Capitalism, when unchecked, tends to create those giant monopolies you’ve mentioned. It is capitalism at its end game, total consolidation.
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Four_mile_circus@lemmy.ml 3 weeks agoYou could go further and say what’s happening now isn’t capitalism at all. Yanis Varoufakis calls the modern world economy “technofeudalism”: it’s controlled by information hypercompanies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, that make money not by producing anything, but by controlling the flow of information between consumers and producers, and charging producers rent for access to consumers.
If you’re an app developer, you pay Google and Apple whatever they ask, and you follow their rules, or you don’t get to sell your product in their app stores; if you sell products, you give Amazon their cut, or you don’t get to sell in their market. And because Google and Apple and Amazon have so effectively entrapped customers, capitalists who don’t agree to their terms can’t get to their consumers at all.
It’s vassal capitalism. Producers pay their technofeudal lords the bulk of their profits and compete with each other for the remaining scraps. And then they squeeze their workers and exploit their consumers even more in order to make enough money to survive at all.
demonsword@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I remember back in the reddit days telling people that the EU doesn’t have trillion dollar tech megacorps because we don’t want companies to have this much power and the americans calling it cope. Well no ones laughing now.
demonsword@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
But today’s money doesn’t really have any frontiers our boundaries. If a corp is being openly traded in the stock market, it belongs to the very same assholes that own the americans megacorps.
arararagi@ani.social 3 weeks ago
“Actually, real capitalism has never been tried”
ebolapie@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I don’t think that’s what they were saying, but I also think you probably don’t care.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I don’t disagree. I don’t know about strictly “techno-“, because it isn’t restricted just to the insertion of technological rent extractors every step of the way, it’s also every single business trying to maximize profits at every step along the production line, and they’re all effective monopolies that have no other way to make the line move up other than to charge for it. Almost nobody is making anything new, it’s just putting different color lipstick on a pig.