• hansl@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    It’s not just rent seeking. It’s the point where screwing your customers isn’t enough, so you start screwing people you really shouldn’t in a normal capitalistic society; your investors, your employees, your advertisers, etc.

    Basically it’s post-capitalist corporation. It used to be that customer paying cost of production + profit margin was the way you made money. Then because the product is cheap enough in the age of internet you can charge nothing and either pay for production through investors or through selling customer data to advertisers. That has the most profit per customers.

    But once you’ve extracted everything from your customers and expansion that way isn’t possible, there’s only one way to increase the margin of profits. You screw over your investors, or your employees, or your advertisers. Since you have a monopoly on your customers at this point, they can’t really go anywhere else (also sunken cost), and they’ll pay upfront. You abuse the irrational behavior to its most, leading to market failure as your product does less and less, you’re rent seeking your investors, and your employees get lower and lower bonuses/salaries/empowerment.

    Your company is getting enshittification.