this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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The sad thing is that if all these investors, finance bros, and tech bros actually paid their taxes and paid their employees decent salaries, so that income and wealth inequality was lower and more people had more money than barely enough to live on... people would have spare money that they might actually spend on things like better services that have fees attached. People use the free, cheap, convenient options because they don't have the time or money to spend on the higher quality ones, since the vast majority of internet services are luxuries, not essentials. No one's going to pay for Twitch if they're spending all their money on ridiculous things like food and rent. The best way to make the internet profitable is, in fact, to redistribute wealth away from the investors, finance bros, and tech bros who are so desperate for the internet to be profitable.
See, the problem is that if they did that, then there would be far less incentive to work at the soul sapping companies they own.
After all, who would choose to take a job at a company where you push ~~heroin~~ pain killers on economically distraught communities, if you were not also threatened with being relegated to the same desperate conditions? Who would willing make purposefully addictive Skinner box games and social media sights, if they were not threatened with homelessness and depersoning for failing to pay their 2000 dollar a month rent?
How could they possibly ever get people to do these kinds of absolutely necessary jobs if there wasn’t an unspoken threat of starvation, death and violence hanging over everyone’s head. I mean they’d not be able to make all the money that they then hoard.