The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.
As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue. It is a race to the bottom.
How do you fix that without massive upheaval for the people you are trying to help. I don’t know.
Companies used to have a smaller reach, meaning less total and potential customers. So they had to balance what what was good for the shareholders qith what was good for the customers or risk losing both. But products are often global now, especially digital ones. There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose. And investors don’t care as much about the long term since they can trade stocks so quickly. Maybe the solution is required holding periods for stocks or something. Higher short term capital gains taxes, and better incentives for long term gains.
I’d say its one step worse than that. If you just wanted to return value to shareholders, the 2010s Facebook model of selling a few ads in between pictures of people’s pets and graduation photos would work just fine. They could have churned this for decades unimpeded. And the less they fucked with the model, the more money they’d have made long term.
It isn’t merely shareholder value that these companies crave, but perpetual double-digit growth in valuation. And, to that end, they’re gutting the golden goose for a sudden spike in quarterly profits.
It isn’t enough for Zuckerberg’s company be valued at $100B. They needed to go for that fourth comma. So they started coming up with crazy - apparently impossible - ideas to reinvent themselves into… the Metaverse, where your whole OS is in VR! Diem (formerly Libra), the Killer Stablecoin! Whateverthefuck AI thing they’re doing, to make human labor irrelevant!
Because they’ve bought into a notion of perpetual high speed growth through financialization. They cannot conceive of any kind of economic boundary or closed system. Like a deadly virus that spreads too quickly, they cannot see the edges of their population space or curb their basic impulse to consume.
So much of the drive towards AI is an insane quest to create a financial market without human customers. Just a big machine that sucks in investment capital and reports back a higher earnings figure.
It’s increasingly divorced from any kind of material condition. And increasingly predicated on unfettered access to an unlimited pool of natural resources backed by an unchallenged Petrodollar.
So I will disagree on one point. If facebook stayed with just a few ads, that would not make value for the shareholders. Shareholders only make money if the stock price goes up, which requires people to buy it at the higher price. And if the company isn’t growing double digits, buyers will go elsewhere. So the drive to produce shareholder value forces companies to chase the double digit growth or die. And shareholders want quick gains, so they can move on to the next company with double digit growth.
It’s not the ceos who are the reason for all this. It’s that all this causes boards to chose ceos that operate this way. People see that, and then aspire to do the same so they can be rich. This is why ceos spend so much time essentially marketing thier companies ideas. Thats how you get the stock price to go up. Buyers buy on the perception that a company is doing great things, or will. Reality doesn’t often factor in like people think it does.
As for AI. They don’t care about replacing humans. All they care about is a sales pitch that makes the stock price go up. If telling people that there software will replace humans does that, then that is what they will say. They don’t let reality get in the way.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dividend.asp
Government should be the balancing act in response to this. Regulations enforced by Governments.
That is a nice thought. But the government has never been “for” the people. And you can’t reasonably expect people who are chosen by a popularity contest to be able to devise a way to provide that balance. It’s not a required skill to get elected. And you can’t expect the voters to know what real skills a polotician has. The spin and propaganda are just to effective at manipulating voter impressions. So it can’t be the government…
It won’t stop until stocks are no longer a thing.
Honestly it seems like a bad idea to have stocks in the first place
Like a loan shark you can never get rid of.
Why does this even exist ?
I remember learning about the stock market in grade school and I thought it was stupid then and I think it’s stupid now.
It’s harmful in pretty much every way.
This is the race to the bottom I mentioned. If one country doesn’t allow stock in their companies to be bought, the companies can’t make as much money. So they don’t form as often or move. Then that country goes into a recession. Overall, it is the lack of a world wide coordinated effort to prevent the incentives to mortgage the future for gains today.
Stocks aren’t necessarily a bad thing since they in theory represent abstract ownership of a thing. Perfectly fine when privately held, it becomes an increasingly problematic thing when. Traded on an open market though.
I think whenever stocks exist, regardless if private or public, the goal of the company becomes focused on increasingly profits instead of sustainability.
Not that non-traded companies don’t want profits too. But the goal of “forever-increases” in profits will ultimately be destructive to a company as it will lead to lower quality, more exploitation, and intense focus on monopolizing their industry as that will be the only way to retain customers.
I think investing in companies is not really a bad thing. But it should be more like a set contract with an end date and/or amount.
More like a loan with interest. From a bank. Or how some contracts are made with movie actors and such.
A percentage of profits over a 10 year period or something.
Idk. There has to be a better way to do this.
The stock market has too much influence on the economy without bringing a benefit that surpasses the damage it does.
The nature of non-traded and private stocks can be debated for days, especially when you get into the minutiae of stuff like mining stocks for example where it can represent the payout to workers, investors, and owners at the end of a season. But what has made itself evident is that the stock market should not be allowed to exist as it is. Maybe it can be devolved back into resource stocks but that’s just getting into your contract loan/payout idea.
Remove shareholders from the equation.
It can change, but it’ll require a large number of people seeing it as a problem worth addressing. Companies currently don’t value customer experience very well and haven’t for a long time, witness how phone customer service has become loaded with automated services standing between users and a small phone support staff. But if that were change, if stockholders were to come to see how much users hate that, and more importantly if users were to base their habits on that decision, it might cause things to improve. Money people, despite their near-legendary density, tend to be very nervous about trends. It might be possible to spook them.
Well, I think it could happen. I’ve been wrong before.
It’s tough, the companies can’t change unless the people do. Meaning customers refusing to do business with companies that have bad customer service or refusing to buy stocks in such companies. But there will always be people who see that they can make money off of other people doing that. And it doesn’t work if some people get rich bucking the trend.