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Comment by jspash | Hacker News Reader

I often question the motives of my company. It has only 100 or so employees. Has been in business for 25+ years. But we are on a continual drive to increase sales, hire new people, add size to the facilities. But it wasn't always this way. It only happened once it went public. Now we are working for the investors. They need to see an increasing return on their investment. Management choices are no longer about the customer or providing a great product/service. It's about squeezing margins and duping the customer to join our mailing list or accept cookies. Otherwise "the list won't grow". And how can we market to more and more people if we can't track how many pages they've viewed?

I've gone a bit off track there, but the point being, there IS no answer when I've explicitly asked "why" with regards to these things. Nobody knows. They just know they have "targets" and the targets are constantly moving.

/rant over

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Where I work is in the similar boat. Except we're 130 people and still private.

The company recently took a large cash infusion from a venture capital firm. The company said "yadayada you'll see small improvements how we work" - what that translates to is:

    1. adding a new C level for sales
    2. doubling the sales department
    3. Metrics now for new customers is doubled

But... The rest of the departments - we have stagnated. It's sales sales sales.

Our department is suffering. Badly. So are others. Complaints to upper management appear to go on deaf ears, or with ridiculous responses (like: well we saw one of you on your cellphone so you're not really busy).

And when we've asked for direct support for retaining customers (using their sales language), our team was told "just make less mistakes". And unsurprisingly, customers are getting more vocal about substandard service after the sale.

I'm looking elsewhere. Have been since this VC firm acquisition/funding was announced. (VC's are poison in every case I've seen.) But things are getting worse, with no end in sight - and I want out.

"Our department is suffering. Badly. So are others. Complaints to upper management appear to go on deaf ears, or with ridiculous responses (like: well we saw one of you on your cellphone so you're not really busy)."

"And when we've asked for direct support for retaining customers (using their sales language), our team was told "just make less mistakes"."

Wow, that's literally Dilbert-level of bad management. My condolences. Where I work (a large international corp.), the two or three levels of management above me are fairly reasonable and in touch with everyday reality. I guess I'm lucky.

I worked at a company that started with a passionate founder who respected his users. Then he was ousted by the investors. Then the company was acquired by a giant corporation. It all went downhill from there. At some point I couldn't take it any more and quit. I couldn't bring myself to betray my users, I felt personally responsible for what I put out. Now, it's increasingly a money-making machine. Many sane people left. There are now KPIs tied to metrics. There are now managers and hierarchies. There are managers who have no clue what they're doing. There are now a/b tests, server-side settings, dark patterns, unwanted algorithms, omnipresent analytics, and user manipulation. It's effectively a B2B company now, and your attention is the product.

Even though I quit 5 years ago, it still pains me to see what has become of something I put my soul into, something I lived for, something I enjoyed using myself and recommended to everyone.

This is why I've been looking at how worker-owned cooperatives can be formed and work. The entry moats for tech businesses is low enough, and tech worker wealth is high enough that it really should be possible - or even common. One difficult part is that for the structure not to decay in the same way you're describing, you need truly shared ownership coupled with democratic decision making and that might be slower and less cleanly decisive than a typical hierarchy.

I would absolutely be interested in joining a worker cooperative in the tech industry.

There's a lot of those:

https://ioo.coop/directory/clouds/ https://dna.crisp.se/docs/index.html https://autonomic.zone/ https://vebit.xyz/ https://komun.org/?l=en

The deal with a lot of them is that they want to stay small, and others want to be local.

I'm involved in the early stage of a new remote-only co-op. If anyone in this thread is interested, my email is on my profile.

I’ve been thinking about the same. Starting a company with good intentions is all well and good but the founders won’t want to or be able to run it forever, and then it seems like your options are either selling to a big company or going public. I’m interested to know more about experiences and practicalities of handing ownership to the employees in a tech company.

As far as I can tell the most public examples are both larger and smaller than what I feel would end up where a tech coop company would end up. Larger because examples like Mondragon corp is just much larger and much more stable than a starting coop would be. Smaller because much coop organization and literature is oriented to something like a coffee shop or restaurant.

A direction might be putting together financing as a coop to purchase an ongoing company that a single founder is maybe ready to turn over or sell - lifestyle companies ready to turn over are maybe an interesting category for this kind of transition.

