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AFAIK capitalism was invented for slave trading, Swedish mines and East India Company so it’s evil by it’s basic nature.
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Gentle reminder that commerce, and business, existed for thousands of years before capitalism did, and certainly before capitalism became the driving paradigm for all business.
There’s still room for ethics and morality in business if we can get capitalism out of the way.
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The ‘old’ IBM had five stakeholders. The informal view was that treating them equally was in the best long-term interests of the company. (I’ve no idea if they still use all five, but their behaviour over the years certainly suggests the balance has changed significantly.)
- Shareholders,
- Employees,
- Customers,
- Suppliers,
- The communities in which it operates
Too much late-stage capitalism exhibits the following attitudes:
- Shareholders are venerated above all else, especially in the short term even if prioritising others may be better for shareholders in the long term. Damage to others is perfectly acceptable if it improves EPS this quarter.
- Employees are an inconvenience to be dispensed with wherever possible and exploited as much as possible, otherwise
- Customers are respected (often it’s just lip service) but can be exploited to the extent that the corporation can get away with it (there’s always more customers, or enough who will tolerate the shit, and often they have no choice - monopolies are the ideal to be striven for).
- Suppliers are there to be screwed - they’ll take the shit, they need the business, very few are irreplaceable.
- The communities? Don’t make me laugh. To the extent that PR weaseliness can paper over cracks and maintain a plausible veneer of caring, that’s good enough.
There are some corporate exceptions, to some extent, but at root this is modern capitalism. Maybe it always was. But look at some of the great historic entrepreneurs and their ability to see how a wider appreciation of stakeholders was good for their business.
Lever Brothers and Port Sunlight or the (Quaker) Cadburys and Bourneville, for example. I know of one local business that guarantees a set price for what its suppliers can deliver, even if it is sometimes above market rates, because it wants to preserve that supply chain’s existence (it is a very fragmented one) and maintain its access to it. Your average capitalist today would scoff at such antics.
Personally, I blame the rise of the business schools and their MBAs, plus the toxic effects of the political philosophies of Reagan/Thatcher and their fellow travellers and antecedents.
(Not sure where I was going with this, but I was in need of a minor rant.)
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Yeah I hear you.
Websites/bbs like BB don’t neatly fit into those models as the users aren’t ‘customers’ in the conventional sense of paying for goods or services.
In some ways the users are the goods/services here - affecting traffic but not getting compensated.
In both cases no real ‘contract’ exists- so there’s no real obligation by BB to keep them happy.
Life is strange
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I tihnk there is “a capitalism” that can be ethical, at least for a while, but I’m not sure there’s such a capitalism that can exist without eventually ballooning into big-C Capitalism, which is where we see all the late-stage shareholder-value-cult stuff suffusing everything like so much toxic mycelia.
Whether the capitalism that our current Capitalism emerged from was ever ethical is left as an exercise to the reader.
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Our current capitalism does seem to be doing all the things that Adam Smith warned against, including concentration of wealth at the top of the pyramid.
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Went to BBchat and feel sad again. They are wondering where people went.
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Opened the blog out of curiosity. The ad-adblocker they have breaks the reading mode most browsers have, even with adblocker disabled. Fuck them. (makes the page stick to the top)
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It’s not like they weren’t told. Repeatedly by different people. They really need to be willfully obtuse not to have figured out this was going to happen.
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My guess is that they looked at data somewhere that gave them a percentage of retention loss of readers if they migrated to Substack and decided that was acceptable. Which is sound… except that i would never have moved the community there, or in the way it was done 
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Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators’ work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable. You don’t have to take my word for it; Substack’s CEO explicitly said they won’t ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting from on their site, they took down… four of the Nazis. Four. There are countless more now, and they want to use your email newsletter to cross-promote that content and legitimize it. Nobody can ban the hateful content site if your nice little newsletter is on there, too, and your musings for your subscribers are all the cover they need.
(Via DaringFireball, who makes small beans of this aspect of Dash’s comments, perhaps surprisingly.)
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Oh, BB knows where we went. I took a look at the Chat over there, and I think @Heikki was referring to our former fellow commenters, who clearly miss us. I miss them too 
And you are correct about BB. Who knows what they were thinking. I’m certain they had their reasons, though.
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I did my best to be super-clear about the why reasons, sorry if I wasn’t clear enough.
