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   HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 11:13:26 JST HeavenlyPossum

   There was a stretch when Elon Musk took over twitter and started charging for blue checks (lmao) and some of his sycophants started talking about “Veblen goods.”

   A Veblen good is something for which demand *increases* as price increases, in contact to the neoclassical orthodoxy that demand decreases axiomatically with price.

   Veblen goods are things that rich people buy to signal their wealth and status. Jewelry, fancy watches, yachts, Ivy League degrees. Things that cost many thousands or millions of dollars.

   The idea that an $8 verification on twitter would ever be a status symbol for the rich was fucking ludicrous.

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   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 11:13:22 JST feld

     in reply to

     • Ed Suominen
     It seeks like the mass market LEDs are all over-driven and die from it. It's so stupid.
   • Embed this notice
     Ed Suominen (edsuom@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 11:13:23 JST Ed Suominen

     in reply to

     @HeavenlyPossum I’m an electrical engineer and there is an aspect of planned obsolescence shittiness that doesn’t get talked about but pisses me off: LED lightbulbs.

     The LEDs basically last forever. It wouldn’t be hard to design a long-lasting power supply to convert the 120 VAC to the voltage the LED uses, using film capacitors that cost pennies more. But nobody even thinks about paying more for something that lasts years longer and what pays is to stuff landfills full of “dead” lightbulbs.

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 11:13:24 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     Business—ownership—does not contribute to production. It can *only* earn revenue through sabotage. Without the fences, the toll booths, the armed guards, the enshitification, then owners do not earn any profits. Capitalism must constantly make things *worse* than they would be if we were free to produce to meet our own and each other’s needs.

     Maybe you’ve seen the news about Reddit? Reddit is restricting access to its API so it can charge more from makers of third-party apps.

     Reddit’s CEO had this to say:

     “Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things…We are not in the business of giving that away for free."

     Oh My God He Admit It dot Gif

     Huffman did not create “the largest data set of human beings talking about interesting things.” Reddits users did. What Huffman owns is a *fence* around those conversations, and he only earns a profit if he can *sabotage* access.

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     https://www.npr.org/2023/06/15/1182457366/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-its-time-we-grow-up-and-behave-like-an-adult-company

     Paul Cantrell repeated this.
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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 11:13:24 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     Sennheiser makes headphones. Some of its models are very pricy, and others are cheaper. This is a common tactic for firms, selling products at multiple “price points” so it can capture revenue from people willing to pay at different levels.

     It’s apparently not very cost effective to make all sorts of different models. But then how do you justify selling headphones at different prices? Why would someone pay hundreds more for the same headphones?

     Why, just make one version *shittier.* Turns out Sennheiser was inserting a piece of foam into some of its headphones, to deliberately lower the sound quality, in order to sell the same headphones at different prices to different people.

     Once you recognize sabotage for what it is, you can’t help but start to see it in every aspect of your life: a deliberate shittiness imposed on us so someone else can earn a profit.

     http://mikebeauchamp.com/misc/sennheiser-hd-555-to-hd-595-mod/

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 11:13:25 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     Veblen called this interference “strategic sabotage.” At the time he was writing, Veblen was thinking specifically about the way capitalists might refuse workers permission to labor, to control wages, or to deliberately under-produce, in order to keep prices high.

     We can and should think about sabotage more expansively, though. When H&M burns 12 tons of unsold clothing each year, it is sabotaging industry. When De Beers buys up diamonds and then locks them up in a vault, it is sabotaging industry. When CVS pours bleach on edible but unsold food, it is sabotaging industry.

     https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/03/11/in-search-of-sabotage/

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 11:13:25 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, authors of “Capital as Power,” have pushed Veblen’s idea forward and view all property as sabotage—a social relationship of interference. Not necessarily in a normative sense, but in a positive one: property is the power to say no to someone else.

     “Anything that can undermine the resonance of industry is a potential business asset. The private ownership of plant, equipment and knowledge (intellectual property); the ability to manipulate and leverage government policy and control the underlying population via education, propaganda and advertisement; the power to undermine autonomous thinking, restrict creative collaboration and humane planning, block the free movement of people and things, induce war and destroy the natural environment – these are all means with which business can sabotage industry. And whatever can sabotage industry can be used to extort income from it by threatening to incapacitate its activity. This sabotage, says Veblen, is the ultimate source of all business income and the basis on which pecuniary investment and the accumulation of capital rest.”

     Unless something can be fenced off, it’s really hard to extract profits off it. We can put literal fences around land and post guards to deny access, but fortunately capitalists haven’t yet figured out how to sabotage and charge for access to air.

     https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/750/39/20221000_bn_the_business_of_straegic_sabotage_web.htm

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 11:13:25 JST HeavenlyPossum

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     You might have heard that the company that owns Instant Pot has filed for bankruptcy. The makers of Instant Pot did something horribly wrong: they made a really good product that works very well and does not need to be replaced frequently. This means that owners of Instant Pots might only need to buy one and rarely replace it, if at all.

     This is a great success from the perspective of *industry,* in Veblen’s sense, but terrible for *business.* The makers of Instant Pot failed to sufficiently sabotage their product by, say, building in intentional obsolescence. Maybe they should have used cheaper parts that wear out faster, or installed software that requires regular updates, or deliberately inserted components designed to make it fail.

     But they didn’t, and so sales were stagnant. The firm that owns Instant Pot borrowed lots of money in an attempt to make a new version of Instant Pot they somehow hoped to sell to consumers of Instant Pot. It was too much; the firm did not earn enough differential profits—profits at a faster rate than its competitors—and so the firm is failing, despite the success of the product.

     https://thetakeout.com/instant-pot-maker-parent-brand-file-for-bankruptcy-2023-1850534708

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 11:13:26 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     But why is it called a Veblen good? I’m so glad you asked!

     Veblen goods are named after Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian-born American economist who wrote around the turn of the 20th century. Veblen was a heterodox economist who critiqued capitalism from an angle that was not Marxist, but definitely complemented Marx’s analysis.

     Veblen noted the existence of Veblen goods in his broader study of what he coined “conspicuous consumption” by the “leisure class,” two terms we owe to him.

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 11:13:26 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     Veblen made a lesser known but much more important contribution to our understanding of the economy. He noted that capitalist enterprise falls into two broad categories, industry and business. While we colloquially think of these two things are part of the same phenomenon, Veblen recognized that there were two separate and antagonistic processes ongoing in capitalism.

     Industry is the process by which we make stuff to satisfy needs. It is a cooperative social process, the effort to satisfy needs as efficiently as possible. Its goal is collective well-being.

     Business, in contrast, is about pecuniary profit for differential gain. Business is the process by which industry is mobilized to generate profits at a faster rate than other business. And, Veblen noted, this often entailed interference with industry.

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     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 11:14:06 JST feld

     in reply to
     I did this mod years ago and it really worked!