emergence of top down constraints and incentives on large platforms

#society #thought
capitalism is a local rule system: people/companies make decisions to optimize for profit; this is sufficient when the company is small enough that society can be extracted away as a thermal bath.

However, we've reached a point where companies are large enough parts of society, that the decisions made by a company (especially a platform) can drastically impact the stability of society. At this point, the company needs to take into account global effects as well. Actually, there's effectively now a global constraint laced on the company: e.g. sure Youtube could start pushing more and more conspiracy theory content, or Facebook more groups for storming the capital; but then Youtube or Facebook probably wouldn't exist in a year.