Technology

And call it "The Money" or something.

Someone wrote a book about this.

You could make a religion out of this!

I figure it’s like cable companies. They get you hooked with a low price that puts the squeeze on competitors, then slowly jack up the fees on existing customers. It’s a safe bet when peer companies are also raising prices because where can the customers jump ship to that isn’t the exact same enshittified service? Plus, if there’s a series they’ve got you hooked on, are you going to want to leave or just rationalize that nobody else is better?

IMO we’re going to see more “subscribe for [extended time period]” and save $2/mo or maybe even timed contracts with abusive cancellation fees to keep customers on the hook.

The purest Capitalism is Unregulated Capitalism: Regulated Capitalism means that there is some other ideology (in the basic sense of "set of ideas") guiding the decisions about the where and how to regulate said Capitalism and having the power to impose itself on Capitalism (otherwise it wouldn't be "regulating" it, just "advising" it, which would be promptly ignored) hence above it.

The problem is exactly that the dominant political system we've had for the last 4 decades, often known as neoliberalism, is all about removing regulations on Capitalism (hence neoliberalism), so a movement to make Capitalism the one and only political ideology with any real power for every and all political decisions in Society, not merelly the ones related to Trading. This is why it's now common for mainstream politicians to harp all about "doing what's best for businesses", unconditionally and never once using the caveat that Society should only help businesses which are good for Society.

The problem is exactly that we've mostly moved to 100% Capitalism, with no other ideology above it providing oversight and correcting its problems.

Maybe Capitalism does work well as a means to optimize resource allocation and bottom-up economic coordination for optimal results in some markets, but it most certainly doesn't work well at maximizing outcomes for the greatest number, in terms of systemic survival (Capitalism brough up Polution, which it most definitelly wasn't solved by it, and now Global Warming) and doesn't even seem to work well in markets which aren't highly liquid with no negative externalities (i.e. naturally very competitive and non poluting or otherwise damaging).

Also a full capitalist system would not have invented the internet as we know it

We'd have had CompuServe, only bigger. Subscription only, walled garden environments.

Might have got something close to modern ubiquity with cable companies bundling search and forum functions in with the video, but it would still be heavily monetised and tightly controlled.