Cory Doctorow

And meanwhile, I think you mentioned acquihires for people who aren't unfortunate enough to be steeped in the business of Silicon Valley.

An acquihire is when a company is purchased not for the product it makes, but because the team who made it have proved they can make a product.

And then they shut down the product and they hire the team.

And acquihires are, I think, a leading indicator of pathology in tech and investment.

An acquihire is basically a post-grad project where venture capitalists sink some money into you pretending that you're going to make a product.

It's a science fair demo.

in the hopes that the company will buy you and in lieu of a hiring bonus will give you stock and in lieu of a finder's fee will give them stock.

But no one's trying to actually capitalize a product or a business.

I think anytime you see a preponderance of acquihires in your economy, that should tell you that you need to sit down and figure out how to rejigger the incentives because your economy is sick.

Yeah, I mean, we could talk about the other tech workers, right?

The majority of tech workers drive for Uber or for Amazon or work in a warehouse.

And they certainly don't get like free kombucha and massages and a surgeon who'll freeze their eggs so they can work through their fertile years.

They're in a factory in China with suicide nets around it.

But

An example that kind of pulls this all together, how you get monopoly, regulatory capture, the degradation of labor with technology that relies on blocks and interoperability.

I think we could do no better than to talk about nurses.

And I'm going to be making reference here to the work of Veena Dubal.

She's a legal scholar who coined a very important term, algorithmic wage discrimination.

In America, hospitals preferentially hire nurses through apps, and they do so as contractors.

So hiring contractors means that you can avoid the unionization of nurses.