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chongli10/10/20241 replyview on HN

to put a finer point on it: capitalism.

That's still an extremely blunt point. While we can imagine some alternative world where we all live in a communist utopia and the internet is the great free place it was in its early days, it's not so easy to build such a society. All the attempts I'm aware of either didn't scale (small, local communes) or were large-scale disasters resulting in the deaths of millions.

What we have now is no paradise, but it's not a disaster either. It's balanced on the razor's edge of disaster, however.


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Terr_10/10/2024

I'm assuming parent-poster means "publicly-traded corporations with limited-liability and low friction on transfers of ownership."

However you're right that "capitalism" encompasses many potential different varieties and actors. For example, family-owned businesses are equally "capitalism", but they don't show up much in this kind of product-degradation story.

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