How The Friedman Doctrine Leads To The Enshittification Of All Things
from the it's-possible-to-make-things-better dept
We recently wrote about Cory Doctorow’s great article on how the “enshittification” of social media (mainly Facebook and Twitter) was helping to lower the “switching costs” for people to try something new. In something of a follow up-piece on his Pluralistic site, Doctorow explores the process through which basically all large companies eventually hit the “enshittification” stage, and it’s (1) super insightful (2) really useful to think about, and (3) fit with a bunch of other ideas I’ve been thinking about of late. The opening paragraph is one for the ages:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
He provides a lot more details about this process. In the beginning, companies need users and become successful by catering to their needs:
When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.
And, especially in the venture-backed world, this is often easier to do, because there isn’t much of a demand for profits (sometimes even for revenue), as the focus is on user growth. So, companies take all that VC cash and use it to subsidize things, and… that’s often really great for consumers.
But, eventually, these companies have to pay back the VCs in the form of selling out to a bigger company or, preferably, through a big IPO, taking the company public, giving it access to the public equity markets, and… then being at the whims of Wall Street. This is the part that Cory doesn’t mention in his piece, but which I’ve been thinking quite a lot about lately, and I do think is an important piece to the puzzle.
Once you go public, and you have that quarterly drumbeat from Wall Street where pretty much all that matters is revenue and profit growth. Indeed, it’s long forgotten now, but Jeff Bezos and Amazon actually were a rare company that kind of bucked that trend, and for a while at least, told Wall Street not to expect such things, as it was going to invest more and more deeply in serving its customers, and Wall Street punished Bezos for it. It’s long forgotten now, but Wall Street absolutely hated Amazon Prime, which locked in customer loyalty, but which they thought was a huge waste of money. The same was true of Amazon Web Services, which has become a huge revenue driver for the company.
But Wall Street is not visionary. Wall Street does not believe in long term strategy. It believes in hitting your short term ever increasing numbers every three months. Or it will punish you.
And this, quite frequently, leads to the process that Cory lays out in his enshittification gravity well. Because once you’ve gone public, even if you have executives who still want to focus on pleasing users and customers, eventually any public company is also going to have other executives, often with Wall Street experience, who talk about the importance of keeping Wall Street happy. They’ll often quote Milton Friedman’s dumbest idea: that the only fiduciary duty company executives have is to increase their profits for shareholders.
But one of the major problems with this that I’ve discussed for years is that even if you believe (ridiculously) that your only goal is to increase profits for shareholders, that leaves out one very important variable: over what time frame?
This goes back to something I wrote more than 15 years ago, talking about Craigslist. At the time, Craigslist was almost certainly the most successful company in the world in terms of profits per employee. It was making boatloads of cash with like a dozen employees. But the company’s CEO (who was not Craig, by the way) had mentioned that the company wasn’t focused on “maximizing revenue.” After all, most of Craigslist is actually free. There are only a few categories that charge, and they tend to be the most commercial ones (job postings). And this resulted in some arguing that the company lacked a capitalist instinct, and somehow this was horrible.
But, as I wrote at the time, this left out the variable of time. Because maximizing revenue in the short term (i.e., in the 3 month window that Wall Street requires) often means sacrificing long term sustainability and long term profits. That’s because if you’re only looking at the next quarter (or, perhaps, the next two to four quarters if we’re being generous) then you’re going to be tempted to squeeze more of the value out of your customers, to “maximize revenue” or “maximize profits for shareholders.”
In Cory’s formulation, then, this takes us to stage two of the enshittification process: abusing your users to make things better for your business customers. That’s because “Wall Street” and the whole “fiduciary duty to your shareholders” argues that if you’re not squeezing your customers for more value — or more “average revenue per user” (ARPU) — then you’re somehow not living up to your fiduciary duty. But that ignores that doing so often sucks for your customers, and it opens a window for them to look elsewhere and go there. If that’s a realistic option, of course.
Of course, many companies hang on through this stage, partly through inertia, but also frequently through the lack of as comprehensive a competitive ecosystem. And, eventually, they’ve reached a kind of limit in how much they’ve abused their users to please their business customers which, in turn, allows them to please Wall Street and its short-term focus.
