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I've ranted about this for years. I've had a bad streak of luck the past 8 years, and everything I've tried to do to improve my situation has just become an increasingly horrible cesspool of predatory horseshit. Every computer application, service, university, and social program is so much worse than they were 10-15 years ago, and I hate it.
And now we have ten years of fucked up young adults who think this is how it’s always been.
"Enshittification" better be the word of the year.
Equally fitting if the word of the year is "Clauding(tm): to leverage Anthropic(tm) intelligence tooling to simplify your life and maximize you potential. Brought to you by Anthropic(tm)! Get your free trial today!"
Innovation these days is just "what if I was able to somehow insert myself into this already functioning service and skim some money off it".
And now AI is inserting itself in the insertion!
Just ask AI to make your Door Dash order for your Pizza delivery driver.
Using your Account® Account™ (one Account™ for all your accounts) in the App® App™ (one App™ for all your apps)!
Can you imagine if there was somebody out there so monumentally stupid that they thought that an app, let's call it "X" hypothetically, that did everything was a good idea?
He got the idea from the Chinese. All you need is complete control by the government to force it upon everybody. So fascism, which is exactly what they are working towards.
Corporations don’t invent new products or improve existing ones anymore. The R&D needed costs too much along with creating the tooling to manufacture and distribute products. Usually quite the opposite, they look how to cheapen products’ construction and durability while charging more to increase the profit margin.
It’s far easier to make a product a subscription, or desirable features a subscription, sell commonly needed add-ons separately at ridiculously inflated costs (like printer ink or power tool batteries) or as you said, insert middle-men to extract fees for the convenience of their existing between the customer and the desired product.
It's literally the bad future from BttF2
Complete with Trump-as-Biff-as-Trump.
Biff wasn't a pedophile who murdered kids though.
We let the MBAs take over. Our culture has been consumed by the idea that it's ok to say and do absolutely anything in the pursuit of a dollar
Thank Reagan.
When he deregulated the banks he gave a blank check to a bunch of third raters who'd gone to small time banks because they knew they couldn't cut it anywhere else.
Thank the people who vote for a piece of shit multiple times just to ‘own the libs’
I mean obviously, but they only exist because of the absolute machine of propaganda carefully designed to create exactly that deranged mindset. Chicken and egg thing.
Reagan fucked everything up, of course, but we cannot forget about Bill Clinton overseeing the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legislation
If I ever invent a time machine, I'm making a few pit stops on my way back in time to cap Hitler, and Milton Friedman and his friends are on the list. He's the misanthrope who popularized the idea that the only duty of a company's leadership is to deliver profit, and any other pursuit is a disservice to the shareholders. This is known as the Friedman Doctrine.
i think you could make a case for Edward Bernays too
Added to the stops. This is going to be a busy fieldtrip through time.
If any government had any god damn balls, advertising would be heavily regulated and your personal data would be wholly under your control.
...and your personal data would be wholly under your control.
But then, how can the IC spy on you without a warrant.
Amen, brotha! I am so sick of being solicited, constantly.
Everything is a scam, and NOTHING works anymore. Customer Service is often "I'm Lily, your AI customer service chatbot. I'm still learning, so please be patient with me. What can I help you with today?"
Bitch, I got a problem with your product/service, and I need help. I don't want to be your volunteer learning experience, I want you to solve my problem, not teach you how to be human.
Sure wish Americans would do something about this so the rest of the world doesn't have to suffer.
Let's not pretend the rest of the world is so much better. I'll concede the US is winning the race to the bottom. This is the winning Trump was talking about.
The rest of the world is largely getting their cues from the US, though. I wish they wouldn't, but with the massive presence of US media and popular culture, the propaganda hits more than just the US.
with the massive presence of US media and popular culture
Look to the billionaires, the Epstein class, for who’s to blame for that.
Almost a quarter of American adults have never traveled abroad. Only another quarter has been to 5 or more countries. Americans, by and large, only understand the world outside of their own country in the terms American media presents it to them.
You're allowed to do your own thing ya know.
Unless you do your own thing too much and the CIA takes interest.
Check out the UK.
It will get worse. And China will take advantage of it, they're not stupid, it's a no brainer when you have all of the manufacturing and industry and your competition has none.
We set a trap and fell in it
Capitalism bitch! Where the ONLY metric for anything or anyone is how much money it can make.
Rent seeking behavior, the thing capitalism is best at :’)
It's relentless. Every fucking thing is made wrong. Design, which is the practice of making things easy to use or understand, not look pretty, is dead.
Design is absolutely thriving. Things are made, with great care and precision, to more easily manipulate and mislead buyers and to more easily misinform the population. Most importantly, things are made to more easily extract wealth from everyone else.
What you are assuming, incorrectly, is that the general population is the customer. The general population is, in fact, just another resource for the wealthy and powerful (the real customers).
Welcome to the world brought to you by corporations, who exist to extract wealth, for the owners, who do not have a limit to their desire for more power, to feed their malignant narcissism. Selfishness on a grand scale is the only reason for the enshitification of existence.
It's a move from profit seeking to rent seeking by the capitalists. Some have called it feudalism.
Oh! I tried to explain to a friend today why LifeLock isn't actually providing him with any useful service today and he just couldn't understand why their "piece of mind" bullshit is all a scam.
YouTube asked me to upgrade to premium... to download my own fucking video!
Late stage capitalism
Also early stage capitalism as it happens. The middle period can go alright if they're absolutely terrified of being guillotined.
