My latest #LocusMagazing column is "Don't Be Evil," a consideration of the forces that led to the Great Enshittening, the dizzying, rapid transformation of formerly useful services went from indispensable to unusable to actively harmful:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
A thing @ploum wrote about corporations wrecking and killing decentralized things (in this case, Google and XMPP) -- and why it's essential to learn from history to resist further corporate destruction:
"We argue that market power by some corporations and in some sectors – including temporary market power emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic – amplified inflation. It made price increases peak higher and remain more persistent than they would have been in a world with less market power. To be clear: corporate profits were thus not the sole driver of inflation, nor are dominant corporations to blame for the energy shock
caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But we argue that their market power exacerbated the fallout – and that this is not sufficiently captured in the prevailing macroeconomic debate or in workhorse models."
"We argue that market power by some corporations and in some sectors – including temporary market power emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic – amplified inflation. It made price increases peak higher and remain more persistent than they would have been in a world with less market power. To be clear: corporate profits were thus not the sole driver of inflation, nor are dominant corporations to blame for the energy shock
caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But we argue that their market power exacerbated the fallout – and that this is not sufficiently captured in the prevailing macroeconomic
debate or in workhorse models."
"We argue that market power by some corporations and in some sectors – including
temporary market power emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic – amplified inflation.
It made price increases peak higher and remain more persistent than they would have
been in a world with less market power. To be clear: corporate profits were thus not the
sole driver of inflation, nor are dominant corporations to blame for the energy shock
caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But we argue that their market power exacerbated
the fallout – and that this is not sufficiently captured in the prevailing macroeconomic
debate or in workhorse models."