I really, really hope Valve succeeds and gets this vision through. It sounds like a great company.
His insight about corporations being Soviet in nature is spot-on. Corporatism is neither capitalism nor socialism, but a hybrid system to give a well-connected elite (~0.5%) the best of both systems and the other 99.5% the worst of both worlds. Look at air travel; that's about as Soviet an experience as one gets, but the pricing is aggressively and mean-spiritedly capitalistic. Or consider suburbia as a microcosm. The rich live in places like the Hamptons and have both rural and urban amenities, while the poor live in depressed, polluted exurbs that combine the worst of city and country life.
What Valve sounds like to me is a post-scarcity capitalistic model where there's still inequality of results (as, IMO, there should be) but there isn't pain or poverty.
In our current world where there is a lot of scarcity (even though it's outmoded and artificial in the US) people work a certain way, and give up too much power, because the alternative is risk of economic misery. In a post-scarcity world with more of a safety net, people probably would "wheel their desks" to other projects, companies, and opportunities (or split their time among more than one, rather than lingering in this undiversified full-time thing) more freely. That's what we're starting to see in technology, as the demand for programmers increases and the stigma against changing jobs frequently (assuming there's upward progress and learning) goes away.
His insight about corporations being Soviet in nature is spot-on. Corporatism is neither capitalism nor socialism, but a hybrid system to give a well-connected elite (~0.5%) the best of both systems and the other 99.5% the worst of both worlds. Look at air travel; that's about as Soviet an experience as one gets, but the pricing is aggressively and mean-spiritedly capitalistic. Or consider suburbia as a microcosm. The rich live in places like the Hamptons and have both rural and urban amenities, while the poor live in depressed, polluted exurbs that combine the worst of city and country life.
What Valve sounds like to me is a post-scarcity capitalistic model where there's still inequality of results (as, IMO, there should be) but there isn't pain or poverty.
In our current world where there is a lot of scarcity (even though it's outmoded and artificial in the US) people work a certain way, and give up too much power, because the alternative is risk of economic misery. In a post-scarcity world with more of a safety net, people probably would "wheel their desks" to other projects, companies, and opportunities (or split their time among more than one, rather than lingering in this undiversified full-time thing) more freely. That's what we're starting to see in technology, as the demand for programmers increases and the stigma against changing jobs frequently (assuming there's upward progress and learning) goes away.