Day: October 27, 2013

entrepreneurs are the new labor, boo hoo

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Regarding class issues and the new dotcom era discussed in previous posts, here is a depressing chart from Forbes depicting the current state of things, at least in the tech sector:

newLabor2

The article's thesis is "entrepreneurs are the new labor" and while we needn't shed a tear for the fallen strivers who will never be the bad bosses of tomorrow, it helps to have a diagram.
Re: the New Museum's plunge into incubation madness, one might ask: where does an art museum fit in this scheme? And do artists count as "true hustlers"? OK, let's not go there.

dot com two, part two

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An earlier post on the return of the dotcom era was light on specifics; some have been added in the form of links. (See also below.) And the conclusion was fortified:

Dot Com Two is happening at the same moment as austerity and widespread social misery post-financial-crash. To paper or pixel over the disparity between VC-funded haves and non-VC-funded have nots, you have Silicon Valley types claiming that "apps" will take the place of basic governmental functions to ameliorate social conditions. Naivete the first time around is now just cynicism.

What remains is the harder work of walking the reader through some of the latest mobile-and-Facebook-based ventures in search of useful life experience. This will not be pleasant so it's being put off. You can check the links yourselves: please shoot me an email if, overall, you think you think the latest dotcom boomlet represents a positive social development.

In the meantime, here is a startups guide, a NYC startups guide (if they get the page working will read it in Firefox eventually), and a post about NYC startup fun.
The New Museum is catching the fever with some kind of incubator cube farm for artistes in what is surely the last "rambling, rough-hewn" space on Bowery (hat tip Ryz). And the line about apps taking the place of governmental functions is from a craptastic New Yorker story about Bay Area whizkids (via saranrapjs): "We now expect social entrepreneurs to solve problems that government used to solve."