The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left.
The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.
Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.
There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
If she's able to do this without risk of being fired, she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism. The worker / employer dynamic under capitalism is: employers try to extract the most labor value for the least cost (maximizing profit margin) while the worker tries to retain the highest labor profit margin possible for the least labor cost (wear and tear on mind and body, time, etc). Since it's not possible to retain / change total capture of labor profit margin on the employee side, since compensation for labor isn't attached to value but rather to "market conditions" (geography, whether or not another employer in the industry recently laid people off, the phase of the moon), the employee's only option is to reduce personal labor cost: work as little as possible, as lazily as possible.
One of the genius strokes of this arrangement is that humans aren't purely economic rational actors: we generally take pride in our work, and also want to be a part of something greater, and even if we don't have either of those things, we suffer social pressure to do good at our jobs or not leave our teammates hanging. So, in reality, the employer has an advantage, because it's basically immune to these human traits. Therefore the corporation can extract even more value for less cost (people will work harder than necessary per their compensation because e.g. they take pride in their work).
As the overall system destabilizes further and normalization deepens and people feel the inherent contradictions more strongly, I believe cynicism will increase and these human traits will hold less influence over the employer / worker dynamic, and people will operate more like rational capitalist actors.
Annoyingly this will probably lead to more articles about how "people just don't want to work anymore."
It is not entirely clear why you call these the values of capitalism. These are universal human values that do not depend on the economic formation.
If anything, capitalism makes people less cynical, simply because it is designed to function independently of such qualities in people. While in many other systems, cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness and deceitfulness of people are simply ignored, giving people with such qualities huge advantages within the system and ruining the lives of everyone else.
If I were to guess at what true universal human values were, I'd take a look at history, anthropology, theology, and philosophy. The trend seems to be that humans universally value selflessness, sharing, doing good to one another, long term thinking, justice, and fairness. Humans seem to universally deride greed, selfishness, cowardice, causing harm to other humans, injustice, unfairness, and boastfulness.
I argue that the derided values are those that are rewarded the most under capitalism, and capitalism at its worst punishes those that live the desired values.
It sounds like you disagree, so, some examples:
In my characterization of the worker / employer relationship, the employer that best is able to exploit their workers (without going so far as to have measurably negative consequences on output or turnover), will have the highest profit margins compared to their competitors, all other things being equal. When they've all found all the other inefficiencies in the market, the last that remains is how terribly they can treat the workforce and still turn a profit. The investment market will see this organization having the highest margins and reward it with the largest stock price. The people who made the decisions to treat the workers poorly will be compensated well for it, being executives and having equity. They might even build career reputations on being able to come into a company and find the maximum possible level of exploitation (it won't be called that, it's called cost cutting or similar).
Thus capitalism rewarded treating humans poorly and short term thinking. Conversely the employer that treats its workers well won't have as high profit margins or growth, money to spend on stock buybacks etc, and so will have a lower stock price, lower valuations, etc, and will be punished according to the KPIs of capitalism. "How happy are your workers" isn't a KPI of capitalism.
Next, the cigarette industry. People like smoking tobacco. People would have bought paper tubes with tobacco in it. But they wouldn't smoke it as much as paper tubes with tobacco and a shitload of known-toxic additives. So, the companies that added a bunch of toxic additives (that increase addictiveness, etc), were rewarded immensely under capitalism. When non capitalist mechanisms kicked in to limit their profits, the companies leveraged their capitalistic power to maintain margins, through lobbying. Thus greed and harming humans was rewarded under capitalism. Marlboro is worth far more than your given indie tobacco purveyor that doesn't add additives.
Just look at the overall state of our society and the fact that capitalism rewards our most derided values and often punishes our most treasured values is fairly obvious: teachers make less than investment bankers. Landlord success is correlated with tenant misery. Public transit in the USA died to feed the automative industry. I mean, America turned its healthcare into a for-profit industry, and just look at the results. But, the health insurance industry is worth 1.59 trillion, so, by capitalism's values, it's awesome!
Yeas, that is exactly what I am saying. People with these qualities still receive certain advantages, but selection selection by these qualities does not happening as in other social systems.
>The trend seems to be that humans universally value selflessness, sharing, doing good to one another, long term thinking, justice, and fairness.
Not universlly, and that's the problem. And you can ignore this fact and fall into slavery to the most cruel, deceitful and selfish people, or you can effectively protect yourself from such people with the help of capitalism.
>I argue that the derided values are those that are rewarded the most under capitalism
For the purposes of the discussion, I am even ready to agree with this to a certain extent. It's just that without capitalism, people with such qualities get everything, including other people as slaves.
>The people who made the decisions to treat the workers poorly will be compensated well for it
The people who made the decisions to treat the workers poorly will not receive a single worker. Because there is competition for labor and because the worker has the freedom to decide where and how to work. This is why workers under capitalism get the best conditions among all social systems.
>the companies leveraged their capitalistic power to maintain margins, through lobbying.
That is, through other non-capitalist mechanisms. The obvious problem of the lack of capitalism