> Resources in Capitalism, however, are not directed toward people who are growing the network in socially useful or ways that sustain its overall health (inclu

> Resources in Capitalism, however, are not directed toward people who are growing the network in socially useful or ways that sustain its overall health (including maintaining its diversity), but toward individual nodes or small clusters that pursue their own short term growth for growth’s sake at the expense of the network’s overall health. The externalities of pursuing such growth and the periodic crises it produces are almost never taken into account. It seems like your point here is mostly just that capitalism, as currently constructed, is imperfect at directing resources towards productive activities, and I would agree with that. But I think it's extremely hard to argue with how successful capitalism has been at creating network growth. Global utility as measured (imperfectly) by GDP has grown tremendously since the introduction of market capitalism. I suppose you could argue that capitalism achieved this 'by accident', but i'm not sure whether that matters. The fact is that capitalism has caused huge swathes of the world to be substantially better off than they were before, and promises to do the same for more as time moves forward. Other economic systems have failed to achieve similar kinds of growth, and absent that growth, they simply don't have the ability to raise people out of poverty, no matter how nice their intentions. > Google is a good example of this because again, they observed a useful signal within a knowledge network and added extra utility in making it available to be easily leveraged by others. But from there, the prioritizing of their own growth deteriorated the network’s overall health, as observed in things like the explosion in various forms of SEO optimization and content mills, surveillance advertising and its malware, foreclosing of the web in services like AMP, and use of its market position to bully competitors and quash innovation independent of them. Yes, Google has created various forms of waste. But you can't look at a single externality and indict a system with it in isolation. You need to look at the net change in utility. I think it's very hard to argue that Google's net impact on the world was not positive.