A Boring Dystopia

Rent seeking is just the latest in a long line of buzz words invented by MBAs

Its definitely a term that's been co-opted by MBAs, but the process of enclosure is centuries old and foundational to the process of capitalist profit-taking.

You seem to not like this.

I'm not a huge fan of negative externalities in business. And profiteering generates enormous externalities.

I would recommend putting down the phone that are using to browse this website, since it exists due to the aforementioned capitalistic system.

Oh no, buddy. I've got some terrible news for you. Cellular mobile telephones are a soviet technology. And the entire backbone of the modern domestic telecommunications service was created with public lands, materials, and labor.

The modern cell carriers are simply gatekeepers, charging exorbitant fees to access public works. When the western states copied the USSR's homework back in the 70s and 80s, no single private business could afford to front the enormous costs associated with the infrastructure. So the Federal Government issued block grants and unleashed (literal) armies of engineers, surveyors, and construction teams to lay the original main arteries. They then tasked a handful of private companies to operate as retail brokers for consumer access and use.

every human on this Earth is already partaking in it to some degree.

The bulk of international digital infrastructure is public works. Always has been. And the cost of accessing these public works varies enormously by state, entirely due to who is tasked with gatekeeping access to the service. US telecomm costs are astronomical, compared to Mexico or Germany or India or South Africa, entirely because the American domestic retailers charge a higher toll.

Incidentally, that's also why we have some of the slowest and least reliable networks in the post-industrial world. Once we gave up investing in public broadband, public wifi, and public satellite services, the gatekeeping private telecom firms failed to maintain pace with peer nations like Japan and Germany and China and India. Now you can buy a cell phone off the street in New Delhi with a plan that charges pennies and get higher speeds and better coverage than anything T-mobile or AT&T can provide stateside for $100/mo.