The move has been a massive success in terms of solving the largest problem for BB, that is, continuing to exist. The move seems primed to usher in an era that returns to having great contributors return and more content diversity to BB itself, and finally gave BB readers an ad-free way to read BB which we had no chance of providing on our own without Substack.
I mentioned this before but communities around BB measure time in years or decades, and Substack is making a real push to allow their community tools to improve. We’ll continue to push them in the right direction as much as possible.
As I’ve also noted previously, BB (and media in general) have been stuck using tools that position themselves as neutral parties (Cloudflare is the biggest one, they shield alt-right sites, but also provide free services to sites like BB via their Project Galileo that are essential for places like BB to exist in the first place. I wasn’t much of a SS user before the shift of BB but I’m now supporting several progressive voices that I had no idea were there with great newsletters and content I can contribute to directly, and I’m amazed how many of them fled traditional media or trying to “go it alone” to find success and amplification of their voice by substack basically becoming a successful version of Patreon for authors. I hope it continues, because good, solid content costs money to produce, those voices deserve support (especially when disinformation is spread for free by so many other sources), and ads do NOT make that possible anymore unless you’re huge.
From the DF post:
I feel the same way about social media platforms. Are there people I find objectionable on Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads? Definitely. On YouTube? Even more definitely. Do I care? No, because I tend never to see their posts, and when one pops up, I can block or mute them, and I never see them again. That’s in contrast with X, the former Twitter, where the top replies to many posts are from first class shitbird trolls. More and more I simply find X an unpleasant place to devote any of my attention, and so I go there less and less. I don’t eat at restaurants whose food I dislike, and the food at X tastes bad and is only getting worse.
So far SS has introduced me to great people and new, progressive perspectives. And Bluesky for better or worse seems to finally have the momentum needed to strip twitter of the media attention that news pubs have desperately wanted to have the option to direct somewhere else. I’m not sure that it will manage to do that entirely, but I’m damn hopeful that it will, and that Bluesky can survive the inevitable invasion of shit that comes with reaching critical mass as they, too, try exceptionally hard to be a “neutral” platform.
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Don’t call it a substack
It’s been shit for years
When a bar has a few nazis
It’s a write-off, anyway.
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I think bluesky has a good chance to be the Twitter replacement that threads and mastodon aren’t, if only because bluesky was always meant to be a Twitter replacement first and foremost. It also has some of the same failings, namely the centralized nature of bluesky means it will always require a huge money investment to work, and that made Twitter unsustainable. It’s a matter of time bluesky begins the enshitification process to survive.
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I think of it as a failing pub relocating to a new building where landlord really wants the cachet of having that brand showing up in the directory and is giving them cheap rent. Kind of like when they took CGBG and moved it into a Las Vegas hotel.
As you are walking through the lobby trying to find the entrance to your old hangout, you keep bumping into white nationalists, racists, and transphobes.
You eventually find the entrance and when you try to tell the people in charge how unpleasant it was to get there, and how the new space just doesn’t work as well as the old one, they just shrug and say that it’s for the greater good.
The owner of the building doesn’t care either as long as their tenants pay the rent.
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You were, indeed, clear. I was being flip, which…never really works well for me, which I should know by now. I’m sorry I worded it that way.
What I meant was that @sqlrob was correct in that of course BB knew they would lose some users in the move. But they had their own reasons to make the move. Which you again explained eloquently here. And, as always, I appreciate reading your thoughtful input, and learning more about your own perspective. Thank you.
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After I saw this article I started wondering how much of the BB move was a result of the Google apocalypse of indie publishers, where they’re now apparently privileging corporate networks of sites in search results, and independent websites have seen search traffic fall off a cliff.
Maybe the timing is a coincidence, but the enshittification of the web is happening at all levels, and enshittification happening upstream has unavoidable (shitty) impacts downstream…
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This has been an ongoing and terrible thing for Indy publishers for quite some time. Between this change at Google and the ongoing pressure to add more terrible ad products to sites in general, you’re getting to understand the existential crisis publishers like BB are facing if they don’t find alternatives to a traditional blog.
The good news is for now SS is going gang busters on that front (memberships) AND without sacrificing the blog itself, meaning if this trend ever manages to reverse (or if another, better option presents itself) BB can pivot, nothing about BoingBoing.net proper is locked in to anything.
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