this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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The word he's describing is called "enshittification".
No, it's monopoly capitalism. A certain Mr. Marx from Germany had a few things to say about it.
One consequence of monopoly capitalism is businesses pursuing growth in revenue more aggressively than growth in user base.
When the market is saturated, all you can do to pursue growth is to increase unit margin. This eventually leads to production of "fictitious capital" as a stand in for real capital (as paper assets cost virtually nothing to produce).
Das Kapital goes into lengthy detail about this process. Specifically, the "how much does it cost to make a coat" chapter gets into it in (exhaustive) detail.
id argue enshittification is a consequence of monopoly capitalism, and not a separate thing.
Enshittification is a feature of capitalism, smartass.
Sure. But it's a consequence of monopolisation. Once you break up the monopolies, enshittification will no longer be economically viable.
Monopolization becomes inevitable in a capitalist economy since the wealthy are still the ones with power, and they will always seek to increase their wealth by any means necessary.
Even in a heavilly regulated form of capitalism, the wealthy will do everything in their power to slowly strip regulations over a period of time where they think people won't notice and attempt to move public opinion towards the wealthy class's benefit via propaganda.
"You're not talking about Sprite, but about sugary soft drinks" <- that's you
I have no idea what you're trying to say here.
I was giving a name to a specific feature of capitalism and you were all "umm actually"-ing me that I'm talking about capitalism.
That's like:
Me: "I really like this chocolate croissant" You: "Actually, you're talking about a pastry 🤓"
My point is that you were mixing up cause and effect.
How?
By talking about the effect (enshittification) instead of the cause (capitalism). One could read your initial comment and conclude that the only problem is enshittification, and not even think about capitalism as the cause, since you didn't mention it.
I'm giving the name of a process. When someone asks for the title of a book, I don't start with Guttenberg's printing press.
You weren't asked for anything, and this certainly isn't the equivalent of book titles and the tools to make them.
It's more like interrupting a discussion about someone who was just shot dead by police to say, "yeah, it's called being shot", then getting all pissy when someone tells you that actually, the broader issue is police brutality in general.
Do you commonly criticize comments that don't issue a historical paper on the background of a meme?
Do you commonly interpret criticism as a request for a thorough academic study?
Only if it's that kind of smartypants criticism.
If that seems "smartypants" to you, your intellectual standards are set pretty damn low.
Mixing up cause and effect isn't some minor goof. It's the difference between eating bread and eating fire.
I'd appreciate it if you didn't insult me. The smartypants part was that you "um-actually"d me. Not that you stated something too "intellectual".
I never said "that's because of enshittification". I said "that's enshittification". My statement didn't contain any description of causal effects.
Enshittification has nothing to do with pricing.
It's about market capture and the resulting lack of choices allowing market holders to maximize profits by degrading product performance. This can occur even when the product has no price.
That's part of enshittification. Step 2 of enshittification is to entice in business buyers with low prices and changes that meet their needs. Step 3 is to cut costs and start price gouging to maximize profits.
Google is free to use. It still is. There is no price.
Facrbook, fee to use. Still is.
Both have been enshittified. There is no price being gouged.
The services they do sell are to advertisers, those costs are not being cut, they are focused on improving their targeting to attract more revenue.
Enshittification is a very simply concept; only product quality is measured. There might be price gouging but turn doesn't have to be.
You're missing half the point of enshittification. I'm just going to quote Doctorow directly:
"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, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."
Counterexamples: Netflix without ads, Gamepass, Tinder.
I think the price being gouged by Google and Facebook enshittification is your time being wasted for their own benefit. Your time and attention is what they sell after all.
I'd say that pricing is part of the deal which can get worse. Claiming that it's not enshittification is useless nitpicking, IMHO.
Going to stroke this image for the next time I see some dumb cunt using the term enshitification unironically.