We’re living in the #enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions
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How did we arrive at this juncture? Is it the end of the #ZeroRateInterestPolicy? Was it that the companies that formerly made useful things that we valued underwent a change in leadership that drove them to make things worse? Is Mercury in retrograde?
None of the above. There have been many junctures in which investors demanded higher returns from firms but were not able to force them to dramatically worsen their products.
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Moreover, the leaders now presiding over the rapid unscheduled disassembly of once-useful products are the same people who oversaw their golden age. As to Mercury? Well, I’m a Cancer, and as everyone knows, Cancers don’t believe in astrology.
The Great Enshittening isn’t precipitated by a change in how greedy and callous corporate leaders are. Rather, the change is in what those greedy, callous corporate leaders can get away with.
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Capitalists hate capitalism. For a corporate executive, the fact that you have to make good things, please your customers, pay your workers, and beat the competition are all bugs, not features. The best business is one in which people simply pay you money without your having to do anything or worry that someday they’ll stop. #UBI for the investor class, in other words.
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Douglas @Rushkoff@social.coop calls this “going meta.” Don’t sell things, provide a platform where people sell things. Don’t provide a platform, invest in the platform. Don’t invest in the platform, buy options on the platform. Don’t buy options, buy derivatives of options.
A more precise analysis comes from economist #YanisVaroufakis, who calls this #technofeudalism. Varoufakis draws our attention to the distinction between #profits and #rents.
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Profit is income a capitalist receives from mobilizing workers to do productive things, then skimming off the surplus created by their labor.
By contrast, rent is income a feudalist derives from owning something that a capitalist or a worker needs to be productive. The entrepreneur who opens a coffee shop earns profits by creaming off the surplus value created by the baristas. The rentier who owns the building the coffee shop rents gets money simply for owning the building.
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The coffee shop owner can never rest. At any moment, another coffee shop can open down the street and lure away their customers and their baristas. When that happens, the coffee shop goes bust and the owner is ruined. But not the landlord! After the coffee shop goes bust, the landlord’s asset is more valuable - an empty storefront just down the street from the hottest coffee shop in town.
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Capitalists hate capitalism. Faced with a choice of retaining their workers by paying them a fair wage and treating them well, or by saddling them with noncompetes that make it impossible to work for anyone else in the same field, and obligations to repay tens of thousands of dollars for “training” if they quit, bosses will take the latter every time. Go meta, baby.
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Some for competition. Faced with the choice of competing to win the most customers with the best products, or merging so that customers have nowhere else to go, even the bitterest of rivals find it remarkably easy to intermarry until our corporations landscape is so interbred the dominant firms all have Habsburg jaws. Think: Facebook-Instagram. Disney-Fox. Microsoft-Activision:
https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interoperability/
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Enshittification has complex underlying dynamics and a reliable procession of stages, but the effect is quite straightforward: things are enshittified when they become worse for the people who use them and the suppliers who makes them, but nevertheless, the users keep using and the suppliers keep supplying.
There are four forces that stand in the way of enshittification, and as each of these forces grows weaker, enshittification proliferates.
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