I'm not so sure. There's no point be rich if your money has no economy. There's no point being powerful in an environment where you can't wield it.
Both require a middle class. While Lanier paints a bleak picture at times of a probable mechanism and outcome, there are plenty of counter examples of capitalism seeking equilibrium while also ensuring stable wealth disparity.
I'm in the "not sure" camp, and though things can be scary, it sure is interesting.
Unfortunately, I think you only need to look at the rest of the world, outside of Europe and the Americas (and parts of Asia), to see how a "typical" society gets structured without a prosperous "middle class." That, and look at history on a broader scale (centuries, not decades) and see that the era we're in now is a historical aberration and it's already returning to norm.
The post-WWII structure of things in the west -- with a fairly well-off professional tier in the working class and "petit bourgeois" small business tier that is politically moderate -- has been in decline since the 70s. After the collapse of the USSR, the decline of organized labour, and other factors, there has been less pressure/thread on large capital to make the necessary welfare-state accommodations.
Things have started to look more like what is the actual historical norm: a powerful land/factory/resource owning minority and a largely impoverished (or at least very vulnerable) working class underneath and a huge security apparatus built around maintaining that order.
As in all things in the last 100 years, the United States is at the vanguard of this.
That's fair, and I'd prefer it not be fact. I just think there's a constant struggle to stop it (power concentration) from becoming reality, and requires people to intervene in the political process to alter that trajectory.
I think there's value in seeing the post-WWII structure of things as being the result of struggle, not automatically intrinsic to capitalism itself.
I agree. The point of my original point a good few levels up was that we have an active choice in the intervention of this tendency, so we can build a more humanist future where we all reap the benefits.
Both require a middle class. While Lanier paints a bleak picture at times of a probable mechanism and outcome, there are plenty of counter examples of capitalism seeking equilibrium while also ensuring stable wealth disparity.
I'm in the "not sure" camp, and though things can be scary, it sure is interesting.