Ah yes, the enshittification of "enshittification". Definitely did not see that one coming.
Apart from being obnoxious and immature, "enshittification" doesn't communicate any concept beyond "something turning into shit." Being both vague and emotionally charged, semantic drift is inevitable.
/s
Parasitoids are parasites that corrupt a host, eventually resulting in its death. Endoparasitism is where the parasitoid infects and lives inside the host.
Note that again, libraries are already paying for the product. This is not "free."
It's not just corporations or government. Any system of organizing multiple human beings that depends on an unbroken chain of Good People Doing The Right Thing is bound to fail, and fail much sooner rather than later. This happens all the time in nonprofit organizations, civil societies, and what have you.
Individual people can be expected to Do The Right Thing, even at personal cost, sometimes. We've all helped strangers change a flat tire even when it's uncomfortably hot outside. But I'm sure we've all also just driven by someone on the side of the road, because we were in a rush to get somewhere.
Over time, and in groups, people can only be expected to operate based on the incentives and disincentives that are presented to them. (Hence your "regulation or continual threat".)
This.
Everyone should serve a stint as an officer in their condominium's homeowners' association or neighborhood association so they begin to understand.
(I want to underscore that the described behavior is not limited to capitalists, although one might at first suspect so).
No, this is missing the core reason due to believing in an inherent order or that implementing the "right" incentives is the solution.
The real core is that humans are sometimes irrational. This irrational behavior is why economists are regularly wrong (on both macro and micro scales, from recessions to struggling to understand why an incentive/disincentive is ineffective when it should from all other testing), and the core as to why groups can't stick to Do The Right Thing.
Sure, but do you think Cory expects people to do the right thing? The entire thesis assumes everyone basically having good intentions except the middleman who mostly wants to make money.
It's not a judgment, so much as a very obvious pattern driven by understandable and predictable human behavior.
If we can find a way to break away from the pattern while still assuming people will not do the right thing and keep doing human behavior, we should do that.
That's the whole point? Enshittification is a response to the idea the capitalism optimizes for the consumer, when instead it points out that it optimizes for the business. It doesn't provide a solution, but it at least names the problem.
I don't think the problems we're seeing are limited to capitalistic nations.
In any case, my understanding of the philosophical foundation of capitalism, wasn't that it relied on optimization or altruism toward consumers at all. Rather, that it structured incentives so that consumers would benefit from the selfish pursuits of industry.
Pointing out the failings of that system is easy. What's difficult is proposing a system that's better, and has a chance of working with human nature as it is, rather than as we wish it to be.
We don't really have any non-capitalist nations. Maybe NK or Cuba, but I don't think that was what you were thinking of.
China's economy is certainly driven by market forces, even though it is steered at the top by a dictatorship.
> Rather, that it structured incentives so that consumers would benefit from the selfish pursuits of industry.
Yes, and enshittification is the result of those incentives not actually being aligned in practice.
You seem to be rebutting me by saying the same thing.
And we need to be very careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because, capitalism has had some very profound and positive outcomes for humanity. So, by all means, let's improve incentives, and punish corruption where we find it. But let's do it with a scalpel, not a machete -- lest the patient die on the operating table.
kind of problematic that capitalism is seen as all-or-nothing. then there's nothing that can ever be done about it. i'm starting to see the perceived problem with calling out enshittification now.
I'm not sure this qualifies, but IMO it comes close. There's a lot of nuance in the whole discussion about ebooks and public libraries and handwaving about "enshittification" avoids all of it and dumps the responsibility for maintaining the concept of libraries on publishers and private companies.
Consumers and communities are free to continue consuming books using the same models libraries operated under for decades. Ebooks came along and don't fit well with that model, at all. It's another public commons problem we're basically hoping that Somebody Else will solve and then complaining when the foxes guarding the hen house do what foxes do.
I think Cory is about half right about enshittification but there's also a huge dose of entitlement and apathy. If you expect corporations or government to just Do The Right Thing when it's not in the interest of those in power, without regulation or continual threat of loss of power or market share, you're going to be sorely disappointed.