We’re living in the #enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions
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Competition has been circling the drain for 40 years, as the “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust, hatched by Reagan’s court sorcerers at the University of Chicago School of Economics, took hold. This theory insists that monopolies are evidence of “efficiency” - if everyone shops at one store, that’s evidence that it’s the best store, not evidence that they’re cheating.
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For 40 years, we’ve allowed companies to violate antitrust law by merging with major competitors, acquiring fledgling rivals, and using investor cash to sell below cost so that no one else can enter the market. This has produced the inbred industrial hulks of today, with five or fewer firms dominating everything from eyeglasses to banking, sea freight to professional wrestling:
https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers
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The endless and continuous weakening of competition has emboldened corporate enshittifiers, who operate on the logic of Lily Tomlin in her role as an AT&T spokeswoman: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company”:
https://vimeo.com/355556831
But the drawdown of competition has also enabled regulatory capture, by converting cutthroat adversaries to kissing cousins.
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These companies have convinced their regulators not to enforce privacy, consumer protection or labor laws, provided that the gross violations of these laws are accomplished via apps.
This is where #TechExceptionalism is warranted: while the bosses that run these companies aren’t any nobler - or more wicked - than the Robber Barons of yore, they are equipped with a digital back-end for their businesses that let them change the rules of the game from moment to moment.
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Think of labor law: as #VeenaDubal writes, gig-work companies practice #AlgorithmicWageDiscrimination, turning your paycheck into a slot machine that pays out more when you are more selective about which jobs you take, and which then docks your pay by tiny increments as you become less discriminating about answering the app’s call:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
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This is a plain violation of labor law, but the fiction that gig workers are contractors, combined with the opacity and speed of the wage discrimination back-end, lets the companies get away with it.
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But the monsters who hatched this scam are no worse than their forebears, nor are they any smarter. Any black-hearted coal-boss memorialized in a Tennessee Ernie Ford song would have gladly practiced algorithmic wage discrimination - but there just weren’t enough green-eyeshade accountants in the back office to change the payout from second to second.
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I call this “#twiddling” - turning the knobs to continuously adjust the business logic that the firm operates on:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Twiddling is everywhere, and it is only possible because “it’s not a crime if we use an app” has been accepted by (captured) regulators. Think of Amazon’s #PricingParadox, where deceptive search results - which Amazon makes $38b/year on - allow the company to offer lower prices, but charge higher ones:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens
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The first constraint on enshittification is competition - the fear that you’ll lose money when a disgusted customer take their business elsewhere. The second constraint is regulation - the fear that a regulator’s punishment will eat up all the expected gains from an enshittificatory move, or even exceed those gains, leading to a net loss.
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