Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

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This is the inevitability of capitalism. It has no built-in control for a company that becomes too big to the point of being a detriment to society.

In my mind there are only three kinds or tech companies:

1. Growing fast enough to eventually become huge and irreplaceable, losing money all along the way. When they are too big to fail, they flip the switches and de-invest and cost-cut to profit indefinitely (Uber and Lyft)

2. Attempting to just run a sustainable business, which translates to languishing and eventually being replaced or acquired by companies in category #3 or #1 (Tile, Pebble)

3. Giants that deserve antitrust attention but never seem to get any because they buy out the government (Google, Apple, Facebook)

That’s why there’s no room for companies that won’t surrender to venture capital. Just making a profitable product isn’t enough, they have to surrender their autonomy to people who have no expertise or innovative tendencies besides having a bigger bank account.

Yes, capital has a tendency to concentrate and centralize.

A 19th century philosopher summed [0] this phenomenon of the concentration and centralization of capital:

Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many.... The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities demands, caeteris paribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages.... It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation#Marxist_c...

To me it feels like this is the opposite of capitalism. The free flow of capital is impeded by monopolies amassing huge fortunes. Just like a clogged pipe, the free flow is then blocked and regulated by such forces. Not ideal for the overall market.

How is it being blocked? The share buybacks are record breaking, but investors just plow the money right back into them by buying more.

The big tech companies are objectively delivering products that people around the world derive a lot of utility from.

> It has no built-in control for a company that becomes too big to the point of being a detriment to society.

That's verifiably untrue. One of the key traits of capitalism is that businesses are allowed to fail, and we see that they do fail. 30 years ago, the retail and supply chain behemoth was Sears; today that's Amazon; 30 years from now, it might be someone else.

Berkshire Hathaway recently remarked on the dynamism as seen in the top 20 companies in the world in 1990 vs today.

https://twitter.com/brettberson/status/1388555627698429953

It's almost entirely a different set of companies.

> Berkshire Hathaway recently remarked on the dynamism as seen in the top 20 companies in the world in 1990 vs today.

180-year-old 360,000-person company worth half a trillion dollars says what?

(They might not be wrong, but they certainly aren't impartial.)

The linked twit simply shows top 20 largest companies by market cap in 1990 vs today. That's a fact. If you want to argue that the particular fact is somehow misleading or misrepresenting, please put an argument with an evidence - without that, this falls into the "attacking the motive" fallacy.

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