There’s only one thing I would alter in your statement. You said:

…and to focus on shareholder profits over making a good product.

I would say, "and to focus on shareholder profits over making a good product anything else, including life itself.

It’s more profitable for a health insurance company to deny someone’s claim than to pay for their healthcare in the US. The insurance company won’t care if that ultimately leads to the person’s death - they have to answer to their shareholders.

It’s more profitable for Nestlé or Google to siphon water from countries in the global South than it is to have sustainable practices that don’t exacerbate climate change. So what if that means that millions of people will die in the years to come? That’s their problem for being poor.

We need to bring about the kind of change that has politicians recognize that there is more to human life than a dollar amount, and that poverty is not a moral failing on the part of the individual. But until that happens, poverty is akin to a death sentence.

I wouls just add that it’s all about making profits and increasing them year per year, but always focusing on the short term. To the CEOs, shareholders and other directives, it doesn’t matter if the company goes bankrupt 10 years from now, as long as they suck in all the profits they can now.

Even if the company is very successful, with a very good product(s) and they could just go into easy-ride mode continuing to provide those products. They only want to make as much money as quickly as possible and once they get their hands on the company, the enshitification for the sake of quick profits ensues.

It boils down to companies only trading on their value and not paying a dividend. Without a dividend, a company has to grow to provide value to its shareholders - with a dividend a shareholder would profit simply from the company making money.

See also: craft brewing

Odwala and Naked are different companies. Odwalla was bought by Coca Cola and then closed in 2020. I think full sail bought it and is reopening it. Naked was started in my hometown and eventually bought by Tropicana, still up and running.

Thank you for the nostalgia blast.

I do remember loving odwalla, specifically the carrot juice. But this was more than a decade ago, when I was still in high school.

Never remember them rebranding as naked juice. Although I do remember picking up naked juice on two separate occasions wondering how the taste would be. Two times was enough to learn the taste wasn’t worth the price.

What you describe is the basic structure in our economy that drives this, but the answer to why the enshittification has been accelerating, is technology. Advances in technology, particularly information technology, progressively enable corporations to be more efficient at all this, including more efficient at gaming the political system and manipulating users and customers.

If you look back nostalgically at some time decades ago when things were less bad, it’s because things were less efficient and humanity was more likely to sometimes get in the way of the machine that we’ve built having it’s way with us.

Ohhhh Naked is watered down Odwalla. Can’t believe I never made that connection but it all makes sense now. Used to love Odwalla, kind of like Naked if I missed lunch or something

The solution, to my reckoning, is to start making things you love because you love to make them and to refuse to sell out when they come knocking.

I mean, sure, that will solve some things. Not climate change, though. I think we can aim for a little higher, but when I say that perhaps seeking infinite growth in a finite planet might lead to an environmental catastrophe that’s somehow controversial.

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https://youtu.be/piwpkQh_YvI

Laissez-faire economics and libertarian ideals (a-la Atles Shrugged) destroy society. I don’t know that anyone has nailed down a good balance of personal liberty, social justice, and (individual) wealth; I suspect one of the nordic models is closest, but fuck if I know.

What I’m pretty sure of is that countries with laissez-faire models are like virulent diseases. They’re aggressive and successful, until they kill the host and collape. To compete, other countries have to adopt similar models. I think the host in this metaphor is the planet, but we’re seeing some indication that the social immune system in the US is responding, with a resurgence on union activity. And it’s possible that one of nature’s balancing tools (diseases such as COVID, SARS, etc) will help with the environmental impact; I don’t see that as a global community we’re doing so well at managing our environmental resources responsibly, so if nature doesn’t cause a great purge, we may simply extinct ourselves and moot the issue.

Edit: Whilst I’m preaching… I believe capitalism is the best economic system we’ve found. I believe some tools in capitalism have unintended, and deleterious consequences. In particular, the stock market, and usury. Both are tools that generate money directly from money (“investing” and “interest”), and both IMHO are responsible for most of the excesses of capitalism.

Apparently just banks and loans from his post

I guess, most specifically the offerings from mega-corporations. I was quoting a hyperbole there, I did not mean to actually talk about everything.

Thanks! I guess, I posed this question badly as most of the other folks came here to philosophize or rant.

If you’re doing those moonshots and a company isn’t profitable, does that mean you don’t get paid out in the meantime? You just keep your money in there, because the company’s valuation rises, which makes your x% company ownership worth more, right?

Right, and with inflation, we just need to slow it, i.e. stretch it over a longer period of time, because we have automatic processes in place to adjust for a certain rate of inflation over a fixed period of time (like for example work contracts that include an automatic pay raise every year).

There’s got to be a more scholarly name for that trend which has existed long before the invention of the word “enshitification”. What is it?

And the bad economics right now enforce simultaneous enshittification in a huge amount of products. I guess that might also be a big point to why it’s so apparent right now.

Capitalism: imminently about to collapse under its own weight for the last 150 years

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I don’t think this is really true, and maybe it’s even a little naive.

For example, 50 years ago earning a “living wage” was much more achievable.

Also, issues we’re presently facing like war related sanctions, china’s instability, and climate change have never occurred before, so how can they be cyclical?

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I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, I was going to say the same thing. “Everything” is quite the exaggeration, most people are just fine without junk tech companies. Things are more expensive and they’ll probably keep getting more expensive because they’ve been out of balance for decades. Food, gas etc. should be more expensive, we’ve just been blessed with cheap labor and subsidies. Climate issues aside we’re all going to be just fine

When do you think the last time there was an up swing?

Yes economics is the study of how people determine what is valuable and how valuable things are divided. People are complex and irrational so it’s difficult to come up with a simple explanation of economic trends.