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There's a concept where it's your design more than intention that will inform who uses your product and how they use it.
Didn't intend that to be a handle? Don't make it convenient to hold from there.
Didn't intend that to be a handle? Don't make it convenient to hold from there.
Enter capitalism: Sure the alleged intention is to foster innovation through competition. What it really does is encourage gaining a lead, transitioning to micro iterations over long periods, and stifling competition as much as possible. Closer to slave wages/labor the better too
Not every company does that. Generally smaller private companies can be more benevolent, but to "win" at capitalism, you have to min/max capitalism.
Market deciders are fun. Like, the concept is people absolutely should vote with their wallets, and that will guide who is successful. The want of the people will win. Except psychology, sociology, and politics are a thing. Mega corps dump a ton of money into manipulating those
I think that's one of the reasons Trickle Down Economics keeps popping up over and over again despite being proven not to work every time it's attempted. According to the marketing slides for Capitalism, it absolutely should work. Successful companies are good for the economy.
But if that were true why does wealth disparity continue to grow. We're constantly having a few people become more and more wealthy. In fact, we celebrate them in our news even while unemployment and deaths are currently also at record highs. We have a cult around wealth.
That cult is so strong that we have an extreme poverty class that is the most fervent supporters of the extreme rich. Forgetting that it was those wealthy people cutting costs, wages, and jobs that contributed to their current situation.
"If Capitalism is so bad, why was it so successful at making the USA a super power?"
Great question. Let's use table top rpgs as a life analog. There's a style of competitive gaming called Meta Gaming, where one uses the knowledge of the rules to inform their actions.
Great question. Let's use table top rpgs as a life analog. There's a style of competitive gaming called Meta Gaming, where one uses the knowledge of the rules to inform their actions.
This behavior tends codify certain best strategies (and their counters) into something called a Meta Game. Game designers keep an eye on that meta game and use it to inform rules changes if the meta game starts impacting their intended design too much.
In table top gaming, players and game masters have the ability to ignore those changes, or even come up with their own changes in the form of house rules. When in a power gaming circle, these changes can modify existing rules to make certain min/max strategies even stronger
Over time, these rules changes get more and more refined to support the specific type of min/maxing that has become popular with that player group, at times removing or replacing checks and balance systems. Eventually it destroys the intention and ethics of the original rules set
These evolutions don't happen over night. Even some of the most toxic games I've seen didn't necessarily start out with the intention of becoming so focused on "winning" that it ruined the original design intentions. But if you compare start and current, the warping is obvious.
That's not to say all rule changes are bad. They're important to allow the player base to grow and mature. And rules changing to support style changes are also a good thing. But when it's the power gamers making all the rules, their success shouldn't just be accepted blindly.
I don't know if Capitalism was always toxic (I wasn't there at its inception). But I do believe our current incarnation of it is extremely toxic and broken. We need to recognize that the wealthy are not our saviors, as the only way to get that wealthy is by exploiting the masses.
