The rot crisis (or: the hilarity of the enshittocene)
Posted by Own_Schedule_5536@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 158 comments
Here are a few ways the situation we're living in is really funny:
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Now that search engines have been killed by the online advertising industry, "the world's information at your fingertips" is a thing of the past. The world's information is at the fingertips of openai or whoever, and they'll only give it to you in a form that's so dramatically compressed that you can't trust it (no matter how much money they pour into research to square the circle of "hallucination").
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Every application you can run that isn't a videogame is turning into a webview running javascript. Have you worked with javascript? It's a janky typecasting mess with a horrifically polluted package ecosystem that shifts on a weekly basis. It's eldritch: you can never master it, only go insane and quit. And it's the future of computing.
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The poorest people on earth now have access to phones and tablets, except those cheap devices struggle under the weight of the software they're running right out of the box. If you're more privileged, you can avoid the experience of swiping around at 15 frames a second by buying more expensive devices on a regular basis.
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If you need like a basic household item of some description, you can probably buy it, except it'll be made of nothing and break after a few uses. You see, half of the price you pay for it goes directly to amazon - the seller has to pay to not get buried several pages into the search results, but they have to raise prices for everyone, all storefronts, because by contractual obligation the price on amazon has to be the lowest globally.
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Something... happened to the fashion industry sometime in the last couple decades. Paying more doesn't get you nicer, more durable fabric anymore. It's all the same. The most expensive bathing suits are ones you can't actually use to bathe unless you want the paint to wash off. If you like fishnets, you need to treat them like a subscription. They're perishable. It's amazing.
I could go on.
Point is, we have the means to provide everyone on earth with the amazing comforts on modern life, but they're more like crude imitations made of garbage. All human achievement is beginning to fucking decompose. The world economy is rotting, from the bottom to the top.
When all hell breaks loose, when the book of revelations happens, when hordes of icky immigrants begin to storm the northern hemisphere, desperate for fresh water and cool air, the rich won't be able to protect themselves. Their drywall fortresses won't keep anybody out. Their shitty plastic guns won't fire. Their buttcoin payments won't clear in time and their contractors will walk away. The climate apocalypse will be a slapstick comedy.
itsatoe@reddit
No we don't. We have set up a system that requires endless extraction of finite resources.
The physics there is hard to argue with (infinite ≠ finite). So instead of avoiding wood, we use fake wood (etc, etc). It's a way of kicking those limited resources down the road a bit further, making it that much harder to deal with when they go away.
Urshilikai@reddit
We do, provided we took a long termist view and built things to last forever, or rationally produced and distributed food with externality minimization. Why aren't we building all dwellings out of fused granite that will last for millenia? Why aren't we building solar breeder factories where solar are produced exclusively with solar power? Takes twice the effort now but saves 100x the effort later. The thought process to get us there is incredibly simple: for solved problems we need to ditch the profit motive.
fitbootyqueenfan2017@reddit
strong cope bro. imagine everyone trying to buy things like western middle class consumers. what a joke of a thing to say the Earth can provide that much resources for everyone. You need to do a lot more reading.
Urshilikai@reddit
When did I say anything about preserving western consumption habits? Building permanent homes that could house thousands of people during its serviceable lifetime is practically the antithesis of US (and japanese) single use paper homes. Same goes with our lack of investment in solar which is conceivably free net positive green energy up to the resource limits of copper. You are projecting your capitalist realism so hard you can't even imagine a better world. I've read all theory motherfucker.
VolitionReceptacle@reddit
The imaginary housing units you are so fond of was maybe possible at a time when the Earth was only beginning to be exploited, and even then they wouldn't have been sustainable.
It will be impossible right now after the entrenchment of enshittification.
Overshoot is a bitch. Sinners in the hand of an angry Gaia.
Urshilikai@reddit
cult-like behavior
itsatoe@reddit
I believe that's possible, but it means abandoning the entire extractive system, which is vastly complex (click the boxes on this process chart to get a tiny glimpse).
It is imaginable that we could shift everything in our economy, but there is unlikely to be sufficient will until there have been some more huge catastrophes and some major systems (especially food systems) start breaking down.
Ok_Difference_7220@reddit
Ya, the "enshittification" meme sort of obscures all the rapacious destruction backing up the previous era of quality we're all so nostalgic for.
VolitionReceptacle@reddit
Yep.
Totally green and renewable coal burning funaces and smogs.
VolitionReceptacle@reddit
This is the truth
PM-me-in-100-years@reddit
The built environment is built to rot.
50 year design life is about average for houses, buildings, roads, bridges, etc. Are we supposed to rebuild the entire world every 50 years?
Many house exteriors are lucky to last ten years without maintenance.
Maybe nanobots will save us. Then again maybe they'll turn the planet into gray goo.
VolitionReceptacle@reddit
Pffff the nanobots are here already, and its the microplastics that have infected every part of the ecosystem, including us.
T-1000 GUMBY
fitbootyqueenfan2017@reddit
lol "Point is, we have the means to provide everyone on earth with the wondrous comforts on modern life" what a false point. this got over 400 likes.
VolitionReceptacle@reddit
Ikr?!
Ig dude be appealing to the coper/hoper population of normies
jaymickef@reddit
"... we have the means..." the first step to accepting collapse is understanding that there is no "we." Whatever "we" there might be is temporary and circumstantial.
