this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
151 points (92.7% liked)
Technology
60040 readers
4755 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Trying to hype up investors, yes! It's exactly why we keep seeing features that nobody wants in goods and services nowadays.
Capitalism is supposed to maximize efficiency and do everything it can to make the consumers happy. But we have reached a point where the "meta" isn't that anymore. It really never was, really. But with corporations becoming so big they dominate world markets, it has become complety shameless about it.
Eh, making customers happy is absolutely still a thing, but it only really applies to smaller companies. Small companies win through superior service, large companies win by being the default option. Once a company is the default option, it comes down to how much profit the company can extract.
The problem isn't capitalism, but all of the rules both explicit and implicit that benefit large companies over smaller companies. Very rarely does a small company lose due to not having economies of scale (does happen though), usually it's because of startup costs, and those go up substantially when there's a large player because of all the barriers in place. For example, ISPs will sue to prevent newcomers from getting established. If you don't have deep pockets, there are many industries you just can't get started in.
It used to be that large companies could fail if they royally mess up, but now get just get bailed out. Or they buy their competition so they don't need to innovate. Or they sue their competitors so they can't compete. The problem isn't capitalism itself, the problem is all the nonsense that protects those with more and allows them to bully those with less. The problem is ineffective government.
The fact that the rules benefit those with more capital is a feature, not a bug, of capitalism
To an extent, but at a certain point having a lot of capital doesn't help as much. Capital buys you economies of scale, it doesn't buy you innovation, and companies tend to get less efficient as they get larger.
The proper counter to large companies abusing their power, then, is something like Universal Basic Income (or my preferred formation, Negative Income Tax), since one of the biggest obstacles to starting a business is being able to eat while the business is growing. That's a fantastic thing for the government to provide since it doesn't interfere much with the market. If we had that, I don't think nearly as many innovators would join up with big tech companies and instead would start their own ventures.
Another big one is cutting corporate protections with size. The larger you are, the less protection you should need, meaning if you break the law, the law can come after personal assets instead of just corporate assets. We should still provide protections for smaller companies though.