I agree that the kinds of pathological feedback loops you describe exist, are bad, and are important. I don’t think the emphasis on financial returns is helpful, though; one of your main examples is nonfinancial and hard to quantify, and the thing that makes these processes bad is what’s going on outside the financial substrate: recruiting people into complicity.
You seem to be treating the question of whether the money is being “burned” to raise more money, or made productive use of (thus justifying further investment) as the easy part, but that’s the whole problem! Without an understanding of how the conversion process works, we don’t understand anything about this, we just have a black box causing nominal ROI >1, which could be either very good or very bad.
I agree that the kinds of pathological feedback loops you describe exist, are bad, and are important. I don’t think the emphasis on financial returns is helpful, though; one of your main examples is nonfinancial and hard to quantify, and the thing that makes these processes bad is what’s going on outside the financial substrate: recruiting people into complicity.
You seem to be treating the question of whether the money is being “burned” to raise more money, or made productive use of (thus justifying further investment) as the easy part, but that’s the whole problem! Without an understanding of how the conversion process works, we don’t understand anything about this, we just have a black box causing nominal ROI >1, which could be either very good or very bad.