VolitionReceptacle@reddit
You are right
Own_Schedule_5536@reddit (OP)
There was a "we" once, however ineffectual and exclusionary. It wasn't dethroned by the various allies of posthumanism, it wasn't annihilated by internal contradictions, it too simply rotted away.
jaymickef@reddit
Right, it was exclusionary so it wasn't really a "we." It crumbled under the pressure of insisting to remain exclusionary rather than expand to include everyone.
Own_Schedule_5536@reddit (OP)
We disagree then
jaymickef@reddit
Yes, I guess so. When do you feel this "we" existed?
Own_Schedule_5536@reddit (OP)
My impression is that I grew up as it was dying, but that might just be what it's been like for everyone born within the last half century, in an "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" kind of way
HeavenlyMusings@reddit
Terence Is that you? I miss him, he said that all the time .
jaymickef@reddit
What country did you grow up in? And what years are you talking about? I'm 65 in Canada and I lived through two separation referendums and some very bad racism that still exists and may be getting worse. Any sense of "we" has only been pushed by governments and media, people are always breaking off into more and more religions and finding new ways to separate into groups. If you grew up somewhere with a genuine sense of we that included everyone that's great and it would be worth studying to see how it happened.
cr0ft@reddit
Yeah, that's the really annoying part... with our current technologies and knowledge, we could have a planet-spanning scarcely even imagined golden age.
Instead, we cling to competition and capitalism, virtually every activity we do has completely fucked destructive incentives instead of sane ones, and our "leaders" are monstrous sociopath shitbags who make things even worse.
And the system we use to determine what we do, capitalism... well, economics is literally not a science. So we have some soothsayers we call economists who spew their favorite theories that often conflict, and meanwhile I assume the derivatives bubble that was something like a quadrillion bucks (actually a quadrillion, not hyperbole) is probably still there... because the rich play silly buggers with the economy and gambles on money with other money to generate money. Good times.
Our species is dying out voluntarily due to stupidity, greed and inertia.
VolitionReceptacle@reddit
No, we can't.
We owe all our progress to fossil fuels.
Overshoot is a reality.
Progress is the lie.
Gotzvon@reddit
I've taken to buying most tools or appliances from flea markets or garage sales. I'm certain the 30 year old skilsaw i just bought would outlast a brand new one from the hardware store, and I got it for a tenth of the price. Throwaway capitalism has been a thing for decades now, but the obscenity of grossly inflated prices AND declining quality at the same time is finally becoming blatant to the average consumer.
Time to go back to bartering and trading with your friends and neighbours.
gobeklitepewasamall@reddit
Disposable consumer goods, a de facto ban on right to repair, a de facto ban on ownership of any means of digital production, utter lack of respect for even basic IP unless you’re a trillion dollar company.
It’s one thing that we don’t have actual civil rights anymore. Those are gone and have been gone for years.
But we don’t even have basic market rights anymore. Even those bare minimum consumer protections are out the window. Workplace & labor protections have been a thing of the past for two generations, but when even CONSUMER rights are gone, I think that’s the final straw of proof we need that our world system is in its final phase, self-consumption.
VolitionReceptacle@reddit
Fuck abusers, but this is right
Ok-Novel8888@reddit
Some books i bought even go as low as not using proper spacing between rows and barely any spacing between words. I sometimes end up reading the same line.
Equivalent_Dimension@reddit
Agree. It's the mass mobilization that's the hard part. If we could unite to create large bartering networks, to mass purchase heat pumps to drive the price down -- that would be so great.
hairy_ass_truman@reddit
I've been getting tools on shopgoodwill.com . Have to check what the shipping cost is on each. I got a skilsaw for 5.99
FeyEffffy@reddit
Absolutely right, except for one point.
The cold hard reality of natural limits means that we CANNOT uplift the exploited imperial provinces of the Earth to "our level" (a somewhat nebulous concept) without totally collapsing. The Fossil Fuel Revolution never made a so called "first world" lifestyle possible for more than a relatively tiny amount of people.
Overshoot is a bitch.
Middle_Manager_Karen@reddit
Fast fashion has chosen to increase Profits at the sacrifice of cloth fabrics. Everything is 25% plastic now. (Wearing microplastics?)
Just brush your hand across a rack of cloths at a retail store it feels like paper.
The cotton clothes now start at $100
Every service wants to increase shareholder value now so they have to change the pricing tiers and add an advertising option. Soon you won't be able to get a refrigerator without a subscription and a second subscription teir to block ads
StrugglingGhost@reddit
Hell, this is crazy, I remember not that long ago that Carhartt used to be a really good, really durable brand! You bought a pair of jeans, spending $40-60USD on them (starting off course) and they'd last for years! I have one pair I bought, beginning of the year, I've only worn them once or twice and there's already the start of a tiny hole in the leg. It's not quite a hole, but you can see the thread has popped inside and is slowly retracting, getting ready to release a hole. And that's my best pair of jeans! The others? Yeah, they're definitely not something I'd wear to a job interview.
So far my Carhartt jacket is in good condition, but I get the feeling it's gonna start eroding soon too, and I don't have the money to get something better, that's supposed to be "durable" and warm...
