LegalHub: theory

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So let us state the manifest failings of reg tech: rent-seeking and iatrogenics.

Rent-seeking in that no reg tech provider has figured out a business model for how to be suitably paid, other than by extracting rent. This they commonly do by reference to the value their product provides, which they equate to the total cost of labour and infrastructure they save.

Historians and lovers of crushing irony will note the resemblance of this notion to the labour theory of value — that the economic value of a service is equals the total amount of labour required to produce it — or in this case, that one would be required to hire to produce it without this new piece of kit. Why “ironic”? Because it is odd to hear a bedrock intellectual foundation of Marxism babbling from the mouths of small-time rentier capitalists, that’s why.

In any case, we are supposed to be so grateful for saving wage bill for a handful of school-leavers in a service-centre in Sarajevo, we will gladly pay the same amount to a guy in Old Street who worked up code from some moonlighting school-leavers in Bucharest, and let him intermediate our processes for the hereafter, doing nothing but cheerfully clipping our ticket each time the machine spits out another document, or even just sits collecting dust on his server (this is called “hosting”). But the promise of the information revolution is something different it is to disintermediate. Shit is meant to be free, not just marginally cheaper than snail mail.