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"Capitalism is an accelerant for addictive behavior" I'm not sure that what we have would be described as capitalism any more. If you buy FB stock, are they us
by jeffdavis 9y ago
"Capitalism is an accelerant for addictive behavior"
I'm not sure that what we have would be described as capitalism any more. If you buy FB stock, are they using that to build new machines that pay dividends over time?
You can make an analogy involving software, sure, but it really seems quite different to me. The way I think about it is this: if we all had amnesia and forgot that company XYZ existed, would it still have any value? Under traditional capitalism, yes, they would just need to advertise a bit and rebuild their customer base. But FB and google would be worth close to zero no matter how much software they have.
- joe_fishfish 9y agoHow much amnesia are we talking about? Google's core feature of being the best web search engine fits into your "advertise a bit and rebuild the customer base" criterion imo.
- jeffdavis 9y agoIf google only had 10% of the search traffic it wouldn't just be smaller, it would be as irrelevant as Bing. So they would somehow need to advertise their way into a dominant position again, which is much harder than advertising just to bootstrap and aquire some custoners.