Expanded shower-thought incoming…
For quite a few years now, society has been moving in the wrong direction, as far as I’m mostly concerned. I’ve tried to outline some technical areas where I think things could be better, but there’s another facet to this. And that’s the way that money and power is being concentrated at the top of society, with very few people having control of the vast majority of resources available. And this will continue unabated unless something is done about it.
Now, I am definitely not saying that capitalism is bad. It’s been the best tool anyone has come up with to create wealth – potentially for all in society. Communism simply doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. But in the same way that our current democratic systems may not be perfect but are the best we can come up with and execute, that was how capitalism was. But with the advent of the Internet, and the ability for a person to have more wealth than any of the countries in the world outside the top 60 cannot be a good thing.
And no, this isn’t simple jealousy. Aside from anything else, all of the people at the heads of these businesses actually seem to be unhappy and angry – thin skinned and unable to take criticism in many cases (Zuckerberg , Trump and Musk spring instantly to mind), like spoiled children. Kim Jong-Un with better haircuts. But life should be getting better for everyone, not just the privileged few. Instead, you have Musk, via DOGE, taking money that is not his and ensuring it doesn’t get to the poorest people in the world that USAid was helping. And celebrating it. Is this really a role model for anyone, let alone an entire society? I don’t think so, and I think you’d have a hard time defending it.
And it turns out there is a term for this. Techno-Feudalism. In essence, capitalism is mutating from making profit to extracting rent. Platforms like Apple, Amazon, Facebook/Meta, and Google charge access fees or take commissions on what users or developers generate via their ecosystems. They act like medieval fiefdoms. You upload content or build apps, and they extract value—much like landlords collecting ground rent—without direct labor cost – and in many cases without any added value or safeguards, etc. We’ve all seen the result of this, and all of the platforms at some point just do a hand-wavey gesture and say something along the lines of “it’s not our problem to police – we have policies in place but it’s impossible to work at the scale we do and examine everything”. On top of that, the people who do end up examining the worst offences on the platform end up seeing incredibly extreme content and suffer the full toll of having experienced these things.
In addition, there is an entire breed of industries which have popped up – now often known as being run by “Tech Bros” who have come up with ways to ‘disrupt’ or ‘revolutionise’ a given market. A quick list would be AirBnB, Uber, Uber Eats, Amazon and Spotify, Tesla and SpaceX.
There are plenty of people who think these are all great businesses and good to use. But are they?
Amazon – where everyone buys everything now, pretty much. It is immensely profitable. So much so, that Jeff Bezos has his own space program, just like Elon Musk does. That is an incredible amount of wealth to have. Bezos is ‘worth’ $243BN. Blue Origin employs 11000 people, and does meaningful work in the space industry. But it’s a private company. Owned by Bezos. But back to Amazon. If you spend any time looking, you can find areas where it treats its employees terribly. There are countless stories of abuse of staff, setting unrealistic deadlines and work schedules, forcing demeaning behaviour on those people. And if they don’t do as they’re told, they’ll be fired, because they know someone else needs that job as much as they do. There are literally countless examples to be found in every area you can think of – not just the people who are delivering packages, but AWS (Amazon’s cloud which I think is the most profitable arm of Amazon) programmers are under just as much pressure and get ousted with regularity. Amazon actively campaigns against their staff having union representation. This, to me, looks like all he needs is a castle and some knights. Might be why he took over Venice for his wedding – giving it a bit of that medieval vibe at the low low cost of just $20 million or so.
Tesla – Definitely a disruptive influence on the car industry, and in terms of the changes that it has led to in the adoption of Electric Vehicles has done absolutely the right thing for… well… probably the entire planet. At one point Musk said it wouldn’t matter if Tesla failed once EVs had started mass adoption. A very noble statement, and not one that you could imagine 2025 Elon saying…. But there are two big issues for Tesla, IMO. Firstly, Musk is one of the worst people you can imagine to work for. He is capricious and difficult, opinionated and often wrong. The clues were there all along – remember his treatment of the ‘pedo guy’ cave rescuer? The guy who knew what he was doing, and criticised Musk’s idea of a carbon-fibre ‘torpedo’ to get the kids out with? Yes… the one where he has absolutely no domain knowledge whatsoever, comes up with a pie-in-the-sky-idea, and when someone pushes back on it, ends up in a court case over a 14-year old’s insult. And if you’re rich, you can get away with this as you’ll have better lawyers than whoever you’re up against. Simple as that.
When a meeting didn’t go as he planned, he fired the entire supercharger team. All 500 of them.
Also, an odd aside. Changing his title to “Techno-King” is oddly close to the terms used around Techno-Feudalism, so I’d be pretty sure he’d be aware of the concept – which he made references to when acquiring twitter and the changes made there.
