EDITED TO MAKE THE TITLE MORE APPROPRIATE. The previous title of this post was “I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life” which was the slug line as it appeared in my mailing-list-to-RSS reader. Although this is the first paragraph of the linked essay, it does not do a good job of explaining the thrust of the essay, and some people (not you though) seem to be arguing with the title instead of the essay.
(Thanks to [email protected] for the heads up.)
END OF EDITED SECTION
Here’s why you’re getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don’t have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don’t compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they’ve amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about “fighting for the user.” Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.
While this article has some good points, it really is sad, and kind of ironic, that the first paragraph of it is bullshit clickbait that completely undermines the rest of the text.
Yep. The title and the intro are both clickbait designed to drag in people incensed by the suggestion that their positive individual actions won’t have impact - which are absolutely the same people that don’t need to be fucking converted into the belief that regulations and enforcing laws already on the books would be good things.
The people that do need to read the article will read the title and intro paragraph (as is often auto-copied into posts on social media pages) and they’ll chuckle to themselves that they know that already and move on with their day.
Tl;dr. This article annoys the converted, and misses the ideal demographic.