Capitalism Gone Wrong

https://kasperjunge.com/blog/capitalism-gone-wrong/

by juunge • 12 days ago

39 50 12 days ago

kasperjunge.com

EGreg• 12 days ago

"There is nothing wrong with capitalism, but..."

- said before any potential criticism of capitalism. In USA, you shall not criticize the Profit.

"peace be upon him"

- said after any mention of Mohammad. In Saudi Arabia, you shall not criticize the Prophet.

rhelz5• 12 days ago

It's not capitalism gone wrong. It's a great example of a historic success of capitalism.

You can't expect capitalism to solve your addiction problems.

blochist• 12 days ago

In fact, you should expect capitalism to exploit your addiction problems in pursuit of profit. That's what it does...

blooalien6• 12 days ago

"You can't expect capitalism to solve your addiction problems."

You can hope and wish that they would have at least enough ethics to not actively abuse psychology and the way human brains are hard-wired to totally take unfair advantage of those facts to extract maximum profit for a tiny handful of humanity at the expense of everyone everywhere pretty much.

rhelz5• 12 days ago

Sure, better ethical principles might solve this. But extracting maximum profit is the prime directive of capitalism. This might be shit ethics, but it is brilliant capitalism.

goatlover• 12 days ago

Should it be allowed to intentionally make addiction problems worse?

rhelz5• 12 days ago

Depends upon how laze-faire you want your capitalism to be.

bgun• 12 days ago

Even if you are not the one addicted, other people’s addiction problems are still your problems. Being blind to that fact makes you both complicit in it and vulnerable to it.

rhelz5• 12 days ago

Sure, they are your problems, but to expect capitalism to solve your addiction is just magical thinking.

Analemma_2• 12 days ago

This is emblematic of a certain kind of foolish libertarian thinking where capitalism is treated as an end rather than a means. To normal people, the entire selling point of capitalism is that it is pitched as the best way to achieve a happy and comfortable life for the greatest number. If it's working against that end, what good is it? Toss it out and replace it.

simianwords• 12 days ago

You have zero theory of mind if you think the poster is a libertarian instead of making a tongue in cheek comment

pupppet• 12 days ago

If capitalism promotes suffering then maybe capitalism is the problem.

jmathai2• 12 days ago

I agree with everything the article says. I think there are two questions that we should be asking.

1. Can we point to a time when Capitalism peaked in terms of a balance of maximal benefit for as many people as possible? In my lifetime, it was somewhere in the late 1990s and early 2000s. No singular answer but something better exists than where we are now.

2. How do we rewind capitalism to that point?

Telaneo2• 12 days ago

I have very little faith that it will be very possible to rewind to that point. Not because the technology of today is different, or even the legal landscape, but simply due to the cultural landscape being different. Pandora's box has been opened, and it cannot be closed.

To me at least, there seems to have been some cut-off point where nothing but money mattered, and someone realised that consumers will just take the abuse and you won't actually be punished that much, at least not to the point where it's not worth it if money is all you care about. I'm sure there were industries that behaved like this before (tobacco comes to mind), but now it's everywhere.

The aura of 'they'll screw me over for pennies' is ever-present. Even if there were legal recourse for stuff before, you didn't need it, because the threat alone was enough to keep companies in line. Similarly, the threat of a boycott could be enough for a company to switch course. Now they've discovered that for every person willing to take a stand, there are 1000 more who'll stick around, or be swayed by ads, or whatever else.

The idea that you're doing business to provide actual goods and services which does some good in the world seems to have disappeared. Now that is nothing more than a means to an end: the money. You don't open a business because you want to get into the whatever-business. You do it to earn the most money you can. I'm sure the ever worsening socio-economic climate has something to do with it.

We can introduce more consumer and worker protection laws to bring back some breaks on all this. Make the former theoretical punishments to businesses come back as actual punishments, which will hopefully make them behave. Doing it properly is hard. The culture of loopholes isn't going away any-time soon.

ericd• 12 days ago

I think more penalties involving "you aren't allowed to operate until this is fixed" rather than fines would help.

Also, this is a pretty good take on a lot of related topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTmpwVCC2So

dTal3• 12 days ago

1. No. It was always awful for an unacceptable number of people. It's just your turn to feel the pinch. I suspect you'd get a different answer if you asked someone from China.

2. We have to look forwards, not backwards. Yesterday contained the seeds of today. Today contains the seeds of tomorrow. No point rewinding unless you want history to repeat.

berdario• 11 days ago

I think that the concept of "Capitalism going wrong" is silly and ahistorical.

Capital and capitalists ("capitalism" was initially not the focus) is a concept which appeared in the last 17th century with the Dutch East India Company, and became a lot more prominent in the 19th century with the Industrial revolution.

