this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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My mind is stuck on the mafia/mob metaphor for the US (well maybe more just literal than metaphor in some cases) and lately I've been thinking about it in relation to what people call "enshittification". The dynamic where a startup gets some nice "friendly" capital injections to build, build, build and grow, grow, grow, and then eventually there comes a part where the investors want a return and the product gets made more predatory and user-unfriendly in a desperate bid to make it especially profitable.
So it's sorta like "hey, we're here to help" later "we're gonna break your legs if you don't have something to show for it"
But a lot of the leg-breaking gets offloaded to the customer, for whom this dynamic is mostly invisible as a process and they just see the bait of "cool product" without the strings attached; the "get their hooks in you and get you dependent on it before they start trying to extract as much profit from you as possible." And once the customer actually sees it, it's too late, they're already personally attached and have to hurt themselves by leaving or hurt themselves by putting up with it.
And this is just like... most of the US tech world? Shit's sickening.
I see it more as a subsidy, the startup with more capital manages to kill its competition (if any) due to them being subsidized by venture capitalists and can operate with negative margins, and they turn predatory once they have aquired a monopoly share.
You know how they complain about "ccp subsidies", well venture capitalists are pretty much doing exactly that.
Most of that makes sense to me, though I'd think the nature of a socialist government giving a subsidy is going to be pretty different than venture capitalists, since the socialist government will not be wanting to extract value for a minority ruling class. That's where the mafia analogy more comes in for me, is the nature of it not having any kind of intrinsically supportive motive in the capitalist case; there's a "catch" and someone is probably going to suffer at some point to fulfill that. Whereas with the socialist structure subsidy comparison, if there were any "catch", it would be more like "this better bring value to society" or "this better not be trying to bring down our socialist government". So while the impact in a competitive space might be similar, the outcome should be pretty different for the customer / end user / whatever you want to call them.
I'd also say the socialist case is more incidentally competitive, in that it bypasses the problems of capitalist funding precisely because it's willing to do things for the sake of something other than profit (operating at a "loss" isn't necessarily perceived as a "loss"). Versus the capitalist, such behavior can only ever be considered temporarily valuable for the longer term payout.