Why Unregulated Capitalism Always Leads to Enshittification
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Lots of ideas work well in theory, but many of them don’t work out so well in practice, especially when the idea becomes an ideology, pursued dogmatically without oversight to correct for malfunctions and abuses.
The idea of investment capital was one such idea, allowing, for the first time, a group of people to pool their money to enable major projects like factories or resource development or large-scale trade that no individual (other than rich monarchs) could finance.
While pooling of capital was a good idea, some people decided to turn the idea into an ideology, called capitalism, and this ideology, in its most extreme, unregulated form, now underlies many of the problems we face today. It has, in short, become utterly dysfunctional, leading to obscene disparities in wealth and income, catastrophic destruction of our environment and many people’s lives, monstrous amounts of waste of all kinds, and a globalized economy teetering on the edge of complete collapse.
Cory Doctorow has dubbed the process by which initial good ideas, without constant attention and oversight, can devolve into dysfunction, as enshittification. (His article is well worth reading in its entirety.) He explains how this has inevitably happened with Amazon, with Facebook, with Twitter, and other “platforms”, and most recently with TikTok and Google Search:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves [ie the managers and shareholders]. Then, they die.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
