The kings are the VC billionaire set, convinced of their divine right to rule and their mastery of all the world. The things they know are the only things worth knowing, and their primacy is the deserved, natural and inevitable result of a well-ordered world, and in no way connected to luck, inheritance, regulatory arbitrage or financial manipulation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The barons are the \u201cfounder\u201d class, who get their money from the VC kings and thus give a share of ownership in their lands. In return, they get the resources to pursue their own goals, with the tacit promise that they too will become as kings if they succeed\u2026assuming they aren\u2019t just bought out or plagiarized out of existence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Below them are their vassals – the full stack developers, 10x engineers and the \u201cthought leaders\u201d who drive the serfs to produce the value that can go back up the line. They\u2019re kept going with the belief that somehow they can become founders and ascend to the ranks of the most high\u2026eventually. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And at the bottom are the serfs – not only the coders and the infrastructure of sysadmins, operators and back office staff that support them, but the actual drivers, delivery runners, TaskRabbits, content screeners and Mechanical Turks who actually do<\/em> the last mile interface that makes the thing go – just. Thanks to regulatory arbitrage and loopholes, they\u2019re not employees, they have no stake, they get none of the protections labor fought for a century to obtain. Because that would be expensive<\/em>, and insufficiently agile and future-facing, and also woke, so hustle harder!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which is kind of the point – this<\/em> is the natural end stage of \u201cbigotry protecting wealth.\u201d It\u2019s not democracy, or even much of a republic, it\u2019s the Morlocks stuck in place and distracted by the Eloi telling them who to blame (not the Eloi, that\u2019s for sure). It\u2019s the constant drumbeat that the poor person across the border might undercut your job if you don\u2019t take a 5% pay cut, and that\u2019s<\/em> why you\u2019re bad off – not because 50% of the national wealth is held by eight people, or because health care costs double what it does anywhere else, or because you have to play against the pros to have retirement money (or else cut them in for a percentage and hope they\u2019re actually good with it and honest to you). <\/p>\n\n\n\n And they will keep getting away with it as long as Ed Earl Brown hates colored people more than he hates billionaires, even as the billionaires wring him dry day by day. I don\u2019t have an answer, because there isn\u2019t one. We just have to protect our loved ones and hope that maybe bird flu will wipe out enough of the other side\u2019s voters to give us a chance someday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The kings are the VC billionaire set, convinced of their divine right to rule and their mastery of all the world. The things they know are the only things worth knowing, and their primacy is the deserved, natural and inevitable result of a well-ordered world, and in no way connected to luck, inheritance, regulatory arbitrage … <\/p>\n