DogFennel2025@reddit
Have you tried shopping at estate sales? You know, when somebody dies and all their stuff gets sold. You might find older versions of what you want. I mostly buy second-hand, on the theory that if something has lasted long enough to be donated, I can probably get more use out of it. I can sew, so I can fix old things, too. (Anybody can learn basic sewing - it’s not rocket science.)
What I really hate is buying shoes that unglue themselves when they get wet.
StrugglingGhost@reddit
Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of estate sales in my area, and those few that do exist tend to charge WAY more than I'm able to pay at the moment
DogFennel2025@reddit
Oh. Rats. I’m sorry to hear that. I used to wear Carharts. I’m sorry to learn they have declined. I’m guessing you wear them to work.
I wish I had a solution to share. It’s so frustrating trying to find sturdy clothing. I have some okay clothes that I wear in public and a vast collection of things with holes and spots that I wear when I figure nobody can see me.
StrugglingGhost@reddit
Yup, all of my clothes are "work clothes". I have one pair of slacks that I'm not even sure fit any more... but it is what it is. I ain't trying to be someone or something I'm not. People don't like how I dress? The hell with em
DogFennel2025@reddit
Okay, I thought of something. I’m not sure this will help, but here goes:
Where I live, there are a lot of minerals in the water. When I first moved here I noticed that after doing laundry, my sheets and towels were sort of stiff when I took them off the clothesline. I didn’t think anything of it but after a while I saw that the dish towels were developing little holes.
The solution to that problem turned out to be a cup or so of household vinegar in the last rinse, hold it ten minutes, then drain the washer, spin or wring, and move on.
If you take a glass of water and you put a teaspoon of baking soda in it, at my house it will become cloudy and brown. (There’s a lot of iron in my water.) But if I add vinegar, the water will clear.
What’s going on is that the minerals are going out of solution in basic water (you can see them). Then in acidic water, they dissolve again.
You don’t rinse the vinegar solution out of the clothes - it’s not very acidic and won’t hurt them. This works for a hair rinse, washing the floor, blah, blah, blah.
I hope this is useful info. It’s taken me a while to get the amount of vinegar figured out, and now I buy a more concentrated vinegar and use less.
Cheers!
StrugglingGhost@reddit
Thanks for the tidbit, I do have quite hard water where I live. I'll have to take a look, see if this helps at all!
Jung_Wheats@reddit
I'm going to have to get a new washer / dryer one day soon and I am dreading the search for a 'unsmart' option.
BitchfulThinking@reddit
Sigh. There was a time when "tailor" was the most common profession in this country. Independent artists and designers just lost most of our suppliers of wool and cotton yarns and textiles... Most of it originates from Turkey or China, or some other country standing up to this idiot regime.
People largely won't care, as Americans have happily adopted the "work in your raggedy jammies" mentality, like the startup techbros demanded, and continue to filter every image and video.
Handmaids and Wives will be wearing garbage bags, I guess.
The era of originality, taking pride in one's appearance, and manners, things that made us human, is pretty much over in any mass cultural sense here.
cr0ft@reddit
And we "recycle" those clothes by handing them off to monstrous criminals who ship them to some third world desert and just dump them in the open to fly around, decompose and become microplastics clouds. Because money we don't spend on properly recycling is money they can pocket.
The incentives in competition-based capitalism are almost invariably completely sickening.
ValuableCoast5931@reddit
Someone advised me recently to donate clothes to nursing homes. Around here there is at least one with impoverished elders that are basically abandoned.
gobeklitepewasamall@reddit
When I use polyester blankets (my partner calls them “asbestos blankets”) I can actually see microplastics floating around in the sunlight.
When i sweep, it’s a mix of dust, pet hair and tiny little fibers that look like dust from afar. The only reason I can even see that they’re fibers is cause I’m so nearsighted it’s like I see with macro lenses.
I have lead in my water pipes, so I got a water cooler. Guess what has microplastics floating around in the water?
comewhatmay_hem@reddit
We are degrading the Earth with unsustainable agricultural practices and cotton is no exception.
The cotton harvested today is not the same cotton harvested in the 1950s. It's probably the same variety, but just like with fruits and vegetables, when you deplete the soil of nutrients the fruit becomes tasteless and tough. Likewise, the cotton becomes thin and stringy, instead of fluffy and strong.
So high quality, sustainable cotton requires labour and cost intensive farming which results in much higher manufacturing costs for the fashion brand. That $50 t-shirt is not brand name price gouging, that's what it actually costs to produce and anything less is the result of exploitation and environmental destruction.
LurkingFear75@reddit
I expect to wear my FjällRäven clothes until I drop, but definitely for the next 20 years. There‘s still quality, and I made the decision to stock up on robust gear 5 years ago, because of course it‘s expensive, especially working as a dishwasher (still absolutely manageable… here in Germany, even with a rented small flat). But keep in mind: every damn piece of clothing, every hiking boot, glove, sunglasses, EVERYTHING, is dependent in its production and delivery on energy availability, and once we enter Energy Descent for real, all the well made plans become obsolete. Now is the time, even if you still feel secure. That‘s a fleeting phenomenon, like this civilisation.
Subbacterium@reddit
Polyester spandex is loaded with biphesenol-A (BPA). It seeps into your skin. Everything is made of it. I won’t.
Collapse_is_underway@reddit
Didn't know about the BPA in it polyester pander lol.
