Silicon Valley was going to disrupt capitalism. Now it’s just enhancing it
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/07/silicon-valley-health-finance
This peaceful – not adversarial – coexistence of old and new in the pharmaceutical industry describes a tacit compromise that might soon emerge elsewhere, challenging the renegade credentials of the technology firms. After all, Silicon Valley built its legitimacy by claiming to lead a frontal attack on the old, crony capitalism, dominated by moribund firms that have become too complacent to be able to innovate and benefit their customers. Such firms were to be disrupted, and a new, leaner kind of capitalism would be all about serving the consumer – and at rates that were heavily subsidised by the collection of personal data.
In fact, few have found clever ways to monetise that data – especially as Google and Facebook have all but divided the online advertising market, that ultimate data cemetery, between themselves. From early on, it was obvious that wasting all that data on advertising was a move necessitated by desperation rather than astuteness. By and large, this obsession with advertising stemmed from the inability of the tech firms to make a dent in markets such as energy, food, agriculture or insurance, which tend to be far more complicated than advertising and entail higher entry costs.