Silicon Valley's Victory

The announcement of the pending shutdown of an independent social media platform, Cohost, has made a bit of a buzz over the last week, especially among those interested in technology-oriented discussions. A moderately-sized project from the standpoint of software development, what it represented as an online space is much more interesting.

Cohost seems to have been envisioned as a clone of Tumblr, as it existed in 2013. As such, the main audience which drove the website were the artists, most of whom arrived at the site for an economic reason: pornography-friendly policies. This was a major sell, given most social media has slowly been “scrubbed clean”, either via outright bans or via algorithmic de-ranking, thus affecting the profits of a large number of artisans which were looking for a business hub that would be on “their side”. As always, being on someone’s “side” tends to mean being on the side of their class.

In fact, the creator-organization of the website, the “Anti Software Software Club”, was in many ways the archetype of a small capital which, while ideologically wavering, still has a lot of words to say. Their manifesto, which in its initial remarks decries “for-profit businesses” that seek to realize the potential of technology via “[enabling] a petit bourgeois to make it through their day without acknowledging another human being” (ha!), calls out the aggressive strategies of monopoly capital, which, entrenched via investments, makes use of all-encompassing internet platforms to drive their competitors out of business. It reads like every petit-bourgeois eulogy to what they see as the “current society”, which decries the misery and squalor created by capitalism, but whose only solution seems to be a return to what came before, to return to an earlier, “fairer” stage of capitalism, where one could create a successful product “by taking out a loan, paying it off, and then owning the company free and clear”. The problem for our noble inventors is not the firm, but the fact that “platform companies lure vulnerable people into working for them just to piece together a living”. Where have we seen that before?

Needless to say, ASSC was founded as a co-op. However, it could not secure enough funding to function via a good old-fashioned American loan, and instead had to rely on one of the co-founders’ friends throwing away an incredible amount of money at it, with the only collateral to defaulting being providing the platform’s source-code. They got a sweet deal. Not only were they provided funding on terms that are basically synonymous with “free money”, during their operation, they had the most extensive user-driven financial backing of any recent project in the web. There are non-profit social spaces today, both online and physically, which would kill to get the amount of money Cohost was making monthly, the few which ever manage to do so acquire funding on way more unfavorable terms.

Still, the money wasn’t enough, even with some fans who were so dedicated as to be supporting the site while on unemployment. This is not only due to what can be lightly described as fiscal irresponsibility, but due to how much capital was being distributed between the owners.

This distribution totaled to around 94 thousand US dollars a year per co-owner at the later stages of the platform. There have been a lot of arguments over whether this was a bizarre amount to spend on a failing company with no clear pathway to profitability, and we will affirm: yes. But financial imprudence doesn’t matter here, instead, what matters is that we understand that this is, in fact, a “capital salary”, not a salary based on the extraction of surplus value.

First, the allegation that this amount of capital is not capital because it would supposedly be the necessary amount to cover the cost of living in affluent tech centers is not so much a justification as an exposition of the fact out noble anti-capitalists are, themselves, the petite-bourgeois they vaguely gesture at disliking. Your relationship to the means of production in the short term says very little about your living conditions (see the amount of managers living in their stores), and even then, the capital being brought home by the co-owners is equivalent to that being brought in by healthy stakeholders in industries which are not hype-backed “drivers of innovation”. Using wording reserved for describing starvation wages to describe a 96 thousand dollar yearly salary is insulting to most of the world. To look at this as a relationship resembling wage labor merely because some wages are higher than the amount of capital being distributed is laughable.

We would also be remiss not to mention that most prestigious tech salaries, even in a bog-standard corporate relationship, are allocated towards the generation of capital. Many people working for a wage in Silicon Valley are capitalists because they can generate capital via investments which are inaccessible to the vast majority of the population, elevating their social stature via shareholding, and allowing them to live off of investments for a very long time once they lose their jobs (that is, if they’re not vested). Employing a crass leftist dichotomy that unifies everyone who works for a wage under the banner of the “working class” while ignoring the relationships of these wage-earners to capital only serves to obscure what was said 100 years ago: “The hell of capitalism is the firm, not the fact that the firm has a boss.”

By recognizing co-ownership as control over a capitalist firm rather than the notion that a small group can somehow “opt-out” of market dynamics by simply proclaiming it to be so, we can recognize ASSC for what it actually is. It is no different to a startup taking investor money and spreading it between its founders. The supposed “differences” of the project are a refactoring of previous rhetoric. Cohost was not merely a social media website, but a “community”, with users and developers being all in this together! If it has taught anything important for the future, it’s that you can repackage old tricks by oiling up the imagination of leftists: get an angel investor, talk about “ethics”, and you can explore a new bountiful market demographic. Hell, maybe you’ll even make it profitable this time. The next savvy tech leader has learned a lesson from Cohost’s failure, and it’s not a lesson about building medium-scale social media software, nor is it about moderation and community. It’s that “innovation” must be repackaged, not as a synonymous of novelty, but as one of living through past novelties: one of nostalgia.

Cohost attracted many users not because they wanted to live through a new media revolution, but because they wanted the opportunity to re-live an old one. Its main ideological pull, its “propaganda”, so to say, was a return to a small web. The most dedicated user sought to live a decade-old experience vicariously through the website, and this is why backers stuck around until the very end. Even now, they are buying merchandise as a form of financial support to facilitate a failing company’s liquidation process.

The way ASSC functioned as a company, the appeal of their platform, is tied to reaction. It is an online social force even more reactionary than the myriad of “alt-tech” that pops up today: it sees a world which is becoming more atomized, tech giants which have more and more power, and its solution is not creating a new internet for 67% of the population, but bringing back an old web which existed for the richest 30% of it. It perfectly demonstrates that the average person who complains about “late-stage capitalism” is someone who hates it because it is in the late stage. If only I could be born 20 years early, if only I could have bought a home, gotten a loan, started a business. I could’ve been the capitalist!