously have had to use newspaper classified ads, or staple flyers to telephone poles, or stand on a soapbox in the town square, or go out and meet your friends in person).
Most of the social networks have had fairly modest revenues. Let's see.... Facebook are claiming $2.5 billion for the three months ending 2013-12-31. That's actually not too bad. Google's $16.8 billion. Most of that's advertising, and if you think of it that way, Google, Facebook, and the other social networks are skimming off of the total advertising market (not insignificant).
A horrible infographic showing Google's ad spend breakdown: http://www.wordstream.com/articles/google-earnings
(When did the world forget how to create bar plots?)
Here we go: http://i.imgur.com/tTVUkwL.png
Roughly 10% of that is finance. The rest various consumer categories. That's the economic impact of social networking, roughly.