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Why Unregulated Capitalism Always Leads to Enshittification
(right click to open chart in a new tab, or click here, to view full-size; like everything on my blog, my graphics are covered by Creative Commons licence) Lots of ideas work well in theory, but many of them don’t work out so well in practice, especially when the idea becomes an ideology, pursued dogmatically without oversight to correct for malfunctions and abuses. The idea of investment capital was one such idea, allowing, for the first time, a group of people to pool their money to enable major projects like factories or resource development or large-scale trade that no individual (other than rich monarchs) could finance.
It has, in short, become utterly dysfunctional, leading to obscene disparities in wealth and income, catastrophic destruction of our environment and many people’s lives, monstrous amounts of waste of all kinds, and a globalized economy teetering on the edge of complete collapse. Rampant unregulated capitalism may be OK for “shareholders”, until the opportunities to maximize profits are maxed out (at which time the numbered parent company will just close it down, stiff the suppliers, employees and customers, and open up with some new enterprise). The same thing will happen, Cory predicts, with the social media platforms — as they get more and more dysfunctional, and provide less and less value to us, the actual users, we will abandon them, and find (with difficulty) some other way to get what we need and want online, that they originally promised.
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