EDITED TO MAKE THE TITLE MORE APPROPRIATE. The previous title of this post was “I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life” which was the slug line as it appeared in my mailing-list-to-RSS reader. Although this is the first paragraph of the linked essay, it does not do a good job of explaining the thrust of the essay, and some people (not you though) seem to be arguing with the title instead of the essay.
(Thanks to [email protected] for the heads up.)
END OF EDITED SECTION
Here’s why you’re getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don’t have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don’t compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they’ve amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about “fighting for the user.” Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.
Boycotts work because boycotts are collective . That’s his point. If you get enough of society together to boycott X, or to call their government out on Y, or even vote Z, then together the difference will matter. What doesn’t matter is a bunch of people buying an item, while you are making your own private ‘boycott’. Personally, I ‘boycott’ youtube. Guess what? They don’t care. They have enough eyeballs that they don’t miss me at all.
P.S. I was happy that Paramount+ asks “why?” you cancel your subscription because I got to explain it was due to the 60 minutes settlement and firing Colbert… but I doubt they care that 1 person stopped giving them money over that.
You know what else is collective ? Votes. If you think you can change the world all by yourself, aybe you’ve forgotten that being human if a profoundly collective experience.
This you?
If you look, I was the person explaining that per Doctorow collective action is good. You’re replying to a post where I said, “…or even vote Z, then together the difference will matter.” Maybe you meant to reply to someon else, or maybe you’re a sock puppet that forgot to change accounts.