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The fact that half of eligble voters in the US willingly voted for the ultimate enshittifier not once, but twice, is a testament to this.

I've also started buying natural fibers only. Noticable improvements in quality of life

Absolutely - enshittification isn't just an internet phenomenon, but literally everything has been getting worse because oligarchs are squeezing more money out of us.

I agree with everything you said, but why you gotta do power windows dirty like that 😭

or "what happens if the email alias service goes down and I can't get any emails I was expecting?”

mail servers are generally supposed to try for a few days when delivery fails

Exactly why I only use email aliases for newsletters and stuff

You can use a custom domain in many cases, which you control (not sure about addy.io though). Still has the dependency on the service, but you can at least quickly transfer if it goes to shit.

For me important stuff gets the real email address and the secondary/beyond gets the aliases

In his Enshittification book, Cory referred to this as "technofeudalism" —essentially the return to the feudal society where there are owner elites and peasant subjects. The owners control everything, and the peasant have to rent access under the terms and conditions set by the owners. In the technofeudalism model, everybody (the peasants) have to subscribe to access anything from the corporations (the owner elites), with the corporations retaining all the power.

If you want a specific variety of a plant that's patented by, say, Monsanto, you don't own the seeds you get but rather their permission to plant them.

If you re-plant seeds in your own field produced by the crops of the previous year on that same field they can sue you and they will win (see Bowman v. Monsanto Co.)

You can have digital no problem. I have 25 year old mp3s. It just needs to be physically on your drives. You can pirate or purchase music today without issues. Spotify just scratched that laziness itch at one point in time and now you are locked in.

Genius

As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue.

I'd say its one step worse than that. If you just wanted to return value to shareholders, the 2010s Facebook model of selling a few ads in between pictures of people's pets and graduation photos would work just fine. They could have churned this for decades unimpeded. And the less they fucked with the model, the more money they'd have made long term.

It isn't merely shareholder value that these companies crave, but perpetual double-digit growth in valuation. And, to that end, they're gutting the golden goose for a sudden spike in quarterly profits.

It isn't enough for Zuckerberg's company be valued at $100B. They needed to go for that fourth comma. So they started coming up with crazy - apparently impossible - ideas to reinvent themselves into... the Metaverse, where your whole OS is in VR! Diem (formerly Libra), the Killer Stablecoin! Whateverthefuck AI thing they're doing, to make human labor irrelevant!

Because they've bought into a notion of perpetual high speed growth through financialization. They cannot conceive of any kind of economic boundary or closed system. Like a deadly virus that spreads too quickly, they cannot see the edges of their population space or curb their basic impulse to consume.

There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose.

So much of the drive towards AI is an insane quest to create a financial market without human customers. Just a big machine that sucks in investment capital and reports back a higher earnings figure.

It's increasingly divorced from any kind of material condition. And increasingly predicated on unfettered access to an unlimited pool of natural resources backed by an unchallenged Petrodollar.

Government should be the balancing act in response to this. Regulations enforced by Governments.

It won't stop until stocks are no longer a thing.

Honestly it seems like a bad idea to have stocks in the first place

Like a loan shark you can never get rid of.

Why does this even exist ?

I remember learning about the stock market in grade school and I thought it was stupid then and I think it's stupid now.

It's harmful in pretty much every way.

Cory Doctorow describes the stages of enshittification as follows:

It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

And for good measure he reminds us of the why and how things used to be better:

The pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership. The executives weren’t better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.

https://doctorow.medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittification-ea343342b9bc

Feels very fitting for The Guardian to downplay how the profit motive inherent in capitalism contributes to enshittification, even when Doctorow's original definition clearly includes it.

Actually, I think that's the main process of enshittification, but I don't think enshittification is always deliberate.

Very often software products are tweaked, changed, or even degraded in an attempt to "simplify" or "improve" a particular user experience at the expense of another UX.

And to make matters worse, some companies end up with a Frankenstein product of confusing functions because they are trying to cater to two entirely different user bases within the same product.

E.g. Microsoft may genuinely have believed that changing their system settings UI in Windows 11 to "consolidate and reduce drift" of system configurations would improve the everyday user experience, but they failed to account for the decades of inertia they'd built up from their prior OS user base and how that would piss off a not-insignificant number of other users who had grown accustomed to the way the product had previously worked.