So that brings us to Cory’s stage three of the enshittification. In which they start seeking to capture all of the value.
For years, Tim O’Reilly has (correctly) argued that good companies should “create more value than they capture.” The idea here is pretty straightforward: if you have a surplus, and you share more of it with others (users and partners) that’s actually better for your long term viability, as there’s more and more of a reason for those users, partners, customers, etc. to keep doing business with you. Indeed, in that link above (from a decade ago), O’Reilly provides an example that could have come straight out of Cory’s enshittification essay:
“Consider Microsoft,” O’Reilly told MIT researcher Andrew McAfee during an interview at SXSWi, “whose vision of a computer on every desk and in every home changed the world of computing forever and created a rich ecosystem for developers. As Microsoft’s growth stalled, they gradually consumed more and more of the opportunity for them- selves, and innovators moved elsewhere, to the Internet.”
And this is what happens. At some point, after abusing your users to please your business goals, you hit some fairly natural limits.
But Wall Street and the Friedman doctrine never stop screaming for more. You must “maximize” your profits for shareholders in that short term window, even if it means you’re going to destroy your shareholders in the long term. And thus, you see any excess value as “money left on the table,” or money that you need to take.
The legacy copyright industry is the classic example of this. We’ve provided plenty of examples over they years, but back when the record labels were struggling to figure out how to adapt to the internet, every few years some new solution came along, like music-based video games (e.g., Guitar Hero), and they’d be crazy successful, and make everyone lots of money… and then the old record label execs would come in and scream about how they should be getting all that money, eventually killing the golden goose that was suddenly giving them all this free money for doing nothing.
And, thus, that last leg of the enshittification curve tends to be when these legacy industries refuse to play nice with the wider ecosystem (often the ones enabling your overall business to grow) and seek to capture all the value for themselves, without realizing that this is how companies die.
Of course, one recent example of this is Elon killing off third party Twitter apps. While no one has officially admitted to it, basically everyone is saying it’s because those apps didn’t show ads to users, and Elon is so desperate for ad revenue, he figured he should kill off those apps to “force” users onto his enshittified apps instead.
But, of course, all it’s really doing is driving not just many of the Twitter power users away, but also shutting down the developers who were actually doing more to make Twitter even more useful. In trying to grab more of the pie, Elon is closing off the ability to grow the pie much bigger.
This is one of the reasons that both Cory and I keep talking about the importance of interoperability. It not only allows users to break out of silos where this is happening, but it helps combat the enshittification process. It forces companies to remain focused on providing value and surplus, to their users, rather than chasing Wall Street’s latest demands.
The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: when Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure.
But, as he notes, this strategy only works for so long:
An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away. The villagers of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks’ violent raids and pogroms for years, until they didn’t, and fled to Krakow, New York and Chicago…
There are ways around this, but it’s not easy. Cory and I push for interoperability (including adversarial interoperability) because we know in the long run it actually makes things better for users, and creates incentives for companies and services not to treat their users as an endless piggybank that can be abused at will. Cory frames it as a “freedom to exit.”
And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit – the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created
But, there’s more that can be done as well, and it should start with pushing back on the Friedman Doctrine of maximizing shareholder profits as the only fiduciary duty. We’ve seen some movement against that view with things like B corps., that allow companies to explicitly state that they have more stakeholders than shareholders and will act accordingly. Or experiments like the Long Term Stock Exchange, which (at the very least) try to offer an alternative for a company to be public, but not tied to quarterly reporting results.
All of these things matter, but I do think keeping the idea of time horizons in there matters as well. It’s one thing to say “maximize profits,” but any time you hear that you should ask “over what time frame.” Because a company can squeeze a ton of extra money in the short term in a way that guarantees to lessen the future prospects for the companies. That’s what happens in the enshittification process, and it really doesn’t need to be an inevitable law for all companies.
Filed Under: cory doctorow, enshittification, fiduciary duty, friedman doctrine, profit maximalization, short term thinking, value creation, wall street
Comments on “How The Friedman Doctrine Leads To The Enshittification Of All Things”
Enshittification
There’s a traditional tale that sums it up. Think killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. The actual story perfectly describes the process described in the articles.
Sounds like Disney
These same factors apply to non tech companies like Disney.
