>Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.
Some is doing an awful lot of work there. Both ads and capitalism have become so degenerate and abusive that I'm no longer confident that either are better than the alternatives. Even phrasing it as "better than the alternatives" is a symptom of one aspect of the overall decline: seeing everything as an either-or choice.
What exactly is the alternative to capitalism? If you aim for a watered down capitalism with regulations, that’s still capitalism, just not as fast or fully-fledged. In HSL, if you reduce saturation you still have the same hue and thus the same color: it just doesn’t look that aggressive to the eye.
All other alternatives than capitalism or partial capitalism have been ruled out by any country that has anything to do in the world, or for any society in which material well-being is present for the majority of their population.
The fact that ads are annoying doesn’t mean that capitalism is bad or degenerate.
If I have had a bad girlfriend and I’m ugly as hell as to not afford any other, then yes I’ll be prompted to say the relationships market has become degenerate. But probably it’s just that I can’t find good partners on it.
The same if you can’t pay for YouTube Premium, X Premium+ or the like. And precisely because capitalism isn’t degenerate but buoyant, ad-free solutions like Perplexity for search are rising at such a rapid pace it can’t do anything but increase optimism in the future.
Every "bad government" out there has been a response to capitalism. Communism and fascism sparked from the outcomes of capitalism. Back with uncontrolled capitalism, 8 year old boys were blowing glass.
Capitalist-democracy is what works. When capitalists hoard power, democracy is the sink that redistributes power. Right now, a lot of that power is being held by tech, which is why the interests of the technocrats are opposed to that of the democracy. AI is going to greatly accelerate this process. When the rich also control politics, the remaining solution is violent force, which collapses into communism/fascism.
Most countries are functioning happily on socialism - healthcare and education is available to most, and not restricted to the rich. Debt cycles are illegal.
Ads are also not the nature of the internet. They are a remainder of an era when micropayments were not possible. By default, the world uses freemium now. It's no coincidence that Google rules micro transactions; microtransactions could gradually chip away at ad revenue. Instead of watching an ad for 30 seconds for 30 minutes of game progress, it might be easier to sell that 30 minutes for $0.009.
Envy has always been a response to successful people, and that doesn’t justify it or undermine the successful.
The hyperinflation that caused turbulences in Germany as well as previous wars aren’t either of them capitalism-like.
Hyperinflation countries suffer it because the government steps in and manipulates the currency. We have the examples of Venezuela and Argentina as the most recent. Germany had the same destiny, although more caused by the constrictions placed on them by the States that won World War I.
Kids blowing glass is caused by poorness rather than capitalism. Precisely now that our capitalists societies created wealth is that we now don’t need to send our children to factories. It’s precisely poor countries the ones that gotta send their children to factories, like certain populations in China. Even before capitalism, children did still worked, yet on farms rather than factories. And their conditions weren’t greater at all either.
Marx wasn’t actually against child labour and he favoured it: he just wanted them to work under socialism and not under capitalists. He actually said that work was essential for the development of those children, but they shouldn’t do it under very poor health conditions. But again, that’s caused by poverty, not capitalism. In the Soviet Union children still worked in practice and conditions weren’t great either.
Regarding health and education, the US is weird because such a system has the absolute worse of markets (having to pay) and socialism (being hyper regulated). Nonetheless, it’s as easy as to fix one or the other. In Switzerland the system is essentially private and doesn’t suck so much. In fact, quite the opposite: it’s much better than most other systems like British or Spanish ones. Here in Spain you can wait 3-4 years for just a diagnosis for a colon cancer. 3-4 years. For the diagnosis only.
In Switzerland you don’t have such long waiting lists and costs are much manageable relative to their living costs.
Most of the US education and health system problems are outrageously caused by the State. As Mises said, every government regulation requires more government regulation, since politicians need to try and palliate the inefficiencies created by them with more regulatory patches.
Even so, how do you define a socialist healthcare system? In Spain or the UK there are private providers of healthcare and actually most of the public administration in Spain (at least the top ranks) are paying one. You could say that if the majority of spending is made by the government it’s socialist-like, and if not it’s capitalist-like. But in the US most of healthcare expenditure is government made, by a small margin. Such a system can’t be considered capitalist, and maybe trying to emulate a more friendly framework like the Swiss could be more beneficial that trying to stack more regulations on top of what the US already suffers.
