The internet runs on ads.
Ad companies pay for all the “free” popular social media we use. Ad companies dictate to social media what their clients want their ads to be associated with, not associated with, and drive media of all kinds to push inflammatory and click-bait content that drives engagement and views. It’s why you indirectly can’t swear, talk about suicide, drugs, death, or violence. Sure, you technically can unless ToS prohibits it, but if companies tell their ad hosts they don’t want to be associated with someone talking about guns, the content discussing guns gets fewer ads, fewer ads = less revenue, low-revenue gets pushed to the bottom.
So lowbrow political rage bait, science denialism, and fake conspiracies drives people to interact and then gets pushed to the top because it gets ad revenue. Content that delves into critical thought and requires introspection or contemplation languishes.
Ads are destroying society because stupid and rage sells views.
Compare Europe’s surge of Far Right to the US’s. They’re handling it a lot better and passing regulations to prevent it in the future. Even getting laws passed to regulate the total use of social media by kids.
I’m not saying capitalism is perfect in Europe, I’m saying it’s a better example of how to regulate it into something sustainable.
Respectfully, the biggest flaw in anarchism imo is that it’s not a system at all. It’s basically just tribalism and immediately devolves into the rule of whoevers strongest in those tribes.
Humans are social creatures. We have literally always made societies based on expanded family dynamics and rules, as that is literally human nature. We want family and structure, and to do that we create rules that structure needs to follow for the family to survive.
Anarchism doesn’t really work for the elderly. The sick. The disabled. Anarchism doesn’t really do anything to protect the families we create as whoever is strongest can just take what they want when they want to.
Granted, Capitalism is horrible, but literally any system we create is doomed to become horrible and fucked up if we cannot regulate it from corruption. If we can’t prevent it from being taken over by strong opinionated assholes, it will also eventually devolve into tribalism.
Literally the problem that needs solving is just our own dark nature. That some of us are born without the capacity to understand our social nature, and survive exclusively through exploiting it. Those people are the sociopaths that have destroyed every society we’ve ever had, including the earliest recorded ones that were basically anarchistic.
It is within our nature to be highly social, but the few of us born without that nature only want to take from others instead of giving.
That dual nature of humanity is something that no civilization we’ve ever built has survived.
It just hasn’t come into power YET. You are being hugely dismissive. I am European and I follow US and European politics extremely closely and I am outright telling you that Europe is a hair away from the same shit, if not worse, than the US. Many EU nations are punishing people for protesting genocide.
Capitalism can not be reformed. It cannot be regulated. It is like a force of nature. It will always lead to fascism. It is inevitable.
You don’t know what anarchism is about, I’d encourage you to learn more about anarchism before dismissing it. I’d recommend checking out an anarchist FAQ.
Any European country with ranked choice voting is safe from the 2 system exploit that has allowed people like Trump and Orban to take office.
I’ve already agreed that any system we design will collapse including capitalism. Regulations are what’s needed to maintain any system from collapse. This includes Anarchism.
Without rules, what’s to stop sociopaths taking what they want? The issue isn’t what system is best, it’s what can be done to prevent any system from collapsing.
The answer is regulations. Not the complete absense of them. We have an incredible amount of data and studies that consistently show how anarchistic societies based on self motivation are immediately exploited by strong men sociopaths.
The same with capitalism. The enemies of both are the same, but at least with capitalism there is a mechanism through which to maintain regulations. Self-governing communities always self corrupt, as evidenced by the US’s now entire corrupt system that was previously self-governing. It just took centuries to corrupt because of strict regulations. But in those centuries people had livelihoods.
Anarchism provides no mechanism by which this can be protected for so long by design. It’s a system that allows for maximum exploitation by those who want to exploit it. That is the double edge of not having bigger heirarchal structures - there’s no reason not to take through strength if you have it. No punishment for breaking rules as there are no general rules that society can reliably enforce.
Historically, Anarchistic societies bend the knee to the first warlord that wants to conquer them, and then only after generations of suffering feel that maybe there should be rules and a hierarchy of law to prevent such exploitation.
I’m very familiar with what Anarchism is. And you’re just focusing on the rose colored parts of it the same as you think I’m doing for Capitalism.
No system works. Period. But rules do. And unfortunately a system is needed for those rules. We just haven’t found the right one yet that can last for more than a couple hundred years.