"So are computers themselves. However free and open the web once was, or could've been, hardware was always capital-heavy, and it only got heavier with time. Cheap, ubiquitous computers and TSMC are two sides of the same coin."

Ok, I can see that is true.

"Exception that proves some markets are still inefficient enough to allow people of good conscience to thrive. Doesn't change the overall trajectory."

That depends on what you are measuring to determine market efficiency. Social, political, knowledge, and natural capital are excluded from consideration, so of course we optimize towards financial efficiency at the expense of everything else.

Which comes back to: business does not have beget enshittification, and it isn't because of market inefficiencies.

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on some of these points.

I don't think we need to agree to disagree just yet. I want to remark on:

> That depends on what you are measuring to determine market efficiency. Social, political, knowledge, and natural capital are excluded from consideration, so of course we optimize towards financial efficiency at the expense of everything else.

I'm taking a loose but classical definition of it, so obviously in financial terms. But there isn't really much choice to be made here: the market, as a system borne of aggregate human behavior at scale, is optimizing along a specific dimension for structural reasons. "Social, political, knowledge and natural capital" aren't excluded at all - on the contrary, they're converted into dollars and become part of the optimization, competing with other things that are also converted into monetary units.

It's just that, it turns out, those other forms of capital you mention tend to not have that much value, so they get optimized away, especially under strong competitive pressure.