So either you end hyper regulation and let markets lower prices or you go all in and go with full regulation and no market prices (think of British healthcare), at the expense of lousy quality in terms of speed and procedures.
First, I should state up front, I am not remotely anticapitalist. Quite the opposite. However, as practiced in the US right now, capitalism has become a cancer that is distorting and consuming everything and replacing it with the profit motive. We are all poorer for it in many ways, and growing more so. I even think it's become a serious threat to our freedom and liberty.
I think any pure "-ism" is an undesirable thing. Every approach has a degenerate condition that it will trend toward if there isn't a countervailing force. The alternative to capitalism is to mix in the strengths of the other "-isms" and to stop treating capitalism like a religion.
This presupposes that humans are incapable of behaving well.
Most people operate in good faith. Some people are dicks. Don’t put the dicks in charge. Create processes and systems to screen for dicks.
Yelp is a great example of a beneficial review system run by dicks. A objective review platform would be a huge benefit. But they corrupted the intent. They solicit bribes from businesses to suppress negative reviews using their default “suggested sort”.
A review platform run honorably for the public good could entirely replace advertising, increase competition in areas of price and quality and create a far more pleasant society.
Instead we get the endless bullshit machine aggressively selling you things you don’t want or need while burying true value in a mountain of mediocrity.
Advertising is where capitalism started to go wrong. The more our society resembles it the worse it will be for everyone.
Advertising is just part of the gospel of the capitalism religion, with its prophets and preachers of the markets, its churches and cathedrals of profit, its dogma and prayers, its even got its cults of crypto currency and the fanatics that believe in profit without production. Advertising is just like the religious pamphlets of old, today just praising the gods of consumption and excess, promising salvation.
Capitalism ain’t a religion, it’s a system. It’s Libertarianism, as a philosophical and moral view of society and markets, the one that can be seen as a religion. And I also think it’s, just that it believes in “supranatural” rights of property rather than “supernatural” beings or moral sources.
Anyhow, capitalism = saving, investing and reinvesting. You can see more details on my reply to MountainMan1312. It ain’t look that bad as a system, philosophy or even religion.
It’s probably consumption that you are attacking, with all the right and common sense of the world; yet that’s cause by opulence, not by capitalism. It’s true that capitalism create staggering wealth that’s a quite remarkable tendency to then produce opulence (desiring luxury stuff in great amounts for the sake of just having and exhibiting it). But that’s correlation, not causality.
Sadly, you can’t criticise socialism on having a consumptionist society because they don’t have anything to consume at all. They aren’t a superior race or morally superior; they just can’t consume as much as we do with the liberty we do, so they don’t.
This relies on false definitions of capitalism and communism, definitions which I believe are carefully crafted to preclude you from having certain thoughts.
You seem to understand capitalism as "freedom" and communism as "government control". These false definitions are what leads people to believe Democrats or Nazis are leftists, when they're very far from it.
Really, capitalism is that thing where when you work harder your boss gets richer. Someone else besides you is the owner of the products of your labor. Capitalism allows the capital-owning class to use the worker class as machinery for a free ride through life.
Socialism (communism isn't quite the right word here) is "worker ownership and control of the means of production". Yes that has included tyranny in the past, but modern socialists are mostly of the libertarian type and totally reject government control of anything.
Yes, advertising is a lot like capitalism, but that's because they both serve only to redirect productive capacity towards things which the parasitic class wants instead of what we need. Advertising convinces you to buy useless trinkets and to think in ways you never would have thought otherwise.
Just as the OP has “definitions crafted to preclude him from having certain thoughts”, I’d argue the same for this comment.
You have essentially used a bad-looking, cynical description of capitalism vs an idealised description of socialism. It’s not fair game to compare a cynical view of capitalism in practice with an idealised view of socialism in theory. You either both compare them in practice, in which capitalism wins every time; or compare in theory, in which both are probably on ties, because any idealised version promises the same prosperity and society well-being.
