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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

It’s really scary what we’ve built on the Internet, and it’s even scarier that these corporations are able to go unchecked. Parts of life are already becoming miserable (e.g., automated “customer support”), and it’s just going to keep getting worse, all at the alter of growth and capitalism.

I absolutely hate the argument used that scale prevents them to do anything about it, as if crimes en masse are suddenly okay. It’s their problem, not ours, that they’ve built systems that are, for all intents and purposes, uncontrollable. These corporations act like they are the victim in these cases of abuse of their platform.

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I said this a many years ago and was downvoted heavily for it. If you think about what the Internet is - it's a technology that enables things to be done at hyper-scale. And this applies to all the good things in the world but also the bad including crime, terrorism, money laundering, propaganda, corporate abuse, etc.

I would venture that what we call capitalism these days isn't truly the capitalism of old. Rather, we're in some dystopian Corporatism future (corporatism vs capitalism) that aims to reduce choice, lock users in, and then treat those users as captive customers. It's no longer about providing a better or competitive product / service, but rather finding more ways to lock in users and eliminate choice. An acquisition by a FAANG is often a means to reduce choice instead of increase quality of a product or service.

For over a hundred years people have described the tendency of a capitalist enterprise to concentrate wealth and power. There is no fine distinction between small diverse competitive capitalism and oligopoly, they are different stages of the life cycle.

This is because small diverse enterprises proliferate at first in the growth stage and then winners start to emerge. When a crisis hits, the larger players snap up the bankrupt smaller players at bargain prices and get their best employees too. Over a series of crises, the market consolidates into oligopoly. Once the national market is nearly consumed, the remaining players look abroad to expand markets. There is nothing controversial about this, it is taught in business school.

https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve

This of course assumes a life cycle that starts domestically. Many ventures instead start abroad witnessing an opportunity to exploit cheap labor, lax regulations, or a unique natural resource. The western governments then assist the western companies in securing the opportunity, usually through gangster tactics. The resources are then extracted from the country, processed by the company into higher value goods, and resold to the originating country.

To add to this, the accumulation of wealth and power is literally written into the very concept of capitalism. That's the capital the name refers to. Even Adam Smith wrote about ways to mitigate it, so it's always been there.

I agree about today's corporatism environment, with the elaboration of the idea that we've basically gotten into a privatized or corporate based socialist/communist regime vs a government controlled one. The U.S. has questionably railed against socialism and communism for over a century and still does, and yet, it's allowed it to take over from the corporation and private sector, which is arguably much, much worse. Governments, for the most part, at least have some incentives to keep people's interests in mind.

However, I think this sort of corporatism is a natural evolution of capitalism, because capitalism has no other incentives outside of profit and growth.

> The U.S. has questionably railed against socialism and communism for over a century and still does, and yet, it's allowed it to take over from the corporation and private sector

Absolutely zero corporations have done anything like letting their workers own the means of production or implementing workplace democracy.

Um, the structure for an employee owned company is a called ... a corporation. Workplace democracy typically happens at shareholder meetings, where senior management is either retained or fired by the employee/owners. The largest example of this is Publix supermarkets. They have 200,000 employee owners.

the first truly revolutionary product

Interesting. Can you detail more about what you mean by privatized / corporate socialism?

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