And if we want to go beyond that, we really just have to blame capitalism. What happens when you build a society around the adversarial collection of money? You get a society that by and large prioritizes making money above all else including ethics and morals.

That and the fact that money and media presence is essentially what wins elections. The only way we can really have democracy is with a truly informed populace and the only way people can make a truly informed vote without all the noise is to have anonymous voting. By which I mean you do not know which politician/party you are voting for, you just know the policies they have promised to enforce.

Further to that, there needs to be accountability. Right now, in the UK at least, governments are not held to account, at all. They get into office with grand promises of flying elephants and golden egg laying geese but obviously never follow through with said promises. The populace, ultimately, just shrugs it off with ‘politicians lie’ and continue complaining about it within their social circles.

Our political systems are fundamentally broken. We shouldn’t care if policies are from party A or party B. All that should matter is the content of the policy and whether it is ever actually materialised.

Right now we have a situation where people are manipulated left, right and centre into believing a given party’s absolute BS manifesto which they write under the full knowledge that not delivering will have very little impact on them as they’ve just had a substantial amount of time getting paid lucrative salaries to essentially argue with a bunch of other liars in a shouting match on tele.

Remove the football-esque fandom which applies to political parties by removing any ability to publicly affiliate any given person with said party and I’d bet we see different results across the bar. Remove all this absolute nonsense of politicians promoting their ideologies on TV/Twotter etc and you will remove a lot of the brainwashing which happens. Remove the most corrupt situation of all: private firms and individuals being able to fund political parties and you level the playing field.

Obviously this is a hard pill for many to swallow as no one likes to be told they’ve essentially been brainwashed into their thoughts and ego is everything in modern society.

It's the combination of software that is infinitely malleable, and capitalism. Successful entrepreneurs in software want liquidity. So no matter how benevolent they start out being, they eventually lose control and the software gets turned into an exploitative adversary to satisfy investor owners.

This is fine if you can refuse the deal. Lots of software and the companies selling it have died that way. But if you've made a product addictive or necessary for everyday survival, you have the customer by the short hairs.

The technology underlying Bluesky is deliberately designed so that it's hard to keep a customer captive. It will be interesting to see if that helps.

yes but it's more complicated

like if you look at original reasoning why capitalism is a good match for democracy you find arguments like voting with money etc. _alongside with what things must not be tolerated in capitalism_ or it will break. And that includes stuff like:

- monopolies, (or more generic anything having too much market power and abusing it, doesn't need to be an actual monopoly)

- unfair market practices which break fair competition

- situations which prevent actual user choice

- to much separation of the wealth of the poorest and richest in a country

- giving to much ways for money to influence politics

- using money to bare people from a fair trail/from enforcing their rights

- also I personally would add in-transparency, but I think that only really started to become a systemic issue with globalization and the digital age.

This also implies that for market wich have natural monopolies strict regulation and consumer protection is essential.

Now the points above are to some degree a check list of what has defined US economics, especially in the post-Amazone age (I say post Amazone age as the founding story of Amazone was a mile stone and is basically the idea of "let's systematically destroy any fair competition and used externally sourced money (i.e. subsidization) to forcefully create a quasi monopoly", and after that succeeded it became somewhat of the go-to approach for a lot of "speculative investment" founding).

Anyway to come back to the original point.

What we have in the US has little to do with the idea of capitalism which lead to the adoption of it in the West.

It's more like someone took it is twisting it into the most disturbing dystopian form possible, they just aren't fully done yet.