Check out the UK.
It will get worse. And China will take advantage of it, they’re not stupid, it’s a no brainer when you have all of the manufacturing and industry and your competition has none.
We set a trap and fell in it
We let the MBAs take over. Our culture has been consumed by the idea that it’s ok to say and do absolutely anything in the pursuit of a dollar
Thank Reagan.
When he deregulated the banks he gave a blank check to a bunch of third raters who’d gone to small time banks because they knew they couldn’t cut it anywhere else.
Thank the people who vote for a piece of shit multiple times just to ‘own the libs’

I’ve got some bad news for you about where the majority of fediverse users are based.
It’s not an American problem, it’s a capitalism problem. The States might be slightly ahead, but every capitalist nation is heading the same direction.
My business works almost entirely organically. We charge a fair rate. Not the cheapest, not the most expensive. We never broke our ethical code. You’d be surprised how many people scoff at me.
As much as everything is a scam, a vast majority of the customers are asking to be scammed. Should I sell the cheapest shit, cash out, and walk away while the work performed for the customer breaks down within a few months?
People don’t get it. Still. It’s mostly the consumer’s fault for not choosing businesses with ethics. People chose quantity. That’s not a decent business person’s fault. Now, we’re here and very few businesses with ethics exist.
Whose fault do you seriously think that is? The person with the money who always had a choice where they could purchase a product or is it the competing businesses who offer a product? It only becomes the businesses fault when there’s no choice left.
There were choices. Choices were made. Now everyone is bitching about how there’s no good businesses left. So start giving your money to decent people.
It’s just like voting. You vote for the scummiest people. Wtf do you expect? A paradise? You’re not getting a paradise and you’re not getting a good product. You.
Congratulations on being able to run an completely ethical business - it can’t be easy. I say that non-sarcastically.
I think one of the many issue which has lead to the state we are in now is that it’s often impossible to tell the true quality or value of a product before buying it. So simply buying something more expensive is no guarantee of a better product, because the optimal strategy for an unethical business is to sell the cheapest possible product at the highest possible volume x price.
YouTube asked me to upgrade to premium… to download my own fucking video!
It’s relentless. Every fucking thing is made wrong. Design, which is the practice of making things easy to use or understand, not look pretty, is dead.
Design is absolutely thriving. Things are made, with great care and precision, to more easily manipulate and mislead buyers and to more easily misinform the population. Most importantly, things are made to more easily extract wealth from everyone else.
What you are assuming, incorrectly, is that the general population is the customer. The general population is, in fact, just another resource for the wealthy and powerful (the real customers).
Just stop buying things. Prepay for phone service every month. Don’t sign contracts. Minimize any potential interaction with corps.
Outside of farming your own food on owned land, (never mind property taxes) how exactly could someone live without buying shit? “Stop buying things” is not a option for most people in most places of the world.
Dont get me wrong, it sucks and im down for the revolute but right now, no.
“Stop buying things” is really just saying “buy fewer things.”
- Do you need it?
- Do you have something already that works in it’s place?
- Can you buy it used?
- Can it be repaired?
If the answer to those is “no”, then go ahead and buy what you need. Exhaust the no-buying options first. Good advice even outside the enshittification conversation.
Sure wish Americans would do something about this so the rest of the world doesn’t have to suffer.
Let’s not pretend the rest of the world is so much better. I’ll concede the US is winning the race to the bottom. This is the winning Trump was talking about.

The stock market is both. No …?
It’s a rigged game, so fraud
Depends on who you are.
Broke-ass everyday American? Gambling.
Rich-ass spoiled-brat insider-knowledge-having-dick multi-millionaire? Fraud.
It’s literally the bad future from BttF2
Complete with Trump-as-Biff-as-Trump.
Biff wasn’t a pedophile who murdered kids though.
… that we know of.
He was literally ready to murder Marty
Everything is a scam, and NOTHING works anymore. Customer Service is often “I’m Lily, your AI customer service chatbot. I’m still learning, so please be patient with me. What can I help you with today?”
Bitch, I got a problem with your product/service, and I need help. I don’t want to be your volunteer learning experience, I want you to solve my problem, not teach you how to be human.
Reminds me of that one time I had to have blood drawn and my phlebotomist was a phlebotomist in training. I’ve never seen my blood splurt like that
I had an experience like that donating blood once. Except the trainee was cute and followed me outside after I was done to apologize and ask if I wanted to get lunch sometime.
I think I got a better deal than you, now that I think about it.
Like 10 minutes ago I was trying to figure out the cost of adding a hotspot to my mobile plan, but I couldn’t find a strsightfiward answer. They ended up sending me to their chatbot who took me round in circles before eventually giving in. Why did that have to be so frustrating? Why did it need ai?
(My kid has poor WiFi in his dorm and his college doesn’t seem to be able to help)
WDYM by poor WiFi
Latency 300-1200 ms, bandwidth topping out at 12mbs. But the thing is he’s captain of one of the e-sports teams and on the board of the larger e-sports organization. How are you supposed to compete with latency like that?
He’s on the top floor of his dorm so I don’t know if that’s part of it. Also a good view of the skyline if I have to pay for a hotspot. He was getting much better performance using his phones hotspot than the college WiFi, but ran into the cap pretty quickly
So far IT support keeps wanting to futz with settings on his pc, but he was getting reasonably close to gigabit WiFi with single digit latency at my house, and use WiFi to connect to his phones hotspot with decent performance. He’s able to connect in his dorm and he has settings that gave outstanding network here so I find it hard to believe the issue is his pc
I’ve ranted about this for years. I’ve had a bad streak of luck the past 8 years, and everything I’ve tried to do to improve my situation has just become an increasingly horrible cesspool of predatory horseshit. Every computer application, service, university, and social program is so much worse than they were 10-15 years ago, and I hate it.
“Enshittification” better be the word of the year.
Equally fitting if the word of the year is “Clauding™: to leverage Anthropic™ intelligence tooling to simplify your life and maximize you potential. Brought to you by Anthropic™! Get your free trial today!”
And now we have ten years of fucked up young adults who think this is how it’s always been.
Innovation these days is just “what if I was able to somehow insert myself into this already functioning service and skim some money off it”.
Corporations don’t invent new products or improve existing ones anymore. The R&D needed costs too much along with creating the tooling to manufacture and distribute products. Usually quite the opposite, they look how to cheapen products’ construction and durability while charging more to increase the profit margin.
It’s far easier to make a product a subscription, or desirable features a subscription, sell commonly needed add-ons separately at ridiculously inflated costs (like printer ink or power tool batteries) or as you said, insert middle-men to extract fees for the convenience of their existing between the customer and the desired product.
And now AI is inserting itself in the insertion!
Just ask AI to make your Door Dash order for your Pizza delivery driver.
Using your Account® Account™ (one Account™ for all your accounts) in the App® App™ (one App™ for all your apps)!
There’s a cute little novel about that: “Automatic Noodle.” Except in that one, a bunch of sentient robots can do Biang Biang better than an algorithm.
I believe the term is “rent seeking behavior”.











