I don't know that he's thinking more deeply than willing to be a bit contrarian... he seems to loosely throw around concepts without seeming to care whether they make sense or could withstand scrutiny in context. He seems perfectly happy with half-baked thinking and poorly defined buzzwords as long as it sounds good for a moment.
Example: "Reagan deregulated business and defanged anti-trust, and so newspapers were snapped up by private equity funds that slashed their newsrooms, centralized their ad sales, and weakened their product. When Craigslist came along, these businesses had been looted of all the cash they could have used to figure out their digital futures, and they started to die."
He laments this as an example of a more tech-neutral but also "complicated" story but it's not just complicated it's also, you know, easy to poke holes in. It was merely the "deregulated environment", not craigslist. Right. I could spend half an hour on this but "neoliberal capitalism" means I have other stuff to do right now, so...
Well, I don't know anything about "neoliberal capitalism", but the big problem with the raiders in the 80's and 90's is that they were all about "maximum efficiency" of money.
The problem is that "maximally efficient" is "minimally robust".
Sure, you can buy that big company and section it into parts. That generally leaves you with 1 or 2 very profitable sections that are what you wanted. That also kills 10 bad sections that deserve to be killed.
The problem is that you also kill a small number of sections that look like they are treading water. These are the sections that produce your next product or that save your company when the main products suddenly die for some reason. And, unfortunately, nobody can tell which of these is going to be successful and which are going to die a priori. Killing these sections is destroying the future in order to produce an extra couple of percentage points of profit in the present.
Example: "Reagan deregulated business and defanged anti-trust, and so newspapers were snapped up by private equity funds that slashed their newsrooms, centralized their ad sales, and weakened their product. When Craigslist came along, these businesses had been looted of all the cash they could have used to figure out their digital futures, and they started to die."
He laments this as an example of a more tech-neutral but also "complicated" story but it's not just complicated it's also, you know, easy to poke holes in. It was merely the "deregulated environment", not craigslist. Right. I could spend half an hour on this but "neoliberal capitalism" means I have other stuff to do right now, so...