You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.
It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.
These people want everything from you — to control every moment you spend working with them so that you may provide them with more ways to make money, even if doing so doesn’t involve you getting anything else in return. Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and a majority of tech platforms are at war with the user, and, in the absence of any kind of consistent standards or effective regulations, the entire tech ecosystem has followed suit. A kind of Coalition of the Willing of the worst players in hyper-growth tech capitalism.
Things are being made linearly worse in the pursuit of growth in every aspect of our digital lives, and it’s because everything must grow, at all costs, at all times, unrelentingly, even if it makes the technology we use every day consistently harmful.
This year has, on some level, radicalized me, and today I’m going to explain why. It’s going to be a long one, because I need you to fully grasp the seriousness and widespread nature of the problem.
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So close, and yet…
The “market economy” is the death cult. The notion that somehow market forces are inevitable, natural powers is the logical fallacy.
We are so primed to capitalist market thinking that we accept its dogma. As Frederic Jameson said, at this point it is actually easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
It isn’t the “rot economy”; It’s the Economy, Stupid.
I mean, without the end of capitalism, the end of the world is only a few decades away. Even the IPCC report says that we need socialism if we want to stop climate change (and I used “stop” instead of “prevent” for a reason, we’ve even crossed the 1.5°C limit a while ago) and survive as a species.
The fediverse is the one halfway viable alternative to the rotten big platforms that has a chance and I continue to be perplexed that Ed Zitron isn’t on it. We’re building the future of social media over here. Maybe that was you back in 2018, giving up after two days when it turned out you didn’t have an instant audience of millions after two days on mastodon. Maybe the problem didn’t seem so urgent back then. Maybe you got a bad first impression for some other reason. Try again. You make the case for it without being part of it. Join the fediverse, Ed.
…because he already owns a domain and independently publishes his blog? He’s not part of the substack world.
Having your own site is the original decentralized internet. I can understand dumping all your effort into things you fully control. Doctorow handles it similarly these days.
He talks on his podcast all the time about being on Bluesky
Dang, I only read his blog, and only sporadically, I hadn’t realized he had a presence on Bluesky. That does seem peculiar considering his other stances. You’d think he’d recognize the issues Bluesky’s funding presents.
Bluesky as a whole should also join the fediverse.
Bluesky is by definition one of the things mentioned by the OP, they’re a commercial site, backed by venture capital, which recently received a round of financing on the order of 15 million by a freaking blockchain company, and i remember recently hearing they just plain don’t have a path to profit so it’s the same story as all the others. They ARE going to enshittify sooner or later. Here’s Cory Doctorow on this.
you, the paying customer
There are ways to mitigate this.
- Interact with software which had more to do with people doing technical work rather than being involved in ‘business’ or ‘employment’.
- Reject the trend of legitimacy and embrace practicality.
- Simply do not co-operate with the entities doing these things. This thing in particular works even in the most hopeless seeming situations. Also, casually disobey.
- Move towards being more and more technically skilled yourself. It does not necessarily have to be with computers, if you prefer not to. You will find yourself not dependent on anything in an absolute manner, and these organisations will lose out on one more user they need to survive—because they work that inefficiently with their already less effective methods of operation.
It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.
This ‘death cult’ is just ordinary people who take the easy way of forcing others to provide what they cannot do themselves. The commercial system is little more than a convoluted mechanism to fulfill this need. While, of course, not being extremely cruel to the workers because that always has consequences. This rule goes against the very instinct and reason for those radically believing in this system though, and as a result is disregarded in time by people who believe their predecessors who bit more than they could chew were foolish for not merely suffocating the poorer classes even more, in the hope they will work for them out of desperation.
These things have a simple root—it is people being unwilling to bear the burdens and pains for becoming capable of doing what they want to do, and seeing it preferable to push the pains on others instead. The most effective way to deal with it is to disobey and push the burden of pain right back to the cause of problems, rather than take up the pain for either pennies or the promise of easing the pressure, while the majority of the benefit coming from the work you put in goes to others. Push it back, reject it, and push it back again when these persons defiantly cause more problems. They’ll end up toothless and—the horror—with take up some form of technical skill learning to survive.
An organisation without the technically skilled persons to
suffer underwork for them are just a bunch of persons with many desires but no way to fulfill them. All the while the structure of ‘legitimacy’, which forces people’s hand to work for practically achieving nothing, breaks down. People are forced to work hard again if they ever had the idea of simply making others do the work and benefiting from it. In this happening you do not destroy co-operation and business themselves, but only trim these perverted aspects off them.
