Corporate capitalism.

Profit before people in literally every facet of modern western society.

Years of believing the adage that “we should just be happy to HAVE a job”, which ultimately gave carte blanche for companies to treat their employees like line items on a spreadsheet; something to be minimized as much as possible in order to squeak more pennies into a stock price.

Literally every bad thing today is the wholly expected endgame of 80s trickle-down economics.

Have you read Cory Doctorow’s book on enshitification? I think he focuses more on the Internet but might help answer your question.

Late stage capitalism is your answer, my friend.

Late stage capitalism. The ownership class has accelerated the widening gap ever more during the pandemic, out of simple greed. Control and wealth distribution systems, even governments are increasingly beholden to their wishes, and do nothing to help aside from lip service. The ecosystem dies of the same disease, endless greed and growth. Number go up is all that matters.

Capitalism is decaying

Two words:

Willful ignorance.

I don’t think that the world got worse so much as the brief period of extreme wealth in the west seems to be coming to an end.

Post-WW2 USA was an outlier, and the countries it funded with countless dollars to make them stay on side in the cold war were funded by that. Every economic power except for the US was destroyed by two world wars. China, an economic powerhouse for millenia, was reduced to a poor and powerless country decades behind the West. Large parts of the middle east, once the center of science and trade, were under European control.

For America, and to some extend America’s allies, the second half of the 20th century was unmaintainable (barring a third world war). The peak of this wealth and peace seems to have been around the late 80s and 90s.

The wealth collected by people wasn’t retained well, though. In a quest for ever bigger profits, regulations and taxes were abolished all over the place. Neoliberalism has become the standard in the west, no matter if you’re voting left wing or right wing. This started happening sixty or fifty years ago.

More and more, wealth is rising to the top and not trickling down. Back when corporate taxes were high and inflation rose less steeply than wages, things were only getting better. That all slowly disappeared.

The dot com bubble, combined with the economic impact of the twin towers attack, caused a minor crisis that was a warning for things to come. In 2008 the worldwide economy, all built on bubbles that had been building for decades, took a huge hit. Countries went bankrupt, pensions vaporised, and entire industries were put on hold for a while. Very few people were building houses for a few years, because suddenly mortgages were out of reach for a lot of people.

That in turn caused a spike in the (ever present) housing shortage. Some smart but unethical people with money saw that as an opportunity to invest, because where there’s a shortage, there are prices to be raised and profits to be made.

The truth is that the 2008 crisis never really went away. Countries all around the world were slowly recovering, but in many countries the impact of the 2008 collapse is still directly visible today.

Covid is the latest nail in the coffin. The economic system we have is built on global, continuous delivery of goods and services all around the world. Things are cheap because there are very few buffers and many industries are at risk of falling behind on demand the moment a single factory shuts down, because additional production capacity would drop the price and make additional capacity economically unviable.

Well, it turns out that if China, the country that produces most of the world’s everything, shuts down its docks for a few months, everything goes to shit. At first we didn’t notice because there was still stuff in the pipelines. But then things started becoming worse.

Around the world, people stopped being able to go to work. Some because of government mandates, some because of a lack thereof and the subsequent deaths of millions. Prices of just about everything started going up all at once.

To combat this, countries borrowed money, or printed money. Healthcare costs needed funding and people needed income. Stimulus packages and loans were thought up everywhere. That kept the people from starving because of a lack of economic fluidity, but it also caused inflation to rise. Luckily, Covid was soon dealt with, as vaccines helped people return to work while the virus evolved into a much less deadly variant. Inflation was high, but it was coming down.

Then Russia decided to fuck everything up. Russia had already started its war against Ukraine in 2014, but they went through rebels and separatists in a proxy war and then held a vote. Not great, but not impossible to overcome. However, Putin decided Crimea wasn’t enough and invaded the whole of Ukraine.

Every ex-Soviet country knew what was coming for them, and so did NATO. All around the world sanctions went up in an attempt to bleed dry Russian’s war chest and to push the cronies surrounding Putin to pressure him into letting go. These sanctions hurt Russia, but also the countries that put those sanctions up.

Fuel prices rose, especially in Europe. Sunflower oil, a common basic oil for cooking, is produced in basically two countries: Ukraine and Russia. Large parts of Africa and Asia imported their grain from Ukraine as well, which now could no longer leave the harbours. This caused global food prices to increase even more, while fuel prices rose as well. It didn’t help that many oil producing countries (basically all the big ones but the USA) decided to limit production to keep prices “steady”.

