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It seems incredibly disingenuous for people to keep renaming the current system "not capitalism," when clearly oligopoly is the end game of unconstrained capita

It seems incredibly disingenuous for people to keep renaming the current system "not capitalism," when clearly oligopoly is the end game of unconstrained capitalism. Capitalism was marketed to us all as efficiency and prosperity. And when down on our luck, we were temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The renaming seems to be an attempt to do a sleight of hand (sleight of word?) so as not to upset all of the people to whom capitalism has been successfully marketed. Are we all so sensitive that we require misplaced blame to discuss the problems? Are we all so naive that we'll fall for the trick?

hattmall 3y ago
I don't really think you're correct. It is appropriate to call it not capitalism. Because that's what's happening. Capital is not controlling the means of production. Perhaps algo-ism or something. Firstly, there is nothing super special about most of these platforms that would make them difficult to reproduce even with a small amount of capital. Secondly, even with vast sums of capital you can't be assured of successfully pulling users away from an existing platform. The point of capitalism is that efficiency is created by the flow of money directing the means of production. Instead with the platforms directing things we see massive gameification of the systems and inefficient direction of production by the platform manipulating things to make the platform more money. Ultimately the will of the consumer is being misdirected by subterfuge creating inefficient markets which are no longer being directed by capital and not capitalist. The platforms all reach a point where they can't make more money by simply injecting more funds to be more productive. They can however make more money by actually being worse and extracting more value from their users though.
randomdata 3y ago
> when clearly oligopoly is the end game of unconstrained capitalism. The trouble (or benefit) of unconstrained capitalism is that as soon as you do anything compelling, a thousand people will jump in to copy you. This makes establishment of an oligopoly highly unlikely. We see oligopolies in our constrained environment because the artificial constraints (e.g. intellectual property laws) we apply help build 'moats', keeping those thousands away.

hattmall 3y ago

I don't really think you're correct. It is appropriate to call it not capitalism. Because that's what's happening. Capital is not controlling the means of production. Perhaps algo-ism or something. Firstly, there is nothing super special about most of these platforms that would make them difficult to reproduce even with a small amount of capital. Secondly, even with vast sums of capital you can't be assured of successfully pulling users away from an existing platform. The point of capitalism is that efficiency is created by the flow of money directing the means of production. Instead with the platforms directing things we see massive gameification of the systems and inefficient direction of production by the platform manipulating things to make the platform more money. Ultimately the will of the consumer is being misdirected by subterfuge creating inefficient markets which are no longer being directed by capital and not capitalist. The platforms all reach a point where they can't make more money by simply injecting more funds to be more productive. They can however make more money by actually being worse and extracting more value from their users though.

randomdata 3y ago

> when clearly oligopoly is the end game of unconstrained capitalism. The trouble (or benefit) of unconstrained capitalism is that as soon as you do anything compelling, a thousand people will jump in to copy you. This makes establishment of an oligopoly highly unlikely. We see oligopolies in our constrained environment because the artificial constraints (e.g. intellectual property laws) we apply help build 'moats', keeping those thousands away.