They know tens of thousands of people want to go to their theme parks every year. So what do they do? They cut back on freebies to please Wall Street and the stockholders.
How much does it really cost Disney to give people a free bus ride from the Orlando airport to Disney World? Too much, apparently, since they ended this service, even though it was considered a nice perk when paying $5,000 (or more) for a family vacation.
How much does it cost Disney to make Magic Bands? Maybe a few dollars in plastic and a RFID chip. Guests got a free band when they checked into a hotel and it was a nice souvenir to take home.
But now people have to pay for Magic Bands. Though most of the features of the Magic Bands have been moved to the Disney phone app.
But worse of all is the Fast Pass system. In the beginning, anyone could walk to a ride, scan their ticket, and get a free pass to come back later, without waiting in line.
Now Disney charges anywhere from $15 to $20, either per day or per ride (depending on the popularity of the ride or if the day is busy).
So what was once a nice freebie for the guests is yet another money making scheme.
And worst of all is that some rides, like the new Guardians of the Galaxy ride at Epcot ONLY use the new system. So you LITERALLY can not walk up to the ride and wait in line.
One of my friends was turned away when he walked up to the ride, and he posted his experience on Facebook and Twitter.
So congrats, Disney, your money making scheme is giving you an even worse reputation.
Re: Theme Parks aren't Disney's worst problem
Disney’s problems go far beyond the theme parks-ESPN hemorrhages cash due to cord-cutting and the ever more expensive rights packages for professional and big college sports. Hence the large and high-profile layoffs.
Additionally, Disney’s politics are turning off a segment of their customers, causing them to not attend Disney movies or buy their videos or subscribe to their streaming service.
Re: Re:
Sports in the US has been loosing interest for decades.
From poorer quality play to protests on field to safety changes that are great for players but, well…
Ever company with a large dependency on sports is in trouble right now.
Reality tv and competitions are out scoring sports
On a regular basis.
Not sure what they can do about it but it is a real issue.
What's the best middle ground here?
I think this post is right on top of the problem that twitter is having now, and will have in the future. And which most businesses have in the long run. So how do we balance the competing interests of quick reporting on business health, vs. the long term goals of being profitable? If we goto longer reporting intervals, then there’s more time for people to rob the corporation blind, etc. Or to just mis-manage it into the ground. But this drive (see Netflix and it’s anti-password sharing drive, endless tries to move me to monthly subscriptions for every damn thing I do, etc) for en-shitification does have some good at it’s core.
Running an IoT infrastructure is expensive. That’s why I loved when Tivo offered you the base unit and either a lifetime of the unit subscription, or a per-month subscription. I could afford the big up front payment, and do the math to show that it made the most sense for me. And I still love my Tivo. I just hate cable companies.
It’s a balancing act which I don’t have an answer for, but wish there was a sane middle ground which didn’t involve ripping off consumers or treating us like shit, but also let companies make a profit. Just maybe not every damn last bit of profit.
Re:
Hey, reporting is fine. The expectation on large growth (or else) every quarter, and regardless of what is happening in the rest of reality, i might add, is the problem.
Re: Re:
Google Cloud only grew 33% this year. Investors feel this is an insulting level of growth and demanded at least 100% growth despite the cloud market being an estimated 90% saturated.
Ya I am not quite sure this short term mindset I see in financial reporting makes sense.
Re: the FIRM ground
The simplest ideas are:
Re:
The best middle ground is to ditch Friedmanism. It’s an absolute menace that has enshrined a race to the bottom. It has eroded workers rights, civil liberties, devalued workers, made the employer class boastful among friends but hostile to the very workers who make them a profit.
I’ve yet to hear a valid argument for keeping Friedmanism alive and well considering all the harm its caused.
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Is it really sad that they resell user information for a profit? Oh yeah. Its an eavesdropping communication tool at its core. What are the benefits of any of those sites again?
They made eat, shit and die an emotion. Good for them.
One last stage in enshittification process. Government monopoly and subsidies. When you can’t make it, force everyone else to pay you for those services and disallow competition at all. See Comcast.
WotC
This is why people are responding so vehemently to what Wizards of the Coast is doing with the OGL. We’ve seen this sort of behavior before and it always goes the same way. Just look at what happened with TSR.
