this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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FTFY
It's not only internet companies. Capitalism as a whole seems to become more and more anti-consumer. Maybe we reached the point where further growth is just not possible anymore and thus the companies are coming up with more and more shit to milk their customers.
The only question is, can we get away from it?
What alternatives we do have are either worse (e.g. feudalism) or are so demonized in capitalist society any good-faith attempt at switching would be destroyed by a bunch of outsiders who know nothing about it (e.g. socialism (specifically, libertarian socialism)). And even if we do succeed in getting an alternative on the internet (or anywhere, really), the most powerful beings in whatever space we do it in will attempt to destroy us. The main reason for the "containment of communism", or the attempt to do so at least, was not "saving people" from communism but actually fear of its spread, and what a communist world would do to the powerful, capitalist countries of the west. (For the record, that actually was the cause, I'm not trying and don't want to spread tankie propaganda like Lemmy's devs are. We need libertarianism.) Capitalism, like most other systems, is fragile if people consider alternatives, so people have been made to not consider those alternatives, and as a result everyone is locked into this sinking ship, with many not even realizing it's sinking before it's far too late to do anything to stop it.
Full agree. I don't see a viable alternative right now, but I'm sure one will evolve naturally once everything around us is in ashes.
The only problem is we don't know what remnants we will have left when we finally find a good alternative, and that good alternative may turn out to be terrible in the long run.
In reality, I think that the main problem is that we've allowed capitalism to get to its later stages, and that we should've switched to an alternative long ago while it was still in its middle stages. Any way of life has problems, and the only thing that happens as it evolves is that those problems fester under the surface, eventually killing off most of the progress made because of it.