Capitalism is about investment, more than anything else. Why was capitalism born at the creation of the Stock Exchange? Because then savers could use their savings as funding for entrepreneurial endeavours. As British Victorians wanted, the goal was “to live off from the interest made by interests”, referring to their investments’ growth and compounding returns.
In socialism, they essentially want to strip off capitalists from their savings and funding and let the State manage it all. Socialists assume a centralized institution can handle all of the information and get right the incentives, which has been seen to not work every time you try it.
It is also a contradiction of terms to say that socialism, as it was defined by any socialist theorist, is of the “libertarian type”; who by definition wants both economic and social liberties to individuals, whereas socialism by its very postules looks forward to remove any economic liberty and ownership of capital as means of production, whatever vague definition they use to define these (a laptop can be both a means of production and a consumption good at the same time).
Further, advertising is like capitalism from the business perspective, not from the customer perspective. For the business it’s an investment. From the customer it’s just the cost to pay to use a service. And, as said, what defines capitalism is investment, not consumption, and prove of that is that we’ve always consumed stuff along history but only when investment was institutionalised and carried out at scale through a Stock Exchange that capitalism was coined, referring precisely to the act of investing and reinvesting.
Capitalism actually wants to convince you to be frugal, save, and invest your savings. It is consumption, and not capitalism, that tries to convince you to spend it all. Both are antagonists. Consumption is born from opulence, not capitalism. If socialism did also produce abundance in extreme levels for everyone they would be as consumptionists as they could ever be, just as we are in our rich, Western societies. Note that less consumptionist societies like Singapore do better and are considered to be more capitalists than countries like Spain or Italy.
Again, it is opulence that causes excessive consumption: and it’s only capitalism the system that has indeed produce overwhelming wealth to every individual, both poor and rich, something that no other system has ever achieved at the same order of magnitude. And that’s nothing mystical or religious: it’s just that capitalism = investing and reinvesting, so no wonder we have much more to consume if we are all day reinvesting the product of our means of production into more means of production.
>Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.
Some is doing an awful lot of work there. Both ads and capitalism have become so degenerate and abusive that I'm no longer confident that either are better than the alternatives. Even phrasing it as "better than the alternatives" is a symptom of one aspect of the overall decline: seeing everything as an either-or choice.
What exactly is the alternative to capitalism? If you aim for a watered down capitalism with regulations, that’s still capitalism, just not as fast or fully-fledged. In HSL, if you reduce saturation you still have the same hue and thus the same color: it just doesn’t look that aggressive to the eye.
All other alternatives than capitalism or partial capitalism have been ruled out by any country that has anything to do in the world, or for any society in which material well-being is present for the majority of their population.
The fact that ads are annoying doesn’t mean that capitalism is bad or degenerate.
If I have had a bad girlfriend and I’m ugly as hell as to not afford any other, then yes I’ll be prompted to say the relationships market has become degenerate. But probably it’s just that I can’t find good partners on it.
The same if you can’t pay for YouTube Premium, X Premium+ or the like. And precisely because capitalism isn’t degenerate but buoyant, ad-free solutions like Perplexity for search are rising at such a rapid pace it can’t do anything but increase optimism in the future.
Every "bad government" out there has been a response to capitalism. Communism and fascism sparked from the outcomes of capitalism. Back with uncontrolled capitalism, 8 year old boys were blowing glass.
Capitalist-democracy is what works. When capitalists hoard power, democracy is the sink that redistributes power. Right now, a lot of that power is being held by tech, which is why the interests of the technocrats are opposed to that of the democracy. AI is going to greatly accelerate this process. When the rich also control politics, the remaining solution is violent force, which collapses into communism/fascism.
Most countries are functioning happily on socialism - healthcare and education is available to most, and not restricted to the rich. Debt cycles are illegal.
Ads are also not the nature of the internet. They are a remainder of an era when micropayments were not possible. By default, the world uses freemium now. It's no coincidence that Google rules micro transactions; microtransactions could gradually chip away at ad revenue. Instead of watching an ad for 30 seconds for 30 minutes of game progress, it might be easier to sell that 30 minutes for $0.009.
Envy has always been a response to successful people, and that doesn’t justify it or undermine the successful.
The hyperinflation that caused turbulences in Germany as well as previous wars aren’t either of them capitalism-like.
