Capitalism also produces its own downfall even on the internet. For instance, AI is now being used against big tech by users reverse engineering its products and services and releasing them for free.

More like crapitalism

I think AI/LLMs are a good example of this too

All of capitalism boils down to something like the terrible terms of a gym membership you can’t afford to cancel that was sold to you via some very special deal with obscured fine print.

The tendency of the rate of profit to decline paired with market share capture is a doom spiral that exists for the benefit of financial interests to skim off the top.

The point of the system is not to incentivize human productive activity, but to hoard more tokens over time, so material reality quickly loses currency.

I don’t think capitalism ruined the internet (it built it in the first place, along with state-funding via universities and R&D centers of course, but it’s all in a capitalist country so it’s effectively capitalist). I think a lot of the most public-facing stuff that gets the most funding is obviously rent-seeking and ad-tech and other crappy products.

But the infrastructure of the internet works decently well. And you can use the internet in all sorts of cool ways. But getting lots of people to adopt the same software so they can communicate is the hard part. Easier to do if you have lots of money to spend on advertising.

You can even build your own “internet” with all the same software and tools as the current one if you want. With your own hardware. Or as a virtual network on top of the existing internet.

Just because the biggest and fanciest products aren’t great doesn’t mean the whole thing is rotten.

It’s been remarkably successful at replacing the global telephone network technology. Phone calls now run over the internet (as far as I know).