- Nvidia and Micron are making emotional appeals to consumers while PC users express frustration with big AI companies’ practices and self-serving motives.
- Memory vendors predict DRAM and SSD shortages lasting until mid-2027, while new tariffs on advanced computing chips and potential Steam Machine pricing over $1,000 add to consumer concerns.
- The article highlights how corporations use emotional messaging to mask financial interests, advising consumers to remain skeptical of such appeals.
Way, way back, capitalism was a version of “the customer is always right.” Various companies would compete to sell a product at the right price point and quality the customer could accept. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pointed mostly the right direction.
Now capitalism is just the few major companies competing to see who can make the biggest cash grab and fuck the regular customer with prices, fees, and enshittification. Now we have dystopian monopolies divorced from the consumers.
You could go further and say what’s happening now isn’t capitalism at all. Yanis Varoufakis calls the modern world economy “technofeudalism”: it’s controlled by information hypercompanies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, that make money not by producing anything, but by controlling the flow of information between consumers and producers, and charging producers rent for access to consumers.
If you’re an app developer, you pay Google and Apple whatever they ask, and you follow their rules, or you don’t get to sell your product in their app stores; if you sell products, you give Amazon their cut, or you don’t get to sell in their market. And because Google and Apple and Amazon have so effectively entrapped customers, capitalists who don’t agree to their terms can’t get to their consumers at all.
It’s vassal capitalism. Capitalists pay their technofeudal lords their 30% cut of revenue and compete with each other for the remaining scraps. And then they raise prices and cut wages, squeeze their workers and exploit their consumers even more, in order to make enough money to survive at all.
I don’t disagree. I don’t know about strictly “techno-“, because it isn’t restricted just to the insertion of technological rent extractors every step of the way, it’s also every single business trying to maximize profits at every step along the production line, and they’re all effective monopolies that have no other way to make the line move up other than to charge for it. Almost nobody is making anything new, it’s just putting different color lipstick on a pig.
Capitalism, when unchecked, tends to create those giant monopolies you’ve mentioned. It is capitalism at its end game, total consolidation.
You are right that capitalism tends towards monopolies. But I think there’s a significant difference in what, exactly, is being monopolized. Capital itself is not being monopolized. Access to the marketplace is being monopolized.
In a capitalist monopoly, you would have to buy, for example, shoes, from just one shoe factory, which is the only factory able or allowed to sell you shoes. It can charge whatever price it wants, and you have to pay it or go without shoes. That’s how a monopoly in a capitalist economy works.
In the current economy, you can go to Walmart or Amazon and buy hundreds of different shoes from hundreds of different factories, all competing against one another. You have an enormous amount of choice in shoes.
But those shoe factories all have to pay rent to Walmart and Amazon, and have to sell their shoes at the price Walmart and Amazon tells them to, and have to agree to sell their shoes at lower prices at Walmart or Amazon than on their own website. If they refuse, they’re not allowed to sell on Walmart and Amazon at all.
And because so many physical consumers only have access to a Walmart, and no other stores; and because so many online consumers default to Amazon for all their purchases; if the capitalists don’t submit to Walmart and Amazon they lose so much of the customer market they won’t be able to compete.
That’s the feudalism part. The capitalists aren’t in charge. The vectoralists are - the people who control the flow of information, the lines of communication between producers and consumers. And the vectoralists have split the economy into a handful of private fiefdoms, and make money not from producing anything, but from charging rent for access to their private fiefdom and the customers entrapped within it.
And since this phenomenon is most advanced online, where Amazon controls almost the entire online physical goods market and Google and Apple control almost the entire app market, we can call it technofeudalism.
Traditional monopolies certainly exist - for example, the American food supply is controlled by only a handful of companies - but those companies aren’t the ones controlling the price of food. Walmart and Amazon do.
Or to put it another way: in a socialist economy, like the USSR’s, the government controls the flow of goods and the allocation of resources.
In a capitalist economy, the owners of capital - the land and factories and natural resources that produce goods - control that flow.
And now, in a technocratic economy, the flow of goods and services is controlled, not by the government, and not by the owners of capital, but by the vectoralists.
I think it’s a vital distinction to make.
I remember back in the reddit days telling people that the EU doesn’t have trillion dollar tech megacorps because we don’t want companies to have this much power and the americans calling it cope. Well no ones laughing now.
But today’s money doesn’t really have any frontiers our boundaries. If a corp is being openly traded in the stock market, it belongs to the very same assholes that own the americans megacorps.
“Actually, real capitalism has never been tried”
I don’t think that’s what they were saying, but I also think you probably don’t care.
The customer is always right was never a thing.
For a start, it’s an intentional shortening of the actual phrase, for exploitative reasons, of “the customer is always right in matters of taste”
Which just means “if they want to buy ugly shit, let them”
You are incorrect.
Huh, til
Well shit, that’s interesting. Thanks for the link.
I have been staring at the original comment trying to figure out how to basically say this, so thank you. lol. “The customer is always right” just means don’t tell the customer that green and purple polka dot curtains are fuck-ugly because it will hurt the company’s bottom line.
I don’t think Capitalism has ever been this romanticized version, at least not in my lifetime. It has always been about how much money “they” can squeeze out of consumers, and they have been inching more and more constantly for a long time to get where we are now. The companies have always wanted to manipulate to make more money, and the only slight road blocks or steps in the right direction have come from government regulation.
The “in matters of taste” line is misinformation started in the last decade online by people who repeat things without looking up if they’re true or not.
It’s exactly what monopolies and oligopolies end up doing, whatever is in their interest to do. If anti-trust laws were actually used to enforce competition, we wouldn’t be here. But since we can’t compete with the campaign donations of the companies those laws should be regulating, we get no regulation at all and end up here. Selfish people, being selfish, making everything worse for everyone else.