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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5478 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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I've been aware of this phrase for years, mostly from Reddit. Is there a canonical definition, however? I say this with genuine curiosity / bewilderment. Capitalism, to my mind, is an economic condition bounded by certain conditions. I didn't know (and I am dubious) about there being a temporal aspect to it.

No idea about a canonical definition but it makes sense to me that forms of social organisation have a life cycle similar to e.g. tech like Google Search.

  1. you start with enthusiasm and success (loads of people use google search, it suddenly renders the internet legible, it's great).
  2. expansion (everyone has an indexable website, search results are really good).
  3. an increasing number of problems as parasites, middlemen, activists, bureaucrats etc. figure out all the places that they can hijack the system (SEO appears and swiftly becomes mandatory to get any traction, Google increasingly stacks the deck towards large and favoured organisations, the map becomes the territory all over).
  4. eventually the whole system collapses under the weight of enshittification / all the edge cases it's responsible for supporting / parasitic load etc.

So for capitalism:

  1. you have a massive initial expansion of activity as corps come into being, positive sum investment and economic activity become possible, LLCs make it possible to invest without risking prison.
  2. companies make loads of stuff people want, poverty drops hugely etc.
  3. increasingly most of our (remaining and new) problems start being caused by companies b/c they're everywhere. Quarterly reports stop being a useful indicator of company health and start being the lodestar that guides all investment/hiring decision. Mergers and private equity vandals turn great companies into skin suits. Stock market arbitrage starts being far more lucrative than making things and selling them to people who want to buy them. 'You are here'.
  4. Theoretically, all of these problems finally cause capitalist economies to slow become so decrepit, futile, ineffectual and malicious to the humans caught up in them that it sparks revolution / takeover by healthy societies with different social arrangements / evolution towards a new model.

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