• NekoKoneko@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        If I create an SAT analogy from that quote and the other Matrix quote that inspired the vulture capital firm Bending Spoons, I have a great idea for a company.

        We can call it Biting Onions. And instead of using capitalistic principles to enshittify, it will subvert capitalistic principles to block enshittification.

        For example:

        • Buy distressed patent assets or R&D explicitly to dedicate them to the public domain.
        • Counterbid evil investors for tools or platforms to avoid extreme harm from other bidders (e.g., imagine a counterbid for Twitter).
        • Seed-fund unions in underleveraged, corporate wage-theft-common industries, requiring only that the new unions to contribute parts of their dues back to the fund to accelerate more seed-funding of unions.
        • Venture capital tech startups with explicit caps on executive pay and barriers on anti-human/customer/citizen conduct (e.g., a lowest-to-highest-paid-employee metric or prohibiting SaaS/subscription fee business models baked into contractual funding requirements).

        Some of this requires altruism and is likely money-losing (I mean, Twitter was never worth what Musk paid for it, unless you factor in the “value” to an evil sociopath), but like Valve, I think companies that have a set mission and that reach stability would actually have competitive advantages. After all, “suck blood until host dies” is a model that is self-sabotaging in the end.

        • satanmat@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          You magnificent bastard!

          I’m in. When’s the IPO; or can I get in during the alpha funding round?

          • NekoKoneko@lemmy.world
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            4 hours ago

            Step 1: Be a billionaire.

            But I kid, if I was a more effectual person I could essentially recreate Kickstarter to crowdsource this with little initial investment.