The internet runs on ads.
Ad companies pay for all the “free” popular social media we use. Ad companies dictate to social media what their clients want their ads to be associated with, not associated with, and drive media of all kinds to push inflammatory and click-bait content that drives engagement and views. It’s why you indirectly can’t swear, talk about suicide, drugs, death, or violence. Sure, you technically can unless ToS prohibits it, but if companies tell their ad hosts they don’t want to be associated with someone talking about guns, the content discussing guns gets fewer ads, fewer ads = less revenue, low-revenue gets pushed to the bottom.
So lowbrow political rage bait, science denialism, and fake conspiracies drives people to interact and then gets pushed to the top because it gets ad revenue. Content that delves into critical thought and requires introspection or contemplation languishes.
Ads are destroying society because stupid and rage sells views.
This was an understandable perspective when we had those regulations in the USA, but since FDR’s New Deal, the Republicans have walked back practically every law and regulation we had to curb the greed of Capitalism. This is the natural tendency of Capitalism
That is the tendency of people. Any system is open to exploitation and greed. The restrictions on growing exploitation are only as good as the humans enforcing them, and people suck. There’s always people trying to force cracks in a system to benefit themselves, and some tribal influences that will allow them to do it.
You are 100% correct. People just want to believe that Capitalism is uniquely corrupt. When literally all of human history has seen us exploit and greedily destroy every social and economic system humans have ever engineered. Now including capitalism.
Good regulations prevent critical exploitation, which is why European capitalism is still functional and looked on positively despite still being capitalism.
Only through regulations can an economic system be maintained. US Capitalism is failing because it has been steadily deregulated for the last 40 years.
So yes, Capitalism is poison. But so is blowfish unless you cut it right. Every system we’ve ever built is also poisoned for failure unless it’s always cut down and regulated to its basics.
I’m really sorry to burst this bubble, but as a European, no. Capitalism is devouring us from the inside out. Haven’t you seen that basically every EU nation has a surging far right?
Capitalism is not uniquely capable of being exploited more than the systems which it replaced, but you’re wrong that it can be regulated. Yes, regulations can be passed, but they cannot be maintained. Capitalism will inevitably trend towards fascism as a matter of design. It is just human nature.
This is why we need a system that acknowledges the reality of human nature. That’s why I’m an anarchist. It’s the only system which really accounts for the fact that humans will abuse power.
Compare Europe’s surge of Far Right to the US’s. They’re handling it a lot better and passing regulations to prevent it in the future. Even getting laws passed to regulate the total use of social media by kids.
I’m not saying capitalism is perfect in Europe, I’m saying it’s a better example of how to regulate it into something sustainable.
Respectfully, the biggest flaw in anarchism imo is that it’s not a system at all. It’s basically just tribalism and immediately devolves into the rule of whoevers strongest in those tribes.
Humans are social creatures. We have literally always made societies based on expanded family dynamics and rules, as that is literally human nature. We want family and structure, and to do that we create rules that structure needs to follow for the family to survive.
Anarchism doesn’t really work for the elderly. The sick. The disabled. Anarchism doesn’t really do anything to protect the families we create as whoever is strongest can just take what they want when they want to.
Granted, Capitalism is horrible, but literally any system we create is doomed to become horrible and fucked up if we cannot regulate it from corruption. If we can’t prevent it from being taken over by strong opinionated assholes, it will also eventually devolve into tribalism.
Literally the problem that needs solving is just our own dark nature. That some of us are born without the capacity to understand our social nature, and survive exclusively through exploiting it. Those people are the sociopaths that have destroyed every society we’ve ever had, including the earliest recorded ones that were basically anarchistic.
It is within our nature to be highly social, but the few of us born without that nature only want to take from others instead of giving.
That dual nature of humanity is something that no civilization we’ve ever built has survived.