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.
I do agree we seem to be on the same side.
Semantics is a bit of a passion of mine. The question I think we differ on the answer to, is wnat is an executives job. I wish it was what you appear to believe. But at the nd of the day, they are there to make money. And helping the stock price makes money for the people above them, who in turn will ensure they are employed in the future. Including at a different company.
And true, a falling stock price does not but a company put of business, that was a poor choice of words. It causes it to get bought by someone else, and either disolved or absorbed. So I guess maybe extinct is a better word. It certainly is more fun.
Please consider: it at executive’s job is only to make money, then why would any executive do anything but chase the single most source of maximum profit, which right now is obviously scamming people and courting Trump’s favor to get out of consequences? Who would care about building anything real? How could they? Just chase hollow bets and game the system as far as you can?
You can complain about capitalism, and indeed there are many problems with it, but I think you should realize that today’s hyper rapacious version of it is not historical, it’s a fairly recent interpretation of the law. A company is more, MUST be more than a single minded profit making engine. If it always had been, our civilization would have collapsed long before now.
I think the balancing factor is that customers sometimes identify the executives and latch on to their activites. Like the theranos lady, and the martin guy who raised the price of some medication. Essentially going viral like they did really slows down a career. So they are held a bit in check. And similar before as well. The mechanism was a bit different, but the people and the customers held them in check much more before. That was because most companies had a smaller customer base. So it was easier for customer sentiment to cause them real issues.
The other case is the one you pointed out. Founders. Companies who’s founders still own a majority have limits to how much they will tarnish their creation. Each founder is different, but on the whole, they usually are more constrained than a CEO brought in by non-founders.
And in many cases, they do simply scam people. Usually by selling them a product that takes thier data. So they get paid for the product, and then again for the data. And they also start pushing ads. Take roku. You pay for it, but they have added ads that weren’t there when you first bought it. That is an obvious scam. Take car rental companies. They will take your reservation, make you pay up front sometimes, and they know they won’t have the vehicle you reserved a certain % of the time. But they don’t care. And they won’t compensate you other then to give you something you didn’t reserve (if your lucky) and claim it is an upgrade. Health insurance… you pay them, they do everything they can to intentionally put barriers between you and what you paid for. Airlines… clickbait scam sites. Phone companies, who can know who is really calling you, but won’t bother to stop them from impersonating other numbers because the scammer generate money for the phone company as well. Amazon who raises the price and then claims a thing is on sale when it is actually more expensive during the big sale.
The list goes on and on. Heck, ever read your employment contract. Mine basically says they reserve the right to change the rules unilaterally such that I am in breach of contract. And thats standard apparently (I asked a lawyer). That shouldn’t even be a legal contract.
A company isn’t a person. It will only act like one when it is in it’s own self interest. And the pressure that the populace used to be able to apply to keep it in check is getting less and less effective.
And last, most of them do pay tribute to trump if he takes notice of them. Others just try to stay out of his sight. But how many immediately cancelled all dei training and such as soon as he took office. Without even specifically being asked.