The marketing company Salesforce was founded in Silicon Valley in ’99, and has been hugely successful. It’s often ranked as one of the best companies in the U.S. to work for. I went to one of their conferences recently, and the whole thing was a massive status display- they’d built an arcade with Salesforce-themed video games just for that one conference, and had a live performance by Gwen Stafani, among other things.
...But the marketing industry is one massive collective action problem. It consumes a vast amount of labor and resources, distorts the market in a way that harms healthy competition, creates incentives for social media to optimize for engagement rather than quality, and develops dangerous tools for propagandists, all while producing nothing of value in aggregate. Without our massive marketing industry, we’d have to pay a subscription fee or a tax for services like Google and Facebook, but everything else would be cheaper in a way that would necessarily dwarf that cost (since the vast majority of the cost of marketing doesn’t go to useful services)- and we’d probably have a much less sensationalist media on top of that.
People in Silicon Valley are absolutely willing to grant status to people who gained wealth purely through collective action problems.
The marketing company Salesforce was founded in Silicon Valley in ’99, and has been hugely successful. It’s often ranked as one of the best companies in the U.S. to work for. I went to one of their conferences recently, and the whole thing was a massive status display- they’d built an arcade with Salesforce-themed video games just for that one conference, and had a live performance by Gwen Stafani, among other things.
...But the marketing industry is one massive collective action problem. It consumes a vast amount of labor and resources, distorts the market in a way that harms healthy competition, creates incentives for social media to optimize for engagement rather than quality, and develops dangerous tools for propagandists, all while producing nothing of value in aggregate. Without our massive marketing industry, we’d have to pay a subscription fee or a tax for services like Google and Facebook, but everything else would be cheaper in a way that would necessarily dwarf that cost (since the vast majority of the cost of marketing doesn’t go to useful services)- and we’d probably have a much less sensationalist media on top of that.
People in Silicon Valley are absolutely willing to grant status to people who gained wealth purely through collective action problems.