I had a SaaS vendor that followed that trajectory. The technical team was very dedicated but the president didn't even pretend to care about existing customers. The cost of leaving was assumed to be so high that he said out loud that they added features only to attract new business.

I left a CTO role of a startup for similar reasons. We already had paying customers, and the company was doing OK, but there was always drive to do and more flashier things, rather than double down on helping our customers.

I remember the moment of epiphany when I realised that the company was not in fact working for customers, they were just a marketing sell to be able to attract more investors to grow the company even more.

While I was not naive even back then and knew that its mostly how the world works, I still felt the misalignment of incentives would generally mean I as a person would need to squeeze and disregard some people in order to accomplish the goals of others. Organizational incentives always win in the long run, however well meaning the people of it are. I'd much prefer to work for a client that gets its revenue directly from its customers, as that would mean helping them would help the company too.

I'm very happy that working in IT allows me to be a bit more picky in who I'm working for to enrich, and it was possible for me to leave, and be happy for it.

Shareholder value above all else is what is important. Unfortunately, VC money needs to be returned to their shareholders too. It's a ponzi scheme and somebodies next big idea will be the catalyst for additional money and so on and so on. It almost feels like startups are the get rich quick scheme of the moment.

> Shareholder value above all else is what is important

At Evilcorp, we are fanatically dedicated to the mission statement and core values articulated by our founder:

"To bring ever-increasing value to shareholders and upper-level managers by harming our customers, employees, and the communities and environment where we operate."

Bingo! I imagine this is what Facebook's mantra of 'Move Fast and Break Shit' has matured into over the years.

I know there was some grumbling recently about some folks on HN drubbing MBAs. But when I think of someone putting profit and servicing the shareholders over servicing the customers that's what I mean when I say MBA disease. IMHO redirecting the company's resources to favor sales vs service in order to fuel growth and pay shareholders will eventually result in a loss of customers, perhaps irreparably damaging the business as a result.

What you are experiencing is growthism, and it is directly tied to local incentives.

CEOs for publicly traded companies have only one goal in mind: make massive bonuses. The path to get to massive bonuses is to pump up the stock, which requires growth, or the appearance of growth.

And to get there, they (instead of providing anything of actual value justifying the growth) play fast and lose with quality, reputation or respect for employees.

It's an overall loss for society and something that I notice has seeped especially into the gaming industry.

I wrote about this phenomenon at https://gavinhoward.com/2020/01/corporations-create-perverse... . I think it's a real thing.

"there IS no answer"

Sure there is.

'In the begging' it was was invariably led by some kind of founder/owners, and the values of the company were intimately related to their values. For better or worse.

A public or widely held company not led by founders tends to have a more political class of executives who are more likely to report to the board on the basis of 'making them money'. Maybe not, but probably a little more so than otherwise. Every situation is different.

So the answer to 'why' is simple: the board probably makes the expectation of the CEO, who requires that of the team, one way or another, and that trickles down into various plans of various kinds. It's really just that.

Publicly traded stocks will inevitably end up in the hands of whoever is more optimistic about a company's potential than everybody else with money to buy. It's like gravity.

If you had a company that could somehow produce a million dollars every time a magic button is pressed, you could get immensely rich. But you could get even richer by selling that company if you found someone sufficiently convinced that they'd be able to scale that magic to two buttons. If geese that lay golden eggs were real, stock exchanges would be their dedicated killing zone.

Then your management aren't very good.

The reason is that every business, or system gets worse if you don't improve it. Call it entropy in physics.

If you don't try and improve, pay attention to the market, adapt, move, change, or at least maintain or build a moat, competition will inevitably want to have what you've got. It's why capitalism works. If you get old, and don't satisfy your customers, someone else will.

Now, if you plan on keeping your job for 1-2 years, then you don't really care. Fine, that's your point of view. But management and shareholders certainly would like the business to be around for as long as possible. And for that you always need to develop and change.

And this is not about some crazy capitalist mentality that destroys the planet. Nature is the same. Inevitably the tribe leading lion will get challenged and taken down. It's just what happens. Unless you at least try and work against it.

> If you don't try and improve, pay attention to the market, adapt, move, change, or at least maintain or build a moat, competition will inevitably want to have what you've got. It's why capitalism works. If you get old, and don't satisfy your customers, someone else will.

only in a competitive market. There are markets which don't behave freely, and some would call those market failures. Health insurance, and healthcare, for one, is like that.

