Google is a surveillance capitalist. It is a factory farm that extracts from and exploits people. Why do you want to create a “Google of Europe?” Why do you want Europe to capitulate to Silicon Valley’s digital imperialism and become its taxpayer-paid R&D department? (1/N)https://twitter.com/AchimMuellers/status/1000989525391413248 …
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Europe must stop investing in startups; especially with taxpayer money. Startups are a Silicon Valley brand. They’re disposable businesses designed to either fail fast or grow exponentially (like cancer) and exit (be sold) to other surveillance capitalists or to the public (IPO)
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Startups are the long-tail of surveillance capitalism that the monster eats to sustain itself. If unsuccessful, the EU taxpayer foots the bill. If successful, they are snatched up by the Googles and Facebooks. EU becomes Silicon Valley’s taxpayer-supported free R&D department.
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We can do so much better in the EU if we have a bit of imagination and the courage to look beyond the toxic Silicon Valley model of technology. Instead of startups, we should be funding ethical technology and sustainable businesses: let’s call them stayups.
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We should take what works from the Silicon Valley model and leave the toxic funding and business model. What works? Funding small organisations that compete with each other and work iteratively. What doesn’t? An incentive model based on surveillance-based growth and exits.
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So let’s fund businesses that, if successful, cannot be sold. We must move beyond VC/equity capital and remove exits from the equation. Let’s only fund business models that are ethical (see https://ind.ie/ethical-design ).
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Replying to @aral
How can you make sure that you are not simply funding businesses that are specializing on permanent rent-seeking? Did you really think through all the incentives? Do you have very good reasons to think your model would have given us a better Google?
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The European answer to Google is basically Toll Collect. Europe’s vision of a goverment funded institutionalized but profit generating digital industry might become an online version of BER with Leistungsschutzrecht.
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The reason why the VC model was so successful is that it incentivizes making actual users happy as quickly and economically as possible, while encouraging disruption of existing, worse solutions. (Often at the expense of sustainability.)
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