I agree that the fundamental issue may simply be capitalism itself, but I am more prone to blame it on a kind of individualism, both in culture and in the nature of how corporations sell products as individual objects to individual people, and not to any larger social organization. (Except as a placeholder for a group of individuals.)
The difficulty is in imagining some kind of economic structure in which an Apple or Microsoft could make billions from selling products/services that are somehow public goods, or enhancing public spaces. We can conceive of top design minds at Apple spending billions to create a new personal computing device, but the same minds working on a way to improve public spaces – say, by removing graffiti easily, or planting trees easily – just somehow doesn't make sense or fit into the "types of things" they would do.
It may also just be a fundamental structural issue, as I talked about in the latter part of the essay. There are far fewer legal restrictions on individual objects than there are on spaces. I.e., while everyone can use an iPhone everywhere, using a device to remove graffiti would come up against all sorts of property rights laws.
It's quite a difficult topic to wrap one's mind around, at the end of the day. But yeah in general I agree that it's not necessarily individual bad actors, and incentives are a huge part of it.
The difficulty is in imagining some kind of economic structure in which an Apple or Microsoft could make billions from selling products/services that are somehow public goods, or enhancing public spaces. We can conceive of top design minds at Apple spending billions to create a new personal computing device, but the same minds working on a way to improve public spaces – say, by removing graffiti easily, or planting trees easily – just somehow doesn't make sense or fit into the "types of things" they would do.
It may also just be a fundamental structural issue, as I talked about in the latter part of the essay. There are far fewer legal restrictions on individual objects than there are on spaces. I.e., while everyone can use an iPhone everywhere, using a device to remove graffiti would come up against all sorts of property rights laws.
It's quite a difficult topic to wrap one's mind around, at the end of the day. But yeah in general I agree that it's not necessarily individual bad actors, and incentives are a huge part of it.