Fair point. Of course a lot of those industries have sown up regulation and spend enough of lobbying to not have to do shit. Unfortunately.

> But management and shareholders certainly would like the business to be around for as long as possible. And for that you always need to develop and change.

I agree with everything you said except this part. Maybe I'm jaded, everything I've read and seen on the market and job shows investors/management only really care about the next quarter, maybe a year the most. Only a few companies who are capable of looking at and committing to multi-year plans.

Be careful drawing conclusions from what you read on business. There are significant selection biases about what stories you hear. Anecdotally - whenever I have read about a company I work for (F500), the outside perspective gets a lot of very basic facts wrong. Often they take small incidences and turn them into broad generalizations. Sometimes their sources have agendas. Etc.

This is one case where it's important to tag information that comes in. The spectrum extremes, IMO, range from "did I observe this fact" to "is this someone else's conclusion". The more from the latter you have, the less faith you should put in your own conclusions drawn from it.

Agree. I don't pretend to know everything that's going on within a business. However, long term strategy/direction of a company is fairly easily observable.

This is a very simplistic take. Capitalism as it is practiced in its various forms across the world, has thousands of levers that are pushed in certain direction by laws and regulations, and by norms and cultural philosophy. If you change the latter, you change the values of the levers which changes how much businesses have to _compete_ and _grow_ in order to remain _profitable_ in the long term. So yes, the current climate is our choice, and we can make different choices if we decide to.

I have the impression that businesses that are not publicly traded are in a better position to plan for the long run instead of having to cater to the quartely whims of shareholders. As an example, see the family-owned businesses in Germany which are often doing quite well over generations in competitive international markets, despite only growing slowly or not at all. Innovation is the key factor to survival, but why should innovation be linked to growth? Why is "growth" even an indicator for success, isn't a big organization almost by definition much less efficient than a small one?

"If you don't try and improve, pay attention to the market, adapt, move, change, or at least maintain or build a moat, competition will inevitably want to have what you've got. It's why capitalism works. If you get old, and don't satisfy your customers, someone else will."

So, the Traditional Sake corporation example aside, I agree - you do need to have some improvement over time.

This is not what public stockholders demand though. Public stockholders demand that intangibles be sacrificed in an attempt to improve tangibles. Sacrifice quality of service in an attempt to increase the profit margin. Sacrifice the lifetime of the product in an attempt to lower the RRP.

This isn't improving the product, it's just moving things around. At best it's shifting market demographic in hope that the new demographic is more profitable, at worst it's burning your customers for a short-term windfall.

The core issue here is that there are limits to what you can improve in a given timeframe, and if you don't respect those limits then you end up just making things worse. Management often just tells themselves otherwise and keeps pushing until they've already killed the golden goose. At that point, the lesson they've learnt is irrelevant - it's too late, customers are already leaving and their reputation is irreparably tarnished.

"The list must grow, the spice must flow"

"I want you to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze! Give me spice! Drive them. Drive them into utter submission! Do not show the slightest pity or mercy!"

I agree, the growth at all costs mentality has the ring of the frothing House of Harkonnen to it.

And even the Baron Harkonnen himself didn't think that was a good way to govern. His plan was to let that run for a while, then have his favorite younger nephew take over, dial it back, and gain the people's support because he would be less bad by comparison.

I think I finally found out why this is often the case - took awhile to figure it out, and many people may intuitively know this without being able to articulate why.

There is a lifecycle in industries and within companies. The more the industry you are in is exposed to competition, the more obvious and unavoidable it is. Some, such as a Dr's office, or a field/industry with geo-local niches (a plumber, or a well drilling outfit, or a realtor), the less obvious it is/the more you can sometimes avoid it. The more you're part of the global marketplace (tech, manufacturing - especially mass manufacturing, food, etc.) the more obvious and unavoidable it is. The way this typically works is:

1) A new field is discovered, a major disruptive shift happens in a marketplace, or a new niche opens up. Everyone jumps on the new openings - new players often have an advantage as they can move quicker and are less 'stuck' in old ways. They also tend to be small. They also tend to be pretty inefficient, but the opportunity is rich enough, it usually has plenty of room - most companies that aren't complete disasters will thrive. Even those that ARE complete disasters can survive.

