Doc Searls Weblog

Just sharing some stuff I said on social media recently.:

1. It’s easy to make an ad hominem argument against anything humans do.
2. If we had to avoid every enterprise with owners we don’t like, we might as well graze on berries or something.
3. Capitalism is way too broad a brush with which to paint all of business. As Peter Drucker put it, most people don’t start a business to make money. They do it to make shoes.
4. The tech world we’ve had for the last few decades is deeply weird in many ways, such as its mix of thrown-spaghetti venture investments and psychotic incentives, e.g. wanting to break things, to run the world, to replace humans with cyborgs, and to work toward exits that will doom what’s already built while breaking faith with customers, workers, and other dependents. Economic thinkers of the industrial age, from Adam Smith and Karl Marx all the way forward, could hardly have imagined any of this shit. I still haven’t encountered any economic theory that can make full sense of it. (Though I’m not saying there isn’t one.)

The prompt for the AI art is a riff on #4. Note that the AI doesn’t have a clear idea of how Adam Smith looks.