> A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user.
login wall != paywall
As for your apples:oranges comparison about maximizing money, which group do you suppose has an unfair advantage these days?
Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h...
All the evidence in the world that corporations are greedy doesn't detract from the fact the end users are also greedy.
It's all greed, all the ways down.
I also can't read the article, not going to make an account, and I stand by not backdooring.
What's wrong with that? Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible. If you aren't greedy while your adversary is greedy, you give up everything you have.
The wrong part is fooling yourself that you are above those principles while actively devoting all your energy too them.
And I'm not talking food, water, medicine here. I'm talking entertainment and general internet stuff.
If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right.
The current global power imbalance was shaped to a large part by us not being greedy while the rich people were being greedy. It only resulted in them owning all of our stuff. It's about time we tried to own their stuff, to restore balance.
>If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right.
It transcends capitalism (or really free markets, I haven't bothered so far in this thread to make the distinction) and is just kind of base human behavior. You can watch animals in the wild and they have the same "maximally greedy" behavior. Your groundhog won't leave any carrots in your garden for you.
Communism unwinds exactly because everyone is there little own min-max engine working to ultimately serve themselves (not to be confused with colloquial selfish behavior, group good can be in ones best interest). At least with free market capitalism, this idea is embraced and turned back on itself to act as the natural mediator. The friction of the mediation though, obviously, is pretty uncomfortable for everyone. And more over, worse for some more than others.
Cooperation is possible, and can become the dominant strategy under certain conditions. However, those conditions are currently not present.
Market economies create economic cooperation. The dinner you ate required countless people from ranchers, farmers, mechanics, chemical manufacturers, steel manufacturers, automotive manufacturers, paper manufacturers, tubing manufacturers, oil manufacturers, fastener manufacturers and countless others working on intermediate factors of production. None of them deliberately and knowingly cooperated, rather prices in the market economy allowed for decentralized cooperation between people who don't even know each other. That is the power of market economies. Command economies cannot deliberately arrange cooperation at the same scale due to information being too disbursed and rapidly changing.
So you are correct that cooperation can become the dominant strategy under certain conditions; those conditions require a small population though.
All of these entities are competing ruthlessly to extract as much value from each other as possible. When they don't compete, the ones they're competing with steal their lunch. See: supermarket monopsonies in Australia pushing food prices to unsustainably low levels, American farm megacorporations taking over from small farmers, everything open source getting sherlocked by amazon.
The discussion wasn't about market vs command economy but about capitalism vs socialism/communism.
See: Market socialism
The discussion wasn't about any economy except for the one we currently live in.
Seems like people who try to argue that Capitalism creates greed are almost always just narcissistic looking for something to blame their greediness on.
> Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible.
Depends on what you mean by "capitalism". The current definition, at least among the big-time capitalists, seems indeed to be "do whatever it takes to get me more capital, by hook or by crook".
But that's not what actually built most of the wealth in the modern world. What built most of that was cooperation, specialization, and positive sum trades, in which everyone involved became better off, but nobody obsessed about counting down to the last penny exactly how much better off they were than the next person, and complaining about unfairness if things didn't balance out exactly the way they thought things should. In other words, focusing on creating wealth, not on grabbing whatever you can, or making sure you grabbed more than anyone else.
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Convenient that your "principles" disallow you from seeing critique of said principles.
Funny that your critique is still capitalist...
It's not though. That's literally the point of the article.
The article that I need to hand over my monetizable information over to read? The article written by a journalist getting paid to produce content so it can be pushed to the market of articles to retrieve more than it's cost to procure?
If they are going to claim to ride a high horse, I'm not paying them any credence when they show up on the same dinkey donkey as everyone else they loudly spite.
Quite the mental gymnastics to simultaneously acknowledge the bootstrapping problem when it suits you, and pretend it doesn't exist otherwise.
I can assure you that whatever the nymag article written by a creative writing major turned socialist journalist says, isn't going to be a life changing read to a long time economics geek.
Pure cope and baseless assumptions.