The bad actors get more press.
All the software companies making products that help people out don't get good press. From implantable diabetic insulin pumps that auto-regulate, to small educational software made by people who love the field they are in.
Heck, Google Maps has made mass transit many times more usable than before, a definite societal good. I love being able to visit almost any major city in any country and have Google maps tell me what bus/subway/lightrail line to use.
There is code out there that helps writers organize their thoughts, mobile apps to help with meditation, and plenty of sites using ad revenue to create high quality video content about how to effectively and safely get in shape and work out at the gym.
Not to mention the thousands of small merchants who make their livelihood from capitalism. I go to an independent optician, the eye glasses I'm currently wearing were locally designed and manufactured. And how many authors has Amazon helped support? Many independent authors who could never have gotten recognized, or had a fan base before, can now support themselves through writing and publishing.
Capitalist incentives are an overall good, but it is incredibly unfortunate that as a species we have used our learnings about ourselves to create self-destructive economic cycles. (Not that this is anything new, opium dens were a thing for a long time!)
Yes, because they have the largest impact, a la 2008 for example, and the subsequent bailouts. A thousand honest, sincere and low-impact nuns are rightly ignored in the face of a few pedophile priests who were juggled from parish to parish.
So for example I think everyone reading Hacker News has a side project they would like to make that would take something like 6 months to implement. It might even go as far as automating their job, or disrupting entire industries like Stripe or Square did.
Instead, most of us are barely making rent. So we spend the entirety of our time doing evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) work. This is largely by design, because profit comes from an imbalance in skills. We pay more when we need something. If we fix all the problems in the world by way of disruptive 6 month startup projects, there won't be anybody to buy the stuff that they can't make themselves. That's why I look at wealth inequality as a means rather than an end. The less time/wealth we have, the more time/wealth they have.
As for externalities, well, those are handled through tax policy since governments are the only entities large enough to counter the private sector. The general trend now is to gut all science and environmental agencies. The current era reminds me very much of growing up in the 80s. Tremendous potential being squandered for short term gain.
In seriousness though, I hate to be "that other" guy, but I'm tired of this. We pick out some flaw in our culture and immediately decide the solution is to throw capitalism away entirely like it's a JS framework. As if everything we have including the forums where we complain about capitalism weren't created by capitalism. I don't think it's perfect, but it seems to be the most successful system we've created so far. And one of the best parts is that unlike some systems, you choose what you take part in. You think social media is addictive and it's creators have malicious intent? Don't use it!
It would be nice if we went back to business models where companies sell products to their end users and not sell their end users to others.
There's nothing wrong with advertising, it's fast, passive, egalitarian and effective for both sides. Perhaps people need better training and self-control but that applies to a whole lot more in life than just ads on a social network.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book) - more or less the original how-to manual, breathtaking both in its cynicism and in its candor.
There's something that could be viable it bundled with other products. That something would be much more like email than Facebook (what is good). Yet, ad-based Facebook would beat it all the time.
If you include services in that you are talking about what, 98% of economic activity currently?
The only difference is the scale of the hierarchy. Capitalists are dictators of the four walls of their enterprise. Communists just scaled the size of the enterprise up to a point where the Coase theorem is working against it.
Neither say anything about individual or popular sovereignty. And as I think we're just starting to see (and will see more of, as the US declines), late-stage capitalism taken to an extreme is no more attractive than the USSR was.
As for the constant "pretty idea that doesn't work" ideological mantra, that requires either defining away China or taking on predictive debt that sounds little different than an earnest Bolshevik did 100 years ago.
You don't have to make a binary decision between capitalism and socialism or communism. It's a spectrum with many steps in between. I suspect or hope that there will be a movement the other way again.
In fact if you look at the countries that regularly top the lists of best places in the world to live (Australia, Canada, Scandinavia) they all follow that sort of model to various different degrees.
I don't think we really give each other enough credit. For instance not all that long ago ad blockers were a really niche thing. And people using them wondered how all of these fools could continue to subject themselves to the nonstop eye gouging and exploitation of ads at the time. But while some people were slower on the uptake, over time things changed. And that change has in turn also completely reshaped the web along with it in an extremely positive way.
I don't see any reason to expect we won't see a similar change as people begin to understand the consequences and exploitation of social media. In a way I think many of these industries are currently just exploiting naivete. People are easiest to exploit when they don't understand that it's even a thing. A conman in a city of angels would have a field day. And while we're certainly no angels, the idea that simply 'keeping in touch with your friends' could be in any way exploited is something that is not very intuitive to many people.
People will always be exploited so long as there are people seeking to exploit others. It is unfortunate that our system incentivizes this sort of sociopathic behavior, but at the same time our system also enables the most meritorious some of the best chances of 'making it' even when their ideas sound insane. How many approval committees (which any sort of social system is going to come down to) would have thought it wise to give Elon Musk 9 figures of money to go start building rockets because 'I think I can do it better than these companies that have been doing it for decades.'? It was an insane gamble, but his to make thanks to the fact he was able to accumulate a very large personal wealth through his other endeavors. I'd agree with supporting the bottom by all means possible, but I think it is important that companies - even awful ones - are allowed to be developed and thrive.
Should we regulate behavior targeting? Data collection? Advertising nature and reach?
Europe in general has led the way with privacy and data rights and we're starting to see similar movements in the US now to fix some of the major problems.
I'm assuming that is meant as a sarcastic nod to, like, a ton of stuff.
But taking the question of "is capitalism a poison on society" seriously:
Are you concerned about capitalism, capitalism as we're currently applying it, or laissez-faire free markets?
Most ills are ultimately because humans are short-sighted, poorly informed, lazy, emotionally biased, easily manipulated, and poor at evaluating risk, at least compared to the capitalistic ideal. Garbage in, garbage out.
Lol you need to do a little reading on socialism. Democratic ownership of the means of production.
Not saying it's better or worse but ignoring this aspect of capitalism invites problems. (IMNSHO)
The world we are in is exactly the world he envisaged. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan began their orgies of deregulation based on this man's work.
The role of government is to regulate when a product doesn't serve the publics interests