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Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde: “No one does tech for good — especially not in fintech”
Sunde talks AI, Klarna and his friendship with Edward Snowden
Debate: A loan shark is a loan shark even if it wears a hoodie?
“Basically, Klarna is SMS loans on steroids, portrayed as a modern bank,” writes Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi.
ETC OF THE DAY. Fintech is not about improving the world but about making rich people richer, writes Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi.
Once upon a time, I ran one of those startups. A technology company with a radical idea; we would make it as easy to share money as other types of information. I had also started a company that would digitize receipts and felt that there was so much that could be done with such simple means to improve the world.
Today this part of the startup environment is called Fintech, Finance technology. Sweden has a lot of shining stars here, the biggest of which is of course Klarna. In Fintech, there are rarely any revolutionary ideas – with the exception of my own of course – instead it is usually about repackaging a working idea and throwing capital at it to buy market share.
For example, the payment company PayPal gave its first customers ten dollars when they opened an account with them. Some of the cryptocurrency exchanges pay you to take different “courses” in cryptocurrencies, which are actually hidden advertisements for that particular currency. Fintech is not about improving the world but about making rich people richer. Klarna’s largest shareholder is Sequioa Capital, founded by Don Valentine, the man credited for Silicon Valley’s love of venture capital.
Something I noticed during the years I worked in Fintech was that I was an odd bird. Questions you got at conferences and meetings were about turnover, market share, which venture capitalists had given you money, how long a runway you had before the money ran out. Rarely, honestly never, did I talk to people in the industry about the societal benefits that the technology you build can achieve. Maybe that’s why my projects didn’t take off with a bang, even though I would rather blame myself than accept that the world is evil and prefer more inequality to social improvement.
If you look at the benefits Klarna brings to society, it is downright tragic. Their installment service has driven more people into debt collection than ever before. Their customers are buying expensive junk they don’t need on installments at sky-high costs.
One of the co-founders of Klarna, Niklas Adelberth, said it best himself:
“The best customer is the one who doesn’t pay directly but gets a reminder and then a collection letter.”
Basically, Klarna is SMS loans on steroids, portrayed as a modern bank.
Tech companies like to point out that they operate in a global market. This mostly seems to mean North American corporate culture, ignorance of one’s social responsibility and arrogance towards what society has contributed to the companies.
So it’s not surprising that Klarna has ignored the Swedish model of collective bargaining. In their industry, being arrogant about “old” ways of doing things is more of an asset, ironically despite the fact that the only thing they actually do is old-fashioned greed.
Part of the solution to this problem, apart from the obvious one of strikes, is that we actually stop looking up to rich people so much. Sweden has more billionaires per capita than any other country in the world. Most of them have become so rich because of the Swedish model and welfare society (or inheritance thereof).
It is time for us as a society to go on strike.
No more positive attention to people who get rich by screwing up the system.
A loan shark is a loan shark even if it is wearing a hoodie.
Evocatively Ambiguous 