I'm gonna listen to Toxicity by SOAD to externalize this other layer of madness :]]
TheCynicalWoodsman@reddit
YOU! WHAT DO YOU OWN THE WORLD? HOW DO YOU OWN DISORDER, DISORDEEEER
ResistantRose@reddit
My washer and dryer push ads to me now. Especially insulting -- the ads are for laundry service 💀
cr0ft@reddit
I've also seen one case (I think it was Bosch) where either a washer or dish washer did not let you use some modes, like Eco mode (naturally) if you didn't connect it to wifi and install an app. I'd have returned that piece of shit immediately if I discovered that after I already had it...
alloyed39@reddit
I've started shopping at high-end consignment stores to find affordable clothes in natural materials. Sure, there are some polyester items, but there's a good chance of finding something in linen, cotton, or wool. Most of the stuff is barely worn, and some items still have the original store tags. I got a 100% cotton, never worn, Brooks Brothers shirt that normally retails for $126 for $19.
AnonymousNPC1987@reddit
Yeah I got a “recycled fabric” pullover from Patagonia last year - I loved the style of it.
I’ve never had a piece of clothing shed that many polyester fibers. For a company that prides themselves on quality and sustainability, this would be laughable if I didn’t passively ingest a bunch of microplastics.
lowrads@reddit
How are people going to write code without their fishnet subscriptions?
Own_Schedule_5536@reddit (OP)
We could solve a lot of societal problems if we just addressed the male fishnetlessness epidemic.
autoencoder@reddit
We could use the fishing nets in the ocean. They seem to never decay
Canard_De_Bagdad@reddit
I find it amazing how shitty AND expensive new furnitures are. Wood availability and quality decreases each passing year and yet somehow people will insist Malthus was wrong. You'll find the Joseph Schumpeter cult insisting "~~God~~ innovation will provide", forgetting that two out of five of his factors for innovations can be resumed as "more room" (new markets; new space/resources) which we do not have.
I studied a science (economics) which got turned (finished to turn?) into a cargo cult somewhere in the 2000's, and sometimes it's depressing. Like being a follower of Jesus teachings:
"it's all about love" / "economics means good management of the house (so today: Earth)"
Being faced by subsequent travesties of the initial message:
"Nah it's all about guilt and burning the witches" / "Ahah no economics is about maximal brutality and line going up"
It's really depressing. To see such powerful and hopeful teachings being turned into hateful idiotic propagandas. The worst part is seeing ordinary people internalizing those horrors just because they heard it at the Church / on the news, heard it so much they firmly believe those have always been their own freely chose values.
SoFlaBarbie00@reddit
Furniture is one of my most rage-inducing example of this. I still have a chest from when I moved out of my parents home in 2000. It is such a wild mismatch from the rest of my bedroom furniture but I just don’t care because the quality exceeds anything I could buy today.
thekbob@reddit
Economics is a social science, and while I cannot speak to your degree, mostly are just seminary for capitalist priests who worship the holy Profit.
Economic theory in the USA doesn't actually study the breadth of economic theory and supposes capitalism is correct and the only method, leaving others to study in history, anthropology, and philosophy.
endadaroad@reddit
Capitalism could work if we were to adopt Universal Basic Income to serve as a conveyor to take money from the top and recycle it to the bottom.
YardMinimum8622@reddit
lol so people should get money just for existing? what a dumb fucking idea
HomoExtinctisus@reddit
Disappoint to see you are being downvoted. So many people can't get past the liberal worldview many of us were inculcated in. This worldview teaches lies like there is enough for everyone and we must care not just about our local tribe/community but also to apply it to every human because humans are innately special.
It's uber delusional and it is what is going to making the coming collapse utterly horrific.
YardMinimum8622@reddit
This sub is very leftist. They think population explosions and demand for natural resources (the main drivers of the collapse) will suddenly stop if we just get rid of capitalism and borders and shit. Guess what, oil still needs to be drilled and trees still need to be cut down in the commune as well.
HomoExtinctisus@reddit
Been saying the similar things here a long time and we still have far to go. Carry on comrade.
endadaroad@reddit
People should be jailed for not having access to money and living on the streets? Now, that's a dumb fucking idea
YardMinimum8622@reddit
point to there part in my comment where i mentioned jail. take your time too little buddy.
endadaroad@reddit
"point to there part"? wtf You might point out where I said anything about existing. It's clear that we see the world differently.
AnotherApe33@reddit
you prefer exploiting the planet resources so they can just exist? That's even dumber.
YardMinimum8622@reddit
giving these people money so they continue to reproduce and multiply and demand more resources? even fucking dumber
thekbob@reddit
That's not really capitalism, then; rather, it's a social economic theory with extra steps.
endadaroad@reddit
When something is not working, it should be improved upon. I am looking for something that works, not strict adherence to an old rule book that doesn't necessarily apply any more. An old broken down beater will get you to work for a while longer with new tires.
HomoExtinctisus@reddit
The only lifestyle Humanity has ever used which did not threaten to destroy everything on varying time scales is the Hunter Gather phase with not much more technology than stone tools. We've been "improving" our life style ever since. The improvements are accelerators in our rate of consumption of the biosphere and other finite reasources.