Hyperinflation countries suffer it because the government steps in and manipulates the currency. We have the examples of Venezuela and Argentina as the most recent. Germany had the same destiny, although more caused by the constrictions placed on them by the States that won World War I.
Kids blowing glass is caused by poorness rather than capitalism. Precisely now that our capitalists societies created wealth is that we now don’t need to send our children to factories. It’s precisely poor countries the ones that gotta send their children to factories, like certain populations in China. Even before capitalism, children did still worked, yet on farms rather than factories. And their conditions weren’t greater at all either.
Marx wasn’t actually against child labour and he favoured it: he just wanted them to work under socialism and not under capitalists. He actually said that work was essential for the development of those children, but they shouldn’t do it under very poor health conditions. But again, that’s caused by poverty, not capitalism. In the Soviet Union children still worked in practice and conditions weren’t great either.
Regarding health and education, the US is weird because such a system has the absolute worse of markets (having to pay) and socialism (being hyper regulated). Nonetheless, it’s as easy as to fix one or the other. In Switzerland the system is essentially private and doesn’t suck so much. In fact, quite the opposite: it’s much better than most other systems like British or Spanish ones. Here in Spain you can wait 3-4 years for just a diagnosis for a colon cancer. 3-4 years. For the diagnosis only.
In Switzerland you don’t have such long waiting lists and costs are much manageable relative to their living costs.
Most of the US education and health system problems are outrageously caused by the State. As Mises said, every government regulation requires more government regulation, since politicians need to try and palliate the inefficiencies created by them with more regulatory patches.
Even so, how do you define a socialist healthcare system? In Spain or the UK there are private providers of healthcare and actually most of the public administration in Spain (at least the top ranks) are paying one. You could say that if the majority of spending is made by the government it’s socialist-like, and if not it’s capitalist-like. But in the US most of healthcare expenditure is government made, by a small margin. Such a system can’t be considered capitalist, and maybe trying to emulate a more friendly framework like the Swiss could be more beneficial that trying to stack more regulations on top of what the US already suffers.
So either you end hyper regulation and let markets lower prices or you go all in and go with full regulation and no market prices (think of British healthcare), at the expense of lousy quality in terms of speed and procedures.
> What exactly is the alternative to capitalism?
First, I should state up front, I am not remotely anticapitalist. Quite the opposite. However, as practiced in the US right now, capitalism has become a cancer that is distorting and consuming everything and replacing it with the profit motive. We are all poorer for it in many ways, and growing more so. I even think it's become a serious threat to our freedom and liberty.
I think any pure "-ism" is an undesirable thing. Every approach has a degenerate condition that it will trend toward if there isn't a countervailing force. The alternative to capitalism is to mix in the strengths of the other "-isms" and to stop treating capitalism like a religion.
Very well said.
Capitalism works very well within boundaries. When those boundaries expand too much, capitalism becomes degenerate.
The ideal is a strong state which polices capitalism so that we get the benefits but not the harms.
Same for ads - allow in general but make laws for privacy and harmful products.
Advertising is the worst way to monetize an app, except for all the others.
This presupposes that humans are incapable of behaving well. Most people operate in good faith. Some people are dicks. Don’t put the dicks in charge. Create processes and systems to screen for dicks.
Yelp is a great example of a beneficial review system run by dicks. A objective review platform would be a huge benefit. But they corrupted the intent. They solicit bribes from businesses to suppress negative reviews using their default “suggested sort”.
A review platform run honorably for the public good could entirely replace advertising, increase competition in areas of price and quality and create a far more pleasant society. Instead we get the endless bullshit machine aggressively selling you things you don’t want or need while burying true value in a mountain of mediocrity.
Advertising is where capitalism started to go wrong. The more our society resembles it the worse it will be for everyone.
Advertising is just part of the gospel of the capitalism religion, with its prophets and preachers of the markets, its churches and cathedrals of profit, its dogma and prayers, its even got its cults of crypto currency and the fanatics that believe in profit without production. Advertising is just like the religious pamphlets of old, today just praising the gods of consumption and excess, promising salvation.
