this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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I'm not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.
But they're not trying to do that. Profit isn't enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.
So they put in ads. But that's not enough and oh look there are more places we haven't put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don't we sell that too? Hey guys, we've heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small ~~protection payment~~ subscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don't like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we're adding ads back into the service. But don't worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don't think that last one's happened with YT premium yet, but it's happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn't put it past them.)
There's no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.
That’s fine. No one needs you to be.
What are those? No, really, this is the crux here. The whole rest of your comment is about growth capitalism generally, and I agree it sucks in many ways. But until you can reasonably provide a working alternative to property ownership, we will continue to have things like rent and lending. Investment is a form of lending. And yes YT shareholders don’t give a shit about anything but more and more and MORE insane profit. Because to succeed, a company has to not only profit but profit above expectation, rewarding the speculative investments others have made in them.
It’s foolish though to think that YT’s management are the source of this desire for profit. It’s their shareholders. YT really want to deliver the best product while making a good living, and their staff are also minor shareholders to some extent.
But your problem is capitalism. And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism, then sheeit you are late to the game and I won’t wait up to hear what your alternative suggestions are going to be. I’ll just point out that you waved your hand at that subject and then moved on like we wouldn’t notice.
I don't know why you'd assume that. I'm pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn't start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn't hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.
As far as alternatives. I'm always up front with people in saying that I don't have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That's a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we'd want to live in for very long. It's a cruel system and it's going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don't do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn't going to fix the issue.
The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it's a proposed solution. It'd be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it's important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.