This is not to rain on your parade (I agree with you!) but I see the only solution as political via vastly higher taxes on higher incomes to support social services. The only place we are remotely close to having any influence is in the political realm, in the economic world, we are completely irrelevant.
Thanks! (I think?)
Bingo.
Relevant quote:
> Paul Tillich wrote that all institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that no institution could ever achieve the morality of the individual. Institutions, he warned, to extend their lives when confronted with collapse, will swiftly betray the stances that ostensibly define them. Only individual men and women have the strength to hold fast to virtue when faced with the threat of death.
Also:
> A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.” - https://nav.al/failure
So for example, structurally I think we can nudge the organization such that any of our individual seegull "communities" can stay smaller than about 200 co-owner/operators/employees. That is to say perhaps each has their own specific bylaws (like states) treasury etc...IDK how to make it last 1000 years I'm just hoping for 100
It is literally impossible to be a public company CEO or senior manager for that matter, which is the goal of most founders in this sphere, and not be slavishly devoted to maximizing profit margin at all costs and irrespective of anything else. Why? You'll be fired if you're not. Once you're past Sr. Manager you'll be challenged on whether you side with your employees or the stock price. We all know who chooses which.
Want to start a high tech company or even a company with high CAPEX or OPEX entry points? Better get a ton of capital, and guess what, that capital wants ownership because the theory is "they deserve it." The reality is money required to do anything (duh!) and you have no choice, because your broke friends can't afford the 500k you need to hire all those well paid FAANG engineers away.
Fine you say, those are the spoils of victory. Well so here's the problem...if all that money only cares about maintaining the power structures and whitewashing their Rand inspired business sins via "charity" or perhaps "running for president" and that group gets smaller and smaller, what's the rest of folks to do?
I ended up writing about this [1] and now I'm doing everything I can to build or support syndicalist organizations crowding out for-profit investor driven companies.
At this point, tech is just an extension of finance. There's no counter-culture here, it's maximum capitalism and we're ubering humanity off a cliff.
I've stopped trying to be in tech and founded a non-stock democratic cooperative that does residential waste hauling [2,3] and hopefully we'll be picking up trash by July.
I'm about to send out our first mailer to two major residential groups. I'm open to anyone who wants to give us a loan or be hired eventually. [email protected]
[1]https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html
[2]https://www.seegull.co/
[3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873099