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Everything is Shit: Tracking the Great Enshittening


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6 hours ago, immamac said:

That's not what it said. You should read it. 

If you're not already, you should check out his podcast Better Offline - they did a great discussion on the trend of empty suits taking control of engineering teams and directing them to build bullshit solely for investors at the cost of their customers experience 

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On 7/2/2024 at 11:02 PM, immamac said:

The Shareholder Supremacy (wheresyoured.at) This edition is a 41 minute estimated read. It's so fucking good, I feel like I'm not a crazy person when I read this. 

On a plane, just read this entire article.  It is a FANTASTIC piece.  I encourage everyone following this thread to read it.  I snipped a few gems from it, I'll just paste them below instead of cramming them into a quote box:

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The answer is simple: the customer, and by extension the service provided to the customer, is no longer the primary concern of a company. It's all about shareholder value, and while this may seem a little obvious, it requires a little bit of a history lesson to really explain how profoundly damaging shareholder supremacy is. 

These stories explain the often-paradoxical motivations of modern capitalism, where those who make short-term decisions (that invariably result in long-term pain and, in many cases, decline) are rewarded, whereas those who build sustainable businesses that actually innovate, and don’t treat their customers and employees like dirt, are ignored — if not actively maligned. 

These people — management consultants, MBAs and Product Managers — are not creators of anything other than financial occultism, a dark art where the financial value of a company is often separated from what it does or whether it’s good at it. They are parasites. 

Sundar Pichai doesn’t use Google, and Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t use Instagram, Facebook or Threads — at least not like an actual user does, anyway, much like how David Zaslav doesn’t watch or care about TV shows and movies. Their deep-seated nihilism means that they aren’t users, or creators, or even active participants in any part of society. They are there to move the stuff around so that they can keep numbers going up.

The business media — and society at large — elevates executives like Zuckerberg and Pichai as they demolish their products and lay off thousands of people because the terms of “success” are no longer about making money by providing a good service. The markets don’t reward steady growth, nor do they punish executives for the quality of their product, because analysts and investors aren’t concerned with the product, just the financial output.

They don’t care that the output is mediocre, that the product is unprofitable, that there is a quickly-approaching wall that generative AI can’t leap over as it runs out of training data, or that the transformer-based architecture of Large Language Models has hard limitations that are impossible to overcome. This is a shiny new object they can wave at investors that already don’t know what any of this stuff means, one that lets them dream of a world without labor.

At some point, things have to collapse. I am not saying that every major tech company goes belly-up, but I believe the generative AI boom is the force that creates a reckoning in this industry.  It’s almost a little too on the nose — a tool that only seems revolutionary to people that haven’t written, or coded, or drawn, or sang, or created anything in years. 

And big tech was desperate for something new to follow, something new to do with themselves that would sustain the Valley’s threadbare facade as a crucible of innovation and progress, rather than doing the hard work to actually research and develop important technology that people would like and pay for. Sam Altman gave them something to do, and he packaged it in a way that told them how to think about it — and, of course, lie about it.

I don't know how you change things, other than loudly saying what I see in front of my eyes and how it makes me feel, and wanting others to, at the very least, have more clarity into the things that are being done to them, and the ways in which others have twisted the system to make more money than anyone's ever had transforming companies into nihilistic engines for growth, anti-companies that create value by reducing what they contribute to the world. 

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I  bolded the one paragraph because that perfectly captures our broken system.  And I mean our entire system.  Our economic system, our political system, our entire social system.  WE have made gods of this horrific, destructive model.  To stop it....WE simply need to decide to stop.

Why is a man who says "My business makes a product, we sell plenty of them.  I will make plenty of money doing that.  I will keep making that money, because it's a good product that people want, sold at a fair price.  And my business will employ a lot of people, and pay them well -- enough to have a good and decent life.  When I see them and their families succeed and thrive, I am happy because I have helped them make that success.  We all have enough.  We sell a product that we are proud of.  And our customers are better off for it".....fucking vilified as a traitor to capitalism?

How on earth is it good and sane for us to treat human beings as purely OPEX instead of CAPEX?  How is that good for any of us?  It's a circle of "fuck you-ism" that always, always comes back on everyone but the handful of people at the very, very top (and eventually, it comes for them, too....because the other people at the top are predatory as shit).

Where we are is completely broken.  It will only change when we decide to make a broad and deep change to who we are, and how we think about the world.  And that will not happen until a brutal and painful collapse.  

On the bright side, we seem to be doing everything we can - socially, politically, and economically -- to make that happen and right soon.  So.....yay.

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Speaking of enshittening, let me talk about healthcare for a second. For 30 years I have had what they call Sampter’s Triad - where otherwise healthy 30-year-olds suddenly develop horrible adult asthma, get sinus polyp growth and also develop an allergy to aspirin that causes anaphylaxis if any aspirin product is taken.

My sinuses are horrible, and I can’t sleep, resulting in breathing through my mouth, which makes my asthma worse.  Granted, people like Michael J. Fox want to trade with me, but it still sucks on a day-to-day basis.  They have now developed immunological treatments for my conditions, and there is a monthly shot that will literally clear my polyps, ease my asthma, and generally improve my quality of life.  It only cost $3850 a month.  A few years ago while I was still on my employers insurance, Blue Cross said I had to have several hospitalizations within a time period before they would give me the drug. If I wasn’t literally dying, then I could tough it out. Now I am on Medicare and a supplement - and it turns out I only have to pay $955 a month. I got my first shot, a week ago and already my sinuses are very much cleared and I have not had to use my inhaler. I feel much better. 

Because I get $3000 a month for Social Security I use that to pay for all things medical. Plus, I am working, which gives me the liberty to do that. Now imagine all the people in the country who have my exact same condition and cannot afford a grand a month for a shot.     I don’t know how people making less than six figures get through some of this crap. it’s total bullshit for healthcare to cost that much.

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10 minutes ago, Gatorubet said:

Speaking of enshittening, let me talk about healthcare for a second. For 30 years I have had what they call Sampter’s Triad - where otherwise healthy 30-year-olds suddenly develop horrible adult asthma, get sinus polyp growth and also develop an allergy to aspirin that causes anaphylaxis if any aspirin product is taken.

My sinuses are horrible, and I can’t sleep, resulting in breathing through my mouth, which makes my asthma worse.  Granted, people like Michael J. Fox want to trade with me, but it still sucks on a day-to-day basis.  They have now developed immunological treatments for my conditions, and there is a monthly shot that will literally clear my polyps, ease my asthma, and generally improve my quality of life.  It only cost $3850 a month.  A few years ago while I was still on my employers insurance, Blue Cross said I had to have several hospitalizations within a time period before they would give me the drug. If I wasn’t literally dying, then I could tough it out. Now I am on Medicare and a supplement - and it turns out I only have to pay $955 a month. I got my first shot, a week ago and already my sinuses are very much cleared and I have not had to use my inhaler. I feel much better. 

Because I get $3000 a month for Social Security I use that to pay for all things medical. Plus, I am working, which gives me the liberty to do that. Now imagine all the people in the country who have my exact same condition and cannot afford a grand a month for a shot.     I don’t know how people making less than six figures get through some of this crap. it’s total bullshit for healthcare to cost that much.

You are better off to them dead. 

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