HomoExtinctisus@reddit
That's pretty much everywhere since Neoliberalism controls pretty much everywhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYyalJMXROw
Steve Keen also has many good youtubes
Tidezen@reddit
Similar problem in Psychology, where they mainly only teach ego-based models of thinking, because they want everyone to be good little ego-individualist capitalists who mainly only care about themselves. It feels like critical thinking is nearly dead in that field.
Ok-Garage-1684@reddit
Interesting. I want to understand this more! Can you give me an example of an ego-based model? And what could be an alternative approach to studying psychology that would make us less capitalist?
Tidezen@reddit
An alternative approach is transpersonal psychology, which is an established school of thought, but rarely taught at universities. A related type of thinking can be found in the works of Carl Jung.
There's a quote of his I read the other day that went something like: The first half of one's life is about establishing the ego--the second half is about transcending it.
But modern psychology is mostly about the first half--defining and establishing an ego, a persona, an individual experience that defines "you" and "not-you", with borders or the catchphrase "boundaries".
Ego-based psychology is about individuation, defining the "self" as something inherently separate from "others". It's not really "bad" or "wrong"--it's in defining those borders that helps one get past them. But Jung saw the ego as something like a constructed armor, a "shell" for our more inward and eternal soul-like being.
Psychology of today doesn't really believe in that--it believes the armor is the self, and its entire goal is to have people identify with that version of "self", for their entire lives, and never move past it.
The reason this ties into capitalism is because, capitalism sells the concept of improving your ego-self by acquisition and power, caring about only "you", competing and defeating all "others". Capitalism does this because it's a lot easier to make people little lonely cogs in a machine if all they care about is their own individual experience. It makes it easier to move them around, if they don't have stronger ties to family and loved ones. Makes it easier to get them to compete and fight against each other, if they don't see themselves as part of a shared collective consciousness.
That's why the "Self-help" movement has gained such traction in the last twenty years...it plays into the consumerism culture very well, because if you're ailing in some way--in their mind, it's better to buy some book or product that focuses on YOU, since you can't trust your friends or family to be there for you. It's pushing people towards an ego-individualistic mindset, more and more.
And unfortunately, imo, this type of thinking has infected a lot of the modern psychology field, feminism, even wokeism--treating everyone outside one's self as a potential threat.
Ok-Garage-1684@reddit
Thank you. Certainly something to think about
supiesonic42@reddit
Interesting! Thank you for putting it all together in this comment!
Seefufiat@reddit
I considered Econ briefly until I took a Macro class and it was just… not correct.
Own_Schedule_5536@reddit (OP)
~~All interesting economic theory is also political philosophy~~
Own_Schedule_5536@reddit (OP)
As the op I think I should step in and express my editorial position that I am not cool with citing malthus
Canard_De_Bagdad@reddit
I understand. Highly questionnable character, ultimately right about rates of population vs resources growth but not necessarily for the good reasons.
I could cite other, modern authors, but their names aren't as famous
Own_Schedule_5536@reddit (OP)
I don't see it as a population issue, I think most people can remember a time when the rot hadn't set in - I'm describing it in these hyperstitious eschatological terms, but ultimately it's the spawn of capitalism, and it's historically pretty young
Urshilikai@reddit
chiming in on both sides of this chain. population might be the most apparent and easily blamed variable for anthropogenic effects and resource scarcity, we do after all have basic thermodynamic requirements. However we are orders of magnitude from that being the limiting factor in our quality of life. We grow enough food to feed the entire world several times over (if we reduced animal agriculture), we have the resources to give a better than first world quality of life to everyone if we built things to last forever and rejected atomization culture and continued to build upon the shoulders of giants. I wish population was not such an easy thing to latch on to, but we need to be unwavering in pointing the finger at the rich who consume orders of magnitude beyond what should be their per capita allotment and, worse, enshrine the systems that cause inequality and inefficiency in law itself.
I like to think this all started with Edward Bernays (nephew of sigmund freud and the creator of modern propaganda techniques) and Dale Carnegie (author of how to win friends and influence people) popularizing social manipulation and kicking off capitalism's co-optation of a variety of things that I think constitute toxic professionalism. All of the enshittification (planned obsolescence, advertising prevalence, loss of quality and substance permanence in favor of "stuff as a service", shift in focus away from real value to perceived/manipulated value, legal capture) is downstream of these concepts, and the left is still struggling with a response to them.
sc2summerloud@reddit
we might grow enough food to feed the world several times over NOW, but it is not sustainable.
Tidezen@reddit
Ehh...to chime in, I'm in my 40's, and the population has literally doubled in my lifetime. 4 billion extra people is a scary increase. And quality of products has been going downhill since before I was born, although it's certainly accelerated in the past 20 years or so.
For my dad who just hit 80 last year, the population has nearly quadrupled in his lifetime, and when I was growing up, he would say the same thing about products being of noticeably lower quality and durability than those from his youth.
I do think that trend has accelerated, but it's always been tied to mass production and cost/corner-cutting, which seems to get worse the more "masses" you have to sell a product to.
Erinaceous@reddit
Yeah economics is wild right now. I lived through 2008 and the general crisis in macro theory and all the critiques and calls for change have all been papered over like nothing happened. It's still exactly the same shit as almost 20 years ago.
There's some rays of light. CORE is really good and MMT has made major gains in credibility but you're exactly right, economics is cultish and desperately clinging to these equilibrium concepts and models that should have been replaced decades ago
urbanAugust_@reddit
JavaScript is not the future of computing.
ribonucleus@reddit
The enshittocene was named thus by Cory Doctorow I believe. Head over there.
