The New Gilded Age; Gene and meme, a revisit in the AI era
The New Gilded Age: Curse of Bigness
Tim Wu’s new book,The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, has stirred up heated debates on corporate’s bigness in today’s digital economy. Here are two different point of views based on his recent op-ed on the New York Times in this subject.
Nicole H
“Let’s not just call them monopolies, let’s call them global conglomerates.
Here are a few ideas for how all the Davids can break up conglomerate monopoly power Goliaths:1)Break them up into the smallest, SINGLE purpose companies (i.e. a Tv company should not be in the business of producing pharmaceuticals or have subsidiaries making F-15 fighter planes, etc)
2) There is no “democracy” without economic democracy. Transform each corporate charter into COOPERATIVE structure: the business would essentially be ONLY run BY & FOR the people actually working in it. They would reap the profits of their labor–not the financial, non-working, aristocrats siphoning the profits into their Wall street casino portfolios. Google: Mondragon–the most successful example of this business structure (founded in the 1950’s!). Yes, it is possible to have a good quality of life as a worker when the system is balanced and just.
This would also restore true competition to an economic system, reestablishing a true “free market”—not the bogus globalist one that we’ve been indoctrinated with for the last 40 years.
3) Encourage the creation of small businesses within a local ecosystem. This would also restore a sense of community and sow the seeds for a healthy quality of life. It would also restore governing power at the local level.”
Chris
“In his Op-ed, Professor Wu attempts to resurrect the intellectually bankrupt and long-ago rejected Columbia School of antitrust analysis by conflating it with fascism. He then proceeds to mischaracterize both the past and current states of concentration in product markets.Size and scale are not grounds for antitrust enforcement, the abuse of that power by using unlawful conduct to monopolize a market are, the key being “unlawful conduct” as opposed to legitimate competition. Furthermore, only where such conduct reduces the performance of the market by raising prices is such conduct typically actionable. The laws proscribing monopolization are still in force and available to litigants, including the FTC and DOJ.
Perhaps in NYC one can patronize small businesses to access the wide assortment of goods found on Amazon. Perhaps one can go to the library of a large university to find the information available on Google. But, only if one lives in the insular world of a large university in a major city.
As one who has practiced for many years in the field of antitrust, I find that the professor’s arguments academic rubbish. The Columbia School was rejected for very good reasons many years ago. It should remain entombed.”
Gene and meme, a revisit in the AI era
In today’s AI era, I revisited the once-hyped concept Gene and Meme, the idea that we are vehicles driven by these two replicators, who care less about the vehicle’s (ours) own well-being (meaning) but thrive for mere replication.
A book called “The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin” came highly recommended during my exploration. It argues
“we may well be robots, but we are the only robots on earth who have discovered that fact. Only by recognizing ourselves as such, we can begin to construct a concept of self-based on what is truly singular about humans: that they gain control of their lives in a way unique among life forms on Earth—through rational self-determination.”
I discovered two different but noteworthy thoughts from the book’s Goodreads reviewers:
Reader Miklos:
“ To summarize, the implications for Darwin’s theory of evolution via natural selection and the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 20th Century really hasn’t sunk in to the public consciousness and that our autonomy is really not ours. Vehicle/Driver analogies are used to explain how genes, memes, market forces, and faulty heuristics distort our perception of being in the driver’s seat, when in fact we are being controlled by the above-mentioned processes. The goal of the Robots Rebellion is to use rationality (instrumental, meta-) to subvert such processes, bring them under more analytical control, and decide for us how to proceed with a specific course of action”.
Reader Blair called the book
“the reductionists(‘) rebellion against Darwinism,” which he doesn’t buy in. In Darwinism, Blaire believes “we evolved through a long chain of organisms starting with bacteria. Worse, evolution is not even about improving animal bodies; it is driven by selfish genes trying to copy themselves. We are a random outcome of a process that is mechanical, mindless and purposeless, nothing but a gene copying robot. We are staring into a “Darwinian abyss” that dissolves every traditional concept of purpose, meaning and human significance.”
However, Blair claims
“..we are made of mindless atoms, but that does not make us mindless. This is the fallacy of reductionism.Evolutionary theory is a physical description of the development of life. It is useful for explaining that we are made of repurposed parts that don’t always work as if we were intelligently designed for today’s world. But it can say nothing about concepts such as purpose and meaning, which emerge from the complexity of our mind.” Blair reduces the robot’s rebellion down to fundamentalists’ rejection of evolutionary, “because they think it will rob their lives of meaning. (The author) worries about evolutionary knowledge being confined to an intellectual elite while his apocalyptic framing only contributes to this polarization.”
More reviews on this book here