Move Over, Disaster Capitalism--Make Room for Addiction Capitalism
Posted by freedomforall 2 months, 1 week ago to Business
Excerpt:
"That monkey on your back comes in many forms.
We've all heard of Disaster Capitalism: the Powers That Be either initiate or amplify a crisis as a means of granting themselves "emergency powers" which just so happen to further concentrate the nation's wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.
Naomi Klein described the concept and cited examples in her 2008 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and summarized the core dynamic: "Disaster capitalism perpetuates cycles of poverty and exploitation."
Move over, Disaster Capitalism--make room for Addiction Capitalism.
Addiction Capitalism is my term for the last-ditch / desperation method of guaranteeing sales and profits when everybody already has everything: reduce the quality so everything fails and must be replaced, and addict your customers to your product or service which--what a surprise--only you or your cartel provide.
And since you've bought up all the competition and moated your monopoly via regulatory thickets / regulatory capture, consumers must continue paying--or suffer the consequences. Addiction Capitalism is capital's last best hope when the essentials of life and novelties are both over-supplied. So the only ways to juice demand and maintain profits are 1) lower the quality of goods so they must be constantly replaced (Cory Doctorow's "ensh**tification") and 2) addict consumers to services such as social media and products such as smartphones, or create dependencies which are equivalent to addiction, such as dependency on weight-loss medications.
Just as the addict is dependent on a drug, patients are dependent on medications that must be taken until the end of their lives."
"That monkey on your back comes in many forms.
We've all heard of Disaster Capitalism: the Powers That Be either initiate or amplify a crisis as a means of granting themselves "emergency powers" which just so happen to further concentrate the nation's wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.
Naomi Klein described the concept and cited examples in her 2008 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and summarized the core dynamic: "Disaster capitalism perpetuates cycles of poverty and exploitation."
Move over, Disaster Capitalism--make room for Addiction Capitalism.
Addiction Capitalism is my term for the last-ditch / desperation method of guaranteeing sales and profits when everybody already has everything: reduce the quality so everything fails and must be replaced, and addict your customers to your product or service which--what a surprise--only you or your cartel provide.
And since you've bought up all the competition and moated your monopoly via regulatory thickets / regulatory capture, consumers must continue paying--or suffer the consequences. Addiction Capitalism is capital's last best hope when the essentials of life and novelties are both over-supplied. So the only ways to juice demand and maintain profits are 1) lower the quality of goods so they must be constantly replaced (Cory Doctorow's "ensh**tification") and 2) addict consumers to services such as social media and products such as smartphones, or create dependencies which are equivalent to addiction, such as dependency on weight-loss medications.
Just as the addict is dependent on a drug, patients are dependent on medications that must be taken until the end of their lives."
