Economic termites

Parasitic activity   monopoly rent extraction from miscellaneous gatekeepers 

‘something is very wrong with our society’ is everywhere now. Corporate procurement officers just assume costs are going up, it’s in budget projections for the Defense Department, and we expect cost overruns on everything. ‘Inflation’ is now a catch-all for a basic view that stuff is just going to suck more and more. 

So what’s going on? Today’s piece is about a concept I am going to call ‘economic termites,’ which are instances of monopolization big enough to make investors a huge amount of money, but not noticeable enough for most of us. An individual termite isn’t big enough to matter, but the existence of a termite is extremely bad news, because it means there are others. Add enough of them up, and you get our modern economic experience.

The concept of an economic termite is the cousin to Cory Doctorow’s ‘enshittification’ or Yves Smith’s ‘crapification,’ terms that describe how a platform gradually degrades the quality of its service as it gains market power and gets pushed to extract cash by financiers. Economic termites describes where these same forces get into the mostly unseen business foundations of our society and profiteer.