logoalt Hacker News

Nevermarklast Saturday at 3:45 PM2 repliesview on HN

I think you mean antithetical to corrupted conflict-of-interest capitalism.

Conflict-of-interest transactions have hidden or coercive impact, lined up in favor of the party with stronger leverage. Examples include un-asked and unwanted surveillance of data or activity, coercive use of information, vendor lock in, unwanted artificial product/service dependencies, insertion of unwanted interaction (ads), ...

None of that is inherent to capitalism. They clearly violate the spirit of capitalism, free trade, etc.

It is providers taking advantage of customer lack of leverage and knowledge to extract value that does not reflect the plain transaction actually desired by customers. Done legally but often with surreptitious disclosure or dark pattern permissions, border line legally where customers would incur great costs identify and protest, or plain old illegally but in a hidden manner with a massive legal budget to provide a moat against accountability.

It is tragic that the current generation of Silicon Valley and VC firms have embraced conflict of interest based business models. Due to the amounts of money that scaling "small" conflicts can make. Despite the great damage that we now know scaling up "small" conflicts can do.

That was not always the case.


Replies

nicoburnslast Saturday at 4:09 PM

The problem with our current system of capitalism is that it causes capitalism to accumulate. This leads to less competition, fewer checks and balances, and undermines the whole "wisdom of the crowd" mechanism that captialism is premised on.

If we want a functioning market based system then we need to explicitly correct for this by aggressively taxing the wealthiest entities (individuals and companies) in our society to bring things closer to a level playing field.

immibislast Saturday at 9:37 PM

"corrupted conflict-of-interest capitalism" is just capitalism.

Free trade is antithetical to capitalism. Free trade means everyone is on a level playing field, but capitalism means those with more capital are above the rest. These are obviously not compatible.