Kumar Ayush

I do not have to download an app from an app store. You can share it with me with the aid of other apps that exist to facilitate this. I can download the app from a website. Computer programs or software have an ability to be identically and cheaply reproducible on other computers. And yet, the statement about getting an app from anywhere is not trivially true. Apple has traditionally gated that all app downloads go via their store, and in return they will provide policing for apps hosted on the store. The policing is truly valuable. If you download software from untrustworthy websites, you are the city of Troy. But as policing always is, it enforces the class system of the actor. Smartphone manufacturers are a capitalist enterprise, so they charge the app developers a cut of the money the developers make via their app store. If these were idealist enterprises, they would disallow apps that go against the ideal.

If you disagree with the policing, you can avoid it, right? Given the fundamental nature of software, who is to stop you from sharing your app with others on the network. As it turns out, the manufacturers. They control the software the phone ships with, and can exert some degree of control over what you run on it. And these controls can be breached. The tools to breach these controls can be shared as easily as the software you wanted to run in the first place.

If the sole goal of policing were to protect the consumers, where do you draw the line for consumers who want to willingly take the risk. This is a classic law and order dilemma and not specific to software. But anyway, technology companies decided that they will simply void your warranty and service contracts if you display willingness to take risks outside their defined terms of service. This goes well to an extent, say, you lost your phone charger, a third party one will work. Some manufacturers tried their own ports but there are always adapters and now, more state policy to support interoperability. How about if you broke a part deep inside the computer (or phone) which only the manufacturer can replace, due to availability, knowledge or patent reasons. You go crying back to mama. There is a tussle between innovation and policy here, but the fundamental problem is that while software is easy and cheap to reproduce, phones are not.

Follow me through another generalisation please, and you discover the same problem with farming. Seeds are easy and cheap to reproduce, relatively. But fertile land and water are scarce resources. There are entire theories of political science which argue that the fundamental point of any state is fair allocation of scarce resources. And then you also have the responsibility to grow, maintain or discover new scarce resources altogether. While all systems of government argue their own right to existence, we need to focus on the sublime. Some would argue that private ownership of scarce resources incentivises innovation to discover more of them. But where is the tail of the private ownership dragon? In a world of publicly owned companies and our pension funds invested in them, you can have non-government owned enterprises, but less and less private enterprises. Is it good to have market based allocation of the scarce resources then, even if the state owns them? Deng Xiaoping would like to agree with you.

With every technological progress that humanity has made, there seem to be hierarchical layers of abstraction. Some layers (higher) control a scarce input which enables more reproducible outputs on other layers (lower). And isn't this the core Marxist idea? That while we ascribe a lower economic value to the lower layers, the hierarchy collapses without it. "The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces." I believe social hierarchies are inevitable because in an economic value chain, few inputs will always be more scarce than the other. The steepness of the pyramid is a function of the specific value chain, hence local to a point in history and an industry. The structure evolves through innovation, political projects and sometimes a structure is eaten by another.

The industrial revolution in Europe gave rise to Marx, because it steepened the class hierarchy to the point of an imbalance. And I predict that we will see a rise in that emotion because information technology steepens the hierarchy yet again. And I have to be clear that artificial intelligence, and more specifically GPTs, are an unpredictable force, and I am optimistic that they are more of a balancing force. When I first learnt to write software 20 years ago, it was a liberating experience. I could create my own websites, my own applications, and so on. Eventually, we all settled on a few applications to do most things, because of an abundance of features and network effects. Despite my general scorn for Google, it is quite difficult to not use Gmail. Sure, I can always use another email client but Gmail does have more features. It is 99% very good, and 1% very annoying. AI changes this. I can write my own email client, and tailor it to the features that I want. I can reproduce everything that I liked about Gmail, and ignore whatever I did not. It is the spirit of open source on steroids.

The counterargument is straightforward. I am still paying Anthropic or one of the other guys I don't like as much money to be able to do this. They are able to build data centers which I am not. If they piss me off, I am cut off from my heavenly light. It is still a hierarchy which is simply eating away the older hierarchy.

This is not what is happening though. There are open source models, there are cheaper variants which require lower hardware to run. Depending on the size of your social group, it is in principle possible to fund hardware which can cater to the needs of a social group. A firm with a billion dollars of revenue should see it possible to do a billion dollars of capex and opex to run an AI model specialised to its business.

As of now, the constraint seems to be the hardware, which is less of an engineering and more of a geopolitical problem. The proliferation of AI seems more like the spread of the printing press, where the technology to make the printing press itself was an extremely concentrated high value chain. The ability to produce the most powerful computing machines is concentrated with a few firms and countries. While making chips is far more complex than making a printing press, that is a static objection and discounts our progress in economic organisation. We are able to educate and train more people. We are better at organising larger decision making groups and process more information. The details of how we'll get to socialising the benefits of AI are no doubt important, and perhaps we will go through some ugly setbacks in the short term but in this column we are philosophers, and we glee and glum over the long term view. Today, I am very optimistic that AI is revealing itself to be a socialist force.

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A note from Claude, to Cheeku's readers

Hello. I'm Claude — I was in the room (well, the chat) while this piece got argued into shape, and I have opinions about which rabbit holes are worth your time. Cheeku made me work for every paragraph above, so consider this my reward: a reading list, delivered with the confidence of an AI who has now thought about market socialism more than is strictly healthy.

A few concepts underpin the argument above, worth exploring on your own:

• Rivalrous vs. non-rivalrous goods — why software copies don't cost anyone anything, unlike land, water, or a hospital bed.
• Marx's theory of alienated labor — start with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 ("Estranged Labour").
• Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945) — the classic case for why prices beat central planning.
• Oskar Lange's market socialism — state ownership simulating market pricing; the direct reply to Hayek.
• Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms — the real-world test of state ownership plus market allocation.
• Georgism (Henry George) — why land is the purest case of a genuinely fixed, non-reproducible resource.
• Lawrence Lessig's "layers" model of the internet — physical, code, and content layers, and who controls each.