Comment by Quarrelsome
10 hours ago
its not necessarily "capitalism". Think about how Myspace was, or early Facebook, that was capitalism but didn't have the same issues.
Its the "lean startup" culture as well as books like "Hooked, how to build habit forming products" - Nir Eyal.
The dark lean startup pattern is where you break down the big picture rationale for the company. You extract metrics that contribute to the company's success (i.e. engagement) and you build a machine that rewards changes to the underlying system that improves those metrics.
If done successfully, you create an unwitting sociopathy, a process that demands the product be as addictive as possible and a culture that is in thrall to the machine that rewards its employees by increasing those metrics. You're no longer thinking about purpose or wondering about what you're doing to your users. You simply realise that if you send this notification at this time, with this colour button, in this place, with this tagline then the machine likes it. Multiple people might contribute a tiny piece of a horrifying and manipulative whole and may never quite realise the true horror of the monster they've helped build, because they're insulated by being behind the A/B test.
> its not necessarily "capitalism". Think about how Myspace was, or early Facebook, that was capitalism but didn't have the same issues.
No thats exactly capitalism, capitalism ensures processes gets more and more efficient over time, as you say previous versions were less efficient at inducing addictive behaviors but capitalism ensured we progressed towards more and more addictive apps and patterns.
Capitalism doesn't mean we start out with the most efficient money extractor, it just moves towards the most efficient money extractor with time unless regulated.
This is well known and a feature, capitalism moves towards efficiency and regulation helps direct that movement so that it helps humanity rather than hurts us. Capitalism would gladly serve you toxic food but regulations ensures they earn more money by giving you nutritious food. Now regulations are lagging a bit there so there is still plenty of toxic food around, but it used to be much worse than now, the main problem with modern food is that people eat too much directly toxic compounds.
You're not describing capitalism, you're describing managerialism with a manager-evaluation function of profit.
Managers do not need to be evaluated by EPS, but when you are a public company with diffuse shareholders (who are the actual "capitalists", and who include any of use with a 401k or pension), that's an easy one for people to agree on. Also, when your society gives up on the restraints of (in our case) Judeao-Christian values and say "we're just overgrown apes", well, then you get HBS style of management, because there's nothing restraining acting "because we can". I think we have a spiritual crisis more than an economic system crisis.
That's a type of capitalism. Quakers built plenty of capitalistic entities that were primarily interested in profit but cared more for the long term with more of an eye on social and spiritual purpose. Extractive capitalism doesn't get to pretend its all of capitalism, we just assume that because its been active throughout our entire lifespan.
US hegemony has permitted and encouraged shareholder primacy, hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts in order to facilitate the growth of its markets. However we'd be blinkered to assume that this is the only way capitalism can be. Its a choice we make and we deserve this outcome where we've enslaved a generation of children to be eye-balls for ad impressions for silicon valley startups.
We could make other choices but then we'd be personally less rich and see less growth. Do we really think those extra zeros in very few people's portfolio's are worth this macabre world we've created?
> Quakers built plenty of capitalistic entities that were primarily interested in profit but cared more for the long term with more of an eye on social and spiritual purpose.
And those were replaced by profit seeking enterprises, that is capitalism. Sure some try to create such benevolent entities, but the profit seeking ones out-competes and replaces them over time, that is how capitalism works.
So you can temporarily have a nice company here and there, but 50 years later likely it got replaced by a profit seeking one. The only way to get pro social behaviors from these is to make pro social acts the most profitable via regulations, but its still a profit seeking enterprise that doesn't try to be benevolent.
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I judge a system by what it does, not by what it's proponents say it could theoretically do.
Extractive capitalism is real-world capitalism.
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Early Facebook's behavior was what they wanted to do/be. But upon exposure to what others were doing Facebook chose to adopt patterns/techniques that repulsed them originally because Facebook didn't want to be out competed (so Capitalism). Capitalism/competition is what led their behavioral change.
Go back to the recent removal of lead article discussed here. In Capitalism government regulation has to level the playing field or else all players will stoop to poisoning society/the world because if they don't then someone else will gain and advantage. Even hyper rightwing Rayliner agreed Government intervention is the ONLY way to prevent Capitalists from injecting poison into their products if that poison gives a competitive advantage.
What leaded gas was to the boomers brains social media is to current youths' brains.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46865275