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It depends a lot on where you end up. There are niches where you can live by market forces alone, and breeze through life being almost unaware of politics - but that's the exception.

For most people, politics will be a dominant force - if not THE dominant force - that they live or die by. Once more than 2 people are involved, you by definition have politics (albeit weak politics). It then grows slightly until it suddenly becomes much more important at about 150 people or so. By the time you're at 1000 it's a major force, and at 5000 it's the only force that matters anymore.

And even if it's not your organization that's this big, a small company selling to Amazon will only succeed if they know how to play Amazon politics.

>It doesn't matter how fast you spin your wheels working on things unless those things are aligned with delivering value to actual paying customers.

Really doesn't matter. I promise you. It might score you some points, sure. But it's not required or necessary.

>Politics also doesn't really matter.

It is the only thing that matters.

> It is the only thing that matters.

This the long and short of it. It comes into play at some point either being your accelerator or your ceiling, depending on how things go.

This is a little tricky. I think it's more about understanding the philosophy. Lets say you make washing machines. The "academic" will say, great, for next year's model, let's fix the most common failure point and improve reliability so our customers love us while the "psycopath" or "savvy employee" will say, no, our brand is still strong, let's make cheaper machines and save money and we can manipulate some of the review sites and anyway, better for us if they fail after 6 years than 10 years, the customers don't have many choices anyway.

You can say the academic isn't solving the business problem, which isn't, how to make the best washing machine, but how can we make the most money by embracing enshittification. But that's probably not why he was hired.

That's a false dichotomy.

You also neglect that all business must necessarily account for inflation in their cost model (an impossible task). Enshittification is just the end result of money-printing through banking loans on the business cycle, that's why it follows the same adoption curves as ponzi.

The end result of that cycle is predictable, and has been discussed quite rationally but many people don't actually read books these days so its become lost knowledge.

The sieving and centralizing monopolization we see all comes from those entities being closer to the source of money than individuals. The systems of banking today neglect the true sources of the wealth of nations instead utilizing slave labor through clever recapture (of debasement lost to inflation). In aggregate these things creates a system where over-expenditure must be paid for by your children's distributed slavery; creating a hellscape of an environment where they are disadvantaged and may not survive. Its al indirect, but indirect things can be quite powerful and if you don't have the mind to grasp it your just trapped like an animal, not given the choice. A slave.

Usury eventually and inevitably gets to catastrophic levels given sufficient time, as all positive feedback systems do, left unattended.

Says the 19 year old startup founder who drops out of college and has it made before most people even start thinking of what they want to do.

We’re all supposed to believe what? That the extremely rare 19 year old startup founders of the world believe the world is meritocratic? Uh, of course they do.