CompostYourFoodWaste@reddit
Rot... but not really... since it's synthetic it will just break down into more microplastics.
vinegar@reddit
Ugh thanks for that. What word should we use? What expresses “Disperses into more smaller worse bits”? I miss regular rot. Everything used to turn into plant food if you just left it alone.
CompostYourFoodWaste@reddit
Degrade maybe? But I understand. I miss regular rot too.
Great job coming up with the word Enshittocene.
mange-ta-pomme@reddit
Well, for the fashion: I am buying now almost exclusively one brand, Margaret Howell (designed in UK, fabricated in Portugal or Italy). Expensive but it lasts, for years. Buy it often second hand (otherwise too expensive). All other brands I know (except some Japanese, really hand made and hence beyond financial reach) are a shit.
hectorbrydan@reddit
The search engines got fully eshitified 2021. I just searched for an article that I had found a few months prior and could not find it on any search engine. I know it can work because it did work. I think powerful interests are burying sources they don't like and the search engines are going right along with it.
The enshitocene epoch is right. Only gets worse from here and fast, barring our organizing despite authorities preventing us from doing so.
Bluest_waters@reddit
Its not a mystery why google is shit now, it was done intentionally. the problem was that if you make google search super effective people leave google right away. But if you put the actual target of the search on page three of google search then they will spend more time on google, and more time exposed to google ads. Its really that simple.
Laid out here
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
hectorbrydan@reddit
Ha ha, I never saw that angle, there are several things going on though.
For one thing there are a lot of bad Pages making the search results now, Having learned how to game the search engine presumably, they start by reiterating the question in 12 different ways to hit all the different ways people could ask the question on the keywords and then give you about a sentence or two on the answer that is not a high quality answer. A lot of them are actually written by computers now.
Then of course the company maximizing Revenue, that is the biggest one and encompasses what you are talking about but other stuff as well. The Glory Days of the internet were in the growth phase.
fedfuzz1970@reddit
DuckDuckGo.com
supiesonic42@reddit
Been having a much better experience using DuckDuckGo and I hate advertising, marketing etc., I'm a real person and everything - I've been running searches the past few weeks how I used to via Google and in ddg and it's better every time using DuckDuckGo. 🤷🏻♀️
Nothing is perfect, but it is better.
birdsy-purplefish@reddit
Doesn’t really help though. You don’t get the ads but the search results are still garbage.
JokeRight4705@reddit
Only one I use 👍
Total_Sport_7946@reddit
I'd recommend his podcast Better Offline as well as the blog:
https://www.betteroffline.com/
alloyed39@reddit
I recommend reading Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At) anytime, day or night.
Ihavemagaquestions@reddit
Yes yes.
Legal-Hunt-93@reddit
Did you try another search engine besides google like duck duck go? I find that in regards to news others seem to be better than google, which I mostly use as a search engine for reddit, which is also very enshittified so less and less
birdsy-purplefish@reddit
I do and it’s still very unhelpful. Not as loaded with ads though.
cr0ft@reddit
I definitely have DDG as my main engine. It's not as aggressively and obviously bought as Google.
hectorbrydan@reddit
I did, Duck Duck Go is my principal one, then I tried start page which is Google run through a proxy server, then I tried Yahoo. We need some more competition clearly.
delusionalbillsfan@reddit
I noticed some apps running like shit on my phone around 2023. It was so bad I got a new phone. Same apps ran like shit lol. The "modern" internet peaked somewhere around like 2019-2022, pretty much all flagship phones at that point were as fast as computers and could do everything, the wifi/data was generally still pretty fast, the search engines hadn't fully gone to shit yet, and the TikTokification of the internet hadn't fully happened yet.
iwillDieplease@reddit
Everyone needs to start buying books. En masse.
Then_Sell_5327@reddit
As a career librarian I support this message. Book reading is 40% lower than it was 20 years ago.
MaelstromTX@reddit
My local library just reopened after a 2-year remodel. Imagine my dismay when I learned they got rid of a large portion of their book inventory to make room for an indoor kids playground, podcast studios, and more fucking computer desks.
birdsy-purplefish@reddit
Indoor kids playground? In the library?! Kids yelling in the library?!
fedfuzz1970@reddit
Visit paperbackswap.com and trade books with readers for only the cost of printed material postage. My wife has been a member for many years and swears by the site.
evermorecoffee@reddit
Yes, and also get a library card.
cr0ft@reddit
Pretty sure at least the first couple pages on any Google search are reserved for paid ad entries, even the stuff not listed as ads - and that Google is intentionally degrading the results that aren't paid.
Ah, the heady days when Google had "Don't be evil" as their motto. They removed that, so that basically means their new motto may as well be "Be maximum evil for money".
panickingman55@reddit
I look at Amazon. Surely a shitty company I don't use anymore but when you get two identical product searches with one rated higher and 500 comments going "GERATE PRODUCT DEFINITELY BETTER THAN ALTERNATE ONE!" you can tell some company is paying to have their knock off, or copy, rated better.
hectorbrydan@reddit
All readings through Silicon Valley are openly gamed. These worst apps all have five star ratings, you have to go to the worst comments first to even get an idea, and some sites will allow the company to pay to remove those.
