This is precisely what happened, it happened long ago though and has been the driver behind actual physical war more-so than any other factor that I can tell.
I'm admittedly kind of annoying with the frequency for which I post it but I wrote a short paper that attempts to demonstrate how we got to that position over the last 12,000 years. This is the most relevant portion here from the Third Proposition:
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"“Creating Markets/Value” (Inducing novel scarcity fears via public storytelling) becomes an optimized resource acquisition strategy, as monopolization of production is most efficient when the market “Creator” controls access to the new market from the outset, minimizing appropriation costs. “Investment capital” (Hoarded value) is used to generate these new markets at a sufficient scale, while the relative abundance of capital for the “house” (Investors) will allow the creators to impede competitors from the start, thus ensuring a maximum return on investment. Power law guarantees that existing resource hoards will forever seek returns and accumulate more into increasingly fallow pools of capital. Unrestrained “Free” competition, a reinterpretation of “might makes right,” then must represent the dogma behind forever growth." [1]
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In a nutshell, people with a hoard of money will fund the creation of "New" markets. Think Meta with the "Metaverse", Apple with the "App store" etc... with the intention of being the monopolist of that market by virtue of creating it. They then propagandize extensively (marketing) to convince people that this new market has value that hasn't been extracted yet and IF YOU JOIN RIGHT NOW you can get a piece of that growing value as a new gold rush. People even use the same language here.
The problem is, only a handful of people can fund large scale new markets and they DEMAND monopolist exploitation capabilities within that new market. Like with Amazon and Reddit, part of the strategy is to delay exploitation significantly so as to bolster the monopolistic market position by pushing platform growth over all other metrics. That way when you flip the cash flow exploitation switch, nobody has anywhere to go and everyone just rolls over cause there isn't enough collective will to change behavior that was reinforced over a decade or more.
I'm admittedly kind of annoying with the frequency for which I post it but I wrote a short paper that attempts to demonstrate how we got to that position over the last 12,000 years. This is the most relevant portion here from the Third Proposition:
----
"“Creating Markets/Value” (Inducing novel scarcity fears via public storytelling) becomes an optimized resource acquisition strategy, as monopolization of production is most efficient when the market “Creator” controls access to the new market from the outset, minimizing appropriation costs. “Investment capital” (Hoarded value) is used to generate these new markets at a sufficient scale, while the relative abundance of capital for the “house” (Investors) will allow the creators to impede competitors from the start, thus ensuring a maximum return on investment. Power law guarantees that existing resource hoards will forever seek returns and accumulate more into increasingly fallow pools of capital. Unrestrained “Free” competition, a reinterpretation of “might makes right,” then must represent the dogma behind forever growth." [1]
----
In a nutshell, people with a hoard of money will fund the creation of "New" markets. Think Meta with the "Metaverse", Apple with the "App store" etc... with the intention of being the monopolist of that market by virtue of creating it. They then propagandize extensively (marketing) to convince people that this new market has value that hasn't been extracted yet and IF YOU JOIN RIGHT NOW you can get a piece of that growing value as a new gold rush. People even use the same language here.
The problem is, only a handful of people can fund large scale new markets and they DEMAND monopolist exploitation capabilities within that new market. Like with Amazon and Reddit, part of the strategy is to delay exploitation significantly so as to bolster the monopolistic market position by pushing platform growth over all other metrics. That way when you flip the cash flow exploitation switch, nobody has anywhere to go and everyone just rolls over cause there isn't enough collective will to change behavior that was reinforced over a decade or more.
[1]https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf