| HN Mirror

Yup, it's another great example of the sort of "late stage" problems you run into with capitalism, professionalization of business management (MBA degrees), and fundamentally just about any system w/ rules and "(semi-)autonomous agents" trying to maximize (or at least perform well [enough]) the value of some metric / function. Here, profit &/ even staying in business.

Capitalism and other features of the system currently used in many of the most developed countries is great during development of markets. The performance is excellent, which makes perfect sense.* You run into problems when markets reach saturation. And, markets have never been remotely as saturated as now. Now, you're literally talking about how finely you can slice the sum total of ATTENTION, period. Think "TikTok".

Basically, you see a lot more "zero sum" behavior at such points. I.e., it's much more just Darwinian** ... some winning, some losing.

One example of this type of strategy that I find distasteful is the "retail reset". Every 6 months or so, the retail reset dairy visits the supermarket I shop at most frequently, forcing me to re-find at least some of what I want to buy. It rarely causes me to buy anything unusual or new to me, but, I understand why they do it. It's not "terrible", but there's a feel to it of a certain ... lack of morals / ethics... feeds into a pervasiveness to that feel ... I believe it to be subtly but moderately bad for societies overall...

Couldn't find a more authoritative source / less markety site quickly, but here's at least some of the description:

https://canadasbeststorefixtures.com/why-a-store-reset-boost...

Of course, this kind of thinking is taught and exchanged among the business-oriented. Makes "the disease" worse (more pervasive) ...

* "Command economy" makes very little if you actually care about overall performance. It's the problem anyone faces when trying to model [e.g., "data assimilation" techniques, very powerful but enough data is essential] - not enough data! Of course, in today's world, it might be increasingly possible to make a more "command" style work, from the data side ... and, if you want to go for that "panopticon look" ... China has headed back that way ... again, in some sense. But, it's really still not good ... you're up against all sorts of other human factors, even if you HAD the data.

** Edit: or noticeably Darwinian (in a more common usage sense). This behavior of systems regarding "niches" and competition applies at all times. It's when the "empty space(s)" or "low density space(s)" are occupied that the more directly / actively competitive behavior w/ more clear negatives for various 'participants' tends to emerge.