EDITED TO MAKE THE TITLE MORE APPROPRIATE. The previous title of this post was “I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life” which was the slug line as it appeared in my mailing-list-to-RSS reader. Although this is the first paragraph of the linked essay, it does not do a good job of explaining the thrust of the essay, and some people (not you though) seem to be arguing with the title instead of the essay.
(Thanks to ski11erboi@lemmy.world for the heads up.)
END OF EDITED SECTION
Here’s why you’re getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don’t have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don’t compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they’ve amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about “fighting for the user.” Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.
It would better if that came off paragraph after but instead they dipped into simultaneously dunking on individual efforts to build up poorly detailed communal efforts. Spends more time complaining about peoples individual efforts than explaining the how to’s and benefits of communal efforts
He should focus better on making his argument more tight and focused with minimal collateral damage. How does using Linux, Signal, Mastodon isolate people. People can have all that installed and more. Terrible examples.
Yes recycling is mostly green washing as it gets dumped/burned elsewhere. Why try make people feel like they were fools for sending things to recycling. They tried.
Not effective writing, not effective communication, not effective persuasion and so far in this thread he’s not even hitting with leftist let alone centrist and conservatives. People are focusing on the hot take because the writer thought it’d be smart to frame his wants with a hot take about the individual actions people take as weak. Frame with click bait so get lambasted for being a click bait artist
If I may chime in, like Sundray, I am used to the author’s style, which preempts critics by acknowledging the difficulty before getting to the positive. He’s had enough people tell him ‘recycling plastic is a joke!’ to now start by saying, yes, I know, BUT you should still do it and then he’ll get to the positive. He’s not suggesting people are foolish for doing it, he’s simply letting the reader know that it ought to work better than it does and the failure is NOT on the citizenry, but on the deep pockets trying to escape blame. He wants you to know how they profit off the backs of the working class and he wants us to fight back together (and to keep recycling).