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This is what in the tech-managerial world is usually called the “commoditize your complement” strategy. The farmers in this case have been reduced to interchangeable learning-loop probes.
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If you only learn one technical term from labor economics, make it "chickenization" - @CLeonardNews's term for the way that the Big Three poultry processors have structured the chicken-farming industry (I learned it from @ZephyrTeachout). pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/bre 1/
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I think Cory has the causality backwards in this case. Monopoly is the effect, not the cause. If you focus relentlessly on cost and efficiency, the advantage goes to a centralized learner aggregating all the data and deciding how to run the DoE (design of experiments) matrix.
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Having the farmers compete by (for example) exiting the contract and cooperating by swapping notes etc. will not learn as fast, or as much, even ignoring the legal hurdles to forming a rebel alliance (I imagine they might be in a capex debt trap?)
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I think you're missing one forest for the other. Competition may inevitably trend towards monopoly, but the legal control of information prevents the development of any collective bargaining or action that might resist optimal exploitation. That's what this is about.
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Collective bargaining is a red herring and a mark of reactionary labor politics that assumes interchangeable people as a given. Thar be regressive backsliding.
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I don't understand this comment unless you have an effective alternative to present. The fungibility of labour — in this case the fungibility of suppliers — is the entire point of the scheme. The suppliers have been constructed to be fungible. What alternative do they have?
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Go indie and build your own farm to table indie distribution channel for a premium product or leave the industry. Monopoly (monopsony rather) dynamics are limited to the low-cost leader market segment. You don’t have to plat there.
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Well, I think the problem is more categorical than that. It's a response to an individual that neither eliminates nor solves a collective problem. "Differentiate yourself from the others, be exceptional, and succeed, albeit it's not easy" is not really any answer at all.
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Well, but I was more pointing out how much effort had gone into preventing such a thing. A credible threat of unacceptable harm to productivity is probably the only leverage they have if they want to change their relationship to the monosopy into something other than thralldom.