Who knew one could make quite a bit of money selling milk from home? As Farm Fresh prepares for its upcoming IPO, it is good to see businesses that are still anchored on the idea that business can actually help people to improve their lives. There has been a lot of skepticism, of late, in the enthusiasm of capitalism to embrace a more stakeholder-oriented stance, but I suppose it all depends on your intention: to truly embrace togetherness and shared prosperity, or to merely employ such rhetoric to mask baser motives of greed and exploitation.
It is a common cycle throughout the history of innovation and technological growth: a new technology platform arrives on the scene – it could be petroleum as a source of energy, or electricity as a means to power machinery, or the Internet as a means of sharing information – and those most well-placed to gain from the rapid advancement and growing profitability of such technologies begin to gain outsize advantage and eventual domination: the Rockefeller oil trust, General Electric, or Google and Facebook. Eventually, burgeoning profitability and market share leads to outsize influence and power, and dominant players find themselves increasingly tempted to wield monopolistic power in their favour. And then, the backlash begins. In recent days, a whistle-blower has made her voice heard, and there is growing consensus that dominant tech giants like Facebook and Google will need to be reined in. Competition eventually becomes normalised, until the next cresting of a new technology…
I believe that when historians look back at the politics of the late 2010s, there will be a huge collective sigh of relief that while Trump was certainly an influential and talented demagogue, his own incompetence and lack of discipline made sure that the damage he could actually inflict on America and the world was relatively limited. Could a more capable wannabe-tyrant have done differently? In my mind, highly likely. We are not yet at the endgame of the current epoch of this collective and corrective backlash against the excesses of capitalism and inequality: for that, we need a 21st century FDR to emerge, so that the inchoate demands for better justice and fairness can cohere into a set of much-needed policy reforms that will shape the world anew.
This is a good read in The Economist by Noam Chomsky, a long-time critic of American imperialism, reminding us that every nation ends up with some warped idea of its own benevolence, especially when that country bestrides the world in economic and military power. For a relatively small nation like Malaysia, the lack of ability to project imperial power means that we are removed from such temptations. And yet, even within our own borders, we often act in ways that belie our insistence on a benign and harmonious “Keluarga Malaysia”. Forced labour, killings in police custody, rounding-ups of “illegal” workers and many other instances in Malaysian history seem to suggest that if ever we were offered power at the imperial scale, we would likely also fail to wield such power with wisdom and restraint.
Jeff Bezos, through his private investment vehicle Bezos Expeditions, has made his maiden investment in an Indonesian e-commerce startup, raising the stakes for Southeast Asia as a frontline in the global competition for tech investments. As it is, most foreign investors would flock to Indonesia – for its sheer size within the larger Southeast Asian region – or to Singapore, for its more mature markets and investor-friendliness. In the meantime, Malaysia is adamant in its insistence on ethnic navel-gazing, pleased at being able to play an outdated game of racial one-upmanship. I suppose we deserve to be where we are, if we continue to insist on keeping our heads firmly stuck in the sands of irrelevance.
In the meantime, PM Ismail Sabri is asking us to “forget our differences”, in the spirit of “Keluarga Malaysia”. It will be interesting to see if this call – noble and much-needed as it is – will be translated into tangible policy changes. Having seen the twists and turns of Malaysian politics over the past few decades, I will not be holding my breath.