Capitalism is not market economy, mercantilism or the accumulation of money (all of that was already a thing during feudal economies, and before the industrial revolution)...

Capitalism is about the means of production, their ownership, the profits (or plundering of resources, in a colonial context), the sharing thereof.

It has *always* been uneven, and unpleasant if you're not in the class which actually has ownership of the means of production.

"Maximal benefit for as many people as possible" is not a goal that the people who hoarded the means of production (people who hoarded capital) ever had in mind. I understand that you didn't explicitly say it, but it's still implied in what you wrote. Maybe the implications is that capitalism fortuitously happened to encourage that "maximal benefit", but even that is misleading: what actually happened is that whenever you have a "blue ocean" to move to, whenever the market is expanding and growing (by the introduction of new productive technologies or the growth of population), there are more spoils that can be shared and enjoyed more widely across the population.

But the rate of profit tends to fall, there are fewer profits to share, and unless encouraged by the point of a bayonet, those who own capital don't have any reason to divest themselves to share more of it with society.

A sibling comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48871234 ) already hinted at the fact that it depends a lot on which group and at which time is benefitting...

One obvious example, are the exploited people during colonialism: despite benefit from spoils being abundant in the west, one shouldn't expect that the colonies' benefit was ever a priority.

Another example is you suggesting

somewhere in the late 1990s

A lot of the profits that you've witnessed in the west, are due to the markets of the former socialist republics opening up to western exploitation. Depending on the kind of investments or economic assistance that had been provided, some countries fared better than others... No one would've claimed that capitalism brought benefits for the many in the late 1990s in Russia, for example.

blooalien6• 12 days ago

"Meta did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design on the physical and mental wellbeing of users" ...

ROFLMAO! They absolutely did adequately "assess the risks" and then decided "Meh... Who cares? Do it anyway!"

esnyder92• 12 days ago

Absolutely. Their plausible deniability died shortly after the like button rolled out. Cambridge Analytica was how long ago?

blooalien6• 12 days ago

I know, right? And what did society learn from all that mess? Oh yea... Nothing. It was pretty promptly swept under the rug and forgotten. :(

AyanamiKaine• 12 days ago

I wonder how that time is being spent. Doomscrolling?

I hate, doom scrolling with a passion. And still I am doing it from time to time, On reddit, youtube shorts or even a little bit on HN. It just seems like wasting time by being bombarded with stimuli.

On one hand I give my self the fault, weak will power and missing volition to change it. On the other it true that the environment has real impact on my behavior. Maybe simply blocking reddit and shorts is the best approach.

But I dont know.

bshacklett• 6 days ago

YouTube shorts is the worst. I want nothing to do with them, but I consume a lot of longform content on YouTube. On a regular basis, I find myself scrolling through shorts without even realizing it. i’ve tried all sorts of things to hide them, but from what I’ve seen it’s impossible.

trjordan• 12 days ago

I am no fan of Zuck. But this is his whole deal.

Instagram was a purchase. Facebook wasn't his idea. Threads is a copy. The 1 thing that Zuck understands better than anybody is that engagement is the only thing that matters to social networks, and he's willing to throw the entire company at the problem. He has been for 20 years.

He's good at addiction. He knows how to build an org that's world-class at addiction. It's entirely reasonable that the EU regulate it, and Zuck is exactly the person to point the regulation at.

changoplatanero• 12 days ago

How come legislators want to stop social media companies from using their power to manipulate consumers, but aren’t as interested in other industries doing the same? Like imagine how much harm is caused by the luxury fashion industry manipulating people to spend $20,000 on ugly leather bags? Or the jewelry industry in getting people to buy shiny rocks? Or sports gambling companies? That money could have been used for something good.

I’m obviously biased. But my point is that the guy that wrote the linked article had preexisting biases too.

strictnein2• 12 days ago

I'd call getting people with too much money and not enough common sense to spend their money a good thing for everyone. Sales taxes collected, property taxes on the store paid, income taxes on the employees and company, less generational wealth passed along, etc etc.

Telaneo2• 12 days ago

Like imagine how much harm is caused by the luxury fashion industry manipulating people to spend $20,000 on ugly leather bags?

The EU is actually working on that, at least from the environmental angle.[1]

Beyond that, I agree, but in a 'yes, we should do that too; that doesn't mean we shouldn't do this' way.

[1] https://environment.ec.europa.eu/news/new-eu-rules-stop-dest...

saulpw• 12 days ago

Because of scale. Social media companies manipulate literally billions of people, whereas the luxury fashion industry only manipulates millions of people.

