Comradeship // Freechat

A lot of agricultural products have been designed for being useful for a wide range of processed foods rather than for direct consumption by the public. Or they have been designed for shelf life and appearance rather than taste or nutrition. Examples:

• Jalapenos that aren't spicy.

• Watery tomatoes.

• Orange juice concentrate.

• Corn for corn syrup.

• Old garlic / topped garlic.

• A near complete absence of fresh herbs but a huge amount of dried.

• Worse limes (key limes are way better but the ones crossed with lemons are ubiquitous because they have better shelf life).

• An absence of seasonal produce in general, replaced by year-round bland stuff.

Search engines prioritize advertising over usefulness, so now researching anything has become so much more tedious. We'll be forced to go back to libraries at this rate 😔

Food, clothing, transport, housing, healthcare, education, technology, entertainment, arts, science, literature, informatics, communication, agriculture and military stuff too

All of them? Capitalism ruins everything it touches. The endless push to increases profits ruins any product eventually. Take for instance the Instant Pot. The company that made the original.... Went bankrupt because they made them too well. They never broke. Never need maintenance. They just worked. Capitalism HAS to make product that get worse over time. That break and fall apart and have to be replaced.

That's not even getting I to stuff like games and media. I see other people already going there, so I will just stop here. lol

I want to say cars but they have also gotten safer, so not really sure.

My first car was a 1990 Suzuki Swift. It was older than me but it just kept going. Took it to the annual inspection only to be outside in five minutes again because there was just nothing wrong with it. It had like close to 350k km mileage on it. Meanwhile my current, newer car has something breaking every year.

poor gaming never got a chance to exist outside of capitalism, and i've always been sure that gamings shaky relationship with artistic merit is because of that. it only took like 50 years from games to turn from interactive media adjacent to toys, into nightmare gambling simulators overly tuned to take your money, with optional gameplay portion available.

Fucking. Everything.

Gaming is a weird one because AAA development is an unsustainable shitshow with goals that can only be achieved with some of the worst exploitation that exists in any industry anywhere, but at the same time it has become easier than ever for a small indy developer/team to make and publish their own stuff and not have to deal with any of the big companies at all. Not that indy development doesn't have its own host of problems, but for different reasons.

The light bulb planned obsolescence scam is probably the longest running and most famous one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

Although in any sane system these things would be seen as universal rights, under capitalism it's easily healthcare and housing that have been ruined through commodification. I can't think of anything that's crippled the most vulnerable people in capitalist society than the denial of these things as a human right.

The absolute worst example is gaming. Went from a promising form of media to what is basically a glorified virtual casino hub. So many franchises went to shit (even CoD), games like Forspoken has some of the worst writing, visuals, and plots known to man. This shit is one of the key reasons I still study historical materialism because I am still exploring how crapitalism ruined gaming.