Moreover the search engines will not give you links to people talking about defective products, I bought a bunch of stuff at Best Buy as I have been doing for over a decade, it always worked before but everything since 2020 has been defective, three MP3 players, bad soldering and bad programming, a battery charger, like a battery bank, defective headphones, all stuff that used to work better.
The only links the search engines will give me are the ones curated by the companies that make these products. Meanwhile on my podcast it is glitchy and they are not fixing any of the glitches yet enjoys a five-star rating, and I regularly get a pop up that asks me to rate the site, I have the option of giving it five stars or doing it later.
Mission-Notice7820@reddit
Yeah to all corporations any rating below a 9.0/10 on anything is generally going to get people fired, and anything under 10.0/10.0 == something is severely wrong and we must take drastic action.
commesicetaithier@reddit
It's not even about selective censorship, the search engines are very lazy now, the results are very short. It's ironic how people might even be right about AI being better than googling... not because AI is even acceptable, but because search engines don't even search anymore.
hectorbrydan@reddit
It is that, but it is also direct manipulation to please powerful players whether they are being paid or just persuaded.
sc2summerloud@reddit
great last paragraph
Filias9@reddit
You can still buy good, lasting tools and household items (in Europe at least). But if you buy stuffs on Amazon today, well it's your pain. Better shops exits.
Web, javascript and programs (I am developer) - people have no idea how much all these apps are fragile. How many moving parts it depends on. And as a bonus web browser developers are absolutely obsessed with removing and breaking things.
Fashion industry. I hate it with absolute passion. Nothing, I mean nothing will last. I completely ignoring fast-fashion, but this trend of low quality for high prices is absolutely everywhere.
DudeLoveBaby@reddit
man, this is the bong rippiest post I've ever seen on here and I'm not saying that as a compliment
makingplans12345@reddit
If you have some extra time you can learn to sew and make some pretty durable clothes with home machines.
shenan@reddit
javascript is awesome
GrandMasterPuba@reddit
Ah, shitting on JavaScript - exactly what I come to this subreddit for.
SquirrelAkl@reddit
I’ve been watching Outlander, set in the 1700s, and keep going “ooh, their house looks so well made! Those clothes look so well made! Everything is so high quality!”
Whereas we just have late-stage capitalism. The quality has been sucked out of everything and funnelled up to shareholders.
HeavenlyMusings@reddit
They don't care cause it's not happening now so they have time to not care about the now cause it's happening later cause they "have time".
HeavenlyMusings@reddit
That didn't come out how my brain arranged it but ya, I really appreciate your post. It's so validating , not even depressing , like actually comical and I'm okay with that.
This post found me staring out my living room window watching the countless cars go by , wondering how much microplastic we breath in each day and also , I really love my cats and watching them marvel over the little things , like air fuzzies and sunlight beams. I do too. They get me.
I'm just glad for their sake they know nothing of microplastics and get to enjoy the remainder of their days oblivious to the horrors of the human created abominations, and be adored by their Mama forever. That's Me.
LurkingFear75@reddit
Writing from Germany - a couple of months ago YouTube let loose an AI-autotranslator on most of the English video titles AND descriptions… it‘s working as expected, namely so abysmally awful that I have to inverse-translate the gibberish into English to get a remote idea what the f that‘s meant to indicate. And I thought they shortened the human thought process enough by introducing… Shorts. Which hit me hard back then as well. I can‘t count anymore how often I told myself „You have to be fin‘ kidding me!“ during the last couple of years.
ansibleloop@reddit
If it wasn't for self hosting and open source, I think I would have gone insane by now
The internet is getting worse by the week - fucking AI slop everywhere and age verification
25 more years of this shit, meanwhile we lose 50% of the global population
That's what the actuaries say anyway
We could have been so much more and so much better, but a few greedy monsters chose themselves over the future of humanity
Pathetic
DisingenuousGuy@reddit
Hooray another self-hoster!
I would bet Syncthing installed on an old Raspberry Pi 3 shoved in a closet running off an old blackberry charger, with an ethernet cord and an external hard disk is a less irritating phone backup solution than most of the paid cloud storage subscriptions out there.
I have one such setup and i have my phone's camera roll, files, and messages backed up over the internet continuously even when I am outside.
ansibleloop@reddit
I just hope you have some offsite backups lol
I love jank setups - it just needs to function properly - who cares how it looks!
DisingenuousGuy@reddit
Yep! Bi-Monthly Rsync to another external drive, checksummed to ensure integrity, then I shove it at the locker at work.
vapenutz@reddit
I have a gigabit network at home, symmetric gigabit. I live next door to Germany so I have a direct link to Hetzner. I'm also using tailscale. I have a server that just hangs out there like it's in my LAN, and it's unavailable from the public internet. At all. I need to invite somebody to my network on Tailscale so they can access it. And honestly, now I know those services could work way better. Everything I self host is super fast, and it's on a 3 core machine with a 4 GBs of RAM. Other than this, I have a home server as a NAS at home. It's awesome, and it's only on 4 cores with a single 8 GB stick of RAM. Yeah, I'm not even dual channel.
