Pretty convincing explanation of why we should hold Silicon Valley morally accountable for their shitty management. As usual, Ed could have stood to be a little more Marxist; in particular, there is a reason why enshittification and rot naturally happens to companies as they age, and it’s precisely the tendency for profits to decline over time!
Bonus sneer: it got double-secret-shadow-banned on HN; here is the submission. Cowards.
Where The Rot Economy separates is that growth is, in and of itself, the force that drives companies to enshittify.
Not finished reading the article yet, but my reaction to reading this line is that Zitron is missing the mark in the same way he qualifies Doctorow’s Enshittification does.
I don’t think growth directly drives companies to enshittify. Rather, infinite (and especially constant-or-better) growth in a finite space is only possible when things degrade. Physical widgets do this pretty decently on their own, though we (humans) had to come up with planned obsolescence to keep degradation above a certain threshhold. Software, on the other hand, doesn’t naturally degrade over time. It only seems to do so because the different actors in its ecosystem, from the software “bricks” to the underlying hardware, are similarly incentivized to churn out new things that deprecate the old, indirectly degrading them.
We’ll see where Zitron goes from here to the end of the article.
Good stuff near the end:
I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer, and the more I learn about both their intentions and actions the more certain I am that they are unrepentant and that their greed will never be sated.
These men lace our digital lives with asbestos and get told they’re geniuses for doing so because money comes out.
I care about you. The user. The person reading this. The person that may have felt stupid, or deficient, or ignorant, all because the services you pay for or that monetize you have been intentionally rigged against you.
You aren’t the failure. The services, the devices, and the executives are.
I don’t feel like Zitron completely addressed my remark in the parent comment, but the end result/destination is the same.
