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.
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.
The problem is that pretty much everything economic still moves on a left/right axis. Capital market reform/redistribution is a left-wing concept, and polarization of wealth, or lack of market regulation, is a right-wing one.
Then at present time there’s a lot of other concepts that have been stapled onto the simple economic axis to further divide the population, such as culture war, religion, discrimination and whatnot, but even if you remove all of that, there’s the fact that a lot of people simply don’t want wealth redistribution. The infamous “temporarily embarrassed billionaires”, as they’re often called. You can’t convince them to “stop fighting” if the very thing you want to achieve is the same one they’re fighting against.
The only way to convince them is to straight-up depropagandize them, to make them realize that the “American Dream” is bullshit, that they’re never going to magically become a billionaire and benefit from all the stuff they’re fighting for, and that wealth redistribution would benefit pretty much everyone on the planet. But there’s people that have tried and failed to do so with their own family, how possible is that to successfully do for the whole country? Especially when every form of information, whether it’s mass media or social networks, work to convince them of the opposite?
Yeah, this is exactly the dilemma we’re facing. Some days I feel like it’s impossible, our species is doomed and it’s our generations’ fault. This was the pivot point where we had the knowledge, the technology, the potential to organised ourselves to sustainably share this planet in perpetuity, but instead we chose short-term greed and factionalism.
I wouldn’t say it’s any generation’s fault, it’s simply that, even in a (supposed) democratic age, the elites still have way too many tools to sway the public consensus in their favor. Most people ultimately get greedy when they have the option to do so, and there can never be enough safeguards to prevent that from happening (or maybe there can be and we just haven’t thought of them yet, who knows).
Our generation (but mostly, the Silent Generation and Boomers) have in a sense enabled the elites to do so, but can you really say it’s our fault when the game was rigged from the start?
Thanks for the chat. It’s rare to have an intelligent dialogue on here, especially when politics is involved.
I feel that if you can perceive/understand a problem and it’s consequences, you become morally culpable for solving it, however hard that might be.
By “generation”, I mean all the people alive today, and in the last century or so, rather than those discrete named decadal generations. Collectively, especially in the face of climate change and the accelerating consumption of non-renewable resources, we know that our actions could doom countless future generations. It’s our responsibility to build a sustainable world. But instead we choose cheaper prices and immediate advantages for ourselves and our factions (nations, ethnic groups, political parties, cultural identity groups, etc).
Thank you too! I feel like a lot of times online discussions get derailed by tribal mentality, and that prevents both sides from understanding each other’s points, even when they might actually be similar. I think if we all focused on discussing our ideas without personal attacks or assumptions there would be a lot more intelligent dialogues, and while apparently not everyone agrees, it’s always nice when it does happen.
This is a valid reasoning, the issue is that mass media does its best to first convince you that there’s no issue, then that there’s an issue but the consequences aren’t that bad, then that the consequences are bad, but we can’t really do anything about it (the fact that Learned Helplessness is a named concept should be enough to tell how prevalent it is).
And even if someone manages to not fall for that and conceive a plan on how to change things, in a society where you have to work 40+ hours weekly for enough money to get by, how many people have the resources, time and willpower to work towards that plan?
I admit that my outlook might be too pessimistic, but I really feel like it’s going to be hard to correct course until there’s a very large amount of people in a situation so dire that they have nothing to lose. And while that could theoretically happen over time with the political landscape, I fear that for climate change we don’t have that much time.