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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?
If you read Cory Doctorow's other posts on his site, he seems to be heavily against capitalism. He recognizes that capitalists working with the government isn't really capitalism, but calls them out in such a way as to suggest the answer is more government interference, not less, and things that people call socialism.
(Also, "enshittification" is not the best term, because it's too generic sounding.)
Capitalism is just another of the words that permeates our culture and even day-to-day life which is basically meaningless stand-in. It may have some prosaic "definitions" such as private ownership of means of production, but virtually nobody uses them this way. In the eyes of many, capitalism is whatever we have now, which is to be problematized, criticized and changed. On the opposite side we have socialism, which is also not strictly defined, it is just opposite of our current shitty system of capitalism, it is an ideal state that will work and whatever it is, it is definitely not capitalism. So capitalism is just useless umbrella term with negative connotation be it insensitive free-market capitalism or it may be late stage crony capitalism and it may be even party-state capitalism under current regime in China.
Capitalism vs socialism is best viewed as part of ideological language, it is similar to other radical rhetoric such as oppression vs liberation and so forth. It really is that stupid, we need to fight oppression/capitalism and if result of that fight turns into shit, then some new form of capitalism/oppression sneaked in through reactionary forces and true socialism/liberation was not even tried. History needs to make another another revolution, only next time informed by previous failures until the true utopia will eventually be achieved.
At this point I think that words like capitalism are just brainworms and we are best served if we taboo these words and restart the conversation.
Sure, but if Capitalism needs to be tabooed Enshittification needs it much worse.
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