Capitalism Gone Wrong

I am no fan of Zuck. But this is his whole deal.

Instagram was a purchase. Facebook wasn't his idea. Threads is a copy. The 1 thing that Zuck understands better than anybody is that engagement is the only thing that matters to social networks, and he's willing to throw the entire company at the problem. He has been for 20 years.

He's good at addiction. He knows how to build an org that's world-class at addiction. It's entirely reasonable that the EU regulate it, and Zuck is exactly the person to point the regulation at.

How come legislators want to stop social media companies from using their power to manipulate consumers, but aren’t as interested in other industries doing the same? Like imagine how much harm is caused by the luxury fashion industry manipulating people to spend $20,000 on ugly leather bags? Or the jewelry industry in getting people to buy shiny rocks? Or sports gambling companies? That money could have been used for something good.

I’m obviously biased. But my point is that the guy that wrote the linked article had preexisting biases too.

A lot of what is being said here could also be said of NBC packing Thursday nights with their top shows back in the day. They increased attention and revenue, but people spent a lot more time watching NBC because of it. Was that a problem?

> They are not even trying to hide it — and I suppose it is not a secret at all: The more time users spend on Facebook and Instagram, the more money Meta makes.

Why would they try to hide something that is obvious?

With the decline of Twitter as the place that it seemed like everyone used to be on, other similar services seeing a small increase is not too surprising. I'm wondering if traffic from Threads, which they launched in 2023 (after Musk bought Twitter in fall of 2022), gets counted under Instagram, since you use your Instagram account to login? I get that Zuck and co want to say those increases are tied to their magical AI to please investors, but was it really?

I'd call getting people with too much money and not enough common sense to spend their money a good thing for everyone. Sales taxes collected, property taxes on the store paid, income taxes on the employees and company, less generational wealth passed along, etc etc.

I have very little faith that it will be very possible to rewind to that point. Not because the technology of today is different, or even the legal landscape, but simply due to the cultural landscape being different. Pandora's box has been opened, and it cannot be closed.

To me at least, there seems to have been some cut-off point where nothing but money mattered, and someone realised that consumers will just take the abuse and you won't actually be punished that much, at least not to the point where it's not worth it if money is all you care about. I'm sure there were industries that behaved like this before (tobacco comes to mind), but now it's everywhere.

The aura of 'they'll screw me over for pennies' is ever-present. Even if there were legal recourse for stuff before, you didn't need it, because the threat alone was enough to keep companies in line. Similarly, the threat of a boycott could be enough for a company to switch course. Now they've discovered that for every person willing to take a stand, there are 1000 more who'll stick around, or be swayed by ads, or whatever else.

The idea that you're doing business to provide actual goods and services which does some good in the world seems to have disappeared. Now that is nothing more than a means to an end: the money. You don't open a business because you want to get into the whatever-business. You do it to earn the most money you can. I'm sure the ever worsening socio-economic climate has something to do with it.

We can introduce more consumer and worker protection laws to bring back some breaks on all this. Make the former theoretical punishments to businesses come back as actual punishments, which will hopefully make them behave. Doing it properly is hard. The culture of loopholes isn't going away any-time soon.