by GWBullshit | 2025-05-13 23:20:49+00:00
Honestly, the problem being highlighted is similar to what happens in the gaming community. Some people hack, either out of a sense of trolling or "everyone else is probably doing it, too, so I need to do it to keep up". Eventually it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as more and more players see other players hacking and succumb to the pressure to do likewise. Then the game becomes hot garbage and the good players depart, leaving the game to collapse on itself as it becomes a wasteland of cheaters.

In the 1950s to the 1970s (when taking on debt was considered a sign of weakness, not the current "prerequisite for success" Wall St. convinced companies it is these days), there used to be this corporate ethos: "A decent amount of profit, a decent amount of the time."

The basic idea is that if you were making an "indecent" profit too often, you were engaging in 1 of 3 possible activities, each of which, despite seeming like a good idea in the short-term, would lead to ruin in the long-term: (1) You were fleecing your customers, leaving open a space for a less-greedy competitor to snatch your customers by replicating you at a lower price point (2) you were doing something illegal (Google "J.P. Morgan-owned ship caught with over $1 billion in street value worth of cocaine") or, (3) you were doing something that, while not "technically illegal", was probably not in your company's long-term best interest (for example, when it was discovered that Disney bought out companies that ran production studios that made "erotica" for cable TV channels, "because it was profitable, so, "Why not?").

That ethos was healthy and realized that business is NOT a "dog eat dog, law of the jungle" world but rather an ECOSYSTEM that needs to be maintained in balance for the long-term good of everyone involved, INCLUDING "competitors".

Yes it sounds a bit like "collusion" signaling through market-mechanisms, but it was a GOOD collusion that ensured the long-term health of the overall landscape.

At some point in the late 70s and 80s, things like Malthusian-driven "Club of Rome" enclaves and "Peak Oil" scares (nowadays "Won't SOMEBODY think of the environment!?") gave rise to a culture where more and more "Pre-("Terminator") and Post-("The Last Man On Earth") apocalyptic SciFi films flooded the general consciousness, which seems to have affected a lot of things including the psyches of business executives who seemed to have adopted this "Everything is falling apart, so grab what you can, while you can!" attitude (Not necessarily true (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon), but highly-profitable for Wall St. and an ever-sprawling cottage industry of NGOs).

Does it "have to be" this way? Obviously not, as at one point it clearly wasn't. But some folks at the top make a lot of money by maintaining the illusion that "Yes this is reality and there's nothing you can do about it ("Hate the game, not the player") except to try to find a knife or club and realize that you're stuck in (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Royale_(film)) ... which ironically has come full circle and seems to be the dominant theme in even video games themselves these days, thus subtly subconsciously imprinting this narrative on a whole new generation.