2) Companies that start iterating on more efficient ways to produce value (more value for less cost) get a lot of extra capital in cashflow, or those that seem most promising are able to leverage outside capital (investment) to increase in scale. This means the 'machine' consuming customer needs is able to take more input, produce more output at a given company. This machinery is expensive to operate, but a key part - produces economies of scale. This rarely is at any one company, it is often spread across many companies, with various degrees of success/copying. With any luck, this expands the market (more customers, more money coming in). This often results in shifts of customers, as those who have free capital have invested in serving the customer needs better or are able to provide lower prices due to their improved economies of scale. This is why folks get so worked up about market share.It is also why Monopolies are so dangerous.

3) This iterates for awhile, until the market stops growing much. You now have a set of companies with various degrees of market share, ability to execute, economies of scale, debt load, etc. Usually 1-2 that are REALLY good, and others that give them a bit of a leg up in a particular niche.

4) Now it gets hard - market stops growing, or even worse shrinks. You have a set of companies with great economies of scale who can cut prices (easy for them, hard for others without that scale). These companies are probably also pretty decent at execution as they have a lot of practice. They also probably have a lot of capital (due to excess from their operations - 10% of a billion is a lot more money than 10% of 1 million, even assuming similar margins), or have experience raising capital. You also have a bunch of smaller companies with none of those things, or that tried to get there, couldn't pull it off, and are loaded with debt (even worse).

Guess who loses? It is rarely the big co.

Long term, it's called a cycle because of the shifts in markets/opportunities. They make the parts that were the big corp competitive advantage in the old environment - all the CapEx sunk cost + operation tuning at the big co - into more of a harm than a help in adjusting to the new reality. Also, no one wants to kill the 'goose that laid the golden egg', so there is intense organizational pressure to even attempt a pivot. Kodak and their huge miss re: digital photos is a great example of that.

This also comes out a lot in things like forest growth, crop development, etc. If you're not racing to be the tallest tree around, or the tallest ear of corn - you're going to get starved out by those who will. Unless you're lucky enough to get a niche anyway they won't try to go after.

Intentionally setting a 'be the best, don't try to grow too fast' business strategy is not, IMO, a good idea to do blindly, any more than settling into your current job and not seeking to learn or grow career wise or eventually find something better. If you're 'lucky' you may end up stagnant and complaining about all the people who passed you by.

At the same time, job hopping between FAANG's every month will quickly run out of steam and leave you with nothing you've really accomplished, and impossible to meet deliverables (like a company that has overpromised/oversold itself without figuring out things like execution, sustainable company culture, etc.). It's a balance.

There is a growing body of thought that capitalism and, more specifically, continued growth, is unsustainable. A lot of the literature focuses around the environment [1], but we should also think about businesses that perform a useful community service or product to their community - must they always grow? If not, must their competitor?

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1558/jocr.v5i2.197

"We have a finite environment—the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist." David Attenborough

SpaceX is trying to solve the finite environment problem.

That's good. It buys us more time. But we need to ease up on the exponent anyway.

Is it? Earth is, or was, extremely hospitable to humans. Mars is, and will be for a very long time, extremely inhospitable to humans. If we can't even take care of the Earth, what hope is there of taking care of Mars? The more likely scenario is that greedy Martians destroy their own Martian environment very quickly and make themselves extinct. It's much easier to destroy Mars (for human life) than it is to destroy Earth.

We need to focus on sustainability, otherwise Mars will also be unsustainable.

Just wait until oxygen itself becomes a commodity, like in the film "Total Recall". Except unlike in film, there's no deus ex machina native ancient technology to suddenly make the entire atmosphere breathable.

Your mistake is thinking that the plan is to move humanity away into space, instead of bringing space (or more accurately mineral-rich asteroids and solar energy) to humanity. That way we can just externalize all industry & pollution to a lagrange point somewhere and let the earth take care of healing itself.

If we continue like this, humans will be long gone before we reach that point (IF we reach that point at all).

Given the timescale of building an endurable self-sustaining civilization on another planet, and the speed with which we are destructing our own environment for humans to live in (and capability to provide high-tech support for this space adventure), my guess is that this is a pipe dream. And that the Mars thing is a nice rich man's hobby, scientists playground, and bread-and-games diversion tactic for the rest of mankind.

