Capital Ventured

The two hundred and twenty million dollars in venture capital given to Instacart, a grocery delivery service that deploys human servants to retrieve goods from the shelves of existing grocery stores, seems less like an investment in the validity of its specific idea — which is stupid and unsustainable for reasons so blatant that they are not even worth discussing here — than in the broader idea of the quasi-permanent establishment of a new and semi-willing servant class defined nearly equally by its piecemeal semi-employment and its function in transporting things (people, objects, pets), at least until it is wholly displaced by a teeming bundle of machine vision and route optimization algorithms coursing through the circuitry of a fleet of drones that will be constructed using capital from the same small group of people that built this new servant class, only to tear it down and trample all over it with their beautiful replica Nike Air Mags delivered straight from an app.

Photo by TheGiantVermin