Community Capitalism

I wanted to wrap up the year by writing about something I have been thinking about for the last few months:

Who owns the best businesses in the world?

I am trying to draw a line from inherited wealth of feudal lords to community-owned services with tokens.

The last 1,000 years can be roughly split into two 500-year chunks: feudalism & capitalism. Feudal lords controlled all of the land, farms, buildings and capital. This was passed down inside families and never distributed to the workers.

Capitalism totally changed that.
Risk, reward and ruin were separated when joint-stock companies became more common. The prerequisite for successful entrepreneurship shifted from inheritance to initiative.

People without wealth could access it and start new ventures.

Founders started founding new companies.
Equity compensation kicked off in the 1950s but it really went into overdrive when it was mixed with high-growth technology companies backed with high-risk equity bets. Silicon Valley perfected the art. Employees at many of the most successful technology companies became owners.
The SEC did two huge things this year. They raised the crowdfunding limit to $5m and introduced a proposal to allow gig workers to receive stock.

I predict that we will see competitors to Airbnb, Uber and DoorDash all take advantage of this rule.
https://t.co/ptLHUJyUbQ
What was the greatest technology investment of the 2010s that was available to the general public? Answer: The Ether Sale in 2014

Initial investors in that event who held on to $1,000+ Ether made 3,000x their money. There has never been an event like it.

https://t.co/4S7maTq6As
Every month, a bunch of new ways to earn tokens pops up: mining, staking, liquidating, curating, slashing, contributing, securing, managing.

Protocols are rewarding the participants with a share of the capital.
https://t.co/C93K1H4HD7
This year, the stock market was pushed to new heights during a pandemic while millions of people lost their jobs. The wealth gap is becoming a wealth gulf.

I do not have all the answers to this problem, but my gut tells me that we need more people to become owners of technology.
Owning public stock in the digital services is not enough. We need to own the services themselves. Big technology companies have become more powerful than nation states. The community capital of the 21st century must be distributed as far as possible.

https://t.co/b3HYOzuLIu
I hope we will look back on the digital services of today in the same way we view the feudal lords of yore. These tyrants that controlled the digital land and forced us to till their soil.

There is so much amazing stuff to be built. Community capitalism is coming.
Note: These thoughts are extremely loose and have only a smattering of historical depth. I welcome all corrections, clarifications and criticism.

I just wanted to get this idea out.

If you would like to read the full post, I just sent it out on Substack: https://t.co/3c9N31W31Y

More from Economy

Interesting thread, but I don't think ecosocialists or degrowthers are arguing that if German socialists had come to power the world would be green by now. Socialism is not automatically green. Eco-socialism is what it says - a green version of socialism - to be tested /1


The historical counterfactual also in not totally convincing. So let's assume Germany and Europe went socialist. The world economy would have evolved exactly the same way it did? 🤔 I doubt it, this is too deterministic. Examples: /2

We do not know if the transition from coal to oil would have taken place when it took place, the way it did. From Timothy Mitchell we know that oil was a fix for capitalism to bypass the labour strikes of coal workers. One would think that socialists would treat workers better /3

We also do not know if socialist governments would strong arm the Middle East the way capitalists did, starting wars to secure cheap oil, and setting up puppet governments. One would want to think that Rosa Luxembourg would not go down that path..../4

We also do not know if they would have continued colonial unequal exchange, extracting raw materials as cheap as possible from the rest of the world. Without cheap oil and cheap materials, it is anyone's guess if GDP and CO2 would be where it is now. /5

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