Amazon is *very* proud of its #flywheel: at first, the company offered subsidies to customers, which lured in sellers. Then, it demanded that those sellers lower their prices, which lured in more customers. With more customers, more sellers piled in. Faster and faster, the flywheel spins, creating the #EverythingStore:
https://fourweekmba.com/amazon-flywheel/
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos
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Cory Doctorow @pluralistic reasons through lock-in in markets, with a eucalyptus tree strategy, resulting in enshittification play.
> Amazon – like other platform businesses – externalizes its costs onto its suppliers, then harvests the majority of the reward. Uber drivers take the risks – car and fuel payments, unpaid time waiting for a ride – and then it creams off most of the money that riders pay to get from A to B .....
> You can think of this as the eucalyptus tree strategy: eucalypts drop oily leaves around their base. The leaves pile up, trapping heat among all that oil until, eventually, they burst into flame, burning down all the vegetation for miles around. The only things that survive the conflagration are the eucalypt seed-pods, which need fire to open and begin germinating. Meanwhile, all the potential competitors for water, sunshine and soil nutrients have been incinerated, forming a rich, ashy mulch for the eucalypts to grow in.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos
With an academic search on #enshittification coined by @pluralistic on Google Scholar, the first link is to @blair_fix , where the tie is made to inflation.
> What’s this enshittification got to do with inflation? Everything! [....]
> It’s inflation through enforced scarcity.
> The ‘enforced’ part is key. Yes, we live in a world in which resources are finite, and hence ‘scarce’. But regardless of a resources’ innate abundance, maintaining high prices requires restriction.
https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/764/3/20230126_fix_the_cause_of_stagflation.html
@daviding @pluralistic
Awesome!