Isn’t all this company is the product stuff an obvious side effect of wealth inequality?
There is way way more money up top looking for investments than there is in the hands of customers, so it’s far more profitable to chase that money and make the stock the product than it is to care about the actual product much.
It’s a special case of the more general big dumb money problem that happens whenever too much money ends up in too few hands, whether those hands are a government or a few private rich citizens. You end up with this giant piñata of big dumb money and everyone whacking it.
In the old USSR instead of the stock is the product it was the appearance in the eyes of other bureaucrats is the product, but it’s kind of the same phenomenon. The customer isn’t the customer.
They are betting on whether richer people will bet on the same things so they can cash out. Repeat, all the way up.
The entire economy is to some degree a casino betting on itself. I think this is always true to an extent but the casino nature becomes much more dominant the more unbalanced things become.
I would be willing to bet addiction in general (gambling, drug, dopamine, etc) is probably a symptom/side effect of wealth inequality. Desperation -> "relatively cheap method of short term emotional/sensory boost" -> Further Desperation not mitigated by outside forces -> repeat
You must not know many rich people if you think addiction is not an issue for the wealthy. The drugs of choice are less immediately destructive, but cocaine, pills, MDMA and ketamine are all wildly abused by the 1%.
All humans are susceptible to addictions and addictive behavior, but the 1% that you mention are mostly shielded from their negative effects. It's far less of an issue for them, and it's not even just about choosing the less destructive drugs. If we talk about just drug addictions, their wealth ensures that:
1. They always have a reliable supply of their preferred drug. No matter how much they need, many of them will be able to afford it pretty much indefinitely. They can just live with the addiction.
2. They have first-class healthcare to mitigate the addiction and lessen its side effects.
3. They have the power to never run into any legal trouble over it. How often do 1%s get convicted on drug possession? This often applies even to the harshest regimes.
So, referring to what the other commenter said, the wealth inequality also affects addicts unequally. The rich, excluding the most extreme exceptions, are immune to the downward spirals of addictions and many of their consequences. The poor addicts become increasingly desperate as their drug habit consumes most of their income and savings. The poorest turn to the cheapest, most dangerous street drugs. Many get little to no medical help. Many are charged with drug-related crimes, ensuring their criminality keeps them down for the rest of their lives. This varies by country, but the patterns are all similar.
There's always going to be an underlying layer of people who tend to gravitate towards addictions, rich and poor - the real question is if more and more people are turning to them as they get desperate, who wouldn't otherwise have.
Then rich people would never be addicted to things, but a history of musicians dying from drug overdoses says that's not true. Addiction is a deep topic that doesn't simplify into one neat little pet theory for it.
Well it's not a neat little pet theory though, it's an opening up of the conversation, thinking in binary.. It's a "poor vs rich" disease isn't helpful. Thinking in gradients is... "It's 50% more likely in people with this income level vs 10% in this other population", that's still a problem. The point is to address problems, not hand wave them away as "complicated" etc etc, something something engineering
the article is about digital addictions, and not gambling or drugs.
The point of saying it's complicated isn't to dismiss the problem, but to invite a deeper understanding of the problem itself so as to be better equiped to help solve the underlying issue, rather than show up, guns blazing, and then not actually fix anything.
There is way way more money up top looking for investments than there is in the hands of customers, so it’s far more profitable to chase that money and make the stock the product than it is to care about the actual product much.
It’s a special case of the more general big dumb money problem that happens whenever too much money ends up in too few hands, whether those hands are a government or a few private rich citizens. You end up with this giant piñata of big dumb money and everyone whacking it.
In the old USSR instead of the stock is the product it was the appearance in the eyes of other bureaucrats is the product, but it’s kind of the same phenomenon. The customer isn’t the customer.