Thread by @doctorow

There's a hell of a zap that neoclassical economics puts on your head. After being brainwashed to think that markets "naturally emerge" wherever a shortage occurs, a certain kind of evil asshole will take it upon themselves to "create markets" and thus "solve the problem"

1/

Remember Reservationhop? It was founded by an SF bro who couldn't get restaurant reservations so he had a brainwave: what if I found a "business" that creates fake identities and books every table in town and then auctions them off to would-be diners?

2/

Markets in everything, right? He's just using markets to solve a distributional challenge by (checks notes) committing thousands of acts of fraud and selling something that doesn't belong to him. This guy's brain-worms are amazing:

brianmayer.com/2014/07/how-i-…

3/

Markets in everything! Monkeyparking was another SF startup that let people sell their street-parking spot - before you drove away from the meter, you used an app to auction off the right for someone else to get the spot after you.

theverge.com/2014/6/23/5836…

4/

I mean, you don't own the spot. Monkeyparking doesn't own the spot. They were gonna go global, despite the fact that this is horrifically antisocial and radioactively illegal.

5/

And they had competition! Sweetch, Parkmodo - yes, those are actual businesses that someone's brain-worms forced them to found.

Really.

6/

Which brings me to @callenqinc. They're a startup that has "solved" the problem that the @IRS
has been so consistently underfunded that no one can get through them on the phone.

Guess how they solved it. No, really, guess. You're gonna LOVE THIS.

7/

Enq has a giant phone bank that places floods the IRS help-line with simultaneous calls, so no one else can get through. Then they sell the right to take over a mature on-hold call - one that is near to being answered by a human being - to busy tax professionals.

8/

They claim they can cut your wait time - that they created with a Denial of Service attack on a federal agency - by 90%! Ransomware by another name.

callenq.com

9/

The @latimes
' David Lazarus called them "enterprising" ("find a need and fill it").

Founder and CEO Andrew Valiente told him, "When there’s a problem, there’s an opportunity."

Brain.

Worms.

latimes.com/business/story…

10/

Yeah, Valiente isn't the reason that the IRS can't fully fund a call-center. But his denial of service racket isn't an "opportunity," it's an electronic assault on a federal agency.

He's not "finding a need and filling it," he's "finding a need and exacerbating it."

11/

There's a reason the IRS hasn't solved this problem by offering gold memberships to large accounting and tax-prep firms - government agencies should not operate like airline frequent flier clubs.

12/

The fact that people raised on neoclassical econ can't tell the difference between "addressing a distributional problem" and "making it worse but also letting rich people buy their way out of it" is basically the core problem with the world today.

13/

I mean, it's great news for @raaleh
and the @trashfuturepod
crew - they're never going to run out of hilariously awful tech startups to dunk on at this rate. But for the rest of us, it's just hell on Earth.

trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com

14/

Image:
Matthew G. Bisanz (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NYC_…

CC BY-SA:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/mar…