Google too.
I wish the fact that every company enshittifies in the end would wake us all up to the fact that rampant unregulated capitalism just doesn't work before it's too late to make any changes at all.
I wish the fact that every company enshittifies in the end would wake us all up to the fact that rampant unregulated capitalism just doesn't work before it's too late to make any changes at all.
- company started in garage
- makes first sales
- gets popular
- gets investors
- becomes huge, changing the world of computing
- enshittifies
- gets replaced by the next company that was started in a garage somewhere
A good system is not one that preserves Apple or IBM or Xerox.
A good system is one that allows these companies to come and go, because in the end we want the consumer to keep winning.
Apple enshittifying is bad for everyone in the short term, but it opens the door for whatever comes next.
The less regulation and tax you have, the quicker the wheel of innovation above turns.
OTOH, there are some cheap and easy regulations with a large societal return, like pollution regs. These low-hanging fruit should be picked, as long as the fruit-pickers don’t redirect the whole economy towards ever-taller fruit-picking ladders.
Half the news stories about Apple, Google, etc are them being fined or being forced to change their business practices due to regulations. These companies employ hundreds if not thousands of people to make sure they are following thousands and thousands of regulations.
What capitalistic mechanism allows a garage startup to compete with a company worth $3,000,000,000,000 ?
Surely you've seen this in Silicon Valley: the infamous way Google (or whoever) kills your startup by releasing your product for free, waiting for you to die, and then killing the product, just to ensure there's no competition in a field they may want to one day enter.
Or they just buy you. Great for the founder! Terrible for the consumer.
The modern tech company is more akin to Standard Oil, but possibly even more powerful and all encompassing considering Google for example can determine what is true and false for a given population. Standard Oil was only able to be toppled by a State.
So again, what capitalist mechanism exists to allow a garage startup to knock over apple or Google? I completely agree with you that Google is enshittifying - my disagreement is that anything will happen about that unless a State intervenes.
I think Apple wouldn‘t exist without cheap labor in authoritarian countries but that‘s a prerequisite for capitalism
I don't think Apple could have existed as it did under Jobs in any other system.
I think we're fixating too much on purity of the word "unregulated." If you'd like to offer a different one I'm open to it - to me, the closest example of "regulated capitalism" is the PRC's State Capitalism, however it's a poor example given the atrocious working conditions there and the massive wealth inequality.
"Unregulated" to me doesn't mean "literally no regulations." To me it means, the owners of Capital have a very large amount of power, to the point that every regulation on them is an uphill, nigh-unwinnable battle. See: pushes for 30 hour work weeks in Europe. Or, see: pushes for socialized healthcare in the USA. I think we can both agree that the USA will never have socialized healthcare so long as the health insurance companies wield so much power and influence!