Jeff Sparrow
the relationship between capital and technology has never been simple. The profit motive traditionally stifles as many mousetraps as it nurtures them, even when the economy offered something like a level playing field…. the dominance of ruthless monopolies in almost every industry means that innovations rarely get used to their full capability… not in ways that actually help people… We’ve reached.. the faecal stage of capitalism, an era of general shittification. Artificial intelligence provides another example.
In a recent post for her Thesis Whisperer blog, Inger Mewburn described the evolution of social media as a process of “enshittification”. The term, borrowed from Cory Doctorow, perfectly captures the trajectory of the major platforms, all of which provide a significantly crappier experience than they did even a few years back.
As everyone knows, Elon Musk bought Twitter for a preposterous $44bn (seemingly to impress his rich-idiot buddies) and then set out destroying each and every feature its users actually liked. Since then, Reddit has cut off access to much-loved third-party apps, with its CEO Steve Huffman telling NBC that he saw in Musk’s efforts “an example for Reddit”…
After the truth-shower 