Recently I asked if VC money does anything good and today I want to dive deeper into that topic.

In the original post I framed the "good" companies had done in terms of fiscal return. With Uber and WeWork tanking, it's easy pickings to say the did nothing good. As Chris pointed out in the comments on that post the point to many of these tech companies is to destroy the power of labour, so from the investor's point of view, they made money and labour has less power. Their next investment can launch of that lack of power in the hands of labour and they can make more money.

I could make The Boring Company another example here. The Boring Company has been big on promises and produced almost nothing. During that time it has diverted interest from public transit though. Cities have wasted millions in terms of employee time chasing down Musk's ideas, and they have nothing to show for it. Was the real purpose of The Boring Company to divert money from public transit and into private hands?

If that was the real purpose of The Boring Company, then it did achieve it's goal. But that accomplishment was terrible for society at large.

Now what about Facebook/Meta, which is a profitable company so if we stick to purely financial measures, Meta is "good". What if we define good in terms other than capitalist based financial terms.

In terms of mental health, the rollout of Facebook has been linked with the deterioration of mental health of the college students that got access to it.

Facebook also used it's tailored ads to gobble up all the local ad dollars and drove many local news publications out of business due to lack of revenue. Sure Facebook and Google put some money down to support local news but it was never going to be enough. The thing about the number 600 million, is that it sounds big but it's a drop in the bucket for big tech, and it's a drop in the bucket for the industries they've consolidated under their banners. When we have no local news, the local politicians don't have people checking up on them and they try to get away with as much as possible1.

So maybe Amazon is a decent company? Nope, turns out Amazon opens it's warehouses in neighbourhoods with predominantly low income residents and people of colour. Then it treats it's workers so poorly and works them so hard in the name of getting us stuff fast that it may run out of people willing to work for it by 2024.

Then the cost of getting that item to you cheaply and fast has a huge cost we never see. The gas alone to get a single item to your door is extremely costly and they don't pay the drivers that well. They make sure they're independent contractors so they don't have to pay benefits.

I recently looked at the book industry and Amazon specifically. In short, Amazon is the biggest seller, and continues to eat up other parts of the book industry like ebooks and any self-publishing dollars. While it has enabled many more people to publish which brought us books like The Martian, it also continues to apply it's monopoly power on the publishing industry in an attempt to drive the costs as low as possible. This means that publishing makes less and authors make less. At some point the pricing will get so low that authors won't be able to earn enough to write, they'll all always have to have other jobs.

Overall, I'm not bullish on an part of big tech. It seems to me that it does far more harm than good, but it's captured our attention in terms of time and dollars. That means we're letting convienence and distraction eat our lives. We're letting Amazon drive our fellow citizens to the breaking point to save ourselves a trip to the store or a wait of a few weeks.

We're letting Facebook gobble up local news and cause mental harm, because it's an easy way to feel connected to people, without making any real connection.

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