This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
where did it all go wrong?
Capitalism is where.
It’ll always fight to go there, because least offered most gained is the name of the business.
Sure you can split them up and regulate them, that’ll last for a few years or decades but money is power and they will wield that power to undo it all again, time after time to seek profit.
The only solution is a system that doesn’t value capital.
Continued vigilance is the price of lasting deenshittification
"Vigilance Mr. Worf. That is the price we have to continually pay."
- Captain Picard explaining to Lt. Worf how to prevent things from getting shitty.
Continued vigilance is the price of lasting...
Sounds a lot like democracy.
Or just not operating under a capitalist model.
Which has many other benefits as well. Who wants perpetual class war.
No human-led system can fully protect against complacency.
Deenshittification: a term used by Fate fans to describe any adaptation before Zero
This is where unions can help. Increased labor compensation trims the share of profits available for regulatory capture, lobbying and so on.
It can do more than that. Unions aren't solely about pay increases, they can enact all kinds of change in the unionized company. If the members of the union don't like that Google is now shifting gears to making killbot drones (this is not something I just made up), a union could demand they stop doing that, and if the demand is loud enough, the company has to listen or go out of business.
Agreed. I was merely going for the most basic, least ambitious impact.
We need to get rid of the notion that corporations first have a responsibility to the shareholders. The shareholders should be last, after the employees, the customers, and the safety of the general public.
But that's not how capitalism works. The employees, customers and general public don't invest any money in companies. Without money, no business.
The employees invest their time and time is money. The customers invest their money and their trust. The general public invests their tax dollars to create the infrastructure needed for the company to even exist in the first place.
And don’t tell me the employees get compensated for their time, because they create more value than they receive, hence, profits.
The shareholders, literally only invest money. They give the least and get the most.
Wait are you talking about caring about the workers? Hm... Idk... Sounds like communism to me 😠
Communism is not "caring about workers". If you read what Lenin thought of NEP, he agreed that it was in fact better for workers, but ideological impurity of that system was more important, and the reason it was kept for a while was that without some economy there'd simply be no new state after the civil war. While for Trotsky even that wasn't a good reason.
I was making a joke about right-wingers calling every slightly social, pro-labor, feminist, or anti-racist policy (basically anything that isn't taxes for the rich) "communist".
That is indeed was how capitalism worked before Jack Welch changed business culture to be all about shareholder value. Before him companies focused on employees. They bragged about how many employees they had. They bragged about not laying off any employees in the Great Depression.
And the biggest economic problem we have is too much investment. Companies are now competing to get investment dollars instead of competing to make good products to make revenue. Too many resources are devoted to marketing and hoarding data because being a data-driven company will attract more investment from billionaires that are hoarding wealth. Productivity numbers have been rising as it always has since the industrial revolution. But productivity is being devoted towards activities which only serve to attract investment but doesn't provide any real world value. Because of this, quality life has been decreasing even while productivity is increasing.
The rich have too much money and it's hurting capitalism.
Without customers, also no business.
Without employees, also no business.
You can technically have a business without the safety of the general public, but which society wants that?
So why do the shareholders get extra privilege?
That's cool and all, and maybe it will eliminate some of the worst bullshit, but it's not going to stop enshitification. Certainly not with big tech because it's driven by the profit motive in satisfying initial investors, going public, and then engaging in the quest to make the line always go up forever.
The only thing that's going to stop enshitification is to stop depending on that model for the platforms we want.
I think there ARE other ways to combat this, and the main one is ending activist investors that empower the Jack Welch pump and dump doctrine.
If someone wants to invest in something because they like it, they should be able to do that. What they should NOT be able to do is overwhelm a company they may or may not even like with dollars and then tell the company how to run its own business. If you don't like what a company is doing, you SELL YOUR STOCK.
It's this incessant worshiping of the shareholder that is step # 1 of enshittifcation.
I'm surprised that there hasn't been more of a push for B Corp style corporate governance in tech considering how many tech leaders claim to be working for the greater good. There are plenty of options for doing well and doing good at the same time.
The only thing that’s going to stop enshitification is to stop depending on that model for the platforms we want.
Did I misunderstand your comment because "stop depending on that model for the platforms we want" reads like exactly what Mr Doctorow is proposing?
Somewhat, my comment got truncated by real life interruption, sorry. But I think we need things that are more community driven than they are profit driven. Things like the Fediverse where the goal isn't doing all these things to make bank but doing all these things because it's something people want and how people want to engage with each other.
Doctorow wants regulations to help stave off "loss leading" style behavior and then hopes unions will also somehow help. I'm thinking ultimately that any platform run as a capitalist enterprise is eventually going to enshitify.
I know this is naive, but sometimes I wish we'd be bolder in brainstorming alternative ways the economy could work.