Taken to its absolute limit, space travel is limited by the speed of light. So when you get to that limit, you are limited by space, as you can only expand in a sphere--i.e. O(n^3). Space is so enormous that even the tiniest exponential will overrun O(n^3) before even getting out of our galaxy. Result. That exponential is going to flatten out and look more like a sigmoid.

One thing this argument misses is that much of economic growth comes not from increasing consumption, but from making that consumption more efficient.

The problem isn't solved while consumption of matter and energy grows exponentially.

When efficiency is achieved, the economic growth is later converted to "everybody should use this new efficiency".

And more importantly, efficiency in the consumption is not translated in efficiency in the use of resources (which is the important one): transporting goods by horse vs faster transportation with combustion engines.

But the result is more consumption, because you spend the money saved on inefficiency on more consumption. If coca cola produces 1m bottles of coke in 1 year and finds a way to produce that many in half a year, they're not going to produce 1m bottles a year anymore, they're going to produce 2m bottles a year.

I know it is besides the point, but just to illustrate the scale of Coca-Cola, they produce 108 billion bottles per year.

Probably not, no. They're already selling as many as they can at the current price -- there's no shortage of Coke out there. They might lower the price and thereby sell more (though they're unlikely to sell twice as much without more than halving the price), but that's not necessarily a bad thing; it means people are having to do less to get the same amount of Coke.

Do you have any data to back this claim? Because Jevon's Paradox is a real, observed phenomenon. In reality, the only thing our economies optimize for is profit. Sometimes profit comes from reducing costs or increasing efficiency. Other times it comes from manipulating consumer psychology. Or did you think that Red Bull cans are tall and skinny because that's somehow an efficient use of aluminum?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I think in a Jevon situation where there is a game-changing technology jump in a consumable commodity, there will be pent-up demand being expressed at the same time better efficiency means prices can decline and profits can rise simultaneously. This can be more sustainable if these factors are better in balance to begin with and stay that way. The improved efficiency is then enjoyed and absorbed into the regular operation of everyone involved and soon or eventually becomes the new normal. Ideally the companies never need to go back to the old normal which may likely not be very economically viable any more so that becomes completely forgotten.

But with growth beyond a certain point, cash flow becomes so significant and so many fewer people are handling it that the room for misguided actions, not just unforseen but often hidden or obscured, can quickly overcome the profits from much earlier technology milestones which took much longer for the entire org to implement. Which can not be replaced unless more technology breakthroughs are forthcoming, but even when a steady stream of excellent new technology keeps coming down the pipeline it could still be a sinking ship. Then if only the top people think it's not seaworthy, or know what they've done that might make it so, they're going to completely deceive the rest of the crew as effectively as possible or all the lifeboats could be used up.

When it comes to building cash flow, profits, shareholder value, and overall company valuation not every economically sensible executive is going to pursue or achieve the same balance among these, regardless of motivation.

When a company originally thrives because the early talent can make profits that are good, it can be the firm foundation for what could be long-term, even exponential growth.

Later leadership which does not always have equal talent for profits will often have more experience utilizing cash flow itself to substitute as a resource for bonuses, dividends, and things like that when much needed technology boosts are not the windfall they once were.

The net effect is people make money for a while then the technology is wasted.

Because profits actually weren't pursued enough, and cash flow too much instead

Like when a huge company acquires a rapidly-progressing technology group but no more progress occurs after that, or progress becomes intentionally discontinued or even reversed.

Like a gravitational field so massive that it draws in other planets and absorbs their potential for continued growth, rather than leveraging progress using the overwhelming resources.

A smallco that made excellent profits primarily from innovation itself, looks excellent on paper because it is actually a good acquisition target. When absorbed into a bigco their impressive profits no longer add up to more than a drop in the huge bucket so focus ends up being placed elsewhere besides the profit-making innovation that was supposed to be so promising.

That quote always bugged me because it disregards that our economic growth is not really tethered to natural resources. Sure a company like Coca-Cola can only grow so much before it effectively covers the entire planet, but they can still reduce costs to improve their profit margins and displace existing drinks from other companies with a new product.

The cloud as a business is mostly about building products that address ever changing needs and making the clients more dependent on said products. There are no environmental restrictions here you could grow for as long as user needs grow.

>That quote always bugged me because it disregards that our economic growth is not really tethered to natural resources.

I really think the opposite is true, what makes you think that?

The only growth that could be tied to non-natural resources is something like the combinatoric possibilities between a set of options.

