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 t
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 t
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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@pluralistic@mamot.fr Being one of Chamberlain's many enshittification victims, I bought a "ratgdo" (Rage Against The Garage Door Opener), a small $30 circuit that hooks to a Chamberlain-brand garage door opener and lets me control it locally with #HomeAssistant. I then disconnected my opener from the official MyQ site and deleted their app.
It's a small victory, but I savored it.
@pluralistic@mamot.fr great piece. That quote about the French railway got me thinking. Our entire society has become enshittified.
That homeless person sleeping in a shop doorway that you pass in the morning on the way to work? Society needs that person to act as a deterrent, to keep you turning up every day to a job you hate, because if you don't, if you stop complying and paying your rent, that will be YOU
@pluralistic@mamot.fr bring on the #enshittocore aesthetic
@pluralistic@mamot.fr will there be a snap back against this?
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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@pluralistic@mamot.fr Great riff on the principles of the word of the year. I think there is one more important countervailing force to add to the four you describe: customers leaving, not just to the competition but just saying "No". While we may be stuck for the essentials of life, large swathes of these markets nobody really needs in the first place, much of it just entertainment in some form or other. I think we the consumers can send the message clearly in the more optional markets and it will reverberate out from there. It does take collective action, but in many cases single digit percentages may be plenty to move the needle loud and clear. All we need to do is stop holding our noses and sticking with them.