Other Castle

Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.

The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.

In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.

you are in the medieval era and you have this role!

❌ Does this ship make any sense whatsoever by any reasonable metric

Like, do you know how swooningly, outrage-causingly shocking it was that the main character slammed her bedroom door in her abusive husband's face? Do you have any idea how unthinkable it was that she denied him access to her space and her person? She was supposed to submissively look away while he turned their son into an alcoholic for his own amusement and seduced innocent young women! It was revolutionary in 1848; when Bronte (Anne) wrote it, she had to do so under a male psuedonym because publishers wouldn't accept works by women unless they were harmless pap, which was all that was thought suitable for women to read lest their mild and gentle minds be corrupted.

The reason these groundbreaking books of history seem to tame and understated now is because they worked. They raised the bar, pushed the agenda forwards, cleared the path for the next writer. They did exactly what they were supposed to. Time is linear. History moves forward. We make progress.

When you are old, if things happen as they ought, a future generation of teenagers will read The Hate U Give and Simon and the Homo Sapiens' Agenda and Speak and think to themselves 'why did anybody ever think this was contraversial? Why did they ban them? These are just things we talk about, these are things we deal with like normal people. What was the past like, and how do we stop from backsliding into a place where these things are considered shocking again?"

Amazon made their service worse, to force people to pay for Prime.

Nowadays, if you order from Amazon, there is a week long delay before your package is shipped. (on purpose)

I remember when orders would ship out the same day. (I remember - it was real)

YouTube didn't used to have ads. Now, ads play in the middle of videos. (it's worse than TV ever was)

The best can opener I have owned is over 40 years old. Modern ones just don't hold up as well. (The ones I bought new broke ages ago)

The bread machine my mom got for her wedding lasted 30 years. It's been replaced twice in the last 5 years. (How can you fuck this up?)

The cardboard tubes in the middle of toilet paper rolls have gotten larger. (This too?) Companies increasing the price of the product while selling you less. (REALLY?)

It sounds crazy. (it's the truth) When you talk about it, YOU sound crazy. (it's true)

Even when people believe you (do they really), all they can say is "it sucks". (it's too big) Because the problem is so big, so pervasive, what can we even DO about it???

To get the necessary laws written and passed, we need politicians, to get the politicians elected we need information campaigns, to fund campaigns we need money, and all the money is being hoarded by the people profiting from enshittification. (it sounds so fake)

Enshittification isn't planned obsolescence, which is just making things shitter by putting a time limit on how long they function. It's a feature that serves the seller and the stock holders, not the customer. Enshittification is a process, not a feature.

The beginning part of enshittification is deliberately making a better product than the nearest competitors, and giving it to people for free.

An essential part of enshittification is not merely drawing you in with something good, but making you depend on it as a key underpinning of your life. The only way you communicate with many of your friends and family (Facebook). The only way to order most items you need, when you need them (Amazon). The only way to process online payments (PayPal). The only way to get up-to-the-minute news and send out emergency messages (Twitter).

The first version of the platform (and it is specifically a platform thing - a platform being something you use to accomplish your other projects) has to be so good that virtually no one goes anywhere else anymore.

That step is like the old Starbucks thing of opening a million locations, offering a quality product, undercutting the local competition until they go out of business and you can't go anywhere else, at which point the prices rise and the quality goes down. The standard monopoly playbook.

But enshittification is more insidious than that. It's about creating a (virtual) place that you need to use not simply to get one product, but to accomplish the important things in your life.

People don't stay on Facebook because it's the only way to socially interact online - it's not! People are trapped using Facebook even though they hate it because their elderly parents and high school friends use it and won't use anything else.

People don't leave Amazon because when you rely on deliveries (eg you are disabled, you live somewhere rural, you need a package your next day or your boss will kill you), with a Prime account, it's the only way to accomplish what you need. AND it's the only way to watch a lot of your favourite TV shows, or access Kindle Unlimited books etc. When I choose between, say, Disney+ and Prime, I reflect that both companies suck, but Prime gets me free and fast deliveries that include everything from groceries to medicines to compost. I am disabled. When I can I order from somewhere else. But relatively frequently I can't. So right now I have Prime and not Disney+.

Enshittification isn't just about eliminating the competition, it's about *trapping* you into using something that gets worse and worse while being the only way for you to get things that are genuinely important. They make you live your life through them by taking indirect ownership of intangible things, like vital pathways to maintain your friendships, and then once they have you, they count on the combination of inertia and the value you place on those intangible things to keep you there no matter how bad it gets.

So I, who have never liked Facebook, even right at the start when I had to sign up to accept a party invitation, am still there, despite everything, because a whole bunch of my friends, my publishing network contacts, and my family, will not go anywhere else. They just won't leave. So leaving Facebook, for me, means severing contact with hundreds of people, some of whom are extremely important to me.

That's enshittification. It's the process by which they make sure you don't leave when it gets shit.

And yeah, the only way to tackle this is to regulate the fucking tech companies. Tell your MP.