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“As America slouches toward plutocracy” JD Rockefeller once was worth 2% of the US GDP. The “sky-is-falling, everything is getting worse” narrative gets eyeba
by FredPret 5y ago
“As America slouches toward plutocracy”
JD Rockefeller once was worth 2% of the US GDP.
The “sky-is-falling, everything is getting worse” narrative gets eyeballs but isn’t true.
- dtech 5y agoRockefeller and standard oil was a big problem, and required large-scale government anti-trust actions to be fixed. Do you see similar things happening now?
- HarryHirsch 5y agoCan someone explain why someone who isn't Zuckerberg would argue that Facebook isn't a monopoly?
- ctdonath 5y agoBecause it isn’t. Anyone can open a social media site. Anyone can use it. Anyone can leave it. Being where everyone wants to be isn’t a monopoly when innumerable other venues are no harder to visit.
- bobiny 5y agoI'd say not monopoly, but anticompetitive behaviour like leveraging company's size, reach and cash to "forcefully" acquire competitors.
- dragonwriter 5y agoIf network effect means quality or “price” (in terms of what you trade, whether or not its money, for the experience) changes don’t lead to substitution between the dominant site and other sites, it absolutely is a monopoly, even if it would be equally easy to go to other sites. Monopoly is an empiricial, behavioral question of substitution between notional competitors, but not abstract question of available alternatives.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bobiny 5y agoThey don't have dibs on natural resources like oil or physical space like with railroads. In theory skillful people can create better analogues of Facebook and Instagram that would serve less ads, be more meaningfully engaging, collect less data etc.
- gugagore 5y agoThat makes sense. If you expand "natural" resource to include something pertinent to network effects (e.g. human attention is a resource) then I see that as the beginning of an argument in the opposite direction.
- bobiny 5y agoThey don't have an ownership right on attention. Railway company might have some unique long term lease on the land. Each user can extract their data with takeout, delete account and if they must – use another service.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoThey have dibs on a natural resource called personal data.
- bidirectional 5y agoDo they? I'd wager Google knows a great deal more about me than Facebook.
- skinkestek 5y agoMaybe. In that case I must be a very special case or they are absolutely clueless or something. I see nothing but idiotic ideas coming out from Googles knowledge of my data: - absurdly irrelevant and even insulting ads. I can easily count on one hand the useful ones I have got (one for a local shop and one for Jetbrains products I think). - Google Now suggesting in the middle of the night that I should text the boss two levels above me or call a random girl I once helped with a computer(!)
- bobiny 5y agoStandard Oil was split as I recall. Similar action is geared towards Amazon, Google, Apple and FB
- FredPret 5y agoYes it was split. One of the child companies was called Esso, after the acronym S.O.
- paulpauper 5y ago'by action' you mean it as been considered or is a 0< possiblity. That is along way from anything actually happening.
- bobiny 5y agoI mean various antitrust court cases and government hearings. Like recent Apple vs Epic.
- FredPret 5y agoFair enough. I know I’m personally not buying anything from Amazon anymore. Just saying it’s not been a one-way inevitable downhill slide like some people make out.
- npmaile 5y agoBy the time standard oil was broken up, it had already dropped from >90% to around 60% market share and was dropping fast. The government intervention just artificially sped up a process that was already happening.
- caseyross 5y agoPlutocracy is the natural state of a capitalist society. But America managed to break out of it briefly in roughly the 1940s-70s period, and has since regressed to the mean. So in a "what your grandparents remember" sense, things have definitely gotten worse.
- mdorazio 5y agoSee [1] for a good summary. Then pair it with [2]. The full picture is, as usual, more complex than a catchy title can summarize, but the trends are pretty clear. If you're in the top 20% of earners, things are improving. If you're not, things are generally stagnant or getting worse. So we're heading for something that's kind of plutocracy and kind of a class-based system of "haves" and "have nots". [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-... [2] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/1/251 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/1/251