The Gradual and Prolonged Collapse of Quality: Enshittificafion and You

One of my hobbies as a semi-intelligent fool is contemplating the concept of entropy. For those of you who didn't study physics (and can sleep well at night), entropy is what scientists use to quantify the tendency in any system to pull toward chaos or randomness. I’m not interested in this form of the understanding of entropy - no, what I am obsessed with is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law, and I’m not sure who signed it into power, states essentially that entropy can only increase or remain the same in a given reversible process. No matter how efficient a process is the system’s entropy, the tendency to pull toward disorder, remains either the same or increases. It never decreases, never becomes zero, implying that over time, there will be less energy. 

Physicists who are no doubt a blast at parties have used this implication of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to posit a possible “heat death” of the universe, whereby the energy of the system of existence is too spread out to achieve any sort of “work.” All of the heat that exists spreads out so evenly throughout the universe that nothing can be done again. The universe simply freezes over, so to speak.

I hear pictures help people understand hard concepts, so when one of you gets this, explain it to me.

Cool, now that we’re all freaking out about that, let’s move on to the topic at hand: Have you guys noticed that everything is seemingly getting just a little bit worse over time? Sure you have. At least, perhaps if you’re terminally online or scroll a couple of TikToks too many, you’ll find people singing about how nobody’s trying to fix anything. You may have even come across the term “enshittification” on your world web travels. 

Not too unlike entropy quantifying a system’s tendency to pull toward disorder, I think we should come up with a term for a very similar phenomenon happening in our social systems - the society we live in every day. Hopefully I find this proposed term in the writing of this article (spoilers, I don’t), but for now, let’s just say it how it is: the system of unregulated capitalism that we’re currently living in is demonstrating a consistent and constant pull toward the worsening of everything around it for the sake of a larger short term gain that only benefits the ultra wealthy. 

The Fall of the House of U.S.her 

So, not to get too political here or anything, but the decline of the United States of America is a topic that I think is going to be studied for a long, long time. And that’s saying something because a weird minority of people can’t even see the decline happening right in front of them (this too should also be studied, probably). 

But before we get to present day shenanigans like the mass firing of federal employees who run vital programs that keep U.S. citizens fed, safe, and not-deported, let’s turn the clock back a bit to the time of a fledgling nation that had yet to be ravaged by savage, greedy capitalists. And I’ll add a disclaimer here that I am not by any stretch of the imagination an historian, so, there may be errors in this point I’m trying to make. 

The year was 1890, wait, that seems…kind of…early? Oh, so capitalists have been ravaging the nation for a long, long time. Okay then, well in 1890 the Sherman Antitrust act passed both houses of congress and was signed into law by President Benjamin Harris back when we didn’t really feel the need to keep track of every little law and action a president did, since well, there was no publicity back then. The law aimed to protect consumers by getting rid of the practice of price fixing by way of being the only game in town so to speak and put into place processes (imperfect as they are, affected by entropy even then) to break up so called monopolies that aimed to strong arm the market with outrageous prices due to there being no competition. 

You see, dear would be reader, the U.S. economy was deemed to be a “free market” where competitors across shared industries would compete with one another either by creating better and better products or coming up with ways to entice consumers to their product over their competitor’s. Competition would drive prices down, you see! 

Well, one John D. Rockefeller (and I’m not being silly here, we’re actually talking about John) figured out that if there were no competition, prices wouldn’t necessarily have to be driven down. They could do the opposite, actually. And they could do the opposite for a really long, long time, potentially. And so a campaign of bribery, violence, and economical warfare began under the name of U.S. Standard Oil, the first recorded monopoly on U.S. soil. 

A real picture of John Rockefeller

A funny thing about the first U.S. monopoly is that it and many other domestic monopolies actually formed after the passing of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Huh, what odd timing. Anyway, U.S. Standard Oil actually benefited the oil industry through its cruel, barbaric ways, if it can be believed. Before the cannibalization of most of the nation’s fledgling oil tycoons, environmental damage through the dumping of waste byproducts and waste water was rampant. U.S. Standard Oil found a way to monetize the byproducts through the creation of oil based home products like Vaseline and Baby’s First Oil Rig (the second one is made up, sorry). 

