The point is that you can participate and thrive in capitalism without doing every resource extracting enshittification strategy in the book, which seems to be just Business 101 these days.
Is Steam perfect? Probably not. But most other major players in this space seem to leap at every chance to charge people more while worsening their product and then we get thought pieces wondering how Steam remains popular by virtue of not actively making things worse.
No doubt. Propaganda is just wild. Kindness and Unity are woke afterall.
Fair enough. Point stands that people don’t understand these terms, have different understandings of them, and are therefore almost never on the same page.
Just like ‘liberal’ means very different things to different people. Conservatives say its like they’re far left revolutionaries. Actual Leftists view them as Conservative lite. And a lot of in-between.
I think there is a big discrepancy between what Captialism is defined as, what Capitalism actually is, and the ‘Spirit of Capitalism’ that a lot of folks buy into.
‘The Spirit’ is the idealistic bit. Competition breeding innovation. The better the service/product, the more successful you can be. Classic American Dream stuff.
In reality, its a race to the bottom where all principles and values are eschewed for profit.
Kinda like Communism where what it Should be or what it Could be are different than what we get in practice. And any given person is going to be thinking about it from a different lens, so you get delusional, idealistic, cynical, and occasionally reasonable takes all talking about the ‘same but entirely different’ thing.
Capitalism just had better PR.
Didn’t say it wasn’t still Capitalism. But there is still nuance between one company doing everything it can to squeeze alout as much ‘potential profit’ possible at the expense of their products and the consumers v one that maintains the quality of product and service a the expense of ‘potential profit’.
Whatever Ism you prefer still requires people to set and maintain a standard. The lack of standards and accountability is how you get the race to the bottom.