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Cory Doctorow’s identification of “enshittification” is a valid and cogent examination of how platforms go to die, and when abstracted, how markets, empires, and other middlemen in general go to shit and either collapse or become niche, or capture the market and become permanently shitty.
It occurs to me now that one of the great strengths of American libertarian-capitalism, as it was in the 20th century, was an environment competitive enough to reduce the incentives and pressures to enshittify, primarily by the freedom to open a truly competitive business. The old could adapt and become competitive once more, but in doing so, they’d lose the benefits of enshittification; great for the customer, but hidden from execs on the bottom line.
But larger organs of power and money have both adapted, the way evolving systems tend to do, and have found ways to capture market forces and regulatory oversight, and entrench their enshittification without fear of ever being unseated. Late stage (enshittified) capitalism and late stage democracy are feeling their oats.
Most noticeably, in my opinion, was the way the American power-sliding-leftward culture captured academia and media, which used to be the oversight mechanisms keeping a free people educated and informed about the agglomerating nature of socialism and fascism. Now, all problems in society are laid at the feet of capitalism and free markets without examination of other possible governmental or societal causes. Any power shifts to the left are framed as “reforms,” and power shifts to the right are framed as “corruption” and “fascism.”
But that’s just leftism, not enshittification, you may (rightly) point out. Ah, but the fiscal effects: taxes must increase because budgets must increase. Why? Solving problems is no longer the goal of the government; now, issues must be managed. Societal woes must be serviced by specific groups of unionized government employees. Union contracts have to be renegotiated because wages have to increase with inflation and/or remain a multiple of the minimum wage. Training programs have to be run during working hours to avoid systemic oppression affecting intersectionally underprivileged clients. Multisyllabic words have to be repurposed to adequately and loquaciously describe innovative and ever more lucrative forms of enshittification.
This is a problem. What are some solutions?
Was academia and media really all that different back then, as "oversight mechanisms keeping a free people educated and informed about the agglomerating nature of socialism and fascism?" Or was it largely a façade then as it is today?
Earlier today Ron Unz posted a lengthy article about some WW-II revisionism synthesizing a bunch of his earlier commentaries on the topic, but what surprised me most was a related article he linked containing shocking pre-war correspondence that I had never heard of before, although I am no stranger to WW-II revisionism.
The context is that when the Germans captured Warsaw they captured the original facsimiles of secret correspondence from the Polish Ambassador to the United States, the authenticity of which have been confirmed many times over. Here's a document from the collection, a secret report dated January 12, 1939 (pre-war) by Jerzy Potocki. This is a translation of the full secret report on the situation in the United States as perceived by the Polish ambassador:
At least from the 1939 perspective of the Polish ambassador to the United States, the purported role of the media as "oversight mechanisms keeping a free people educated and informed about the agglomerating nature of socialism and fascism" was a farce then as it is now.
Wouldn’t your point be considerably undermined by the near indisputable fact that Nazism was, in actual fact, a severe threat to both fundamental human right to life as well as world peace? And the fact that despite all this FDR actually failed to bring the US into war against the Nazis? There is no global Jewish conspiracy.
All Great Powers are a severe threat to both the fundamental human right to life and world peace, this isn't saying much. Are you saying Germany had a plan to attack the West? That's a popular conception but one that is also dismissed among the reflection of "insiders." There's an interesting 1945 diary entry from James Forrestal, the first U.S. Secretary of Defense:
The idea that the media is so full of this cynical, power-seeking narrative building today, but in the 1930s was when it was actually dedicated to the truth of "keeping a free people educated" is what looks naïve in the context of these insider perspectives.
So Great Britain took a stand and pressured Poland to not negotiate a settlement over 95% ethnically German Danzig. Then Great Britain declared war on Germany after their invasion of Poland, which the Germans did not expect, then however-many-tens-of-millions dead and the Soviet Union conquered half of Eurasia, including all of Poland... If you don't trust the media narrative-building today it should also make you somewhat suspicious of the narrative-building of the past.
I don’t think you can simply call the entire body of WWII scholarship “suspicious narrative building”. I’m especially astonished to see an actual argument… arguing that the West’s meddling caused the war? Dude. It was brutal and vicious German expansionism, abetted by Soviet greed, that caused the invasion of multiple neighbors, an outright war of conquest. And that’s not even getting into the obvious Holocaust and associated war crimes angle. I do appreciate the source but it’s the height of narcisssism on the part of the two Americans quoted to take full responsibility for the UK going to war. They aren’t as influential as their egos think. Don’t forget Poland was the last straw of a long string of events and invasions. If you want to find a culprit, Munich is a good start as even Hitler admitted he was willing to back down if push came to shove. But the acquiescence gave him a false sense of weakness for later moves. In particular, it’s well documented Hitler thought until the very end that the UK wouldn’t join in and was a bit in denial when they did — but a lot of that had to do with his idea of Britain as a racially superior country, and in his schema the racial winners didn’t fight each other, and less the actual actions of the UK itself.
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