Workers at Tesla have been treated badly throughout its history. And Musk relies on the fragility of employment in all his companies to keep people in line. And then comes up with something along the lines of “no-one works harder than me at this” and that people shouldn’t be doing the job they are doing if they’re not willing to sleep in the factory or whatever other crazy thing he’s decided on. Totally forgetting of course that they are on a salary… and he’s making millions. And it’s not just bullying or rights, Tesla is not working to the correct safety standards for workers – even today.
Disruptive? Yes. Abusive? Definitely. But many workers will have no other option but to keep their heads down to keep their jobs. An electrician died – which again points at procedures not being in place that should do, and another died of hyperthermia during the build of the site.
SpaceX – again, looking on the face of it – absolutely disruptive in terms of the space launch industry. The ability of the Falcon 9 to land the first stage (something which in the 90s was described as ‘impossible’) and then be re-used is an incredible engineering achievement which has changed the cost of access to space. If you have never seen the landing of two boosters from a Falcon Heavy launch – which land next to each other when being used in recoverable mode – it really looks to be from a science fiction film if you’ve never seen it. But this is a regular occurrence, and fits with the SpaceX plan to be able to offer internet from space – Starlink – anywhere on the planet. It simply isn’t cost-effective if you have the extra cost of building an entirely new rocket and throwing it away for each launch of 50 satellites. While there are arguments to be had over how beneficial this is overall (depending, of course, on what is being put into space), the economics are unarguable. This is revolutionary, and looks like something from science fiction – even after 500+ successful landings.
The next project – Starship – is an order of magnitude more disruptive again. It is huge if you haven’t seen it, but aims to make the second stage re-usable as well – something which has truly become the ‘holy grail’ of rocket engineering. There are now plenty of other companies – large and small – who are looking to be able to do this with rockets large and small. Watch a launch video – here with the first stage being caught by the launch tower. And then bear in mind that what you’re seeing is a cylinder that is 9 metres across and the height is 71 metres – like the Grand Canyon it’s difficult to take that in without something for scale, and there’s not a lot in the video that allows that to happen. But it is the largest, most powerful rocket ever built. It is awe-inspiring that something that is as huge as this can get into space, and even more so that it can be landed and caught. Solely looking at the engineering and technical size, it’s difficult not to be completely blown away.
But once again, the human cost of this is being forgotten. Take a read of this article. Injuries and deaths. There is a summary at the bottom of this post, because I think nearly everyone is blind to this because of the incredible progress which is being made, and I was one of those people. The ‘move fast and break things’ mentality, and ‘success at all costs’, means safety is being compromised, and it’s not Elon Musk who is paying the ultimate price, despite his claims of such sacrifices that he makes.
Now, I could go on to itemise all the things that the rest of the companies here do to take advantage of their workers.
Uber. Uber Eats. Deliveroo. Just Eat. Amazon. SpaceX. Tesla. All names everyone would know.
The ‘kings’ you’ll have heard of? Who literally don’t care whether their workers suffer or even die (it has to be said this allegation cannot be aimed at Meta, but only because they don’t create anything physical). But it does apply to their customers. Search ‘facebook myanmar deaths’ and be prepared to read some harrowing stories.
Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg.
The kings who are nearly as powerful and rich, but aren’t generally known, because they don’t have or need a high media profile?
Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, Larry Ellison. All in the top 10 richest people in the world. And all of them are richer than entire countries in terms of their wealth they have accumulated. Suprised by this? I was. Here’s a quick table of ‘which country this person could buy with all their wealth’. Yes, I know this isn’t a practical thing to actually happen, but it is the only way to think of just how unbelievably wealthy these people are, and how they can out-compete governments – not just individuals or companies or even conglomorates. And you’d think “yeah, but these are gonna be small places that no-one has heard of other than in some novelty story in the news or something like that.”. Nope. Ethiopia is the 63rd richest country in the world.
| Person | Company | Net Wealth (BN) | Country |
| Elon Musk | Tesla, SpaceX | $342 | Ethiopia |
| Mark Zuckerberg | Meta | $216 | Costa Rica |
| Jeff Bezos | Amazon | $215 | Oman |
| Larry Ellison | Oracle | $192 | Slovenia |
| Bernard Arnault | LVMH | $178 | Tunisia |
| Warren Buffett | Berkshire Hathaway | $154 | Panama |
| Larry Page | $144 | Latvia | |
| Sergey Brin | $138 | Iceland | |
| Armancio Ortega | Inditex, Zara | $124 | Bahrain |
| Steve Ballmer | Microsoft | $118 | Ghana |
I think that’s the only way I’ve found to have any idea of the vast amount of wealth these people have accumulated. And for the record, some of these countries are the ‘next one down’ because I’ve assumed they all go richest first and buy the biggest one, so some are ‘out of stock’ – I’d imagine that the sentence, “you can’t have that, it’s not available” isn’t one any of these people have heard in a while.
