RE: https://fosstodon.org/@ovid/116334866923361500
My earlier thread on 4,000 years of enshittification got some great responses. One question kept coming up: if the extraction pattern is deeper than capitalism, what is the root cause? I think I have the start of an answer, but it means annoying people across the political spectrum.
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Marx correctly identified capital as extractive. His solution was collective ownership, with the state as a temporary bridge. Every implementation saw the bridge become permanent. The party became the new extractive class.
Libertarianism correctly identifies that institutions are extractive. Its solution: strip them away and let markets sort it out. Each one correctly diagnoses a disease, then prescribes a cure that causes the same disease.
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Because both models miss the deeper pattern. It's not capital or government that's the problem. It's power asymmetry and power asymmetries are convertible. Eliminate economic power and political power expands to fill the gap. Eliminate political power and economic power does the same.
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What other kinds of extraction do both miss? Kinship networks. The Soviet nomenklatura extracted through party connections. Silicon Valley extracts through founder-class access. Ibn Khaldun documented this in the 14th century: the cohesive in-group always extracts from everyone outside it.
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Informational asymmetry. Sumerian priests controlled literacy and therefore controlled surplus. Medieval guilds hoarded trade secrets. Modern finance extracts through complexity regulators can't parse. Communism assumes state planners will be benevolent with their knowledge advantage. Libertarianism assumes markets make information transparent.
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Ecological extraction is stealing from the future. Externalizing costs onto people who don't exist yet and can't fight back. Soviet industrialization and unregulated capitalism have both been catastrophic here. Neither model has a mechanism to represent future populations. The extraction just changes who gets the bill.
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Religious and ideological extraction. Tithes under feudalism. Enforced conformity under state atheism. Prosperity gospel under capitalism. Control over meaning and legitimacy is a form of power, and it generates extraction under every economic system we've tried.
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The difficult conclusion: the fundamental problem isn't capital or government or religion. It's that any sufficiently large power asymmetry will be exploited for extraction. Or, as I put it in my earlier thread: if you can get away with it, it takes less energy to steal than to create.
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This is why solutions designed to eliminate one form of power just create a vacuum for another. We need mechanisms designed for recurrence, one that assume extraction will re-emerge through whatever channel is left open. Because it always has.
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@laurel Definitely not an inappropriate comment. Different POVs help me look at things differently!
I like the idea of addiction as a metaphor; it's powerful. It's also dangerous. @pteryx pointed out that I was teetering on victim-blaming and I think "addiction" does, too. But I also have known addicts who *like* their addiction and just gloss over the side effects. Short-term reward versus long-term wellbeing.
But I won't tell my wife about the flowers. I'd have to fess up to the book.
I should explain how assymetries are "convertible."
A tech founder has informational power (a proprietary algorithm). That converts to economic power (market dominance, stock price). Economic power converts to political power (lobbying, regulatory capture). Political power converts back to economic power (favorable legislation, weakened antitrust). The cycle completes.
The point is that if you eliminate one type of power, such as abolishing private capital, the people who still hold other forms of power (political connections, social networks, information access, capacity for violence) can convert those into whatever replaces capital. The extraction continues through a different channel.
We cannot fight a pattern we don't learn to recognize.
@trademark To be extremely clear: if you have a business idea and become insanely rich, I have NO PROBLEM WITH THIS if you fairly earned that money.
If you did it through extractive means (/me waves at Uber), then no, this is not right. So the question isn't whether they have more billionaires per capita (they are, after all, very innovative), but whether that behavior was extractive.
Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)
😀🚲
Jeffrey Yasskin
Herman 🇪🇺🇺🇦🇾🇪🍋
laurel
Scott Perry
trademark