[nicoburns]

Some things that could help:

- Worker representation on company boards. Meaning that those who work on the product at an everyday level gain influence over the overall direction of the company.

- Progressive taxation of corporations to bias our economy towards small companies that are more likely to care about their users, and to encourage more competitive markets.

- Regulation to enforce interoperability and/or the ability to export data.

None of these things are about abandoning capitalist ideas entirely. There's a lot of merit to them. But they are about tweaking them to that power doesn't solely lie with money and is diluted with power from other sources.

[lotsofpulp]

Those are all interesting and viable proposition, but I would not say they have any relation to the “shareholder model” as you called it in your first post I responded to. All of those proposals, and shareholders, seem like they can co exist.

[andrekandre]

consumer co-op* (owners are the customers) might be an alternative

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers'_co-operative

[nicoburns]

It's not shareholders that I have a problem with, it's giving shareholders exclusive control of companies. They may seem like small tweaks, but you end up with a very different model.

[Applejinx]

Exactly. It's like game balance: you can have a game scenario where there's an exploit, and everyone ends up simply going with the exploit or being crushed, causing the game to become simplified to an uninteresting, uninvolving mechanical process whereupon it just dies, because it's no fun. There are a few people who think they are the big winners because they're the masters of the exploit, but they're whales in a tiny pond and are themselves stifled by how dead their environment is, and may themselves die off, still being the biggest whale in the drying-up pond, and insisting they've mastered everything that matters.

That, but capitalism.