Everything else links back to matter. Even my "internet points" on HN are tied back to the food I had to eat to type in that sweet sweet snark.

This notion that economics isn't ultimately a resource scheduling theory that falls out of a base set of behaviors (commerce). If we removed choice, we get operations research.

Capitalism is akin to wanting to cook a hotdog on a campfire and burning down an entire house to do it.

“There are no environmental restrictions here.”

Cloud is still computing. Computers with a finite life that need to be produced, from natural resources.

Computing that needs to be powered and cooled.

Those have environmental impacts and very much align with OPs quote.

This is a wildly out of touch view of how economic growth works.

First off, where do you think "the cloud" comes from? Even if we assume 100% renewable grid (which is currently impossible) the computers that run the cloud require an enormous amount raw materials and labor to manufacture.

But far more importantly, where does your clients capital come from?

The greatest accounting trick capitalism every pulled was to get people to think of individual parts of a system rather then the entire thing.

There's real magical thinking involved to think that capital just appears in these clients at now real cost. At some point labor and resource exploitation is required to create economic value which is then passed around throughout the system. Just because you can skim off some surplus value selling some SaaS product in the cloud doesn't mean that the value you are paid with doesn't come from the exploitation of resources.

Finally, you can easily dispel this myth by looking at the current state of our global environment. Show me any period of economic growth that isn't also tied to increased energy and resource usage.

Fiat-denominated economic growth may not be tethered to natural resources, but real economic growth is.

We may well develop technologies that allow us to generate more with less, but there are limits to this.

Yes, Coca-cola may invent a new soda, but that soda will always have some material inputs.

Cloud computing most definitely does not escape this - it relies on massive networks of physical infrastructure that require huge investments of natural resources and human capital to build.

Even the monetization of things that appear at first blush to avoid this issue such as the monetization of human attention do not do so in reality as our mental faculties themselves rely on the continued sustenance of our physical bodies.

It's a never-ending vicious cycle between the strive for more energy- and resource- efficient production of goods, and the dispersion of these efficiency gains through increased consumption and market expansion, both geographically and through new classes of products/services. The "airy" fiat currency together with the impersonal profit-seeking multinational corporations create this fairy-tale illusion of infinite growth, which may look efficient from the perspective of a single company, but isn't when viewed holistically on a global level.

> There are no environmental restrictions here you could grow for as long as user needs grow.

All this demand for software and ever changing needs, and more cloud computing environment is coming from somewhere. You want to know where?

Merely 2 decades ago, the average household had one computer in the house, and it was typically a desktop, and the adults and teenagers had had cellphones.

Now, almost everyone that is middle class or above has multiple computing devices in their possession at all times. Every member of the family has their own laptop or tablet and cellphone, probably even a smartwatch or two, even kids as young as 4. There's probably multiple TV screens and gaming consoles as well. Devices that are designed to be replaced in a mere 2-3 years through planned obsolesce. We have more cheap shit than ever before and it gets thrown in the trash at an ever increasing rate. There are screens literally everywhere now: My gas station pump, the wine and beer isle at my grocery store, at the checkout line, walking out into the parking lot, on my wrist, in my pocket, at my coffee shop, in my restaurants.

That results in more companies needing to have digital presences, more apps, more games, more features, more data collection and spyware tracking you around the internet, more ML models being trained and draining energy, more crypto-mining and 4,000 watt PSU's coming online, so on and so forth.

All this stuff requires an ever increasing amount of rare earth materials and burned fossil fuels to produce and operate.

That kind of economic growth requires more resources, but not all does. When Google tweaks a caching algorithm to enable 10% more with the same hardware/energy input, that contributes to economic growth with less resources. Same as if we discovered a new steel smelting technique that uses 10% less coking coal for the same quality steel.

> When Google tweaks a caching algorithm to enable 10% more with the same hardware/energy input, that contributes to economic growth with less resources.

Sure, but that also increases Google's net profit and allows its users to make more queries. That profit is then maybe invested to penetrate new market segments like transportation or hardware production, or is distributed among CEOs who buy bigger houses and more cars.

In essence, the efficiency gains of improving the algorithm are lost because of the free-flowing streams of capital.

I don't think it allows its users to make more queries. When is the last time you've done a google search and have seen "too many queries, try again later"?

The efficiency gains of improving the algorithm ARE free-flowing streams of capital.