Sports gambling is another example of the issue at scale. When it was at a racetrack, it's naturally limited to those who can go to that physical location. When it moved to OTB, the scale goes up an order of magnitude. When it moves online and to apps, the scale goes up again. And so it's become important to regulate.

dlcarrier• 12 days ago

The entire media industry uses tactics like that, and has for ages. They probably only notice it with social media, because social media itself is new and different. More at 10:00, but really 10:50, because I'm going to make you stay up late watching a bunch of ads, before I tell you what'll be in tomorrows newspaper, anyway.

lenkite• 12 days ago

How come legislators want to stop social media companies from using their power to manipulate consumers, but aren’t as interested in other industries doing the same?

Because its like comparing murder with genocide. You have to stop the enormously larger problem first before you get around to fixing your nails.

strictnein2• 12 days ago

A lot of what is being said here could also be said of NBC packing Thursday nights with their top shows back in the day. They increased attention and revenue, but people spent a lot more time watching NBC because of it. Was that a problem?

They are not even trying to hide it — and I suppose it is not a secret at all: The more time users spend on Facebook and Instagram, the more money Meta makes.

Why would they try to hide something that is obvious?

With the decline of Twitter as the place that it seemed like everyone used to be on, other similar services seeing a small increase is not too surprising. I'm wondering if traffic from Threads, which they launched in 2023 (after Musk bought Twitter in fall of 2022), gets counted under Instagram, since you use your Instagram account to login? I get that Zuck and co want to say those increases are tied to their magical AI to please investors, but was it really?

staticshock• 12 days ago

The way I understand doom scrolling (and all other forms of passive engagement, e.g. youtube, reddit, hacker news, etc.) is that when we dip below "baseline" mood (be it through stress or any kind of adversity), quick hits of stimuli momentarily bring us back up to that baseline.

At the same time, access to abundant entertainment establishes in us an unrealistically high baseline that we're destined to fall below whenever we're not actively "plugged in". When you fall below baseline, unrealistic though it may be, you feel lacking, like an addict, and you respond to that feeling exactly like an addict.

It's all too easy nowadays to forget that boredom is good. Adversity is good. Having the time to sit with your thoughts is good. We grow stronger through any form of perseverance, and weaker through any form of surrender.

chasd00• 12 days ago

This reads like someone who didn't get offered the job after going through a lengthy interview process at Meta.

celeries2• 12 days ago

Switching to a more ethical model than advertisements hardly helps. Most tech companies are competing for people's attention, so making one platform less addictive just means the attention will be consumed by the next most addictive platform.

Ads aren't really the problem, either. It's the fact that people are willing to fork over so much of their lives to media feeds. It's a false community, a sea of information filled with faux connection.

The only way out of this trap is to invest in your local community. Meet people in real life and spend time with them and form mutual relationships. Media feeds aren't necessarily bad, but you need to prioritize them according to the innate human need for real community.

blooalien6• 12 days ago

Ads aren't really the problem, either.

You're right. Ads are a different problem that just happens to finance this problem (and many others).

Meet people in real life and spend time with them and form mutual relationships.

It's sad how hard that's gotten these days, what with so many folks havin' their faces glued to their little glass slab all the time. :(

celeries2• 12 days ago

Oh don't get me wrong, I agree. They are unreasonably effective, but I think that's in large part because people have lost touch with reality. People tend not to think very critically about ads.

josefritzishere• 12 days ago

There will come a time when we need to have an honest conversation about the limitations of an economy which is based on encouraging sociopathic behavior.

vannevar• 12 days ago

This is a specific example of a more general problem: the ability of capital to manufacture demand and not merely satisfy it. An implicit assumption about supply and demand is that they are largely independent market forces, that demand is an organic and emergent phenomenon arising from the desires and ambitions of free individuals, and that supply reacts to demand. But first mass marketing and now hyper-targeted marketing turn that assumption on its head, and given sufficient capital, you can manipulate consumers into buying something that, left to their own devices, they otherwise would not. The harm that this can cause is most easily seen in the addictive context, but it appears throughout the market as a lost opportunity cost: to what more beneficial use would they have put that money had they not been subject to the manipulation?

usamasulaiman• 12 days ago

You’re being very nice towards Meta and giving too much of a benefit of the doubt as to their intentions.

tim333• 12 days ago

I'm not sure producers wanting you to spend time on their stuff is that wrong. Hollywood aren't going to start deliberately making crap movies so no one watches. It's a consumer choice what you spend your time on.

ozlikethewizard• 11 days ago

This is capitalism functioning exactly as intended no?

dTal3• 11 days ago

I am sure Facebook did not begin as a project designed to steal people’s time. It began as a cool app that people genuinely loved.

  Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
  Zuckerberg: Just ask
  Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
  [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
  Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
  Zuckerberg: I don't know why.
  Zuckerberg: They "trust me"
  Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks

Capitalism Gone Wrong

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