Just because Americans have an obesity problem doesn't make every food vendor a drug dealer. Come on, get real. Basically everything that is being sold can be abused by the user. Does that mean every vendor of anything is potentially a bad actor? I believe you are exaggregating. BTW, I virtually never thought about Thiel when I ordered a Pizza. Is there a reason why you drag the owners into this? It basically sounds like you are antagonising everyone above your wage-class. I don't get it.
It’s by degrees right? You can make a business that treats people as well as you can manage while feeding yourself, but almost anybody will want more than that, and some people want way more than that for a variety of social and innate reasons. Eventually you cross some arbitrary threshold where you’re doing, or at least enabling, really awful mistreatment of people and you use the level of indirection you have or some ideology or some excuse to justify it, but that’s when it’s a problem. People above the parent commentor’s wage class just so happen to also be the people most susceptible to this process, which is why they’re in a high position in the first place. Also, not that this is particularly important, but many or most of them (the extremely rich) dislike and look down on you because they need to in order to feel alright about their position. You don’t owe them kindness that they won’t return.
>Also, not that this is particularly important, but many or most of them (the extremely rich) dislike and look down on you because they need to in order to feel alright about their position
The rich don't give a shit. They're comfortable in their position. It's the uppity doctors, lawyers, techies, and everyone else with an office job that need to feel like they're better than the plumber, line cook and brick layer.
Every idiot who lives in a good school district with manicured lawns and reads the nutrition facts on the frozen dinner they're buying at Target thinks they're saving the world by telling the politicians to ban fireworks and menthols.
> The rich don't give a shit. They're comfortable in their position.
I don’t get why you say this. Almost everyone has a need to feel like a good person, justified, etc, and the easiest way for someone with a several hundred million plus net worth to feel that way is to believe that they earned it, are special and that normal people are too stupid to do the same thing. There’s lots of other options for justifications but none of them are particularly flattering to the have-nots.
I think OP's point wasn't so much about the fundamental services being bad or harmful to most of their users, but rather about the over-optimization of every single tech service toward finding ways to build on people's bad instincts and decision-making to squeeze just a penny more out of them.
When no ceiling is imposed, the natural state of business is to consume all oxygen.
It doesn’t matter that you don’t know who Peter Theil is when you buy a pizza. It matters that he somehow makes money from that pizza and if he can, he will extract more value than the pizza guy.
The pizza guy had 30 years to conquer the internet. They could have hired a coder to do their online order website. 12 years later, they could have hired a coder to create an ordering app. Most of them didn't, because they weren't willing to part with the money. Now, Lieferando takes a 10% cut from every order because they created infrastructure the customer actually wants to use. What is so bad about it? You can only cut out the middle man if the vendor is going with the times.
Or they can just make pizza. Meanwhile, I could get a $11 pie delivered with a phone call 20 years ago, and now I’m paying $35 for some stupid cloud app to do the same thing.
It's not black and white, but what you're saying sounds like "just because users have an attention problem doesn't make every social media app an attention grabber"
I mean, companies optimise for profits and at some point people fall for it in excess which is the point OP made.
It kinda makes sense, because the means the companies employ are psychologically advanced plays on people who don't know the spelling of psychology.
I'm probably manipulated into scrolling more than I wanted to or buying more than I wanted to on an everyday basis.
> Does that mean every vendor of anything is potentially a bad actor
Yes, of course they are. Left unregulated they will form cartels. As Adam Smith said, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
They will try to raise barriers to entry as well, to limit competition. They will try to increase sales by many means.
They may be ethical enough not to do all that, but the potential is definitely there.
Are cartels inherently unethical? The US government approves of and protects certain cartels (e.g. unions, hospital systems, defense contractors).
If anything, cartels thrive under heavily regulated and dirigiste economic systems, where as in an unregulated market a cartel would eventually lose to a competitor or succumb to infighting.
