This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “Show Me the Incentive, I’ll Show You the Outcome,” about the process by which we ended up with an enshittogenic policy environment:
The whole point of the conservative project is to take away choices, and corral us into “preferences” that we disprefer. Eliminate no-fault divorce, suppress the vote, gerrymander the electoral map, cram a binding arbitration clause into every terms of service and a noncompete into every labor contract, buy up all your competitors, DRM-lock all the media, ban contraception and abortion, and you’ve got a world of partners you can’t divorce, politicians you can’t vote out, companies you can’t sue, jobs you can’t quit, services you can’t leave, books and music you can’t move, and pregnancies you can’t prevent or terminate.
And after you are relentlessly corralled into all these things you hate, you will be told that you don’t hate them after all – because you revealed your preferences for them.
Consumerism is a terrible way to make change at the best of times, and it gets less effective by the day, as authoritarianism and market consolidation shrink the world of possibilities to an endless Pepsi Challenge, where “choice” is narrowed to which flavor of sweetened battery acid you hate the least.
I don’t think that end users are to blame for enshittification.
