“Disruptive technologies” was always just code for “paying people less for the same work” or some variation thereof.

Every single one of the major Silicon Valley beasts has had this same issue. It all came about because of Venture Capital. Now that VC money is indeed drying up, but that’s because it succeeded in what it aimed for: It created a litany of businesses that people now rely exclusively on to the point where it’s difficult to disengage from said business.

The point of the VC money was always to finance a business that had no way of being profitable to compete with businesses that were profitable, but only barely.

Amazon is a great example. They famously made no money for over a decade. During that decade, they become the top ecommerce site in the US and drastically changed US citizens shopping habits. Best Buy went from an electronics retailer powerhouse to being a showing room for people to view the product before they bought it on Amazon.

Now Amazon now has such a large userbase, they’ve started raising prices and making search results worse, with more and more results being advertising. Now they have that userbase effectively captured and there isn’t a great alternative to Amazon. Now they can absolutely fuck over that userbase with basically zero consequences.

Don’t even get me started on Amazon Web Services, because it’s even worse over there. If you ever wanted to boycott Amazon, you’d have to stop viewing half the fucking internet that’s hosted on their servers!

Anyway, the entire point was always to crush competition when you were making zero money, but had enough Venture Capital investment to stay afloat, and then when you’ve captured the market then you absolutely ream that markets assholes right the fuck open.

The game was never going to end any other way, this was always the plan. From Amazon to Google to Netflix to Uber. They all banked on capturing a market and then fucking over that market once the capturing was done (Uber’s plan was literally to shitcan all their human drivers and replace them with driverless vehicles, a plan which failed spectacularly). Amazon and Google are firmly in better market positions than Netflix at this point. I can see Netflix getting bought out and becoming a shell of the pathetic charade it is now.

I mean holy living fuck, Google is using their market position to dictate how the modern Web works. They’re also one of the ones hardest to disconnect from… which is entirely on purpose and basically the point of it all. They want you captured and unable to extricate yourself from their “services.”