Yes. As a left-libertarian, I criticize corporations and their profit motive all the time. I see the concentration of power being married to the inherent incentives of increasing share value for the shareholder class. The only way I see we can reform the system — and fix many of the problems — is to gradually replace shares with utility tokens, ie the accounting system inside an ecosystem that producers and consumers of a marketplace use, and gradully buy out the parasitic class of “investors” who just want to extract rents and enshittify everything. It is a bit like the efforts Europe undertook at peacefully buying out slaves from masters or serfs from feudal lords. Just get out gradually from an economic system that encouraged exploitation.
We have just been inculcated with this exploitation as a “natural” part of our capitalist system for so long, since childhood for most of us, that many have a knee-jerk reaction to shut down this line of criticism and not hear the simple solution. Many on HN have built a startup when they’re young, been part of the VC industry, akin to a music prodigy or young actor or model being “discovered” by “talent scout”, and sold a dream which only a few achieve. For every 1 person who makes it big, 1000 who do the same thing fail. But they keep licking the boots of the system hoping they’ll be among the lucky ones, so they better say nice things. If they see words like “utility tokens” they immediately think “grift”, when in fact the system they’re supporting has grift and exploitation built in. Having utility token holders buy out shareholders also may be an element in furthering SDG goals and “stakeholder capitalism”, and saving the planet. But hey, as soon as the words are uttered which may trigger pushback, the system starts to protect itself, in the form of downvotes or strawman attacks etc.
Yeah, planned obsolescence is one feature of corporate control and profit system. As is surveillance capitalism, or pollution, or pushing people to work long hours, or have a gig economy, neglect their kids, or having people in echo chambers be angry at each other online because anger and misunderstanding leads to more “engagement” etc. All the ways that represent gradual “enshittification” that Cory Doctorow coined, is not an accident. These are all negative externalities, which are all traced back to one main factor: the profit motive of shareholders as a core feature in the system, forever. The rents aren’t going to extract themselves.