But when was the last time you went on a site like Reddit just to be greeted with a "Our CDN is overloaded" page or similar?

> There are no environmental restrictions here you could grow for as long as user needs grow.

Computers need matter, energy, and space.

In a way, sure. The reality is they are mostly a consolidation play.

Lots and lots of apps are going to be rolled up into forms solutions, for example.

Without farming you and everybody else would be naked and starving to death. I can guarantee you that no app will save you then.

You can have unending growth even with finite resources.

It's Zeno's Paradox - if you have use half of the resources, and then half of the remaining, and then half of that remaining, you could continue forever.

> There is a growing body of thought that capitalism and, more specifically, continued growth, is unsustainable.

Excuse my language but... who the actual fuck thinks otherwise? This is extremely perplexing to me.

How many layers of double speak must one hide behind before you can believe that sustained growth for its own sake can be a healthy, sustainable goal?

People with no imagination, knowledge of history, or capacity to think about anything but themselves. People who think humans have a right to obliterate all other forms of life in order to carpet this planet with...whatever we want. People who go to zoos and watch Ow My Balls.

Continued growth: absolutely. Capitalism itself only exists because resources are finite though. It's the most practical method we have right now for efficiently allocating those resources.

Allocating resources is a hard problem to solve. If we had infinite resources we would not need to solve it.

Unfortunately, a transition to a more planned economy is going to be necessary, because individual actors working independently of the needs of others might be a surprisingly good way to allocate resources, but it's not smart enough to be done sustainably.

It doesn't need to be planned. The markets just need to be constrained and regulated. In some extents they can be expanded. E.g. you can force companies to buy and trade quotas for different types of externalities to cover undoing those externalities and let the markets sort out the most efficient way of addressing them.

There is complexity there (you need to ensure there aren't any easily exploitable loopholes), but markets have lots of uses.

> It's the most practical method we have right now for efficiently allocating those resources.

This is where true why is our way of life less sustainable today than it was 1000 years ago?

Nearly all first nations tribes lived in a way of live that was sustainable indefinitely. In 250 years of developing capitalism we have destroyed most of the biosphere, and trigger climate change that has the potential to undo civilization as we know it.

Capitalism and rapid hydrocarbon extraction has allowed the species to surpass the carrying capacity of the planet in away that cannot possibly be sustained.

Personally, I think this was always our destiny, but to try to delude yourself into believing that capitalism is making things better is a strange form of denial.

Because there are many, many more of us than there were 1000 years ago. Per capita, sustaining the lifestyle of a 21st century Westerner requires less land than that of an 11th century peasant.

It requires less land because of the heavy use of fertilizers and non-reproducing hybrid grains. It's literally and unquestionably and unsustainable process.

The CO2 emissions per person, which is a much better way to measure how much energy it takes to sustain a persons life style is unimaginably higher.

I think capitalism is being misused in this sentence, and that is making it hard for people to make sense of. Capitalism is simply an economic system where the means of production are privately owned. Growth is not a requirement or even feature of capitalism. Being able to own companies, property and hold currency are all features of capitalism. If you are trying to say "infinite growth is unsustainable" that stands on it's own and is worth discussing.

Growth, is however, an emergent property of capitalism by virtue of the competitive model, that is very hard to counter.

A problem with capitalism may be that it is a very broad category, and that currently we have a particular nasty flavour of it, that deserves its own name (e.g. hypercapitalism?) to avoid the endless discussion & confusion whether its all good and natural, or utterly broken (at least for the common folks participating in it).

It seems to me we had a form of capitalism that flourished (piggy-backed) well on top of democracy, and now it has morphed into a form that thrives best in a plutocracy (where democracies are eventually just Putin-style husks of their former glory).

> currently we have a particular nasty flavour of it, that deserves its own name (e.g. hypercapitalism?)

Corporatism.

It's publicly-traded corporations that cause many of these negative effects:

* Since investors treat corporations as black boxes that are just numbers going up or down, they are separated from the non-financial ethical consequences of what the business does. We all, through our 401ks, probably own stock in companies doing outright horrendous things to human rights in developing countries or harming the environment.

* Investors put pressure on corporations to grow at the expense of all other things. Corporations that fail to prioritize that will be replaced by better-capitalized corporations that do. It is an evolutionary environment where the primary selection pressure is growth.

