WeWork Founder Adam Neumann’s New Start-Up Is Backed By Andreessen Horowitz – The New York Times

Mr. Neumann, who has purchased more than 3,000 apartment units in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta and Nashville, aims to rethink the rental housing market by creating a branded product with consistent service and community features. Flow will own and operate the properties Mr. Neumann had bought and also offer its services to new developments and other third parties. Exact details of the business plan could not be learned.

Source: WeWork Founder Adam Neumann’s New Start-Up Is Backed By Andreessen Horowitz – The New York Times

“In the future, you’ll own nothing, and be happy.”

The middle class was born out of the post-war boom, and the iconic thing that defined the middle class was home ownership. Those times are simply gone now, as any economic chart can show. The housing market is experiencing a huge bubble, and what’s left of affordable housing is being gobbled up by private equity and “startup” monopoly power plays like this one. If the US were run by elected representatives, there might be a change to put a stop to this. But it’s not, any more. It’s being run by the very companies who want to own everything, and rent it back to us.

In the very near future, there will no longer be a “middle” class. Not as a category. Of course, there will be people who fit the description, but it won’t be some broad strata like it has been. There will only be people who own capital, and those that labor in it and for it. I suppose it’s just Capitalism, fully-formed, with a capital “C.” It’s weird, but the US is reinventing feudalism, right under the nose of the Constitution. The oligarch billionaires are the new monarchy, the government does whatever they tell them to do.

jwz: ENGAGEMENT!

Every time we post to our Facebook account, it immediately gets 2-5 one-word comments from random Indian dudes with locked accounts that are years old and have thousands of friends:

Source: jwz: ENGAGEMENT!

There’s never post about Facebook on “Hacker” “News” where the comment thread isn’t filled with people saying, “I hate it too, but what do you want me to do? Never know anything that’s going on around me? There’s literally no other option.” Even JWZ himself, who abhors Facebook, still uses the platform to promote is nightclub in San Francisco. That’s how deeply ingrained the service has become to society, and how irreplaceable it is to local businesses.

This is a pitch-perfect example of what I was talking about in my previous post. This irreplaceability is precisely what all tech investment is gunning for: total control of a channel. Eliminating all competitors in the space, and establishing a monopoly. If you want to advertise some local social event, at this point, Facebook is your de facto only choice.

Right now, Uber seems like a good idea. Door Dash seems pretty nifty. WeWork sounds great. But make no mistake, once those platforms have removed all the competition in their spaces, their services will start to experience the same sort of corruption that is being described here. Scammers will flourish, as they focus their efforts. All of these services will come to feel like shopping at Amazon, where you used to be able to trust the reviews and delivery times, and now it’s just a roll of the dice on both.