It’s incredibly ironic to me that the OGL was such a great idea to try to preempt this sort of thing, but when leadership decides to enter the death spiral they feel free to ignore all considerations other than immediate monitization.
Elmo jumped the enshittification timeline with Twitter, by saddling it with $12bn of debt. Twitter wasn’t making vast boatloads of profit as it was – and was operating fine with that.
But there’s not that many companies that can survive if you ask them to suddenly double their gross income. And that would only have been if everything else stayed the same, which of course it didn’t.
But Elmo had to put down an offer he couldn’t really afford, in order to have his way.
'Why would I wait three months to get $150 when I can get $100 now?!'
When presented with an offer of $100 right now or $50 a month for a year unless they absolutely need that $100 immediately the smart person will go for the $50 even if it means less money right out the gate, which makes the fact that the Wall Street mindset sees the first option as the best choice all sorts of absurd.
Making more money is good but only so long as it doesn’t hurt your ability to sustain that flow of money, as a smaller but sustainable flow of profits will beat out a larger but non-sustainable burst given enough time unless something goes really wrong.
Re:
It’s also known as the Marshmallow test and Wall Street is the absolute worst at it.
Re: Re:
I disagree. The whole point of the option market of Wall Street (which is a larger market than actual ownership transfers) is to connect short- and longterm business interests. And there are people good at it in the game. It’s essentially the basis for longterm investment funds.
Of course, a whole lot of middlemen slot themselves into the process, fleecing the business partners until the business becomes almost but not quite entirely inattractive. That doesn’t mean that Wall Street is bad at transactions but that Wall Street is good at bleeding its customers without outright killing the bulk of them.
Re: 'Why would I wait three months to get $150 when I can get $100 now?!'
the stock market logic appears to aim to get $100 now and $120 next month and $150 the month after that. $50 per month isn’t so good in comparison, is it?
oh, but that will kill the golden goose!
so what? we sell the golden goose to some loser before it dies, and buy stocks on the next golden goose
because while useds and customers can be captured and forced into loyalty, but stock market investors?
glad to see the legacy entertainment industries mentioned here. they are, in my opinion, a massive fly in the ointment. nothing matters to them but maximising profits, at any cost and the same with control. the problem then occurs that when these industries not only begin to lose profits because of losing customers, they actually begin to fail, massively, they blame everyone else for their failures. then along come some fucking money grabbing assholes in government, who get kickbacks left, right and centre for doing so, pledge to throw countless millions at the industries, in short, doing what they can because of getting kickbacks, subsidising a sinking ship! a ship that once started to sink, is beyond salvage! again, as far as i am concerned, fucking good job! they’ve stolen enough tax payers money, prevented all sorts of projects from being started or improving, all for personal greed. the sooner they get thrown into touch, the better!!
See also Web 3.0
I was thinking along these lines earlier today as I thought about how little we’re now hearing (thankfully) about web 3.0.
Web 1.0 and 2.0 offered clear value to the end users, access to the world’s information, and then freedom to create and share your own.
Web 3.0 only ever seemed like a grifting opportunity for the techbros, there doesn’t seem to be any real value proposition for the end users.
Straight to step three.
Regarding the villagers of Anatevka
To be fair, in the movie they were physically forced out of the country…
You make good points Mike:
But miss one option so many of today’s startups are using. Non-Wall Street public. StartEngine top of my mind. But many such services exist.
You can go public through your users.
Going public to wall street shows zero concern for the user base.
Selling the company to your users shows a company that cares.
I welcome you to look through StartEngine and related services to see how many times companies did this and didn’t die. Didn’t shrink. Made loads more money.
And didn’t sell out!
Such services have existed as a viable option since the 1960s!
Stakeholders
It’s strange to experience something (i.e., Amazon shopping experience today) and then read about it. I have been reading about this stuff for decades and can’t say much has changed for the better. I do like the idea of B-Corp. Four items:
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/
https://fortune.com/longform/business-roundtable-ceos-corporations-purpose/
And now we see reddit follow Twitters example...
Reddit is shooting itself in the foot right now, the culmination of around a decade long enshitification process that started after they went corporate.