In fact, U.S. Standard Oil gave seemingly a lot back to the nation at large, creating numerous infrastructure improvements across the nation to perfect its oil distribution network which created thousands of jobs in the process. I mean, the oil baron was still an oil baron, but there has to be a reason that 30 Rockefeller Plaza is such an iconic mainstay of the New York skyline. Traditions like the large Christmas Tree and the ice skating rink during the winter certainly helped and Rockefeller wasn’t the only millionaire giving back. Carnegie Hall comes to mind, funded and constructed on the behest of Andrew Carnegie, a steel magnate and founder of U.S. Steel Corporation (there weren’t a lot of names back then, so you just called your company the product you sold, apparently?). 

Point is, these monopolies run by tyrants who employed terrible practices to ensure a lack of competition, thus maximizing their gains, used to give back to society at large. They funded the arts. Erected concert venues where the greatest musicians of the world came to play. They created infrastructure that would be used by hundreds of dozens of Americans. This idea was put forth by the Carnegie Hall guy (relax, I know his name is Andrew) who argued that excess wealth should be put to the betterment of society in his work “The Gospel of Wealth.”

This theater wrote that book.

I’m not defending their practices or the means by which they funded all of these things, but the point is, they did them. Maybe as a way of paying off the public at large from thinking what they were doing was underhanded. Maybe as a way of paying off government officials from employing the use of that Sherman Antitrust Act we keep hearing about. Sure, their motives might have been far, far, far from pure, but at least there was something. 

Nowadays, our millionaires and billionaires only seem to give money to charities toward the end of their lives, which is fine I suppose, but what happened to the societal pressure to be seen as some sort of benevolent force of unfettered wealth? Where are the sponsors for the arts, the champions of infrastructure, and why does it seem like every millionaire is trying to get the basic necessities of their industry subsidized by the government when they already have so, so much money?

A fundamental shift in the mindset of your average millionaire seems to have taken place somewhere between the dissolution of U.S. Standard Oil and the explosion of Silicon Valley. Where the Renaissance was spurred on by the patronage of the Medici family in Italy and the sparse amount of public works we got later in the Rockefeller and Carnegie era, a draconian (and I do mean like a dragon) hunger has taken place in the heart of the obscenely wealthy today. This hunger seems to possess two primary directives: hoard and increase. 

Neither of which actually improves anything other than the number in a bank account. 

Trickle Down Tendencies 

The absolutely fun phenomenon of humans that starts when we’re all just infants is that we like to copy each other. We see someone do something we want to do and we do it too. Why not? I mean, the entire reason this blog exists is because a fellow improv comedian I’ve met on a few occasions started his own blog and started writing about Donkey Kong sequels, so like, I’m not innocent either. 

Usually in infants, though, we have parents to steer us away from behaviours that should not be copied. Bad influences we call them, and we strive to teach our child that rocks aren’t for eating or throwing, but for collecting, polishing, and storing in a nice display case that we show our friends when they come over before they stop coming over (no one wants to look at your rocks). The problem with infants, though, is they stop being infants. Children, and science is still unsure why, grow up into adults and adults, and scientists are also unsure why, do not tend to listen to other adults. I mean, like, the police can dissuade you from stealing by their sheer existence, I guess, and like society is supposedly supposed to guide us from doing bad influency things and all, but the problem is there’s no real laws against being the shittiest capitalist to ever capital in hopes you too can be like the Big Boys. 

Hence, a lot of copycats trying to out-shit each other and a prolific abundance of copycats making less than quality products at premium prices. A service that launches for free with really good features soon turns into a paid only service that barely offers the bare minimum for an untenable monthly subscription fee. One only need to say the ill-begotten sentence “I think I want to start a podcast” to receive hundreds of VoIP recording services, each charging $19.99 a month for the most basic of service packages that allows you to 1. Record Over the Internet, 2. Download Your Recor–WAIT, WE CAN EDIT YOUR PODCAST WITH AI! 

