It’s because our economic system requires constant increases to profit margin.
Once a company gets to market saturation there’s only three ways to do that:
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Make product shittier
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Make product more expensive
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Mergers
We can just not use the ridiculous economic system we’re currently using tho, it’s easily fixable.
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Enshittification is only inherent to capitalism because there is a monetary incentive to steer in that direction.
Despite capitalism, companies used to diversify or improve their products when they were no longer selling. Now they’re forcing people to buy them anyway by bribing politicians and either being in cahoots with or buying up competitors.
You can only grow so much doing things good that eventually you need to start doing bad in order to have higher profits than the previous year. Early stage capitalism looks pretty good; late stage capitalism is pure shit.
People making things worse isn’t a natural state.
To give an example off the top of my head, the US House of Representatives used to be even worse. An interpretation of the Constitution’s quorum clause became traditional in that if a rep would not answer “present” when called to a vote they were counted as not in attendance. Essentially, a minority faction gave themselves a veto on the whole body. This persisted for decades until one speaker just said “I can see you there”, and the body got slightly better.
(That it was latter became bad all over again in new and clever ways is a slightly different issue.)
The house of representatives is arguably a technology (or something like that. A shared machine?). Technologies are a special case. We’ve got big groups of people actively striving to improve them.
The casual, half-neglected “everything else” is the norm. Tragedy of the commons and progressively intensified exploitation of that commons is the norm.
Unless it is specifically protected and fostered it gets chewed to bits. The only thing that really protects it is keeping it out of reach (through lack of communication, transportation or whatever)
I don’t think it’s often useful to react to contrary evidence as special case exceptions.
The “tragedy of the commons” is a real thing, but it’s also literally what “the cathedral and the bazar” is about. I would argue that the awareness and intentional action made based on either side of this mode is why technology seems to behave differently from other areas of human society.
Generalizing from the specific, I think it’s more helpful to say “things tend to change randomly over time, and people can be resistant to sudden change which is not obviously better.”
Since random change is more likely to be a change for the worse than a change for the better, societies will have a tendency to slowly become worse as time goes on. But the worse something gets the easier it is for people to discard it, and since intentional changes for the better are so often deliberate they also are often improvements to the best of what came before.
Enshittification occurs more as a deliberate act to increase revenue or decrease cost, which is a whole different ball game.
I’d recommend reading Enshittification by Cory Doctorow if you’re interested in the subject. He argues that there are some specific causes. To name a few:
- The US has been lax on enforcing antitrust laws, meaning there are fewer and larger companies, and less competition forcing them to not be shitty
- The power of these large companies has also allowed regulatory capture
- Technology has allowed them to do a lot more shitty things and obfuscate bad practices. This includes being able to communicate faster as well as other things.