One glaring flaw with this analysis: Facebook isn’t dead. Twitter isn’t dead. There’s very little empirical evidence for this final stage. Enshitificated? Absolutely. Dead? No.
Solution to this issue of internet cartels
Modernized Craft Guilds as a solution to pervasive off-shoring.
My solution is provided at the end of this thesis as I find it firstly necessary to fully explain the problem of offshoring as not only an economic phenomenon as it has social and philosophical implications as well, so please bear with me even though it is quite long.The idea of the dignity of man giving strength & courage for the many challenges of the past few centuries is challenged by the individuals ultimate powerlessness and relative insignificance in the face of the masses in the overpopulated regions of the world being exploited by opportunistic parasites taking advantage of the situation thereby undermining the gains achieved during the enlightenment and the very concept that an individual has the inherant right to be treated with dignity and respect. The enlightenment taught man that he could trust his own reasoning and make sound judgements based upon what information he was able to aquire and simple well applied common sense. The general idea behind the enlightenment was that a man of sound mind needed neither revelation nor the authority of the church or other learned body (University etc…) to arrive at viable solutions to the problems presented to the individual in question. Indeed the catch phrase of the enlightenment was “dare to know”; in other words trust your ability to think for yourself and arrive at reasonably good conclusions and if not at first just keep on trying until you get it right. This became the starting point for true independant thought and enquiry leading ultimately to our modern complex industrialized/information
age society. However along with that complexity has gone the handing over of authority intellectually speaking to the current high priests of our modern world the Universities which now act as the ultimate arbiters as to who has the adequate credibility on almost every range of issue. Essentially we have arrived at a point by which a sort of group think on a range of issues exist and only those with certain credentials have a right to a say as to how to solve a given problem. The group think results from those having been through the system having been adequately conditioned to not only think but behave a certain way in order to get the rewards they seek ie: diplomas and thus social acceptance, automatic credibility regardles of the content of their comments and a reasonable socio-economic standarding in society. People who for whatever reason missed the boat or were not adept at conforming or worse the system shoe horned into programs they were ill suited for are effectively left adrift and this applies even to those who have succeeded academically but are stifled creatively speaking by the way our corporate society is structured. Those who are doing well within the current structure more likely than not assume that everything is as it should be and admire their status in the overall scheme of things and are most likely aloof regarding those who haven`t gotten their act together or who are just basically getting by. The problem facing western societies however is that the current existence of offshore labour on truly a massive scale is a relatively new phenomenom since the fall of the Berlin wall and China`s entry into the WTO. This has allowed those companies with good contacts overseas to crush their local rivals without the infrastructure and or the indifference to the implications of their decision to offshore. This of course has been mannah from heaven for corporate managers who have new markets to tap (although less lucrative than they had believed) but far more importantly the vast army of eager to please cheaper labour which doubles as a club to keep those who haven`t lost their jobs back home in line. Computerization has also modified the field of manufacturing out of all recognition making formerly difficult to acquire skills requiring good hand to eye coordination more easily reproducible by anyone able to navigate a keyboard thus the creative worker on the floor is undermined in this respect as well. It`s in this environment of managerial bliss that the creative individual is increasingly marginalized and his efforts muted. The Wal-Martization of the world means that corporations force inventors and artists to sign humiliating contracts resulting in them essentially handing over the rights to their creations for relatively little in return and without even a guarantee of long term employment and in turn offshoring the work to China etc..: the old social contract has definitely ceased to apply. I was once about to take a production job because of the need for the money even though I could have easily ran the entire facility but refused due to the terms of an employment contract presented to me just before starting at 6:30 in the morning. The contract entailed me signing over permanent ownership of any designs, patents, artwork, plays, books, films etc.. that I could create while being employed and thereafter on company time or my own and this for a lousey 12 $ per hour. I was barely awake but told him that I had contemplated taking this menial job only to make ends meet and definitely did not think of it as a career move as there was little I could learn from them and the reverse was most definitely true and told him to get ****ing lost and that I would be better off working at Mcdonalds. Unfortunately this is not an isolated case and worse the contract had a clause stipulating that I could lose my job at any time for whatever reason the owner felt reasonable so that in effect he could have complete lifetime rights to whatever creative thing I do for only employing me for several hours. There is also the homogenization of what is available as the most profitable items are spread over greater portions of the globe and even the urban landscape becomes filled with boxy cavernous out of scale retail outlets. In view of that rather bleak description is the marginalization of novelty which is viewed by these homogenizers as threatening unless it can be harnessed to their ends. The reason it is often viewed with trepidation is that it undermines their ability to anticipate events. However psychological experiments in the field of motivation and behaviour has shown that novelty is an inducement to action. The creative process embodies a tension that petty bureaucrats most definitely find