Trump and American Enshittification
It's worse than you think.
You feel it and see it, everywhere, like an ambient, grating sensation that everything is worse, and getting more so by the day.
Your airline seat is narrower than it was ten years ago, and you paid extra for it. Your insurance company denied the claim through a system designed so that appealing it takes more days than the cancer patient has left without treatment. Your groceries come in a smaller box at a higher price. The brand you love was bought out by private equity and cheapened, a logo stuck on something made in a Chinese slave factory.
The app that used to just work now wants a subscription. The doctor gets four minutes. The customer service line is a machine that says it understands, then hangs up. The hotel charges a resort fee for a resort that doesn’t exist. Every institution you interact with has quietly discovered that it can degrade the thing it sells you and lose almost nothing, because where exactly are you going to go?
Cory Doctorow named this process enshittification, and the word went viral because everyone in America recognized their own life in it.
They’re good to you at first, because they need you. Worse once you’re stuck. Worse still once being stuck is the entire business model. He was describing tech platforms, but the idea scales to the whole country.
This piece is bleak, even for me, because thus far there’s no immmediate cure for enshittification.