Capitalism ain’t a religion, it’s a system. It’s Libertarianism, as a philosophical and moral view of society and markets, the one that can be seen as a religion. And I also think it’s, just that it believes in “supranatural” rights of property rather than “supernatural” beings or moral sources.
Anyhow, capitalism = saving, investing and reinvesting. You can see more details on my reply to MountainMan1312. It ain’t look that bad as a system, philosophy or even religion.
It’s probably consumption that you are attacking, with all the right and common sense of the world; yet that’s cause by opulence, not by capitalism. It’s true that capitalism create staggering wealth that’s a quite remarkable tendency to then produce opulence (desiring luxury stuff in great amounts for the sake of just having and exhibiting it). But that’s correlation, not causality.
Sadly, you can’t criticise socialism on having a consumptionist society because they don’t have anything to consume at all. They aren’t a superior race or morally superior; they just can’t consume as much as we do with the liberty we do, so they don’t.
This relies on false definitions of capitalism and communism, definitions which I believe are carefully crafted to preclude you from having certain thoughts.
You seem to understand capitalism as "freedom" and communism as "government control". These false definitions are what leads people to believe Democrats or Nazis are leftists, when they're very far from it.
Really, capitalism is that thing where when you work harder your boss gets richer. Someone else besides you is the owner of the products of your labor. Capitalism allows the capital-owning class to use the worker class as machinery for a free ride through life.
Socialism (communism isn't quite the right word here) is "worker ownership and control of the means of production". Yes that has included tyranny in the past, but modern socialists are mostly of the libertarian type and totally reject government control of anything.
Yes, advertising is a lot like capitalism, but that's because they both serve only to redirect productive capacity towards things which the parasitic class wants instead of what we need. Advertising convinces you to buy useless trinkets and to think in ways you never would have thought otherwise.
Just as the OP has “definitions crafted to preclude him from having certain thoughts”, I’d argue the same for this comment.
You have essentially used a bad-looking, cynical description of capitalism vs an idealised description of socialism. It’s not fair game to compare a cynical view of capitalism in practice with an idealised view of socialism in theory. You either both compare them in practice, in which capitalism wins every time; or compare in theory, in which both are probably on ties, because any idealised version promises the same prosperity and society well-being.
Capitalism is about investment, more than anything else. Why was capitalism born at the creation of the Stock Exchange? Because then savers could use their savings as funding for entrepreneurial endeavours. As British Victorians wanted, the goal was “to live off from the interest made by interests”, referring to their investments’ growth and compounding returns.
In socialism, they essentially want to strip off capitalists from their savings and funding and let the State manage it all. Socialists assume a centralized institution can handle all of the information and get right the incentives, which has been seen to not work every time you try it.
It is also a contradiction of terms to say that socialism, as it was defined by any socialist theorist, is of the “libertarian type”; who by definition wants both economic and social liberties to individuals, whereas socialism by its very postules looks forward to remove any economic liberty and ownership of capital as means of production, whatever vague definition they use to define these (a laptop can be both a means of production and a consumption good at the same time).
Further, advertising is like capitalism from the business perspective, not from the customer perspective. For the business it’s an investment. From the customer it’s just the cost to pay to use a service. And, as said, what defines capitalism is investment, not consumption, and prove of that is that we’ve always consumed stuff along history but only when investment was institutionalised and carried out at scale through a Stock Exchange that capitalism was coined, referring precisely to the act of investing and reinvesting.
Capitalism actually wants to convince you to be frugal, save, and invest your savings. It is consumption, and not capitalism, that tries to convince you to spend it all. Both are antagonists. Consumption is born from opulence, not capitalism. If socialism did also produce abundance in extreme levels for everyone they would be as consumptionists as they could ever be, just as we are in our rich, Western societies. Note that less consumptionist societies like Singapore do better and are considered to be more capitalists than countries like Spain or Italy.
Again, it is opulence that causes excessive consumption: and it’s only capitalism the system that has indeed produce overwhelming wealth to every individual, both poor and rich, something that no other system has ever achieved at the same order of magnitude. And that’s nothing mystical or religious: it’s just that capitalism = investing and reinvesting, so no wonder we have much more to consume if we are all day reinvesting the product of our means of production into more means of production.