In maker-land, things don’t do impressive stuff without you specifically trying to get them to do that stuff; and the hard work is always getting it to do that stuff, even though figuring out what stuff you want is also hard.
I think it’s more that in maker-land, the sign of the impact usually does not appear to matter much in terms of gaining wealth/influence/status. It appears that usually, if your project has a huge impact on the world—and you’re not going to jail—you win.
The marketing company Salesforce was founded in Silicon Valley in ’99, and has been hugely successful. It’s often ranked as one of the best companies in the U.S. to work for. I went to one of their conferences recently, and the whole thing was a massive status display- they’d built an arcade with Salesforce-themed video games just for that one conference, and had a live performance by Gwen Stafani, among other things.
...But the marketing industry is one massive collective action problem. It consumes a vast amount of labor and resources, distorts the market in a way that harms healthy competition, creates incentives for social media to optimize for engagement rather than quality, and develops dangerous tools for propagandists, all while producing nothing of value in aggregate. Without our massive marketing industry, we’d have to pay a subscription fee or a tax for services like Google and Facebook, but everything else would be cheaper in a way that would necessarily dwarf that cost (since the vast majority of the cost of marketing doesn’t go to useful services)- and we’d probably have a much less sensationalist media on top of that.
People in Silicon Valley are absolutely willing to grant status to people who gained wealth purely through collective action problems.
I think it’s more that in maker-land, the sign of the impact usually does not appear to matter much in terms of gaining wealth/influence/status. It appears that usually, if your project has a huge impact on the world—and you’re not going to jail—you win.
What are some examples of makers who gained wealth/influence/status by having a huge negative impact on the world?
The marketing company Salesforce was founded in Silicon Valley in ’99, and has been hugely successful. It’s often ranked as one of the best companies in the U.S. to work for. I went to one of their conferences recently, and the whole thing was a massive status display- they’d built an arcade with Salesforce-themed video games just for that one conference, and had a live performance by Gwen Stafani, among other things.
...But the marketing industry is one massive collective action problem. It consumes a vast amount of labor and resources, distorts the market in a way that harms healthy competition, creates incentives for social media to optimize for engagement rather than quality, and develops dangerous tools for propagandists, all while producing nothing of value in aggregate. Without our massive marketing industry, we’d have to pay a subscription fee or a tax for services like Google and Facebook, but everything else would be cheaper in a way that would necessarily dwarf that cost (since the vast majority of the cost of marketing doesn’t go to useful services)- and we’d probably have a much less sensationalist media on top of that.
People in Silicon Valley are absolutely willing to grant status to people who gained wealth purely through collective action problems.