onepict, 14 days ago

@sellathechemist ah yes the same old question, why don't we have a British big tech firm?

Tech firm gets acquired by American Firm as founders look for an exit to clear debts from a lack of support, or a loan rather than a grant.

BBC: No one will ever know...

sellathechemist, 14 days ago

@onepict Spot on, though not just American tech now. ARM went East. I don' tknow enough to be able to opine on "golden share" type arrangements, but the idea of companies that emerge from state funding being held in part in some kind of parastatal ownership so that they provide not just taxes but dividend revenue to the state seems sensible.
But the neo-liberal mantra is for the state to sell the family silver, typically at firesale prices in the name of an abstract nirvana.

onepict, 14 days ago

@sellathechemist somehow I don't see the UK Government creating a series of funds like @EC_NGI or like @NGIZero in particular.

They want massive unicorns, rather than consider small to medium funding grants for digital innovation in #FOSS projects etc.

Let alone investment in digital sovereignity via supporting and using these projects.

sellathechemist, 14 days ago

@onepict @EC_NGI @NGIZero Yup. Good point. This government wouldn't but the next one might, given that MMazzuccato is one of their advisors. Sovereign wealth-like funds holding strategic companies larger and smaller.
But the temptation to sell anything off for a quick buck is, unfortunately, catnip when all you ever hear is the siren call of lower taxes.

njr, 14 days ago

@sellathechemist Indeed. Not to mention Acorn, creator of The BBC Micro and the company that begat ARM.

So many people I know if and around tech in Britain got their start on the BBC Micro. It was an amazing machine.

(Image from Wikipedia, Stuart Brady, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BBC_Micro_Front_Restored.jpg)

sellathechemist, 14 days ago

@njr Absolutely. Aside from teh sheer disingenous-ness/ment of his statement, their other blindspot (to mix my metaphors) is to see the BBC as some kind of parasite that undermines the free market… I suspect that Mariana Mazzuccato could have used the BBC/Acorn/Arm saga as an example of the entrepreneurial state. (Maybe she did, but I mostly remember the US/DARPA/NIH examples. Annoyingly a colleague borrowed my copy and has for about 5 years… )

(edited to close a bracket)

Rhodium103, 14 days ago

@sellathechemist @njr
Last I read a government tech celebration thingy (Report? Festival? I forget the details...) it was Uber and Deliveroo that were being hailed as the great tech innovators to imitate.

I'll not insult anyone's intelligence by elaborating on why that was garbage. But I think it does illustrate their priorities for what "innovation" means.

sellathechemist, 14 days ago

@Rhodium103 @njr Yeah. Is intermediation really such an innovation? It seems to me that digital intermediation is the gateway to #enshittification.

Perhaps this is a moment to remind readers that my lovely local pizza place, run by a group of young and bloody hard-working owners, pay 30-35% of the customer price of a pizza to JustEat, who provide online payment, a webpage, and some badly paid zero-hour e-bike riders. I walk to the shop, pay cash, and leave with pizza and receipt.