Oh, and if they all decided to get together…. they could buy Austria. Austria! AUSTRIA!!!!!!!
What could you and your 9 best friends buy if you put your net worth – once mortgage paid off etc was all taken into account? I’m thinking the scale would be considerably less.
And I know there is always a balance to be struck between profit and how workers are treated. Work has always been more precarious in the US than in the UK – you can literally be fired off the bat in many situations in the US where that simply couldn’t happen in the UK. Full disclosure here, I’m in the Musicians’ Union. And when I had the worst employment week ever (two jobs, just gone), they were in my corner to ensure I got what I should have had all along in terms of payment as an employee (which I had been but both schools claimed otherwise – despite me having a contract on paper!) – They felt they could just bulldoze me after I had meetings with them. The MU stepped in, and I was paid what I was due – legally and fairly. And all of this is denied to the workers of all of these companies because they are actively being intimitated to not join or create unions. This is part of the whole techno-feudalism movement, and it’s working for them. Because they now control the game. They can out-compete not only companies, but governments. They can buy influence for what is pennies to them, and gain millions which turn into millions because they earth wealth, out-wit tax codes, claim they are creating wealth for everyone, and know there is no way they can lose now.
This is why it is time for a global wealth tax. The poor billionaires (and multi-millionaires) will complain that it will leave them destitute. It’s simply not the case. The rates being asked are not punitive, but would transform the way the world works, particularly for the very poorest. And if you’re reading this, you are nowhere near the poorest on the planet, for the record, even if you do live in difficult circumstances, which I am definitely not playing down. There needs to be a global political will to carry this out, and there are plenty of people who think it is a good idea who are much more inteliigent and educated about this than I am. Gary’s ecomonics is correct on this. It’s the only way we have any chance of being able to keep a civil society, and what the billionaires are all forgetting is that at some point they will be fighing each other rather that us, because we won’t have anything left for them to take.
The funny thing is? This used to happen under islamic law. They had this right, IMO. I don’t know if it really is still implemented, but I do find it interesting that it’s not a new idea. Had it been in place since its invention and implemented everywhere (in a secular way, for those societies who are not Islamic), the world would be a better place. All the studies ever done show that more equitable societies are happier, better ones. Not just for those at the ‘bottom’, but those at the top as well.
As I said at the top, I don’t have a problem with people earning more money than I do. I don’t have a problem with people doing better than me. And I don’t begrudge people the fruits of their work. You should profit if you make a good product, or contribute to society. But who adds more to society? The nurse who works through the night to ensure her patients are well looked after and live better, happier lives? Or the guy who thinks he’s the world’s greatest engineer ever, but still can’t get the panel gaps right on a premium car and makes flamethrowers? Whose business is built on a P/E ratio whose hype means it would take 400 years to get your initial investment back? Who’s really doing more for society.
Yes, I’ll get back to man baby later if I have the energy. Pet peeve. But as ever, you don’t have to read it!
But if you have been… thank you. And now…. for a summary of how not to run a company when you care about worker safety:
Summary of Reuters Article – Here is a chatgpt summary of the article. I think just reading this is enough to get the idea (and I know all about LLM inaccuracies, but this is not an hallucination):
Key Findings from Reuters
- At least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries since 2014
- Included crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds—and one worker fatality. forum.nasaspaceflight.com+13Reuters+13ishn.com+13
- One death in 2014—Lonnie LeBlanc
- A former Marine, LeBlanc died after being blown from a trailer hauling foam insulation at SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas, facility. An OSHA investigation cited significant safety oversights. Reuters+1LinkedIn+1
- Injury severity and spread
- High injury rates year after year
- In 2022, Brownsville (Texas) saw ~4.8 injuries per 100 workers—six times the industry average (~0.8). The rate increased to 5.9 in 2023, placing SpaceX well above peers. en.wikipedia.org+2Reuters+2ishn.com+2
- Rushed culture, weak safety systems
- Employees describe a chaotic environment where aggressive deadlines meant skipping basic safety precautions. Undertrained, fatigued staff were often told safety was up to them. en.wikipedia.org+2LinkedIn+2Reuters+2Reuters+1LinkedIn+1
- Leadership’s role
- Elon Musk reportedly discouraged high-visibility safety gear and sometimes demonstrated unsafe practices—like playing with a flamethrower on site—reinforcing a culture that deprioritized safety. Business Insider+14Reuters+14Reuters+14LinkedIn
