Monopoly is capitalism's gerrymander - by Cory Doctorow [View all]

[justaprogressive]

The original 'The Gerrymander' editorial cartoon, which depicts a sinister salamander wrapped around a curiously shaped void. The salamander and the void are labeled with the names of areas that had been crammed into different electoral districts. The image has been modified: the salamander and the void have been colorized with desaturated yellow-green tones. An image of a portly millionaire in a suit with a money-bag for a head pokes out from behind the salamander. The background is a marbled endpaper from an antique book, desaturated and recolored. The image is labelled 'THE GERRYMANDER' in block caps.
Monopoly is capitalism's gerrymander (permalink)

You don't have to accept the arguments of capitalism's defenders to take those arguments seriously. When Adam Smith railed against rentiers and elevated the profit motive to a means of converting the intrinsic selfishness of the wealthy into an engine of production, he had a point:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Smith – like Marx and Engels in Chapter One of The Communist Manifesto – saw competition as a catalyst that could convert selfishness to the public good: a rich person who craves more riches still will treat their customers, suppliers and workers well, not out of the goodness of their heart, but out of fear of their defection to a rival:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

This starting point is imperfect, but it's not wrong. The pre-enshittified internet was run by the same people who later came to enshittify it. They didn't have a change of heart that caused them to wreck the thing they'd worked so hard to build: rather, as they became isolated from the consequences of their enshittificatory impulses, it was easier to yield to them.

Once Google captured its market, its regulators and its workforce, it no longer had to worry about being a good search-engine – it could sacrifice quality for profits, without consequence:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

It could focus on shifting value from its suppliers, its customers and its users to its shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/#ai-search

Much More!