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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Profit is income a capitalist receives from mobilizing workers to do productive things, then skimming off the surplus created by their labor.
By contrast, rent is income a feudalist derives from owning something that a capitalist or a worker needs to be productive. The entrepreneur who opens a coffee shop earns profits by creaming off the surplus value created by the baristas. The rentier who owns the building the coffee shop rents gets money simply for owning the building.
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The coffee shop owner can never rest. At any moment, another coffee shop can open down the street and lure away their customers and their baristas. When that happens, the coffee shop goes bust and the owner is ruined. But not the landlord! After the coffee shop goes bust, the landlord’s asset is more valuable - an empty storefront just down the street from the hottest coffee shop in town.
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Capitalists hate capitalism. Faced with a choice of retaining their workers by paying them a fair wage and treating them well, or by saddling them with noncompetes that make it impossible to work for anyone else in the same field, and obligations to repay tens of thousands of dollars for “training” if they quit, bosses will take the latter every time. Go meta, baby.
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Some for competition. Faced with the choice of competing to win the most customers with the best products, or merging so that customers have nowhere else to go, even the bitterest of rivals find it remarkably easy to intermarry until our corporations landscape is so interbred the dominant firms all have Habsburg jaws. Think: Facebook-Instagram. Disney-Fox. Microsoft-Activision:
https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interoperability/
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Enshittification has complex underlying dynamics and a reliable procession of stages, but the effect is quite straightforward: things are enshittified when they become worse for the people who use them and the suppliers who makes them, but nevertheless, the users keep using and the suppliers keep supplying.
There are four forces that stand in the way of enshittification, and as each of these forces grows weaker, enshittification proliferates.
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The first and most important of these constraints is #competition. Capitalists claim to love competition because it keeps firms sharp: they must constantly find ways to improve products and cut costs or be swept away by a superior alternative. There’s a degree of truth here, but that’s not the whole story.
For one thing, competition can “improve” things that we would rather see abolished.
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Critics of the #GDPR, the EU’s landmark privacy law, often point to the devastation that enforcing privacy law had on the European #AdTech industry, driving small firms out of business. But these firms were the most egregious privacy offenders, because they had the least to lose, lacking the dominant position of US-based Big Tech surveillance companies.
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Having the least to lose, they were the most reckless with their privacy invasions - but they were also the least equipped to pay expensive enablers from giant corporate law firms to hold off European enforcers, and so they were obliterated. The resulting lack of competition is fine, as far as privacy goes: we don’t want competition in the field of “who is most efficient at violating our human rights”:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/fighting-floc-and-fighting-monopoly-are-fully-compatible
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But there’s another benefit to competition: disorganization. A sector with hundreds of medium-sized, competing companies is a squabbling mob, incapable of agreeing on the site for an annual meeting. An industry dominated by a handful of firms is a cartel, handily capable of presenting a unified front to policy makers, and their commercial coziness provides them with vast war-chests they can use to suborn governments and capture their regulators:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/
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