* An effective way for a corporation to grow is, instead of competing, simply acquire competition to reduce selection pressure and then do things like regulatory capture to rig the system.

> Capitalism is simply an economic system where the means of production are privately owned. Growth is not a requirement or even feature of capitalism.

The problem is that private ownership leads to the classic collective action problem, where actions that are individually rational to each private owner have consequences that are collectively irrational and make the world worse off.

This is not to say that private ownership should be abolished. But there has to at least be a heavy collective counterweight to self-interested wealth accumulation.

> Capitalism is simply an economic system where the means of production are privately owned.

Just a nitpick, there is another condition, which is that the labor is traded on the free market under capitalism. I can imagine a society where everything is done in cooperatives where the workers are also the owners (they have shared private ownership).

The natural state in capitalism is that a worker owns their own means of production - their time. If one wants to trade their time into a collective, that is their time to trade. Slavery breaks this, and one of the more interesting facets of the American civil war was that the North (anti-slavery side) was much more efficient than was the South (which favored slavery), even in agriculture.

Labor is not capital (means of production), it's not being "owned", since one cannot accumulate it. That analysis is deliberately obfuscating problems with capitalism, which stem from capital accumulation. (And if anything, it is slavery that turns labor into actual capital.)

You missed the point.

That thought that continued growth is eventually unsustainable has been there since at least the 1840's. The core of Marxism is the idea that capitalism is the most effective method of increasing productive capacity, and that this is fantastic (the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto is fanboy-level praise for capitalism), until it runs out of room to grow into.

Whether or not you agree with the analysis, the core problem it posits - that capitalism will grow out of markets to expand into, and that once it does, it will fundamentally change the game - matters.

We can necessarily not have growth forever - if not before, eventually we run out of exploitable energy within our light-cone. In practice we'll hit limits far sooner that will cause competition to drive down production cost will be far harsher than it needs to be in an environment where you can compensate by expansion.

Marx thought that would happen "soon" - when capitalism has spread to the entire world. But it's a question when, not if, we hit a ceiling where further demand growth can't physically happen, and quite likely we'll reach a ceiling long before there where it's not happening fast enough to counter competitive pressure. The world population is expected to stabilise and start dropping - at least for a while - possibly as soon as towards the end of this century. What happens to growth then?

Whenever we reach a point where capitalism is no longer getting growth by growing into expanding markets, the question becomes whether capitalist competition will drive us to a level of automation that threatens to kill capitalism. Marx believed that would happen by causing crises of "overproduction", where improved efficiency would cause mass unemployment and by extension kneecap demand by taking away peoples incomes. Alternatively, whether we'll be able to as a society reign things in and ensure people share in enough of the improvements in efficiency for capitalism to survive - be it with UBI, or shortening working hours, or other means.

Because it's easy to forget that one of the "promises" of capitalist competitive pressure is to drive margins towards zero, because a company that can survive with lower margins can out-compete one that can't. And ultimately that means driving every cost that can be reduced down, and that means ultimately driving labour costs down as far as they can go...

I agree with a lot of what you just said, I think Marx was correct about the idea that capitalism requires the growth. I would state his thesis as follows: If you reward continued production of goods (which requires investment) with property, eventually you will run out of property to give away.

I believe in the 20th century, this conundrum was resolved in enormous growth of what we consider to be property assets. We have not only reached the limit of exploitation of natural resources on the planet, but also added intelectual property, military-industrial complexes, various financial instruments, healthcare, and as of late, we have monetized human attention and behavioral data. On top of that, we monetized human servitude, now lot of well-off people are in debt (at least with mortgages and student loans).

It's not so much that you run out of property, but that you run out of ability to expand your customer base fast enough to see fast growth, and the slower growth capitalists can get from external factors, such as new markets, the more incentives they have to look to internal factors to maintain their competitive advantage.

Ultimately that means addressing labour costs. For an individual capitalist it makes sense to drive labour costs towards zero. But if everyone does it, then their markets shrink unless there are external factors (e.g. UBI or similar) that counters the market-wide effects of their reduction in labor costs.

This is also why UBI is a "liberal" (in the classical, not US sense) policy, and not something the socialist left is very interested in - from a socialist point of view UBI is bread and circus to keep capitalism from imploding.

There are many flavours of Capitalism. Some work extremely well (Scandinavia) others less so (Russia/China). However Capitalism still beats anything else humans have ever tried.

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