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by samg 4335 days ago
Alternatively, a creator can now build a product with fewer people and doesn't need to raise capital. This trend is extremely empowering of labor.
3 comments

In theory, yes. In practice, most people aren't entrepreneurs. Try convincing someone living in the Bay Area to walk from their 200K/yr plus stock units from FB/Google/etc. and you'll find out the reality: what really separates capital from labor is risk tolerance.

Labor = show up, do your job, get paid. Capital = put money at risk without any guarantee of getting anything back, let alone earning a profit. Capital makes the rules because half of America is two paychecks away from bankruptcy (I read this somewhere credible) and can't/won't take any risk.

Actually it makes labor redundunt.

People talk as if everyone can become a creator, which it ain't so (partly because of the personal skills needed, partly because there's no economy where "everybody is a creator" -- for the same reason why not everybody can be a millionaire at the same time (money loses it's value then). Any large scale economy needs few sellers/creators and many buyers).

So what this trend does, it empower a few programmers/creators (ok, more than the past few large capital owners), and makes all the other programmers redundant or devalued.

The history of every mature industry on planet Earth says otherwise.