| > making employment more attractive than company-building This is decidedly untrue. You can make a few clever(er) points here: VC meddling is rotting at the core of ingenuity (which I happen to agree with) or even that large companies (GOOG/MSFT/etc.) are tangentially capturing startups via incentives (think free credits, etc.). But author doesn't make these, so I won't argue against (or for) them. > Today, higher-leverage actors are strip-mining institutional commons—democratic norms, social trust, educational relevance, economic mobility—faster than lower-leverage actors can regenerate them. This will seem like a technicality, but for a pedant like myself, it's quite important: this is absolutely not the tragedy of the commons. It might be a new tragedy (maybe we'll call it "theft?"), but the interesting and paradoxical nature of the original has nothing to do with this reformulation. What makes the tragedy of the commons interesting is that all agents will favor maximizing their local maxima in spite of minimizing the global maxima. A sort of "missing the forest for the trees" thing. > The stakes couldn't be higher. If we don't develop conscious approaches to managing leverage arbitrage, we risk a future where technological capability advances exponentially while social coordination capacity deteriorates linearly—a recipe for civilizational breakdown. This seems a tad dramatic; "leverage arbitrage" was significantly higher during colonial or industrial times and society didn't exactly collapse. I agree with the sentiment, but not sure about all the "боже мой." |