While all this is happening, people are demanding higher wages. In industries where the profit margins aren’t high (i.e. European supermarkets), those increased wages translate to higher prices. In other places there is more than enough buffer to dig into, but as everybody is raising prices, the cost of higher wages may as well be compensated with higher prices to keep a “healthy” profit.

A completely unrelated problem is healthcare costs. The USA is an outlier here, but many countries are suffering from a shortage of replacements as boomers and Gen X are retiring. The boomers were with too many to reasonably support the way they supported their parents, and the systems benefiting them need to be changed in order for pensions and healthcare to remain affordable. For countries lacking workforce to compensate for the burden of the elderly, there are two options: treat the elderly worse to save money, or supplement the workforce through immigration. Neither are very popular. This isn’t a problem everywhere, but it’s having a crushing effect on a few countries or even industries.

How bad things are, depend on where you live. The housing market is fucked up worldwide, but how much so depends on how high the housing shortage and housing costs are. These prices are driven by corporate greed, but also the aftermath of the 2008 crisis and the spikes in transport and resource cost for building materials during the covid pandemic.

Things aren’t universally bad, though. Sure, my parents had it better than me, but take a look at the difference between China in the 1950s and China now. India, too; the periodic famines that the Indian subcontinent has suffered for hundreds of years (yes, even before the British made things worse) seem to be mostly gone now. Electricity and education is producing opportunities for literally hundreds of millions. In a few decades, these Asian countries have gone from “backwater nobody pays attention to” to “economic powerhouse”. The same can be seen in parts of Africa.

Even within the west, things weren’t all that hunky-dory for everyone. Racism is still around everywhere, but it’s no longer codified in laws. Woman can vote now. In my country, companies were legally obligated to fire women when they married. Up till the 70s many women had to have their husband with them to consent to them opening a bank account. This had a lasting impact even to today, with women in their sixties or younger weren’t allowed to get any higher education, leaving them stuck in dead-end jobs today.

The perfect world, as the media depicts it, never existed. It was great for the in group, but only for a short while. We can cut down on the exorbitant profits modern economies let rise to the top, but we won’t ever bring things back to the way they were before. And for billions of people, that’s an amazing thing.

Lots of stuff involved. For one, globalization and mechanization are driving forces. The Wikipedia page for pretty much the official term enshittification has a link to another page describing another term “rent-seeking behavior” that means:

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society.

i.e. when something just takes takes takes and never gives, that describes the broken state.

Also in the late 70s, corporations were given enormous power and now they have more power than any individual human beings - even their CEOs exist as slaves to their whims, except to the extent that they also are shareholders in their stocks. Humans have to do things like breathe, eat, die, and pay their debts, but corporations have special legal exemptions and don’t have to do any of this. And this even without the extra special stuff done on top of the normal when they are deemed too big to fail - e.g. banks can smuggle money from genocidal terrorists and get away with it, but don’t try that at home unless you too are a corporation of at least a certain size, and can afford to bribe/threaten the life of your own personal judge!

And underlying it all is the dirty word politics, an ancient Greek word meaning “how (the process by which) we all agree”, or another definition is “who gets what, when, how”. Every time something happens, whether it be genocide or school shootings or even just allowing corporations to claim one thing on the internet while delivering the exact opposite of that (without consequences), it is this “politics” that decides the outcome - like WILL we support Ukraine (financially and/or otherwise) to defend itself from Russian aggression or WON’T we? And on that note, there is a fascinating series of videos on YouTube called “The Alt-Right Playbook”, which explains why conservatives like what has happened the last 10 years - e.g. not paying taxes is “smart” and Musk taking over Twitter is “his own business/matter”, and corporations having all the stuff while we merely working stiffs have none of it is very much not a byproduct but the literal point of the systems, which is very much working as designed. You may call it words like “inflation” and “price gouging”, but companies charge what the market can bear, so according to that philosophy, whatever you call it is a good thing, very much not something that government should be doing anything to stop, and in fact perhaps corporations should be given even more power on top of that.

Like everything else - e.g. physics, biology, chemistry, economics, etc. - you are not going to understand everything in less than let’s say a year, or possibly a decade, but you will get there if you really want to know. The short answer imho is that giant corporations now have more rights than mere human beings and thus normal folks are fast becoming obsolete. We will either be killed off (a large number anyway) and the rest absorbed into becoming slaves for them, the same as has happened many times throughout history. And we will be shocked, shocked I tell you, shocked, as if this entirely predictable outcome had never happened before and never would again. Basically they are putting in huge efforts to do these things, and very few people are bothering to lift a finger to try and stop it so… how is it not inevitable? About the only thing I see working against corporate enshittification is FOSS and piracy, each providing for free what corporations want you to pay for.