threatening even if their long term survival depend upon it. People distinguishing themselves in artistic, scientific and business creation are typical of the seemingly contradictory themes of integration and diffusion, convergence and divergence, thesis and anti-thesis. Psychological studies of highly creative people has led to descriptions of this tension in terms of intellect and intuition, the conscious and unconscious, mental health and mental illness, conventional and unconventional, complexity and simplicity. Professor Bergson`s theory of creative evolution expresses one of the basic fundamentals of the creative process. Intellect according to him finds it`s purest application in the mastery of the hard sciences and in everyday form the effective use of common sense. Intuition is it`s opposite in that it is non-rational as it `knows` by feeling and arrives at conclusions in an empathic immediate manner rather than analytic detachment. Freud referred to three seperate states of mind that being the unconscious, pre-conscious and the conscious. The conscious being largely rational, the unconscious being basically irrational and the pre-conscious being where the wild and primitive thoughts of the sub-conscious exist in a kind of highly mobile way station to be either rejected or accepted and sent forward or upward to the conscious. The creative person is typically intelligent in the ordinary sense and functions reasonably well along those lines but he refuses to let his intellect rule, relying strongly on intuition and hunches as well and thus respects the dichotomy of the irrational in himself and others. If one accepts Freuds`above stated theory then we can see that the creative person is more open to the more unconventional and even primitive aspects of their own thought processes and how they relate to their environment. Therefore being in tune with the unconventional and following one`s intuition increases the probability for creativity to occur. The German chemist Kekule solved the vexing Benzene bonding problem when he dreamed of a series of snakes alternatingly biting each others tail in a circle. Upon awaking he realized it`s applicability to what in reality would be considered a hard science problem typically only solvable through empirical logical analysis but the problem appeared totally illogical. Kekule was open to his intuitive side and thus employed his illogical vision from his sub-conscious to create a logical solution to a real world problem. This was not a minor case as this was a major breakthrough for organic chemistry and the scientific and economic implications have been enormous. To allow a little space and time for irrationality the creative person is therefore able on occasion to transcend the limitations of the known and create something new to the world. Disorder, contradiction, imbalance and assymetry are often viewed by creative people as a challenge and by rejecting the tendancy by the majority of people to reject these thoughts prematurely they help improve society as a whole even if it means that they should be allowed free reign within reasonable limits so that they are not obligated to surrender their unique fundamental state of being. Societies can become more creative if certain criteria are met such as freedom of expression, a willingness to break with customs, a spirit of play and yet a fervent dedication to one`s work. Crusades of a social or technological type can spark great creativity in a given society and it may be advisable to enlist the publics`advice on how to best solve vexing large scale problems in the most cost effective manner for prize money. There is a great deal at stake as those societies which engage wholeheartedly in creative endeavours stand to be in the best position possible to deal with the plague of off-shoring. Now it may be more understandable that even intelligent and creative people can fall through the cracks in society and even if they are doing ok financially could still feel unfulfilled creatively.On the spectrum of economic and social constructs is fascism in the capitalist extreme and Stalinist type communism in the public sector extreme with the individual in the center. The black market and piracy have always existed and most likely always will to varying degrees depending upon circumstances. The basic assumption would be to place the individual at the capitalist end of the spectrum but my observations and history actually dictate otherwise. The individuals at the top of these enterprises may be doing well for themselves personally (Enron executives, Bernie Madoff etc…) but in reality most corporations are run as petty dictatorships so in reality are quite fascist in reality. The corporation of limited liability with shareholders expecting the best possible return on investment along with globalization obviously leads to corporations like Wal-Mart combing the globe using their arsenal of capital and highly efficient logistical management to run a large segment of the economy but systematically undermining the income potential and dignity of the small and medium sized businesspeople. Economists typically argue that everyone benefits from this system and it is only a matter of retraining those displaced workers. They also state it`s only a matter of finding niches to exploit the only problem being that if little countries throw all their effort into niches they could be in serious trouble if those niche markets collapse. All of this is beside the issue of the social implications of being told that a way of life for you has come to an abrupt and painfull ending and that you should look forward to the promising opportunities of fork lift driving or truck driving after having been a tool designer/die maker and ship repair designer/draftsman. To some people that would be soul deadening and I believe that it is more than half of those affected in the manufacturing sectors feel this way. Truck driving and being an import clerk or whatever may be usefull to society as a whole but it is less than thrilling to people wanting to take charge and make a dent in the Universe and can easily be interpreted as a sentence of hard labour for being out of step with the majority viewpoint of the society in which that person lives. It is particularly galling to me to see people I know of considerably less skill doing great as a result of having be doing essentially clerical jobs such as SAP database management which is something I could learn in a week and people who scraped through high school doing extremely well selling lighting fixtures made in China.
