I think the way that the collapse of capitalism appears most obvious to me is in an experience of encroachment. youtube ads are getting longer, more frequent, and unskippable. links are generated with source identifiers to harvest extra data. modern cars are built to fail after a couple years, and be so expensive to fix that you just buy a new one. you're routinely expected to pay more for less.
capitalism necessitates constant growth, which means you cannot just find a profitable business model and coast on safe returns. you have to expand. sell more, produce cheaper, whatever. you have to keep escalating, gradually taking more and more things away from the people who end up using what they sell. I guess you could call this "enshittification" but I heard Cory Doctorow is cringe now or whatever so I would posit that the process we're seeing here is a more fundamental feature of capitalism.
when talking about big tech specifically a lot of this stuff comes down to the fact that many of these companies are not profitable. twitter, for example, has never been profitable in its entire history. but evidently, profitable companies outside tech engage in this behavior too. the line must go up, it must always go up, but you don't really have any "innovative ideas" and you don't have any more markets to expand to. so you have to start hollowing out your products.
what happens once the bottom of the barrel is scraped dry?
my guess would be that this would mean capitalism collapsing under its own weight.
I don't like the term 'Late-Stage Capitalism' because I mostly see it used as a meaningless buzzword. but, yeah. this might not be the end for capitalism, but we seem to be in the late stage of this capitalism.
