In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More
I read most of this, but holy, it just goes on and on. A lot of the messages are repeated to death. While I agree with them for the most part, it’s incredibly frustrating how libs always create this imagined form of capitalism (the rot economy in this case) to point at and tell everyone that if we just had “ethical” capitalists running the industry that everything would be better. This is what no theory does to a mf.
It’s incredibly obvious that this trend isn’t unique to the tech industry if you take a moment to think about how other industries have followed the same goal of infinite growth that is inherent to the capitalist system. Property development, furniture, small and large appliances. Everything gets shittier due to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall as described by Marx and these large corporations monopolize and cut costs to make up for it. Perhaps a system that requires infinite growth based on a planet with limited resources is simply not sustainable. I know that I’m preaching to the choir here, but I had to get this out after spending so long reading this.
For sure, they’re able to see the horrors of the system, but can’t understand that these horrors aren’t aberrations but necessary outcomes of the system functioning as intended.
I do find it funny how the author criticizes the enshittification theory as only partially correct, only to propose their own theory which is also incorrect. Perhaps correct theories can only be established through scientific methods and thorough study of history 🤔. Or perhaps you just need to have a blog and an audience 🤷
I find it’s actually kind of interesting to see what people get wrong when they try to reason through this stuff on their own. It’s useful to identify the common misconceptions because it helps focus the messaging.
That is a very good point. After all, a lot of Marx’s work was synthesized by correcting the errors in other previously proposed theories, such as dialectics. I agree that it’s a good opportunity to seek out the flaws in this type of thinking and establish good arguments that counter it. I will try to remember this instead of allowing it to frustrate me.