Capitalism–Not a Few Bad Actors–Destroyed the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism–Not a Few Bad Actors–Destroyed the Internet

bostonreview.net

33 pointssyliconadder23 comments

Why is this post flagged? It is interesting, people can agree or disagree with it, but flagging it seems like propaganda. It is mostly about the dominance of data hungry, advertising backed web sites. But I also blame browser companies (I'm looking at you Firefox) for helping that happen.

The internet seems rather non destroyed to me. I use it daily and it works fine.

If you don't like targeted ads etc there are various ways to avoid them. Ad blockers, Ghostery and the like.

Ads also create the incentive for spam domains. These are not so easy to block.

We absolutely do demonize a few specific companies, ones that tend to be highly visible already. Ad serving networks & other systems were already proliferating wildly & increasingly vicious about gathering data. But few of those were visible to consumers, & Big Tech, by being consumer-facing, had a much firmer hand on the third rail.ofnthe issue, even though they often were doing better than the emerging ad-industry by lightyears.

BigTech is terrifying in that it holds so much data, but gosh darn it's spread much much much less readily than that we were doing before it became so dominant. There werent any controls, if the IAB & their ilk had their way. Tech defends against capitalism.

The title should be neoliberalism or free-market fundamentalists.

There's nothing inherent in the private ownership of capital that stops regulations which force markets to be competitive. And the article isn't even really arguing this, they're using capitalism as a shorthand for 'free markets'.

I disagree. What's that one about how power corrupts? Power converges and consolidates into fewer and fewer hands if left be. Money begets power and that leads to lobbying which leads to regulatory capture and monopolistic abuses of power like exclusivity agreements. There may be some platonic idea where greed doesn't corrupt, but those examples seem to be few and far between.

> they're using capitalism as a shorthand for 'free markets'

Not at all; see my response to syliconadder. However, they are misusing the term. What they seem to mean by it is neither capitalism nor free markets but advertising/marketing.

Isn't it hard to divorce free-market from capitalism at this point of time?

Particularly be because, as Piketty shows, again and again and again, amassed concentrations of captial bend all politics to it, with seeming certain inevitability.

Not at all. They're largely orthogonal to one another, one being about market access and the other about factors of production. In many ways they're even antagonistic; a system that asserts the primacy of capital over labor and treats it preferentially reduces access to markets for those whose primary contribution is labor (which is most of us). The two only seem hard to distinguish or disentangle because people are conditioned not to think too hard about the difference.

Academically maybe, but in practice?

Is North Korea's Internet a better alternative?

Curious why downvoted ?

Because the answer is obviously no and neither the question nor the answer are informative whatsoever.

Because it’s a straw man bigger than Kim Jong Il’s ego.

Pretty bad faith comparison. The implication is that the only alternative to capitalism is state repression. This is a false dichotomy.

As an aside, I've noticed a lot of accounts avoiding bans recently by registering to make a single comment, like this one. I kinda wonder if they're all the same person, and that now they've run out of ideas for account names & are just using keyboard mash. I don't find this one particularly objectionable (except in that I disagree), I don't think you'd be banned for saying this, but the other comments were literal hate speech.

It's the lowest-possible effort response to any criticism of capitalism.

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