Meta Is Dying. It's About Time | Hacker News Reader

Meta Is Dying. It's About Time

nytimes.com

20 pointsflowerlad8 comments

When you look at the eye-watering amount of money that Zuckerberg has spent on false starts in the past ~10 years, it makes you wonder whether capitalism truly does produce the most efficient allocation of resources.

Granted, a lot of that money created jobs for white collar workers, which feeds into other parts of the economy. But is it really more efficient to allocate those resources toward enriching a small group of Alexandr Wangs than allocating it toward projects like infrastructure, modernizing energy production, building housing, etc?

Can one draw that general conclusion from the thrashings about of a single, once lucky sociopath? I’ll argue that it’s the gained credibility of success that gives Zuckerberg this kind of leeway. I could argue that the economic history of the Soviet Union is a persuasive disproof of socialist efficiency. :)

I’m not exactly making an argument for Soviet-style central planning. In a way, the system we have is its own form of central planning, except those with the power to do the planning are people like Zuckerberg, Musk, etc, and there is not even an illusion that they have any duty to serve anyone but their (also wealthy, but slightly less so) shareholders, participating in an increasingly irrational stock market.

The beauty of capitalism is that collective market forces determine the allocation of resources, but is that really what we have when certain individuals reach escape velocity of wealth and are no longer threatened by the natural selection of the market?

I totally agree with this.

I don't get why so many still believe the US is capitalist or that the word is even a useful abstraction.

Zuckerberg controls the allocation of resources that he does because created an advertising and surveillance apparatus useful to the ruling class.

The reason he allocates huge resources on huge gambles is because he's paid to gamble on trying to create the next huge advertising and surveillance platform.

Within his viewpoint of the world, this is the best allocation of resources. From the standpoint of just a regular person, it's obvious that this is wasteful compared to a hypothetical scenario where you invest those billions into proven projects like housing, infra, and energy.

But the ruling class will not allow this. If Zuckerberg announced tomorrow that Meta would start trying to build high-speed rail, the stock would tank, even though it is a successful business model. The US is a playground for the wealthy to gamble on finding the next tools of world-domination. The "Capitalism" window dressing exists as a facade to give a justification as to why Zuckerberg deserves his houses while nurses sleep in studios.

> you wonder whether capitalism truly does produce the most efficient allocation of resources

it does, but current state of capitalism has kinda degenerated. the main sentinel about this is the fact that us antitrust has not imposed any decent spinoff in the last 20-25 years.

just to give you an example of proper activity of antitrust activity: IBM released the ibm pc as a farily open/standard platform in the 80ies because it had just got out of a multi-year, very serious and very expensive litigation with the DoJ.

The litigation lasted 13 (!!!) years, from 1969 to 1982. See https://truthonthemarket.com/2020/02/03/the-ghosts-of-antitr... if you want to know more.

Think of what the DoJ should do to Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft (which had its own antitrust lawsuit... in the 90ies).

I don’t think that’s true at all. IBM was forced to be fairly open/standard because that was the only way to quickly enter a rapidly growing and changing segment. They tried to drag it to proprietary with their follow-on PS2 and only cratered their business, all without antitrust intervention.

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