I faintly remember a time when companies tried to succeed by developing outstanding products that conquer the market by merit.

These days development seems almost irrelevant, everything is optimized to extract the most cash from the cheapest, often white-labelled, products.

And on the consumer side? When did we go from "best value for money" to "cheapest whatever it takes".

With the advent of the internet? Social media? Amazon? I really can't tell anymore 🤔

@fribbledom something something the tendency of the rate of profit to fall

@fribbledom

It's partially economic as people are a lot poorer these days, but it's also that the price-point of automation has dropped through the floor.

@fribbledom I was thinking about it a lot. To me this is a natural evolution of capitalist businesses who, over the XXth century, gradually honed the way to make the most money, and it turned out that aggressive marketing + buying out competitors + subverting industries with a subsidized "free" products, all work better than "honest" competition. Computers helped doing it more efficiently, and the Internet helped to scale it globally.

@fribbledom
And I remember all of those companies getting crushed by Microsoft exploiting the monopoly position it had.

@fribbledom running a solidly profitable company is no longer enough if the company is public. Show hockey stick growth every quarter ( which is impossible) or be punished by the markets. Leads to bad decision making, Netflix being the current best example.

@fribbledom Slow trend over many decades and several generations.

Possibly starting with clothes and then furniture.
My mother (now 93 y.o.) would inspect every piece of clothing and check every stitch to make sure it was well made, and if not either reject it or demand for a massive discount.
IKEA was very frowned upon by her generation. "Only last a few years", and the furniture she bought lasted a life time.

Once supply-chain logistics and Amazon came to be, the masses were already primed.

@alcinnz

Some questions:
- Who creates these products? Some soul-less people or people like you and me?
- Who is interested in making money? Some greedy businessman or people like you and me, e.g. by working for these companies or owning shares of these companies?

I think it's easier than ever to stand up against this shit: don't create these products and buy old/alternative products. I'm very happy with my 2012 Thinkpad

@fribbledom Yeah. I still try to buy quality. But if that's not available or not for a sane price, it's pretty difficult.

@fribbledom Old normal is now called premium.

@fribbledom With marketing being able to replace quality with adverts, influencers and "must have" product cult.

@fribbledom it was always that way. capitalism is a mistake. humanity must fall.

But hey, on the bright side, you can get a blåhaj.

@fribbledom
> And on the consumer side? When did we go from "best value for money" to "cheapest whatever it takes".

I used to enjoy domestic plane rides too. Same thing.

@fribbledom Hard to say this without sounding like a snob, but I rarely buy cheapest. I don’t want my crap to break.

@fribbledom Probably because if it's gunna be crap anyway what's the point in spending more?

Vicious cycle.

@fribbledom and what's worse is if the product is defective, chances are you can't refund or exchange because it's no longer available for special order so you have to live with it.

@fribbledom cheapest*
* until you achieve some degree of monopoly, in which case you will start selling garbage at a massive price. (yes, I'm looking at you Autodesk😉)

@fribbledom Others have already said plenty, but I'll just add that Walmart and the Walton family's influence on government policy made some big changes in the 1990s.

@fribbledom I think a lot of this goes back to the trend for business people to do an MBA the last several decades. Back in the day, business was never something that was a science unto itself but was generally done by people who were generally interested and experienced with the things or tasks of their firms.

But when "management" was turned into an (abstracted) academic science, they had to make it about numbers, spreadsheets and optimization. There's the line from management consultants like McKinsey about managing what you can measure. And so it becomes a kind of video game and they optimize production and supply chains etc to get whatever numbers as high (or low) as possible and never consider the long or medium term consequences (let alone the external material and social effects). Eventually, you get to a logic of "never do the actual thing" and you outsource your entire operation to the cheapest (and likely, most cynical) producers and you just play around with finance. Number go up!

@fribbledom The advertising industry became too powerful. Influencer mentality poisoned minds. Hype became weaponized by bots that made stuff appear more popular than reality. So many things wrong with modern society and it can all be summarized as capitalism eating itself and the world.