My proposed solution De-industrialization and a falling birthrate have resulted in a surplus of industrial and educational buildings to be available and are frequently owned by the state. My solution would be to provide these buildings to a new type of social construct called craft guilds that would have temporary non-profit status for a ten year period in order to permit them to aquire the equipment, machinery, educational liasons and infrastructure necessary to get started and off the ground. The ideal craft guild would be an assemblage of architects, engineers, artists and production technicians who would enter upon mutual contracts respecting their individual rights and not excessive in their demands. Patents, copyrights and designs would be owned by their creators with a 10 % royalty fee for the first invention etc…reverting to the guild enabling the continuity of the guild`s existence. Guild types can cover the entire spectrum of creative activities but the special status of the guild would be dependant upon their being engaged in creating goods and services not readily available and not simply being job shops which in reality would have them compete with existing companies and be disruptive as a result. It should also be an objective of the guilds to disavow any government assistance whatsoever except for the building and renovation assistance of it and donations if possible and the tax benefits to society for donations of capital and machinery etc…that would be available from the ten year tax free status. I believe these guilds can be operated within the current capitalist system as another type of entity just like the corporation as a creation by government decree but of course with different objectives and methods of achieving their goals. Guilds can offer society the benefits of invention and creative production in order to combat the flood of cheap imports unethically produced by having limited production capabilities as part of the guilds`structure. Marketing can be carried out via the guilds` direct internet marketing over Craigs list, Kijiji and Ebay in order to bypass the Wal-Mart phenomenom. This would be a closed loop between creator and the end consumer thus guaranteeing the integrity of the design and manufacturing process. A seal of the guilds`approval along with details as to how the product or service was created/mfd. could be given giving the consumer that cares the peace of mind that he/she is part of the solution and not part of the problem. All members of the potential guilds should be able to have had a proven track record of creativity without any financial assistance completely independant of any institution so as to demonstrate the ability to think outside the box and survive with limited or even no resources as anything is possible with money but things get far more difficult without it. This is about creativity and not getting on a gravy train, it`s tough love and sink or swim. The original craft guilds didn`t have a steady stream of government handouts to rely on they managed to bring about some pretty crafty innovations such as the Chartres cathedral and the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, London Bridge, the Gutenberg press and the Sistene chapel etc…. The impact of creativity should not be underestimated as it has taken a single mother scraping by in England to being a powerfull billionaire. How many other J.K. Rowlings have yet to have their creations see the light of day because of narrow corporate interpretation of what society would be interested in which in reality can be totally off the mark as it is more often than not plays to the lowest common denominator. I believe modernized craft guilds can be a medium by which society can be enriched and the rights of the creative better promoted and protected. This way the current prevalence of societies begging and bribing corporations to invent things and employ people in the western world when in reality they are merely re-inventing the wheel and buying off the shelf items instead of `researching` and then offshore the production to the PRC or wherever as soon as no-one is looking can be remedied to a certain extent.
Thanking in advance for your consideration.Robert Hennecke.
Is enshitification quantifiable though
Can we measure how shitty things become? Is there a way to track over time how ‘features’ or ‘changes’ in our daily used online platforms and social media make our experience worse for us and better for shareholders? I am trying to come up with a site to do exactly that.