Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

@GoblinQuester

Now, I just say "I don't understand" as soon as I'm at all confused and I can learn things much faster. The kind of people I want to be respected by aren't phased by this, and the kind of people I used to worry about impressing were never going to be impressed by me no matter what I did. So it's much faster if I just ask questions when I have them and admit what I don't know.

Saves time.

Which is precisely why it’s such a powerful concept. Because it’s entirely imaginary, it can be anything. Which is why it’s easy to apply to the broader internet, to software development practices, and to product trajectories, but it requires extensive mangling to make it extend to the global south. Enshittification is in contrast to decolonial and antiimperialist critiques. Enshittification explicitly calls back to early social media and cheap Netflix and the general free money period of VC funded startups that from the start were aimed at creating monopolies and destroying regulation.

The popular understanding of enshittification gets things precisely backwards. It's not that digital platform startups set out to make valuable services for consumers, but end up making changes that tilt the balance toward exploitation. Rather, exploitation was the destination from the very start, and user satisfaction was a means of scaling up the pool of exploitable users. Enshittification is planned, not inevitable.