The fact that everything is so slow and sucks so much is 100% due to modern choices. Like, Windows 11 on my machine somehow has a full 5950X, and before running a debloat script it ran slow and had stutters when opening the start menu. It's insane.
cr0ft@reddit
I'm paying a minimal fee every month for a virtual private server at Hetzner; I run an Ubuntu server that I installed Nextcloud on. It has all the tools I need even on the go, with file sync between devices being the original reason I set it up. Now it also has my photos, a great photo viewer, the office package so I can use web based office tools, mail etc. Notes are there as well. To-do lists.
Some bulk storage for it on Wasabi S3 as external storage, like my music collection so I can access that too on the go and it's a semi backup.
EvilKatta@reddit
I also self-host. I get do much flak if I mention I self-host a website and it's SSR :/ like it's the worst thing ever and alternatives are free.
Konradleijon@reddit
Planned observe
DickCamera@reddit
While I agree for the most part, I can speak to the Javascript aspect. While I am in no way defending the terrible language that Eich "designed" in days, the concept of javascript on the "modern web" is mostly an eldritch horror of build systems, type systems, linters and npm.
Let's not lump all that webshit stuff in with plain old js. If you need to write a web application, just learn js. Take a look at http://vanilla-js.com/ for a satirical look. You may be fighting an uphill battle with co-workers, but learning js by itself will pay off 10-fold because all of these build systems and frameworks are just crutches because the people using them never learned how to write actual js.
It's really not that hard once you learn it and you'll be hard pressed to find a real application for any of that "modern" stuff once you realize what you can do with a proper understanding on the language.
NyriasNeo@reddit
"Paying more doesn't get you nicer, more durable fabric anymore. It's all the same. "
Really? I would swear the $2,500 cape my wife bought years ago is still like new, and so is the $600 custom made skirt she purchased from a tailor shop.
chotasahib@reddit
“Enshittocene” is the portmanteau^2 that I did not realize was missing from my life. Thanks, OP!
country_garland@reddit
Keep going I’m almost there
CantHitachiSpot@reddit
fishnet stockings just aren't durable like they used to be 😔
AbundantExp@reddit
Mostly agreed besides javascript mostly lol. Typescript and web assembly help a lot depending on client download size. But it's not like an end user knowingly does javascript coding to any extent anyway. They don't give a fuck lol. It's more that any important or useful webshite needs to be aware of the amount of data they're sending to the client, which vibe coders don't even know to consider.
Own_Schedule_5536@reddit (OP)
Web/cloud is inherently wasteful and restrictive. Hell, no matter the language, these days the code is cobbled together by llm's. The base architecture powering our shit is becoming increasingly arcane. It's like wh40k (I don't know anything about warhammer, for the record)
AbundantExp@reddit
I'm not sure I agree cloud is innately more wasteful or less green than local computing if that's how you meant it. The on-demand aspect from my understanding means that the actual servers are more appropriately using their resource capacities compared to on-prem with expected growth where half the servers are below 20% CPU most the time. So mineral resource-wise it makes more sense to share collective computing resources. But I could see how the data transfer over internet uses more power than within a LAN. hmmm. AI are a resource usage problem now but so is the way we gather resources (burning fossil fuels) so that's my biggest concern there. All sun, nuclear, wind, hydro energy could help minimize those negative energy impacts. Thoughts?
Own_Schedule_5536@reddit (OP)
If we're talking about efficiency, I've heard an argument, applied to household tools but also worth considering for digital devices, for sharing tools/devices on the basis of a library system. If you need a thing, you go to your library, take one, use it, and then give it back. I mean, libraries these days do have computers for you to use.
I think as a civilisation we're doing way too much computation, and generally too much everything. As I say, much of the global economy is flows of crap that's of use to nobody. That applies to the internet too - ads, slop, bureaucracy, we don't need a lot of what we do online, our motive to engage with it is often a parasitic kind of compulsion.
As the era of cheap and abundant electricity ends, we'll have to reconsider our relationship to these things. Best case scenario, maybe my kids will get to play some gba games on the days when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.
sudonut@reddit
Just use Typescript, my dude.
Own_Schedule_5536@reddit (OP)
Just tell people to use rust/wasm
jalans@reddit
+1 for "Enshittocene"
Fickle_Stills@reddit
For textiles order from China. Tariffs might kinda fuck with it a little but the goods are the best compromise of quality and price. Most "fast fashion" is actually manufactured in countries with cheaper labor than China so their clothing industry actually produces pretty nice goods.
hyakumanben@reddit
Enshittocene is so right on the money. I’m stealing that.
No-Papaya-9289@reddit
search engine: use Kagi.com
JoeyJoeJoeRM@reddit
Heh, great post but I worry you are mistaken about the "drywall mansion" thing. No doubt a premium vault service will be introduced. The billionaires are already building bunkers
Own_Schedule_5536@reddit (OP)
But the providers of those services are also companies, and we should probably expect them to begin nickel-and-diming their customers if they exist for long enough
(I should clarify: the future I'm describing is the rot tendency taken to its self-overcoming limit - I'm not really making a prediction, I'm only trying to make this social force appear visible)
RexCorgi@reddit
So I asked DeepSeek to give me a forestry planting schedule for Tasmanian climate and it did pretty well actually but consistently recommended planting some Yews because they’re good for making bows and arrows. I think DeepSeek believes the future will be “handmade” .
the_instantgator@reddit
Are y'all taking baths in your bathing suits?
I thought that was just what Europeans called swim wear