OT Enshittification

[DUB]

Interesting article about today’s Internet and the companies that run it. It’s well worth reading the whole article, not just the parts I quoted.

Here is how platforms die: first, they 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.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

 

[Everything Beagle]

Enshittification is one of the core tenets of capitalism. It’s useless to talk about the phenomenon as if capitalism doesn’t demand this of every company.

Doctorow is possibly boiling the frog by isolating a critique of capitalism to the realm of the internet, because he definitely hints as the larger world:

“The Netheads were right: technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom – our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.”

A few removed words and you get:

“self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom.”

This is straight up Marxist, and also factually correct if you’re not a weirdo capitalist sympathizer (nobody on this forum is a capitalist in the true sense of being owner class; we are all laborers).

The only way out is to prioritize human experience over the obsession with number-go-up. It’s too bad we will not live to see such a time.