Imagine, for example, the IRS would send a yearly, mandatory "happiness questionnaire" to all employees of a company (compare the "world happiness report"). This questionnaire then would have a major influence on how much taxes the company has to pay, so much that it's cheaper to make employees happy and content than to squeeze them for every ounce of labor they can give.
Or an official switch to 6 hour days, except to get those 2 hours less, you have to use them for growing your own food. Shorter workdays, more time with family, more self-reliance. And a strong motivation for cities to provide more green spaces and community gardens.
Very naive ideas with lots of problems, yes, but I wish we wouldn't have the concept of revenue generation so thoroughly encrusted in our heads as the guiding principle of all we do and dream of.
Economics is called the dismal science for a reason. Most policies don't that the effects you think it would have.
With the happiness questionnaire, how is the overall happiness of the employees of the companies calculated, just a straight up average? So if the company made sure the really shitty stuff was compartmentalized to a very small portion of the employees, then they would be rewarded? If it's determined by the least happy employees, a company could fire the least happy employees and be rewarded.
Growing your own food only really works for people that aren't living in high density housing. So that policy would encourage people to move to low density housing which would have a negative environmental impact.
A lot of times these kinds of far out economic ideas simply won't have the intended impact (dismal science, sorry!) and really only distract from needed economic policies that are known to work but aren't being implemented. Universal Basic Income is often promoted, but would actually mean companies like Walmart don't have to pay their employees more. This distracts from a push to increase minimum wage which companies like Walmart do not want. And of course a lot of problems would be solved by simply raising taxes on the wealthy.
Should we really be exploring experimental economic policies when we can't even implement the economic policies that have been proven to work?
How about we focus on tax the rich, raise minimum wage. Once those are implemented then we can brainstorm other ideas.
Agreed, companies will try to game any such regulations (just like tax laws, labor laws and such, those just had a lot of time to mature). The "free-time-for-gardening" program, too, would make city dwellers without access to community gardens balk and maybe fake gardens with rubber plants would become a thing to claim that gardening time without gardening :)
Regarding UBI, the counter argument is that if companies like Walmart paid scraps for hard work, it would allow people to simply leave. Same for cleaning sewers or emptying trash bins. It could be an instrument that adjusts economic rewards away from "how much revenue does the worker generate" towards "how bearable is the work."
Should we really be exploring experimental economic policies when we can’t even implement the economic policies that have been proven to work?
How about we focus on tax the rich, raise minimum wage. Once those are implemented then we can brainstorm other ideas.
I believe we should do both. This "waiting for the right moment" or "focus on one thing only" can be a fallacy, imho, that leads to well polished counters from reactionaries and less motivation in supporters.
With the happiness questionnaire, how is the overall happiness of the employees of the companies calculated, just a straight up average? So if the company made sure the really shitty stuff was compartmentalized to a very small portion of the employees, then they would be rewarded? If it's determined by the least happy employees, a company could fire the least happy employees and be rewarded.
Send the questionaire to anyone who gets a w2 from that company. Set multiple factors to determine over all taxes paid. A good average could reduce your taxes by x%, but too many very unhappy outliers could raise it back up by even more.
Edit: over all though, your comment is spot on
This buzzword has been beyond enshittified already
Doctorow is the one who coined the term, I think he's allowed using it.
It's an antibuzzword. It's describing the culmination of all the buzzwords that get corrupted by marketing people and destroyed by bean counters. In order to destroy something you must be able to name it. He has revealed the name, now we can take action.
I love that thumbnail. Man in suit high up in the air yells into megaphone.
What's he saying? And it's not like he can see what his words are doing down below.
Maybe he is yelling "SHUT DOWN THIS TECH BEHEMOTH! YOUR ENSHITTIFICATION IS STARTING TO GET OUT OF HAND!"
Meanwhile streaming services are jacking up their prices, having locked in their viewers.
That's the one thing I don't agree with. No one is locked into streaming services. Charging the prices people are willing to pay is not enshittification. Encshittfication will be when they buy all the cable TV, shut it down, start producing only reality shows and show ads every 5 minutes. So far they charge more but Netflix is still making Oscar winning movies.
Eh, people have their own tastes in TV. Streaming companies buy exclusive rights to certain content and if that's where your tastes lie, you're pretty SOL. It's about as close to "lock-in" as you can get.
Your definition of enshittificantion is also far too strict. It's just the shift that companies inevitably make from trying to attract new users quickly by providing a great service, to trying to extract maximum profit by degrading the service quality and cramming in as much revenue generation as they can.
You are arguing about definition of enshittidication from guy who defined enshittification...
No one is locked into streaming services.
Well, ok, there is alternative.
How about making bootstrapping businesses easier and providing preferable tax strategies floor small businesses? That would show down venture capital backed companies demanding a public offering and short term profit motives over sustainable businesses.
Or opening up platforms to drive increased competition?
Or providing sponsorship for open standards so users get more choice in the market instead of relying on entrenched large companies?
