I think pretty much everything worth building that could be built and was feasible to build has now been built. There are no more big projects left to conquer, barring some massive advances in material science.
I’ll tell you exactly what broke: the social contract. When the rich find ways of not paying a dime “for the common good” and just free ride, plus move everything out of the country because it’ll make them a quick buck (but make everything worse in a decade-wise time frame), people stop agreeing to their enthusiasm for capitalism.
Neo-industrialists were let off their leashes and went straight back to their old favorite, wealth extraction. Rockefeller strangled the economy by controlling the trains and pipelines undermining his competition rather than competing on quality. When they can hoard enough cash to buy any potential competitors (see Meta buying Whatsapp and Instagram) it distorts the market. VCs no longer want to build companies they want to sell them.
Fossil fuel can't compete with wind and solar so instead it spends its resources trying to kneecap them rather than innovate.
PE buys up all off an industry in an area and puts the price squeeze on the consumers.
B2B has transitioned from one time sales to a focus on MRR.
Microsoft jams copilot into everything whether it makes sense or not so that it can goose the usage numbers for investors.
Google is incentivized to push ad clicks over legitimate results because it has no real competition.
I could go on for pages and pages. Industry consolidation is what's destroying innovation.
When we were selling our first startup, we hired an "expert" to value our company. He started the discussion with "what is the valuation you're looking for?"
Then he started playing games with his "model" in Excel.
The difference between industrial capitalism and financial capitalism is Excel.
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[ 488 ms ] story [ 1901 ms ] threadAll of US manufacturing went to China because labor was cheaper.
You can't build things when you don't have a robust manufacturing base
Fossil fuel can't compete with wind and solar so instead it spends its resources trying to kneecap them rather than innovate.
PE buys up all off an industry in an area and puts the price squeeze on the consumers.
B2B has transitioned from one time sales to a focus on MRR.
Microsoft jams copilot into everything whether it makes sense or not so that it can goose the usage numbers for investors.
Google is incentivized to push ad clicks over legitimate results because it has no real competition.
I could go on for pages and pages. Industry consolidation is what's destroying innovation.
Because every new technology is sold as a way to fire people and not “grow the pie”. What do you expect?
Rich folk don’t like it when poor people get more. It’s not partisan, it’s class based.
elites figured out that usury was easier than manufacturing, so they financialized the economy
When we were selling our first startup, we hired an "expert" to value our company. He started the discussion with "what is the valuation you're looking for?"
Then he started playing games with his "model" in Excel.
The difference between industrial capitalism and financial capitalism is Excel.