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.
By the same logic, the more either party wins, the more the Overton window stays fixed on the current systemic status quo being the only viable, or even imaginable system.
Both parties are unambiguously serving the interests of their respective elites. They’re just using different tactics to distract their respective audiences. In both cases the core strategy is to evoke the strong emotional intuition that sacred values are being violated. For conservatives, those values are tradition, and especially sexual norms. For liberals, it’s the protection of vivid victims.
The only actual solution is to stop fighting your enemies and start working together to actually redistribute power and reform the whole system.
Oh, worth putting out there, the other tactic I see often is to create the impression that the only alternatives are 19th century political philosophies: capitalism vs communism, etc. In reality, there is a massive space of potential global political and economic systems we could adopt, and we’re in a much better position to work together as a single species to scientifically explore that space and design a stable global system than we were 150 years ago. But we can’t get started while everyone is convinced that all they can do is vote for their team in the next election.
Then by that logic, how do you explain Republicans going more and more off the deep end after they kept on winning? The system isn’t “fixed on the status quo”, it’s actively getting worse.
Both parties serve elites, that’s true. But they can only afford to do that because one party promotes Christofascism and half the country joyfully votes for them, so the other can basically do nothing and still be the better choice for a sane person.
There’s a lot that we could theoretically do to change the system, but is that possible when the majority of people in voting age are forced to have a stable job to survive and mass media does everything they can to push narratives in the few spare time they might have to get informed? I’d love if everyone could afford to organize general strikes to, for example, put in place an actually functional voting system instead of FPTP, but that’s just not a likely outcome and probably won’t be in our lifetimes.
Let me be clear, I’m not saying all we can do is vote for “our team”. But we NEED to keep doing that, at minimum. Then, if you can afford it, you can also organize to push for reforms, protest, strikes and everything else. But if we keep on letting fascists take office because “the other side was better, but still bad so I didn’t vote them”, soon it’ll even be illegal to do anything else.
To your opening question: in two dimensions, you can stay still in one while moving along the other.
We’re in a complex multidimensional space of political/economic possibilities, but the current discourse keeps everything focused on a single left/right dimension as though that’s all that matters. By ensuring you’re only seeing that battle, always fighting the other half of the population, they prevent any possibility of change in other directions (e.g., massive capital market reform/redistribution).
I’m not American so can’t speak to your detailed points about Republicans, but the same left/right, liberal/conservative division is happening everywhere, as well as the simultaneous acceleration of the polarisation of wealth, erosion of wealth redistribution systems and rapid destruction of our global environment for the short term gain of the ultra wealthy.
Insisting that you must constantly fight the other half of your country’s population is an error. You are being distracted and misled. So are they. You don’t win by beating them. You win by convincing them to stop fighting too.