It's interesting how many complaints I see on HN that are framed as if they're complaints about a specific piece of technology when they are really complaints about capitalism. I'm all ears if you want to criticize our entire economic system, but I think it's silly to have that conversation specifically in the context of car software rather than at a societal level.
> when they are really complaints about capitalism
it's not a complaint about capitalism. It's a complaint about asymmetric bargaining power in the seller/buyer relationship.
That's not inherent in capitalism. It's inherent in an anti-competitive market. The failure is in gov't making sure there's sufficient regulation to prevent monopolistic practises.
"It's not a complaint about water. It's a complaint about the wetness."
If capitalism requires constant vigilant government intervention to prevent monopolistic practices, anti-competitive markets, and asymmetric bargaining power, then it seems to me that this is absolutely a complaint about capitalism. If anything, your comment just makes the indictment more damning.
i'd rather have the gov't be vigilant, than to have the gov't be the one monopolistic dictator. None of those problems of monopoly are inherent in capitalism - they exist in one form or another under a different market style (that of a command economy). It just appears different.
> The failure is in gov't making sure there's sufficient regulation to prevent monopolistic practises.
This may not be a problem inherent to capitalism, but it certainly is a problem caused by the capitalism we currently have (by which I'm specifically referring to the US, but it may apply more broadly elsewhere).
And the government's failure to adequately regulate the market is due to the right. The party that claims government doesn't work has repeatedly - for generations - run on this as their platform, and when in power, they ensure it doesn't work by continued regulatory capture and gutting of consumer protections.
The world we live in is capitalistic. We can imagine another world that isn't, but when we're considering specific pieces of technology, it's worthwhile to judge it by how it will perform or be exploited in the world we live in.
When you're fighting the same enemy on a dozen battlefields, you won't stand a chance of winning until you understand that fact and go after the root cause.
The whole idea of enshittification is that someone makes a high-quality app (or whatever), outcompetes all other entrants, and locks down the market. Then, having acquired pricing power, they can raise prices or, more often (as these tools aren't 'priced' from the perspective of the consumer, but rather indirectly funded e.g. through ads) lower the quality of the product. The steps in this chain are not inherent to 'making products', they emerge entirely from the confines and incentives of our market-based economy.
And it's not just "centrally planned economies" that avoid this. We see evidence from historical modes of production like artisinal handicraft. Despite there not being a free market of producers (as guilds generally possessed legally-enforced monopolies over saleable production) the general quality of goods thereby produced did not generally trend downwards. Indeed, we can see from the sources that in cases where quality was known to have dropped, popular backlash led to interventions, e.g. the various Parisian bread laws, or hallmarking regulations for goldsmiths. Obviously, similar mechanisms exist today in the form of governmental regulations, but the problem with free market economies is that they produce actors both incentivized and empowered to hamstring the government, capture regulators, and ultimately undermine that self-same free market, to their own benefit.
This feels to me like a false dichotomy. The only alternative to the current way of doing things isn't a planned command economy, no matter what "libertarians" or tankies might argue.
Anything other then capitalism with slightly more regulation is just going from the US to Germany. Great, but they have software updates on cars too.
If you want to change anything more fundamental, you are going to have to do a planned economy.
At best you can say, maybe could be slightly better Germany by having a better political process or something. But even then, software updates in your car are going to be a reality because it solves are problem for manufactures, saves consumers lots of time in many cases and generally the positives outway the negatives.
I bet you 100% that in any planned economy OTA updates would still happen.
At best we can argue for some better practice about OTA Updates in regards to security and functionality. Maybe forcing manufactures to have a 'security only' feed an a 'feature feed'.
> I bet you 100% that in any planned economy OTA updates would still happen.
How so? In a democratically planned economy, we would expect that economic decisions considered by the majority of the population to be unwise/upsetting/etc. would not take place. Yes, many/most decisions would probably happen 'behind the scenes', according to the delegated authority of smaller committees or individual officials, but that's only so long as those decisions don't cause bad results for the broader populace.
More broadly, how exactly would enshittification take place in an economy not based around market principles? The whole idea is that someone makes a high-quality app (or whatever), outcompetes all other entrants, and locks down the market. Then, having acquired pricing power, they can raise prices or, more often (as these tools aren't 'priced' from the perspective of the consumer, but rather indirectly funded e.g. through ads) lower the quality of the product. These steps are not intrinsic to reality, they emerge entirely from the confines of our market-based economy.
And yes, you can argue that in an "ideal market" they wouldn't happen, but a truism of modern economics is that "sufficiently free markets" produce actors with the power and desire to capture/destroy said free market.
