I wonder if the people who started AirBnB sat around...

Catherynne M. Valente's posts Post Back to profile

I wonder if the people who started AirBnB sat around thinking:

“If we do this thing right, we’ll destroy countless neighborhoods worldwide, annihilating the very concept of owning a home, with all the prosperity & stability that once offered, for generations! Maybe forever! Fingers crossed, guys!”

Like 12 November at 14:56 | Open on wandering.shop

19 comments

Rachel Rawlings

@Catvalente Maybe not in year 0, but by year 3 that was definitely their business model.

12 November at 14:58 | Open on mastodon.social

MylesRyden

@Catvalente

Funny how the motto of the TechBros is "Move fast and break things," and then people are all confused as to how we are surrounded by broken things so quickly.

12 November at 14:59 | Open on social.vivaldi.net

Thiago Ferrer Morini

@MylesRyden @Catvalente Finishing with "Move fast and break people".

12 November at 15:00 | Open on journa.host

MaybeMyMonkeys

@MylesRyden @Catvalente TechBros twisted it to suit them. The correct phrase is “fail fast, fail cheap”, which means figure out what doesn’t work as soon as possible so you don’t waste time and money. It doesn’t mean let the user be the Guinea pig.

12 November at 15:37 | Open on mastodon.social

MylesRyden

@MaybeMyMonkeys @Catvalente

Obviously, this makes much more sense.

12 November at 16:44 | Open on social.vivaldi.net

Philippa Cowderoy

@Catvalente "We might even disrupt homeownership!" is how they woulda thunk it, but... yeah, sounds about right tbh

12 November at 14:59 | Open on mendeddrum.org

Matthew Murray 🦇

@Catvalente

Drawing of man in tattered business suit sitting next to fire facing three other people in tattered clothing. In the background is the implication of destroyed buildings.
Text: "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."

12 November at 15:03 | Open on glammr.us

aburka 🫣

@Catvalente probably not but the VCs who bought them certainly did

12 November at 15:04 | Open on hachyderm.io

Megs O’Brien

@Catvalente I think you’re giving start-up tech bros far too much credit for independent thought. They’re just dreaming of dollar signs and nothing else.

12 November at 15:10 | Open on wandering.shop

CJ Paloma ...again

@megsobrien @Catvalente which is a huge part of the problem.

When confronted by the reality of the impacts of their actions…they deflect in an impressive number of ways: deny, minimize, demonize, refute, offer whatabouts and both sides (etc), until they finally shrug and say "okay, well, I got mine"

12 November at 15:35 | Open on mas.to

Orz

@megsobrien @Catvalente Also, ’how can we become middlemen?’

12 November at 15:49 | Open on kamu.social

Mg. Moss

@megsobrien @Catvalente Exactly—there is no long-term thought in these ventures, just a quick cash grab, a “novel” way to extract money that was previously tied up. Even the ones whose pitch is long term (Mars, cryogenics, etc.) are doing a short term cash grab with no actual care for what happens next.

12 November at 16:01 | Open on beige.party

Caddi

@Catvalente What they are doing to the rental market round here (a small coastal town that relies on tourism) is absolutely frightful.

12 November at 15:49 | Open on wandering.shop

Syn-ACK, Pentagenerian :facepalm:

@Catvalente I'm betting that they didn't even give it a single thought, initially. Their goal was just to see if they could do it and whether or not it would make them the money that they coveted. They likely operated under the standard delusion that most tech companies have, which is that their way of seeing a particular piece of technology is the "best", most "common sense" way and that everyone has the same view of how beneficial it can be.

And then once the social side-effects of their careless "disruption" became known and increasingly problematic, they just hand-wave it all away as being a social problem that wasn't the fault of their "agnostic" technology because "technology shouldn't be political" so they can enjoy their profits without feeling guilty.

I'd say that very, very few software companies even think about, much less care about, the long-term "non-technical" side-effects that result from the growth of their product or service because they got what they wanted out of it.

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12 November at 16:34 | Open on corteximplant.com

chx

@Catvalente I am quite sure the investors of Uber deliberately turned it into a vehicle (ahem) to dismantle the protections organized labors worked so hard for 100+ years. Not sure about airbnb.