it's been a while but i wrote some flamebait
"enshittification is what happens when a disney adult learns about captialism"
@tef g_d thank you, i'm so annoyed with how quickly it went "specific point when an unsustainable company tightens the screws" to "price go up"
@bonzoesc @tef as I understand it the term was coined to describe exactly the phenomenon in this article, the inherent startup death spiral, but the nature of the way it sounds has resulted in it almost immediately being used to mean “something got worse”. A neologism born on skis pointed downhill towards semantic drift
@bonzoesc @tef I do think its utility was in describing a particularly optimized form of hypercapitalist grift. Microsoft, apple, ford, general electric were all founded to capture value too, but they produced a bunch of useful stuff that wasn’t really there before. In the current era, Uber made a taxi dispatch app with slightly better usability than the ones that came before, that really anybody could have made with a small infusion of capital and then lied about it
@bonzoesc @tef All market actors in a ‘capitalist’ system are constantly under subtle pressure to increase margins, externalize costs, but there is nevertheless a substantial moral difference between, say, Netscape and FTX. Doctorow did describe a particularly interesting cultural inflection point where the pathology that everybody was pretending isn’t in some way inevitable became the blueprint that every new company was pursuing