Capitalism seems to run in a cyclic manner. If you remember in the 80s we had movies like Wall Street and Other People’s Money, because I think things were at a similar point then to where they are now. But, through the 90s (and I joined the workforce in the mid 90s) I recall a more customer-centric view, and even some level of consideration for employees. This has gradually deteriorated starting in the new millennium.

The last 10 years I think has seen this accelerate such that the only consideration for a company is to the shareholders (public or private), customers are in the equation somewhere but way, way after providing value to shareholders via cost-cutting in any way possible. Employees are absolutely just a cost of doing business and if they could eliminate them too, they surely would.

The only hope I have is that I’ve seen this reverse before, so it CAN happen again. But what makes me place some doubt about this is headlines like the four richest people doubling their net-worth in an incredibly short period. The economy is a zero-sum game, if they doubled their worth other people lost everything, MANY people needed to lose everything to achieve that. Those people need to lose, and lose a lot to bring us back, and I can’t imagine they will let that happen.

Maybe things will improve, maybe there will be a revolution/uprising when it just gets too bad. Who knows?

it’s just how capitalism works. Read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher if you want to get a better idea of how things got here

Covid made things worse, but the fundamentals were bad.

We are in the middle of a massive tightening of the labor market as boomers retire and there aren’t enough young adults to fill the gap. This is causing major ripples in the market, with a very antagonistic relationship forming between capital trying to keep labor costs down and labor tired of the bullshit.

This is causing some mild inflation, so companies are jacking up prices since they have an excuse to. This increased inflation is making the time value of money cost more. So now you have companies that were losing money having to scramble to finally generate a profit. This is causing the enshittification of the Internet and the loss of jobs in the tech sector.

The worse economy is causing political problems as it is harder for politicians to justify their positions in power. This encourages conflict between nations and the justification to deny some people of social benefits to create an underclass to benefit voters.

I’m coming across this post after reading an article about how Netflix is bathing in money and now making their options worse for customers, how the most wheel of a Boeing 757 fell off, and a how a country has been so free of criticism for decades that they’re able to commit genocide for over 3 months.

I’m having a hard time seeing hope in our future. Every company operates solely to extract as much profit as humanly possible (and not as Artificialally Intelligently as possible) without considering for a single moment how a decision they make may effect their relationship with customers or the quality of their product. I know companies are in it to make money, but they used to at least correct decisions in the face of public outcry. (Hell Microsoft did an about face on Xbox One features in 2013 after public outcry)

But things seem different now. Since the pandemic and the overall regard for human life went up, companies almost feel vindictive and emboldened to do even more to fuck customers over. Its almost like they’re holding a grudge over consumers for considering anything in life over their spending habits from March 2020 - September 2021. After all, the biggest push to “return to normal” was to get the economy back on track. I’ll never forget some asshole on a fox news segment saying “We gotta return to normal people. Yes some people will die, but grandma would sacrifice herself for the economy.” That’s when I lost all hope of things getting better.

We’ve had the chance many times to change the way we act as a species and potentially make the world better, but somehow we always fail to do so. We’re just fucked.

Globalization. Exploiting developing countries, export jobs and environmental damage, hiding profits. Not so long corporations had to be careful not to shit where they eat. Now they can shit in Asia and eat comfortably in USA/Europe. Everyone lost on that.

Capitalist governments are pro-finance, not pro-people. Totalitarian gvmts (China etc) are pro-system, not pro-people. They’re just different ways of maintaining classes of people who control the power/finances.

There’s always been an uber-rich elite, all the way from the first tribal chieftain or Pharaoh or whatever until now and there’s always been a huge underclass of the rest of us. The first law of any hierarchy is to protect the people at the top.

What we see today (in Westernised countries) is the natural, logical progression of economics driven democracy. Economic theorists say wealthy people create wealth by purposefully distributing it via jobs etc but in reality they do everything possible to minimise the loss of what they see as their money by abusing labour laws, privatising everything, trying to kill unions, creating convoluted laws to protect their fortunes, avoiding taxes and hiking prices up to the point most of us are just about surviving with enough carrot to ignore or pretend we don’t see the stick.

And we’re willing participants in that system. We know this is happening but we’re dazzled by lotteries holding out the chance to join the rich, promises of work making us rich and a media which lionises the elite as some kind of fabulous aspirational status to the point we have people on social media faking a rich lifestyle for internet points.

The uber rich believe they’re better than us and our acquiescence with this system really means we agree with them.

Greed won.