this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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Capitalism - and I am the last person to defend it - didn't used to be like this, or at least not as bad. shrug I could probably tolerate capitalism if, say, no company was allowed to employ more than say 15 people.
That’s like saying eating fatty food never got you obese when you started.
The end goal of capitalism was and forever will be monarchies. It’s the game of monopoly until one player owns all.
Oh I know, but it used to be at least - on the small scale - somewhat mitigated by the fact that most people were basically decent and not trying to fuck everyone else over. I remember as a young child in the 70s that my mother shopped at a grocery store that wasn't much bigger than my house is today, a little mom and pop operation that had been open for 40 years and run by an old guy, his wife, and a couple of their kids. They knew every customer who came in, knew each others' families, and were actual acquaintances or even friends instead of merely friendly with them. Nowadays I couldn't even tell you how to go about finding a grocery store that isn't the size of my neighborhood and owned by one of maybe 5 companies. Monopolies certainly existed before, but I dunno if it was people, regulations, or what, but there was a while, when I was a kid, that at least the ground-level experience of it wasn't nearly as bad as it is now.
Capitalism didn't used to be like this because it was still developing, but it was always going to become this. Enshitification is not a bug, it's a feature. Capitalism is supposed to work like this. And when it wasn't, it was just because it wasn't there yet, mainly due to technical limitations.
I agree. It was always going to isolate, alienate, and dehumanize people to the point that keeping their own heads above water was all they could think about and there was just no room left for having some empathy and compassion for their fellow human beings.
Enshitification is a consequence of legalized dumping. Companies are allowed to dump loss-making profucts and services on the market until they achieve dominance, then they squeeze the users that now have nowhere else to go. In startup-lingo this is blitzscaling followed by monetization. Our competition laws are 30 years behind the curve on this stuff.
It’s an interesting debate, if what we are seeing now is the natural, inevitable progress of capitalism, or it could have gone a better way, but eg. Reagan fucked it up for all of us in the 70s.
Reagan was in the 80s, but yeah, 100% agree. But I mean someone was going to fuck it up sooner or later, cause this country has always been by, for, and about the rich, and it was pretty clear the rich weren't very happy about how hard it was to get even richer back then.
yeah it’s not like Smith predicted this but yeah … it’s certainly not human nature either.
i’d be happy if shareholders, all of them, were held criminally responsible for the criminal things corporations do - all the way down to wage theft and child labor.
That'd be a hell of a thing. I'm with you on that one. Too bad this country is by, for, and about the rich and we don't really.. do consequences for the rich.
We used to. That's why it didn't used to be like this.
Indeed.
Late stage capitalism, then. 🤷♂️
That it wasn't always like this doesn't mean that it wouldn't always lead there though.
I think that is the point.
No, that's fair, the isolation, alienation, and dehumanization was always going to just continue to get worse.
Continued expansion or ever-increasing profits is a definitive characteristic of the system though. Enshittification is just the latest feature it found, for software-based companies.
One could also argue that enshittification is independent to software, like diluting juice or other "innovations" that products received...
Yeah, but compare even Henry Ford, who was not exactly a socialist icon, when he said:
...to the 'fuck you I got mine' attitude that is utterly pervasive today. Definitely feels like something other than just the evolution of a broken system. It has changed in character as well as in scope.
Sounds a lot like gig economy for everyone.