Has anyone written anything comparing enshittification to the immiseration of the proletariat predicted by Marx?
(Consider search engine users as providing labor – clicks – to capitalists – Google – and being paid in search results. Hard to argue that the “living standard” of Google users isn’t constantly being reduced.) (1/2)
@marick hard not to see Marx’s Fragment on Machines as the man doing that himself.
@leeg Scanned it. Don’t get your point, I’m afraid. Summary?
@marick in Marx, the automaton becomes a “ruling power”, that “subsumes” living labour. In Doctorow, the platform “abuses” its users, and holds them “hostage”.
In Marx, this leads to a collapse that’s the fundamental crisis of capitalism. In Doctorow, enshittification destroys the platform it supported. In both, this is inevitable.
In Marx, the automaton alienates the worker from the work. In Doctorow, the platform alienates the user to maximise rent extraction.
@marick but in Marx the workers are producers, and in Doctorow the users are consumers?
Yes and no. This being a double-sided market, the workers are consumers (their wages go back into the capitalist system) and the consumers are producers (their work using the platform and adding their data generates its use-value)
@leeg Yes, I was being too cutesy in considering clicking on ads part of the work (doomscrolling?) that’s being done by people of a particular class in order to allow the owners of the means of advertising to capture surplus value.
@marick BTW I consider other forms of "work" than clicking on ads as labour that provides value to the platform-owning capitalist. Viewing ads, of course. Also, anything that provides them with telemetry, generates network effects, supplies tracking or training data, and so on.
@marick that seems like a good future topic for a podcast I listen to and highly rate, where the presenter investigates ideas from outside software engineering :D
(The later phase of enshittification – using vendor lock-in to squeeze fellow corporations – illustrates a big flaw in OG Marx: assuming class solidarity exists. The Great War – WWI over here – put paid to the idea that class solidarity among the proletariat would trump nationalism. But isn’t it the same error to assume an Amazon would have class solidarity with Keurig Inc. or Tempur-Pedic?) (2/2)
