Reflecting on Kyla Scanlon's recent Substack on our transition from a Creation Economy to a Zero-Sum Economy and its relation to the "Where's My Flying Car?" question (i.e. we thought we would get flying cars and we ended up with Twitter), it occurred to me that part of the problem may be at least in a thought experiment addressable via taxation.
Ben and David from the Acquired podcast have really driven home in my mind that software is in many ways the greatest business of all time because it allows for infinite reproducibility of the product at zero cost. Unlike any physical thing, software can be just spun up endlessly and sold again and again, so long as the IP is protected. Which has given rise to the cancer on the body politic that is the world-dominating tech broligarchy of today and a society with pretty bad inequality (even if there are, as I have written recently on my Substack), lots of affluent people.
So to control the cancer why not just tax companies whose products are software differently, at higher rates? I know there are a bajillion reasons in fact that we don't, and this blog is not the forum in which I allocate enough time to think them through, but it would be a fruitful exercise to think them through one by one. Others likely have.
It occurs to me after the fact that taxing software profits (or social network profits, or....) might be a way to offer users the long sought-after way of sharing in the monetized value of their attention, which has long been expropriated exclusively by the platform providers themselves. Yes the providers' shareholders have also benefited, but shareholding is a luxury which benefits the top two (and disproportionately the top one) income quintiles while largely leaving out the other three, who just see their monetized attention sucked out of them by the online vampires.
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