Criticising our entire economic system tends to have very little effect. Criticising specific poor business practices and/or technologies that enable them has a much better chance of improving people's lives.
> Criticising our entire economic system tends to have very little effect.
I think its actively counterproductive. Criticising the entire economic system doesn't do anything. Complaining in broad strokes about stuff you can't change reduces your sense of agency over the world.
Also, if people believe that businesses must be sociopathic, they will make sociopathic choices in business. The belief reinforces the problem.
Do personal computers even really emerge under communism? it is yet to be seen. But this specific technology seems to only evolve under capitalism to suit the needs of a certain type of buisness against the consumer.
If it emerged under communism, it probably would be equally as bad. I imagine if it emerged under communism or socialism it would be designed to solve a similar problems: securing the needs of the state against the citizen.
The economies of all countries that claimed to be socialist or communist were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
Because nowadays the economy of USA resembles more and more every year to that of the socialist countries from the past, a non-negligible risk has appeared for the personal computer to become an endangered species.
The prices of personal computers and of their components have been increasing steadily during the last decade, long before the current wave of extreme price increases.
There is a steadily increasing pressure from big companies and from the governments controlled by them to eliminate true ownership of computers and of many other electronic devices, by introducing more and more restrictions for what owners can do with their PC/smartphone and by introducing more and more opportunities for others to control those devices remotely.
Many kinds of computing devices have eliminated their low-price models and they are offered now only in models so expensive as to be affordable only for big businesses, not for individuals or SMEs.
Ten years ago, I could still buy various kinds of professional GPUs with high FP64 throughput and any model of Intel Xeon server CPUs.
Nowadays I can choose to buy only high-end desktop CPUs for my servers, because the state-of-the-art server CPUs and datacenter GPUs now have 5-digit prices. NVIDIA, Intel and AMD see only big businesses as customers for such products, and they no longer offer any smaller SKUs in these categories (Intel nominally offers a few cheap Xeons, but those are so crippled that they are not worth for anything else but for enabling the testing of some server systems).
So in the kind of unregulated capitalism that exists today in USA, PCs would not have appeared and there is a risk for them to disappear, because they have become a relict of the past.
Ah the old 'No true Scotsman' argument. Except of course that the centrally planned economies like the Soviet Union were exactly what socialists before WW1 demanded. And what they tried to implement.
If the Soivet Union and friends were not Communist/Socialist then a communist economy simply doesn't exist, and has never existed and we see 0 reason why it would ever exists. And its not even clear what it would be or how it would work. So its completely and utterly irrelevant for any debate in the real world.
Its only in circular marxist self-mastrobation logic to redefine Soviet Union as 'monopolistic capitalism'.
> The prices of personal computers and of their components have been increasing steadily during the last decade
Not in terms of actual performance ...
Maybe for Graphics cards, but at the same time, those graphics cards can do things now they could not before so they gained in value.
Those against capitalism are going to speak out against what capitalism will lead to be exploited. I don't consider it "silly" to be against something that will lead to disaster, even if the disaster is systemic. Like, so what? Honestly. You can be against giving bad actors new tools without the tools having to be bad themselves. That's the premise of gun control for example.
As another poster already said, the complaints are not about capitalism, even if sometimes they are worded in such a way, but they are about monopolistic capitalism.
For "capitalism" without other qualifications, there are no alternatives. The so-called socialist or communist economies have always lied by pretending that they are not capitalist. In fact all such economies were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
Towards the end of the nineties of the previous century, a huge wave of acquisitions and mergers has started and it has never stopped since then.
Because of this, to my dismay, because I have grown in a country occupied by communists so I know first hand how such an economy works, the economies of USA and of all the other western countries have begun to resemble more and more every year with the socialist/communist economies that were criticized and ridiculed here in the past.
While the lack of competition and its consequences are very similar, in some respect the current US and western economies are even worse than the former socialist/communist economies. At least those had long-term plans. While those plans were frequently not as successful as claimed, they at least realized from time to time useful big infrastructure projects.
The main role of the laws and of the state must be the protection of the weak from the powerful, for various definitions of weakness and power, to prevent the alternative of attempting to solve such inequalities by violent means, when everybody loses.
Therefore there must be a balance between the economic freedom of the private companies and the regulation of their activities.
It is obvious that in USA such a balance has stopped existing long ago and the power of the big companies is unchecked, to the detriment of individuals and small/medium companies.
The US legislators spend most of their time fighting for the
introduction of more and more ridiculous laws, which are harmful for the majority of the citizens, while nobody makes the slightest attempt to conceive laws that would really protect the consumers against the abusive practices that have now spread to all big companies.