As a seasoned idiot podcaster for the past 8+ years, I have navigated a number of these services and sadly, it’s the same story each time. Debut for free to establish a user base, then turn on the monetization switch and watch your user base plummet off the face of the earth because WHY ARE YOU CHARGING ME TO RECORD A CALL OVER THE INTERNET? 

This has led my podcast (www.zerocredits.net) to go underground and use the very gracious people over at Discord’s voice chat with an open source bot that simply just records the call for free. Until Discord starts charging for long voice calls and loses their user base overnight, that is. 

The problem with this Money, Please mentality is that no one following it seemingly wants to follow the long-term strategy goals of making a good product and support it over a long product life cycle to create loyal customers. Instead, it’s slap together a decent product and slowly strip features out of it overtime to keep scraping and squeezing as much money as possible out of the initial investment without infusing any more cash. 

Pictured: Capitalism

This phenomenon was first thoroughly documented in the software as a service industry (SaaS if you’re sassy) by Canadian-British blogger and anti-monopolist Cory Doctorow as “enshittification.” Here’s a link to a podcast with the man himself explaining way more about the thinking behind it and its detremets. 

Before it hit the software industry, however, enshittification hit a much different industry, one much closer to home: the grocery store. Going by another name but in essence being much the same thing, I present to you Shrinkflation! Pioneered, possibly, by one of my favorite websites MousePrint.org, shrinkflation describes a practice by food service companies who shrink the size of internal packaging while charging the same amount of money - your money literally buys less product due to changes in packaging. 

These practices, of course, are nothing new - companies and corporations are always scheming ways to shrink overhead and cut costs to achieve short term gains that reward shareholders with more instantaneous gratification than prolonged rewards - but it’s becoming more and more obvious that we need to be prepared for a reality where everything is broken, our money doesn’t go as far, and presumably someone out there is amassing all that stolen wealth. 

Cyberpunk 2027

One of the key aspects of the genre of Cyberpunk put forth by movies like Blade Runner and books like Neuromancer are the sprawling megatropolis-es where these stories take place. These mega-cities are dingy, run-down, expansive, and seemingly all-encompassing; they are as much a force in the narrative as any of the characters due to their ever present and oppressive nature. 

These cities are symbols for rampant, unchecked capitalism that thirsts only to expand, to grow, to make the line go up and achieve another year of record revenue. That is accomplished by building new things to promote more investors and creating more products so that more people spend more of their money with your branding. Let’s face it, fixing up something that is old and broken is only sexy if it’s on HGTV. So let’s keep building new skyscrapers. New hotels. New day spas and luxury resorts. Let’s keep building all these new things and maintain none of them so that they all slowly break down and wear away over time. 

The spiraling cityscapes of this genre do not happen by accident or chance. It’s all purposefully designed. The wealthy take care of their own - their offices are spotless, pristine, lording over the common filth of the streets below because what obligation does those with means have to take care of those who do not? There is no obligation in these futuristic science fiction settings and it’s becoming very apparent that certain individuals are watching these movies and reading these books and learning the wrong lessons. 

The thing about a capitalist system is that no matter how it tries, if unregulated, it will pull more and more money out of the process and set it aside for hoarding. The more money it siphons out of the system, the less money there is to go around for the average day working person. Our buck will stop shorter and shorter and the ever widening gap between the ultra-wealthy will only deepen into an impassable crevasse.

This is the true heat death of the country of America. With the passing of one of the dumbest named bills in U.S. History, our government as all but enabled the greatest siphon of American wealth to the ultra-rich we’ve ever seen, speeding along the heat death of the country. When the money is too spread out to be spent, the system will collapse. The ultra rich will survive through the sheer force of their means, but the average person will have little option but to perish, since the safety nets of our social programs have been all but cut to ribbons completely. 

Unregulated capitalism kills. It’s also the reason why everything is just a little bit worse now. And why I lay up at night, thinking about entropy.