Ed Zitron - The Enshittifinancial Crisis [View all]

[erronis]

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/

One time, a good friend of mine told me that the more I learned about finance, the more pissed off I'd get.

He was right.

There is an echoing melancholy to this era, as we watch the end of Silicon Valley's hypergrowth era, the horrifying result of 15+ years of steering the tech industry away from solving actual problems in pursuit of eternal growth. Everything is more expensive, and every tech product has gotten worse, all so that every company can "do AI," whatever the fuck that means.

We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there "just isn't the money" to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal healthcare, or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth. The money does exist, it just exists for those who want to gamble "private equity firms," "business development companies" that exist to give money to other companies, venture capitalists, and banks that are getting desperate and need an overnight shot of capital from the Federal Reserve's Overnight Repurchase Facility or Discount Window, two worrying indicators of bank stress I'll get into later.

No, the money does not exist for you or me or a person. Money is for entities that could potentially funnel more money into the economy, even if the ways that these entities use the money are reckless and foolhardy, because the system's intent on keeping entities alive incentivizes it. We are in an era where the average person is told to pull up their bootstraps, to work harder, to struggle more, because, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, it's socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.

The "free market" is a fucking con. When you or I run out of money, our things are taken from us, we receive increasingly-panicked letters, we get phone calls and texts and emails and demands, we are told that all will be lost if we don't "work it out," because the financial system is not about an exchange of value but whether or not you can enter into the currently agreed-upon con.

By letting neoliberalism and the scourge of the free markets rule, modern society created the conditions for what I call The Enshittifinancial Crisis -- the place at which my friend Cory Doctorow's Enshittification Theory meets my own Rot Economy Thesis in a fourth stage of Enshittification.

Per The New Yorker:

Enshittification unfolds in three phases: first, a company is "good to users," Doctorow writes, drawing people in droves, as funnel traps do Japanese beetles, with the promise of connection or convenience. Second, with that mass audience consolidated, the company is "good to business customers," compromising some of its features so that the most lucrative clients, usually advertisers, can thrive on the platform. This second phase is the point at which, say, our Facebook feeds fill with ads and posts from brands. Third, the company turns the user experience into "a giant pile of shit," making the platform worse for users and businesses alike in order to further enrich the company's owners and executives.

I'll walk you through it.

. . .